Relief News Tuesday 12.7.10

Announcing Our Pushcart Nominations

The Pushcart Prize anthology is a thick volume produced every year with literary work selected from the best literary journals and small presses. We're proud to honor the following works with this nomination:

Poetry "Doubt," David Holper, Relief 4.2 "Fleeting," Jeanne Murray Walker, Relief 4.1

Short Story "Requiem for a Daughter," John Matthew Fox, Relief 4.1 "The Ice," Kenneth Steven, Relief 4.1

Essay "The Art of Work," A.S. Peterson, Relief 4.2 "Like a Spread-Eagled Cat Suspended," Sam Martin, Relief 4.2

John Matthew Fox's "Requiem for a Daughter"

John Matthew Fox joins the blog to share how he came to write "Requiem for a Daughter," the Editor's Choice in fiction that will be appearing in Relief 4.1.

I wrote "Requiem for a Daughter" in 2005, or maybe it was earlier, or later.  It depends whether you count the living, the thinking, the drafting, or the revision.  Deborah Eisenberg said that she took eight years to write the eight stories in her collection, "The Twilight of the Superheroes," and even though I'd like to be faster, there's a process you can't rush.

For this story, the tri-part structure of the college, daughter, and student arrived at once, in my first draft, but the rest took more effort.  After I'd had it down for a few years, I rewrote it as a short screenplay, and reimagining it in a different medium helped me better understand the story.

The ending--with the bittersweet dialogue--was influenced by Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Decalogue," specifically film two in the ten-part series, where a doctor confronts a moral dilemma.  Kieslowski's last lines shoehorn an enormous amount of emotional complexity into few words.  Of all my influences from film, he's made the biggest impact--I watch "The Decalogue" and his trilogy "Three Colors" on an annual basis.