![]() JW: In my experience of that opening paragraph, the first few lines are emotionally neutral, even though we’re learning how Evangeline was widowed during her pregnancy. I don’t want anything dumbed down for me in any way. I like it when that happens to me, because it’s a really rich experience. I learned to read that way-first having no idea what was going on, and having to keep turning back. At first, I worried about jamming too much into that first paragraph, but then I decided it’s okay if the reader feels overwhelmed for a second, because after that, I’m going to slow it way down. So when I took out that part about waking up, I decided to just go for the gut and say what the story was about as quickly as possible. The thing that changed Evangeline’s life completely (the death of her husband, Eamon) had already happened, but this weekend of being snowed in with Dalton marked another huge shift for her. Once I read a craft book that said you should start the story at the most important point in the person’s life, or the moment everything changes. We’re not supposed to do that, right? But everything that was happening to her was an awakening. Leesa Cross-Smith: Originally, in my first draft, I had Evangeline waking up. Jessica Wilbanks: So many of the qualities I love most in your work show up in that first paragraph of “Whiskey & Ribbons”: the smoldering sexual tension between characters, the elevation of the domestic sphere, and your deep attention to the emotional and romantic lives of women.Ĭan you walk us through some of the decisions you made as you began to immerse the reader into the story? She is the author of This Close to Okay (Grand Central Publishing, 2021), So We Can Glow (Grand Central Publishing, 2020), Whiskey & Ribbons (Hub City Press, 2018), Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014), and the forthcoming Half-Blown Rose (Grand Central Publishing, 2022). ![]() Leesa Cross-Smith is a homemaker and writer from Kentucky. This month’s interview focuses on Leesa Cross-Smith’s short story “Whiskey & Ribbons,” which was published in Carve magazine after winning the Editor’s Choice Award for the 2011 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and which later became a novel published by Hub City Press. The full text of each piece discussed in the column is available online. ![]() In this column, writer and Catapult instructor Jessica Wilbanks sits down with a diverse range of contemporary writers to take a close look at the craft choices they made while writing a single short story, essay, or poem.
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