Award-winning short story writer Ben Shattuck talks to us about his latest collection of short stories 'The History of Sound' and the book that encouraged him to switch from researching behavioural biology to writing fiction.
Image credit: Andreas Burgess
Ben Shattuck is the author of Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, which was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of Spring, a New York Times Best Book of Summer, a New England Indie Bestseller, and was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife and daughter on the coast of Massachusetts. Ben's latest book of short stories is The History of Sound which was published by Swift Press in the UK. You can find The History of Sound and Ben's other books on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
Back in the early 90s, when I was seven or so, my dad, who is a landscape painter, illustrated a children's book called Moonlight on the River, which is about me and my brother sneaking out of our seaside home and taking a sailboat for a midnight fishing trip. Watching my dad work was my introduction to how books are made, how long it takes to shape a story and what it means to publish—that books don't arrive on library shelves out of nowhere as I suppose I imagined, but are the hard work of very creative people. My favorite book to read around that time was Jane Langton's The Fledgling. I remember thinking that the protagonist really had figured out how to fly – I hadn’t paused to think about the difference between fiction and nonfiction. The first book I loved as a teenager was Annie Dillard's essay collection Teaching a Stone to Talk, but I didn't really like reading for pleasure until the summer before I went to college, when I read Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which I found on a bookshelf in a friend’s house in Australia.
A couple of years after I graduated from my university, I took a job as a field assistant at a research station in the Carmel Valley, California. The graduate student I worked for was studying Western Bluebirds. My job was to wake up very early and count how many times the bluebirds visited their nest sites, what males were singing where, map their territories, and so on. Because my days were done by the early afternoon, I had hours and hours of free time, and because this was 2009, none of us had smartphones or – at least at the house where all the research assistants stayed – internet connection. Meaning: I read a lot. At the bookstore in town (we went to town once a week to get groceries) I came across Jim Shepard's short story collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway, and fell in love with the short story form.
That year, after realizing behavioral biology wasn’t in my future, I applied to graduate writing programs and later attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While at Iowa, I had an idea that I might publish fiction someday, but still didn’t know how. It all seemed very far off and out of reach. So, I started writing historical nonfiction articles, which in many ways is easier to publish than fiction. Those articles weren’t encouraged by anyone, but driven by a fascination with 19th century New England. From those articles, I got the encouragement and confidence to publish fiction, beginning with the literary magazine The Common, whose brilliant editor, Jennifer Acker, supported my writing and gave me positive feedback. The Common published the short story “The History of Sound” back in 2016.
I write in my dad's old painting studio (the shed), which had been my great-grandfather's toolshed. It's filled with mason jars, old wasp and bird nests, animal bones, dusty books, a broken mandolin, pinned butterflies, pressed seaweed—imagine Rembrandt's painting studio and you're not far off. The studio is a hundred feet or so from my house. When I'm in the middle of a writing project, I go to the studio first thing in the morning, then write for about three or four hours. There are few distractions when I’m there. I leave my phone at the house; there's no internet. It's impossible to think that I would have completed any writing projects without this space, without the solitude and quiet that probably many people need to complete something as (sometimes) overwhelming as a book. The studio is just far enough away from the house that it can feel like I step into another world when I walk through the creaky old door.
This is a collection of short stories that would be called historical fiction – in that every story is either set in the past or explores the ways that the past (personal or historical) changes characters’ lives. The collection spans 300 years in New England, the area of the world where my family has lived for generations. Some stories are set in present day, centering around historians or podcasters or writers or academics who are interested in history, but the majority of stories are clear historical fiction: a cult in 1600s Massachusetts forests is waiting for the turn of the century; a logging camp in early 1900s New Hampshire is the site of a mass homicide; a single mother in an apple orchard in 1800s Cape Cod is trying to decide how to live her life.
I don’t think any artifacts were cut – maybe because of the process that many of the stories were formed. I’d start with an image of an artifact in my mind, like a wax cylinder (The History of Sound) or an antique sex toy (The Silver Clip), or a taxidermied extinct bird (The Auk), then build a character or plot around that object. Those objects become the foundations and the glue of the stories, touching the lives of the characters throughout, but also settling them on a base from which the plot grew.
As I was reading primary sources and nonfiction to get ideas for stories, I started feeling a natural duet forming between the past and present. As in, the writer in the present starts to become paired with an event or place or person from long ago, which is being resurrected through an instrument of research or imagination. I started thinking about how someone in the present can be changed by the past—anyone who has discovered a family secret knows this. The question then became: how would they be changed, and could that change go both ways (the past changed by the present, and the present changed by the past)? It seems to me that the history isn’t cause and effect—but, more, impacts creating radial shockwaves. Something happens, you don’t know how or who it’s going to affect, but you can be sure it won’t be linear, that large circles of us are connected. Like, in one story, a woman leaves her child with her brother and sister-in-law in the 1880s, which leads another woman in the present day to meet her husband. Or in another story, two young men in Maine record folk songs on wax cylinders in the early 1900s, which leads a woman eighty years later to realize she’s married the wrong person. The collection isn’t broadly interconnected or interlinked as some collections are, but specifically in pairs. It’s a one-two relationship featuring those duets, or – per the book’s epigraph – rhymes. Hopefully, when those stories are put side-by-side, something like a harmony forms, a third entity that offers the reader some new understanding of each.
Writing a screenplay is a bit like making architectural plans as opposed to writing a novel or short story, which is like building a house. In fiction, the writer must create and describe the characters, generate dialogue that fits each, describe how those characters react to each other, what characters’ thoughts are, go into their backgrounds, describe the spaces and landscape and weather those characters move through, decide on the register of prose for those descriptions, what verbs or nouns or adjectives or punctuation to use in a way that best renders the story, create metaphors or foreshadowing, and so on, and so on, and so on. It’s a lot to keep track of. But in screenwriting, it’s just two things: where the character is, and what they are either saying or doing. All the rest (all interiority, emotions, reactions, descriptions of place, tone) is in the hands of the director, the actors, production design, the physical locations and so on. There’s just a lot less to write – which, in a way, can make the task harder. If the story or character development isn’t compelling, the film will become just a stack of meaningless scenes. But, maybe because of my background in painting, screenwriting felt like picking up an instrument that I could play without too much difficulty. It’s very a stripped down and minimal medium, an almost poetic form of writing that makes big swoops of the imagination.
I’ll return to the novel I’m working on, which begins in 18th century eastern Germany and ends in the Hudson Valley, New York, in a sort of retelling of the story of the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
I keep returning to Paul Harding’s Tinkers, and I wish I had written Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
I really love Morris dancing, despite what I know everyone thinks about that! For years in California, I was on a Morris dancing side. One particularly enchanting event was doing Abbots Bromley through the redwood forests north of San Francisco on the winter solstice. The dark, the quiet, the enormous trees towering overhead. There’s so much magic in these old dances and in the music.
