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  • The Novelist and the Short Story Writer
  • Douglas Trevor (bio)

She had written two novels by the age of twenty-seven and was known, by the time she went to the Upstart Conference in the Hills to teach, as an author of peculiar power and enviable sales numbers. Her first novel, Hand Job, was about a teenage girl in a small town who used her considerable finger dexterity as a pianist to satisfy the various adolescent boys who courted her relentlessly, until a carnival came to town and she discovered the love of her life: a transgender pony wrangler with whom she ran off at the book’s conclusion. Yes, there were some contrived elements in play here, as reviewers noted, but they also praised the way the author balanced her treatment of sexual frustration with a meticulous account of carpal tunnel syndrome. In addition, the book’s depictions of what the effects of a steady intake of high-fructose corn syrup can be on an unnamed but clearly red-state community were universally praised. “Junk food has never looked so junky,” one critic noted.

Ellen’s second book, The Sodomite, detailed a fourteenth-century young nun’s affair with an abusive Dominican who offered the girl comprehensive knowledge of Scholastic philosophy in exchange for a kind of love that pretty much dared not speak its name. On the heels of this work, one reviewer enthusiastically described Ellen as “the illegitimate daughter of a carnal union between Umberto Eco and the Marquis de Sade.” Just a week before the conference was scheduled to begin, the novelist’s agent optioned the book to an Italian movie producer.

The short story writer was older than Ellen: thirty-three. He smoked continuously: cigarettes he rolled himself to save money and also because he was particular about the kind of tobacco he liked. Thom wore a long beard. His hair rested on his shoulders. He was very tall and gaunt and looked and carried himself more than a little like Jesus Christ. Unlike Christ, however, Thom coughed a lot and professed to suffer from both claustrophobia and acrophobia, although in both cases he was lying.

More than anything, Thom identified himself as an experimental writer. He identified himself in this manner a lot; he had to, since no one had ever heard of him before. Faculty positions at the Upstart [End Page 26] Conference in the Hills were all endowed and came with differing—although unpublicized—compensation and acclaim. Ellen, for example, was the Dow Corning and Norwesco Septic Tank Distinguished Author. She received an honorarium of $15,000 for her ten days of work. Thom, on the other hand, was the Arthur McKendrick Author of Experimental Fiction. Harry McKendrick, Arthur’s father, lived a few miles from the conference and had occasionally attended the public readings, although not so much anymore. He had used some of his considerable inheritance to build a bomb shelter on his property and fill it with Star Trek memorabilia. His son, Arthur, had taken after his father. Midway through high school, however, Arthur’s attempt at launching an assortment of kitchen flatware into space via a homemade rocket resulted in a serious conflagration that killed him and torched about three acres of the McKendrick property (true to form, the bomb shelter was unharmed). In memory of his son, Harry had offered to cover the airfare for a writer of experimental fiction to come and teach at the conference annually. Each year, when it came time to select the Arthur McKendrick Author of Experimental Fiction, the director of the conference wrote the names of all the applicants on tiny slips of paper and then drew one from the pile randomly. In this manner, Thom was selected as an instructor.

The director of the Upstart Conference in the Hills was not a fan of experimental fiction. Notwithstanding his general dislike of the genre, if he had bothered to read Thom’s work, he might very well not have tossed his name into the pile in the first place. Thom had published nearly all of his stories in journals run by his friends. The journals had names that couldn’t be...

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