The idea

In 2006, when I was in college, I had the good fortune to study abroad in Prague. While I was there, taking a class titled “Gender in a Post-Socialist Society,” I sat near a young woman named Christina. She was from the American Bible Belt and was a deeply devout Christian. Christina seemed to take personal offense to everything discussed in this class on Eastern European feminism.

Christina had all kinds of things to say to our class about marriage and a woman’s place being in the home. She told us she was a virgin, and that her parents had a deeply loving Christian marriage. She said she was only going to stay in college long enough to find a husband. As soon as she found a man who treated her like a princess (just like her daddy did), she was going to get married, drop out, and have nine children, because to her, the pinnacle of femininity was being a mother and running a home—just like her mother had. I remember she had this huge virginity promise ring that her father had given her. It had a diamond the size of a marble.

I remember listening to Christina talk at length about how her life was going to go. She had a very specific life script, and so help her, she was going to follow it! As far as she was concerned, the rest of us women in this class were a bunch of abominations for abandoning our God-mandated biological imperatives—to reproduce and be subservient to our husbands.

Some of the other people in my class responded to her with rational arguments and some with hostility. 

Me? I didn’t try to argue with her or shame her for her dreams. But I did feel worried for her. 

I had grown up in a matriarchy of three generations of working single mothers—all of whom were married when they first became mothers. I knew personally that life is complicated and messy and unpredictable. Having a man financially provide for you is nice, but it isn’t a given—and it isn’t always the preferred option, either. A mother’s income is the bedrock of her family. When all else fails, she has to be able to provide for her babies.

What was it going to be like for Christina if her rigid life script didn’t go as planned? What if she got the life she’d dreamed of and found out it wasn’t as simple or perfect as she thought it would be? What if the man she married turned out to be a deadbeat or an abusive drunk? What if she spent years feeding him and caring for his children, and then when he’d used her all up, he’d abandon her for a younger woman when she was too old to financially provide for herself? What if her husband became disabled? Or died? What then?

I thought about Christina again, years later, when I was happily married. I had found a partner with whom I felt a powerful, explosive love. The kind of love that could be best expressed in poetry. At our wedding, I had asked for Pablo Neruda’s Love “Sonnet XVII” to be read because this was the best way to describe how I felt:

XVII by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as certain dark things are loved,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries

hidden within itself the light of those flowers,

and thanks to your love, darkly in my body

lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,

I love you simply, without problems or pride:

I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,

so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,

so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close

Twelve years later (and counting) and I still feel this way about my husband.

I remember thinking of Christina and wondering what advice I would give her if she were my daughter. What if she had grown up seeing a happy marriage and always assumed that’s how it would be for her? What if she didn’t get the perfect fairy-tale love of her dreams, and instead had to create her own happiness?

That was part of how I got the idea for “Heart in a Jar.” I wrote this story for Christina. I don’t know where she is now, but I hope she is okay. If I were her mother, I would want her to find a life of happiness, meaning, fulfillment, love, self-forgiveness, and self-acceptance, no matter what her marital, childrearing, or job status turned out to be.

SPOILER ALERT: This is where I ruin the soup by telling you what went in it.

I imagined a heart that would beat in the presence of true love. But what “true love” meant would change to the main character, Anya, throughout the story.

Starting with a cool idea is only the seed. From idea to finished short story took four years of work.

I started attempting to write it in 2009-2010, when I was working as a bookseller at Borders, during the months before it went bankrupt. I worked the early shift then where we would arrive at 5 a.m. and spend several hours shelving new books in the empty, closed store. I’d walk up and down the aisles, putting books in their places and telling the story to myself, trying to figure out how it would work. I’d write on my lunch break, and when I got home from work. I have about 50 pages of handwritten scene, notecards, sprawled notes.

There was a mood I was shooting for in this story. In 2011 I read Ken Liu’s incredible Nebula and Hugo Award-winning short story “The Paper Menagerie.” That feeling of loss and profound emotional impact moved me to tears every time I read it. I was impacted by the love between the son and his mother, and by the son’s denial of self as he tries to fit in. How the paper tiger was a metaphor for his mother’s love, and the magic of her culture. I wanted to use the metaphor of the heart in the jar in the same way.

While I was in my MFA program at San Francisco State, I had this wonderful teacher, Junse Kim, who would get into the fine grit of writing craft. I remember him teaching us about how to use symbolism in our writing, that we ought to treat it like a Pavlovian response to external stimulus: linking an emotion to a physical object, scent, or place over and over again until you can end a story with just the symbol and readers will still feel the ring of emotion without having it to be stated. He was also very generous in explaining how he used this technique in his Pushcart Prize-winning short story “Yangban.” This is also present at the end of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. When Adam whispers “Timshel!” as his dying words to his son, readers know exactly what that means and the impact of that last words lands on you in a wave of emotion that makes you want to hug a puppy and cry.

I wanted to end with Anya kneeling at her mother’s grave, ear to the ground, hearing a heartbeat. But for this moment to make sense, I made a list of all the other moments that would have to happen before. I came up with a series of moments I would need to write about for the ending image to resonate.

This was late 2012. I was able to hold the whole plot in my head, but I still didn’t have the voice and voice is everything. Especially in short stories. This was Anya’s story, not mine. It needed to be told in her voice.

I didn’t have what I needed to write the story until our class was assigned to read the first and last story of Robert Olen Butler’s short story collection Tabloid Dreams. This was it! For anyone who hasn’t read Robert Olen Butler, he has this incredible way of layering stories on top of each other, where it is as if a character is in two places at the same time. They are anchored in the present through a sensory experience, but that sensory experience pushes them deep into a memory of a very intense experience in the past. He uses this technique all over the place in Tabloid Dreams, such as when the man who was a victim of the Titanic regains consciousness as a waterbed, or when another Titanic victim is discovered floating in the Bermuda Triangle and both of the characters are both grounded in the present moment and pulled back to the memory of when they crossed paths on the Titanic an almost fell in love.

That was it! I had found Anya’s voice. Now that I had all the ingredients, I wrote the story in about 40 hours, over the course of several weeks.

When I turned it in, Junse Kim wrote this as his feedback: “This is the first manuscript I’ve received from a student where I subjectively feel that the end drama is earned, that the stakes have been developed.” Yes! I did it!

via GIPHY

As for Christina…I doubt she will ever see “Heart in a Jar,” because I’m certain we run in different circles. Even so, I still think about her sometimes and hope she is doing okay. I hope she found the love she was looking for.

For those of you who have bothered to read this far, I hope this gives you a window into what my process is like. Many of the other stories included in my upcoming collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse went through a similar multi-year process of digging and digging and digging, and then finally the dam breaks and it all pours forth in a flood. I have a few more short stories to write to fill out that collection…ideas that have been haunting me for years. I can hear them calling to me. I hope to be able to attend to them soon.

If you want to read “Heart in a Jar,” you can get a free copy by signing up for my newsletter.