The story began with something from my past – a teacher I really cared for who was involved in an ill-advised sporting contest for money with bad-ass middle school girls – and I just started building the other elements around that. And I think what kind of amazes me about writing these stories is how, when I work my way through the confusion and the weirdness, at the heart of these stories is tenderness, of wanting to somehow tell the character, and maybe myself too, that they made it. That they’re still in this world, still alive. Maybe that’s all I’ve ever wanted from a story.
Kevin Wilson, Contributor Note
I’m very fond of the BASS contributor notes. They go beyond the biographical and bibliographical details included in most publications, and give the author a chance to describe the process of writing for a particular story, why they wrote it, how they wrote it.
I sometimes get distracted by a very different question I haven’t seen addressed, either as a writer or a reader: in the world of the story, why is the narrator telling this story now?
In fact, in last year’s BASS, Wilson’s story “Kennedy” raised that issue for me. I mentioned it in the Sonoma Novel Reading Group I mentioned in this year’s opening post, and one participant had a great scenario: Kennedy had just been released from prison. While plausible, and appealing, that wasn’t written into the story.
Maybe that question is something you’re not supposed to ask of a short story. However, sometimes the story provides an answer, as in this case. It’s an envelope story, beginning and ending with short sections from the present that explain why Patrick, our first-person narrator, has recalled his middle school years on this particular day: he reads a Facebook notice that his former biology teacher, Mr. Reynolds, died. We then find out, in something like an extended flashback, why that has significance for him.
In eighth grade, like every single grade leading up to that year, I was unpopular. I was too fat for sports and I had all these weird habits, little tics, that, even though everyone in our town had grown used to them, kept me from getting close to anyone. I cried sometimes if people smiled at me too long. I grunted a lot when I was reading to myself. I was an island, but not far enough away from this huge body of land that was the rest of my town, so I could easily feel the separation.
As it happens, Mr. Reynolds is himself “famously weird.” His car is a clunker literally held together with masking tape; he lives with his mother; he dresses stylelessly and monotonously.
It’s kind of a familiar story: awkward kid connects with awkward teacher. But there’s an element that lifts it out of the humdrum: the Death Cards.
Since I was about eight or nine, I’d been updating and revising this card game I’d invented called Death Cards. It was this big stack of index cards, and most of the cards had interesting life events like graduating high school or winning an astronaut scholarship or having sex for the first time. But there were also death cards that featured people dying in horrific, graphic ways. Nobody would play the game with me, so I just played against myself. By eighth grade, there were more than four hundred cards in the game. I couldn’t stop playing, finding my way to whatever kind of life I could have before I died violently.
The Death Cards are both the means by which Patrick expresses his anxiety about his future, and by which Mr. Reynolds helps him find a different way of looking at things.
I can’t help but remember Seth Fried’s description of his process for writing his wonderful story, “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” when he was an undergrad: he had a page in a notebook titled “Massacre Ideas” and sometimes worried that if someone looked through the notebook, they’d think he was a dangerous lunatic “plotting to kill people by means of strategically set-loose gorillas” among other methods. I wondered if Wilson had a similar notebook, or maybe a file on his computer that might give someone the wrong impression (and, by the way, Patrick has a death card featuring a gorilla as well. Gorillas seem to be popular fantasy death machines). But I discovered, via his author interview with Preety Sidhu at Southern Review, that his methodology was much more personal:
PS: In a recent interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, you explained that the spontaneously combusting children in Nothing to See Here were partly inspired by your own experience with Tourette’s syndrome, in which violent images such as “falling off tall buildings, getting stabbed, catching on fire” would suddenly burst into your head. To what extent was this also the inspiration for the Death Cards in “Biology,” in which players might suddenly draw cards “that featured people dying in horrific, graphic ways”?
KW: They’re completely connected. I keep trying to figure out ways to deal with these things in my head. I never made literal Death Cards, but I would do it in my head, trying to imagine my life and seeing how long I could go before I fell into a combine or something, because I knew that was always coming. And that ending in “Biology” to play the game without the Death Cards, was an incredibly cathartic thing for me, which sounds so fucking corny, but it’s true. I am grateful for that teacher in the story, for that moment of kindness. It helped me.
Author Interview, Southern Review
While Patrick does blurt out that he thinks he’s gay, the significance is that Mr. Reynolds, who appears to be asexual, takes it in stride. We’re reassured that things did get better for Patrick by the envelope, in which he has a relationship and seems to be living at least a reasonably happy life.
This is another of Ward’s “young people” stories, showing how kids survive in spite of whatever is going on with them. It’s a warm, funny story that makes great use of its structure – and gets a lot out of a made-up card game.
* * *
A Just Recompense 
Lovely and sweet and I think a fairy tale, but OK, I will accept a fairy tale. Maybe not every story of adolescence has to be Deliverance or Carrie, although I think those are likelier, hahahahaha. My own experience is a little brutal, but I guess I survived, too, no Death Card.
The whole story is a flashback and I think generally that is frowned on, but basically I think it works for him.
Maybe I have to read other work by him.
But the envelope isnt a flashback – he reacts to the past in the present.
It is kind of unusual for literary fiction to be sweet rather than tragic, but one of the cool things about BASS is that it can show a range of stories that were written through the year. I’ve noticed several of these stories have a more hopeful – or at least less tragic – ending than their elements might suggest at first. Maybe that’s a sign of the times: take heart, the worst doesn’t always have to happen.
This is the third story I’ve read by Wilson. Last year’s, “Kennedy,” was outstanding, though it was a bit enigmatic, and if you’d asked me if I’d like to read a story about a high school bully, I would’ve declined; yet I was engrossed throughout. And I like the personal source of the death cards in this one; I didn’t know Tourette’s could manifest itself as intrusive thoughts. I like it when I learn something.