Tomorrow, I defend.

Tomorrow I defend my two years of work, 162 pages of short stories. I am terrified and have a hard time convincing myself the fear now is really worse than what it will be like tomorrow. Tomorrow I start the defense with an oral statement of my work that will be the topic of discussion. Here is my oral statement....

Before I began to write, I’d dress up my younger siblings in travel attire, pack a suitcase full of clothes, line-up chairs in rows for our imaginary airplane, and we’d travel the world without ever leaving our living room. When I was old enough to leave the house on my own, my mom drove my brother and me to a new and unfamiliar neighborhood in Davis. She gave us a blank piece of paper and a pencil and before driving away she told us to draw a map of all the roads we traveled as we found our way back home. I was ten. It was a moment that would help define the writer I’d become. Even in a town as small as Davis, it could have been scary—but I was excited about my first independent journey. I walked through the streets of Davis and drew pictures of the different roads and houses that made up my map and eventually led me home. Thinking back to my childhood in Davis—a childhood so tied to this one small spot of earth— I realize that I was somehow always traveling. That I went so many places in my imagination. And though the streets of Davis seem much smaller to me now, well over a dozen years later, I’ve never stopped seeking the sense of adventure that filled me that day when I took my first “trip.”
As a writer, I have continued to travel through story, crossing lonely county lines and busy California highways, even venturing at times into other counties; it is as if I need to explore the imaginary geography I have always carried in my head. But the places I've visited aren't always fictional. During my first year in the creative writing program, I worked with the university's Art of Regional Change program on a project that sought to give a rural community in Calaveras County a voice through recorded storytelling. Though I was again working very close to home, stumbling upon so many unexpected stories in such a quiet little corner of the world awakened in me a sense of wonder about the stories I might find elsewhere. Last summer, I received a grant to write and travel, and the opportunity to indulge this growing curiosity. I wondered how much these tiny specks on a map shared with any other part of the world, and I convinced my family to come with me to Cahuita, a tiny village in Costa Rica, reached only by nameless dirt roads. I ate delicious food and hiked through miles of jungle. I also chipped my front tooth and experienced a robbery at gunpoint. Most importantly, I came to know a place and was changed by it. I began to realize that my own stories, my writing, whatever else it might be about, would always be about the places that fascinate me, real or imagined.
As I reflect on my collection of short stories, I see that my characters are grounded to place either as outsiders who find themselves in the heart of new lands or they are insiders, small town locals, who want to step outside of the borders of the world they’ve known. Either way, these roles force my characters to undertake risky journeys. Travel writer James O’Reilly has said that the journey strips away illusions of self; a new place, a new culture, chance encounters with strangers— they so often charge the traveler with wonder and inspiration and the courage to live better (14). I believe this sentiment applies to each of my stories and my collection as a whole. I write about small, rural places that people might not know existed and I populate those spaces with characters in motion, or longing to be. They yearn to travel because they want to escape the counties they live in, the relationships they have, and the heritage that binds them to a culture. Most my characters stay within county lines and never leave the spaces they occupy but even without going far from home, they find themselves traveling because of the counter characters and towns that offer a journey in one way or another.
When I started to piece these stories together for my thesis, I realized that each one was a point on a map and that they came together as the California that I know. I wanted to convey that meaningful travel doesn’t have to be to some exotic place; one can do it without even crossing county lines. I explore places that are rural, small, and sometimes deceptively familiar to the characters who live in or move through them. Each county is filled with different characters from all sorts of backgrounds- farmers, Native Americans, Russians, hippies, religious people. I realized by putting together a diverse group of characters in a small space where they are forced to interact with each other, it becomes a metaphor for traveling to learn from other cultures without the physical aspect of traveling. My characters find that the answer to a lot of their conflicts exists at home, in a place they want to escape or a place that becomes a similar parallel to home. What writing these stories has also taught me is the value of thinking about the places we know, or want to know, in terms of the individual spaces that make them up, no matter how small, and how those spaces fit together to make a whole world or state.
Most the places I chose to write about are rural small farm towns filled with corn fields and the possibility of fire. I see fire, whether it is a literal flame or the fire of a gun or the summer heat, working as a force of nature that is there to wipe out the past of my characters and symbolize the change that can be scary. I feel place can ground people and sometimes the force of fire is the only thing that will push them out of their familiar roles and places. There is an end to fire in my stories as my characters develop based on their growing relationship with their counterpart characters. I chose these places and these diverse people to write about, because I think we don’t know the amount of story in these farming communities and we tend to forget about the corners of the world that sit quietly harvesting corn.
But it is not only places that have been important to me in writing these stories; there are people who have served as my guides on this journey. Lucy Corin challenged me. She gave me deadlines and made me realize I can write ten pages every week. It wasn’t until I was encouraged, even required, to write in such volume, that I had a critical mass of my own work that allowed me to see exactly what threads were running through all of my stories and weave them together into a unified manuscript. In workshop, Lucy made sense of my work through translating them into pictures, images— maps of my stories. I’ve always been a visual learner, so Lucy’s maps made sense to me. My stories took on three-dimensional shapes and I started to visualize the space my characters inhabited and the roads that connected them. Yiyun Li taught me to write about the mysterious and gray characters. She told me that no matter what, I was going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters I love and that my characters will grow out of the challenges they are faced with. She taught me to continue to let my characters exist miles after the story is finished on the page. David Van Leer introduced me to the timelessness of the classics. He taught me the value of exposing my characters to risk, controversy, and conflict. He pushed me to think about complex characters and relationships and how to write them subtlety and honestly.
I’ve also been influenced by people whom I’ve never met but whose work has always pointed me in the right direction. Anne Lamott taught me how to “make real or imagined events come alive” (7) and that if I look around I will start to see story everywhere and that the trick is to learn to be engrossed by something outside of myself (102). Under the influence of her writing, I began to look outside; instead of writing about myself or characters already familiar to me, I found the stories in the face of an armed robber, in the line at the post office, or in a shed on the side of Highway 20 advertising homemade bat houses. Raymond Carver’s work taught me that there is story in the grimmest corners of the world, places unimaginable to most people, and that those places should be written into story, as well. Sherman Alexie illustrated for me the importance of heritage and culture. Through his stories I was able to reflect on applying my own Russian heritage to my stories and realize how the passing on of culture through generations becomes a way to travel without leaving the house. Jodi Angel taught me to write the hard truth of my characters, because even when things get uncomfortable the reader will be intrigued by that raw honesty. My stories don’t shy away from risk and danger. My characters are put into positions that show how danger and crisis have a way of making us instinctively understand what matters at any given moment, and what doesn’t. It is precisely these moments of danger and crisis that cause my characters to change their lives.
This collection, like the characters who populate it, is still a work in progress, a journey that is on its way to being fully realized. I feel closer to my stories that are written in first person, and feel like I am still negotiating an authentic third-person point of view. I constantly second guess my titles—they are so important as the first sign-posts or markers that the reader encounters along the way. But for the most part, I feel confident about where and how the collection has come together as a whole. I set out on this journey to help my readers learn about the world without even realizing it. I wanted that to happen in the most unlikely places--Hopland, Arcata, Yuba City or Knight's Landing--because I think that's how it really happens in our lives. These are real towns that people might not know existed, even though some are close to home, unique points on the greater map of California. They offer the foreign and the familiar; they are journeys that don't require a plane ticket or any luggage but only the reading of words off the page. I want my stories, these places, to inspire equally fulfilling journeys for my readers; I want to offer them an entire world without travel.