SAM SCHIEREN is a writer from Valley Cottage, New York. He received his MFA from the University of California, Davis. His work has been published in Gulf Coast, Bellevue Literary Review, and Southern Humanities Review, among other journals. He has previously taught at UC Davis and Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, and teaches at VCU.
SR ÁLIDA is a writer, educator, and professional and academic development specialist. Within all these realms, she is invested in cultivating spaces of radical learning and community that question social structures and realities to imagine expansive futures beyond the limited possibilities of today. You can find her writing in “Ni de Aquí, Ni de Álla” from DWA Press 2021, Southern Humanities Review Summer 2021 (vol. 54.2), Orison Anthology/Best Spiritual Literature 2022, Teach for America One Day Virtual Magazine, and “When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent” from University of Arizona Press 2023. She is fiction editor for the Yalobusha Review and a 2021-2024 MFA Candidate in Fiction at the University of Mississippi. When she’s not writing or teaching, she is daydreaming about blood orange sunsets.
Fiction Editor Sr Álida spoke with Barry Hannah Prize winner Sam Schieren about his winning story, “A Disturbance.”
SA: Setting, I dare say, is the motor driving this story. I was particularly impressed by the active work that setting did to frame the narrative and introduce an immediate sense of urgency. I found myself wondering if the plot could develop as brilliantly given a different setting. Walk us a bit through your writing process in relation to setting. What came to you naturally? What choices felt more consciously driven? How did you envision the setting functioning within the story?
SS: I was twenty-three when I started this story (I’m now thirty). I was on a plane and as we took off, I looked out the window and watched the cars on some busy road. I began thinking how small a thing it’d seem if one crashed and yet how big it would be for the driver. I was interested in this difference in perspective. I tend to think first of the mind of the character(s) in a story. In this case, the action of the mind of the woman on the plane is determined by her being strapped into a seat in a tube of metal, hurtling through space high above Earth, facing the same direction as three hundred strangers, bombarded with nudges to accumulate points and peruse Sky Mall magazine. The intensity of this setting is already “happening” to the woman when she sees the crash, which is a comparatively tiny sensory experience. Nevertheless, it is more meaningful than all the noise. That, to me, was the whole story—a snippet of the mind-state of a sane and concerned witness, trapped amongst a forward-facing, airborne society. But it might be about something else. In a workshop years ago people fixated on the flight’s lack of origin or destination. From this nowhere-ness an unintended interpretation arose: perhaps she was in some kind of purgatory. I like when the ultimate “plane” of a story cannot be determined.
SA: The story is written in third person and the main character is only referred to as “the woman”, which normally creates a bridge between the consciousness of the story and its subjects. Yet, the story entangles the reader in the anxiety that engulfs the main character in a way that feels disturbingly close and vulnerable to say the least. Talk to us about characterization in relation to this choice. What did you want your reader to know about this character? What details about her were most present for you?
SS: When I wrote the first draft, I had only been writing “seriously” for three years. Almost everything I wrote was in the first person. This story included. The narrator was still an unnamed woman, but it didn’t read right. The late Ellis Avery, who was leading the workshop I presented it to, suggested I try converting it to third person. So, I did, and it then became much easier to see how the society of a plane might react to a “concerned witness” of an impossible to remedy tragedy. The passengers’ reactions then inflected on the woman’s mind-state, which further altered the passengers’ reactions, and so on. Getting a feel for that feed-back loop allowed the woman to become herself. I think this allows the reader to know what it feels like to be her, but also what it feels like to witness someone behaving as she does—well-intentioned but panicky. The crowd offers a range of sympathies and antipathies. But none of them fully share her perspective. Hopefully the reader comes to understand her better than the crowd does. Though perhaps not. I’m sure some read the crowd as hysterical while some read her as hysterical. Who is failing to understand the true significance of this little pinpoint of a tragedy? One great power of stories is to allow you to live inside of a question, to turn a question into a prolonged mental experience. I hope this story does that.
SA: Do you have a writing process? What’s writing advice you wish you had been given sooner?
Writing Process: It’s always changing. At the moment, I make myself a cup of coffee, read for an hour or two, make myself another cup of coffee, then sit down and write (which often means edit) until my partner returns from the botanical garden where she works. Then we walk the dog. She tells me what she learned and did that day and what plants our future garden must have. I tell her what strange thing I’m having some character do now. She tells me if it sounds good or not. Then the writing day is done.
Advice I wish I had been given: One—listen to your mother when she tells you to read more. She tried to convince me to read more as a teen, but instead I simulated season after season in NBA Live “Franchise Mode”, trying to build my own virtual basketball dynasty. Two—you can have many projects going at once; it’s okay. People often tell you it’s vital to finish things. This is good career advice, but not necessarily good artistic advice. Many things I write I do not finish. Someday I might, or not. But when the cyborgs exhume my hard drives and find those messy, half-written texts—