fwriction

Nam Le’s short story collection, The Boat, is extraordinary. Besides winning a slew of awards and accolades, the actual experience of reading Le’s writing has pushed me in my own writing. I hope you enjoy this Story of the Day, originally published in Zoetrope:

“Deadlines came, exhausting, and I forced myself up to meet them. Then, in the great spans of time between, I fell back to my vacant screen and my slowly sludging mind. I tried everything—writing in longhand, writing in my bed, in my bathtub. As this last deadline approached, I remembered a friend claiming he’d broken his writer’s block by switching to a typewriter. You’re free to write, he told me, once you know you can’t delete what you’ve written. I bought an electric Smith Corona at an antique shop. It buzzed like a tropical aquarium when I plugged it in. It looked good on my desk. For inspiration, I read absurdly formal Victorian poetry and drank Scotch neat. How hard could it be? Things happened in this world all the time. All I had to do was record them. In the sky, two swarms of swallows converged, pulled apart, interwove again like veils drifting at crosscurrents. In line at the supermarket, a black woman leaned forward and kissed the handle of her shopping cart, her skin dark and glossy like the polished wood of a piano.”