The roundabout making of a short story

This is not how I usually do it

I have a new story out today. It’s called “The Rock is Not a Rock” and it’s in issue 163 of TriQuarterly, where you can read it online.

If someone asked me to point them to one story that is exemplary of “my” work and the kind of thing that I “do,” I would probably tell them to read this one, and so upon its publication I am feeling all sorts of feelings: excitement, nerves, expectation. I am trusting that it will find its readers.

Fun fact: “The Rock is Not a Rock” was born out of the novel project that precipitated this very newsletter, the novel about the glass house. It takes place entirely in the “present day” timeline of the novel, so there’s no architect or house museum, and there aren’t even any scenes set in Illinois. But it has northern Illinois in its DNA, and I love that it wound up with Northwestern’s literary magazine.

If you like the story, you might be interested in these past newsletters, which provide a kind of timeline, over the course of a year, of how it came to be:

• The film that influenced Nina being a filmmaker.

• Writing most of the passages that would eventually become this story during 1000 Words of Summer 2021.

• Grappling with the point of telling in the novel, which became the present day and where this story takes place.

• That brief period of time when I thought Nina might write her story as a screenplay.

• A synopsis of the novel, once I figured out how the three storylines could work together.

• Pulling the pieces that would become “The Rock is Not a Rock” out of the novel and workshopping them as a story in December 2021.

• A natal chart reading for Nina, part 1 and part 2, which guided my story revisions.

I want to be able to say with certainty I will finish the glass house novel, but there is a distinct possibility that I wrote ~100k words to arrive at one short story, and if that’s the case, I am totally fine with it because I love this character. Also, that’s writing sometimes!

Congratulations to my fellow TriQuarterly contributors — I will be spending today relishing your work. And thank you to everyone at TQ for being incredibly professional and kind throughout the publication process, with special gratitude to Emily Mirengoff, whose editorial insights made the story exactly what it needed to be to stand alone.

More pond novel updates next week, promise.