Behind the Book With Cary Fagan
Today, we invite Cary Fagan to the Book*hug blog to share the story behind how the five disparate stories in his new collection A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News came together to create a single book! Take it away Cary!
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You know that story about the elephant? How one man feels its tail and thinks that an elephant is like a rope. Another feels a leg and thinks it’s like a tree. A third feels a side and thinks it’s like a wall…
In most collections of short fiction, the stories all feel like ropes or trees or walls, but not like all of them. Their stories inhabit one landscape, are populated by people who might even know one another. They’re told in similar voices. So many great collections come to mind—by Mavis Gallant, David Bezmozgis, Jhumpa Lahiri, etc. I myself have written such books.
But what about a story collection that is like an elephant? Where, if you get hold of one story or another, you think that it is a whole other kind of animal. That might describe my own new book, A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News. There are five stories in Fast Horse and they aren’t, as in most collections, even close to the same length. Instead they are arranged from shortest to longest, from seventeen pages to almost eighty. That difference in length alone means that they are not going to all work the same way. While the first stories take advantage of the short story’s brevity, the later have some characteristics of the novel.
And what are these five stories about? The Book*hug catalogue does a good job of describing them:
A disgruntled border in 1970s London watches an affair develop between his landlady and a young Canadian student. A woman recalls the family that lived in a lovely tree in her backyard. A fifteen-year-old girl steals a book from a bookstore and sets in motion a remarkable whirlwind journey through New York City. Three turn-of-the-century musicians cross into Saskatchewan to escape an angry gunslinger. A couple decides to separate, only to find that their cat and their dog have a lot to say on the matter.
I didn’t set out to write such a book. Each story has a very different history. The longest (about the musicians) was first drafted some fourteen years ago. My intention had been to write a novel but, despite months of additional research and note-making, it simply refused to grow any larger. The story set in London had haunted me for decades; I only succeeded in writing it when I found its unlikely narrator. The New York story came right after finishing my last novel, The Animals, as a sort of coda or addendum to it, but then felt as if it ought to be separate. The couple story came in a rush, without planning, and was written on a little table that I had nailed together when Covid closed the cafes.
I remember when it occurred to me that these stories, despite being so different from one another, belonged together. At that moment I started pulling manuscripts out of the stacking boxes where I keep works-in-progress. I laid them on the rug and stared. Yes, crazy as it seemed, they really did belong together. And so I spent the next months revising them, which gave me the chance to think of them together and even to see some correspondences.
The original manuscript was just four stories. It was Jay and Hazel at Book*hug who suggested it needed one more. Fortunately, I immediately thought of a story that I’d been thinking about writing, one that is itself about storytelling. It has become the first work in the book, almost an introduction to the others.
So here is my elephant. So different in its parts but forming, or so I hope, a strange, ungainly, beautiful whole. I hope that readers find pleasure in their pages and that these stories suggest there is not one but many ways to see and respond to the world.
