SmokeLong Quarterly

In such a tiny piece as “The Shell,” every word has to be carefully considered to make sure it’s serving the story. What was the process of writing and editing “The Shell” to get it to its current iteration?

I’ve had the rough idea for “The Shell”—a Native Hawaiian trans woman “curses” the married man from the mainland for breaking her heart—for a while. Making the connection to the superstition of “Pele’s Curse” that taking shells from Hawai’i was forbidden, was the “eureka” moment that locked it in thematically. I’ve had versions of it that were over a thousand words, versions in the third person, versions that followed the man all the way home. Getting it down under 250 words allowed me to focus on the language first: watery imagery, the way the phrases actually felt and sounded in my mouth. Any sort of meandering that did not serve the immediacy of this moment of the curse had to be excised.

“The Shell” provides a soft-spoken comment about perception—the speaker’s perception of themselves, their perception of the person they’re with, the person’s perception of them …. How did that focus inform or impact your use of second-person POV?

“The Shell” began to really take shape during a SmokeLong workshop I took earlier this year, The Music of Flash. One exercise from that workshop had us imagine a piece we were working on told the following way: two paragraphs told by one character, followed by two paragraphs told by a second character. In such a short piece, trying to use two third person POVs felt disjointed, but when I shifted to the point of view of the speaker, the piece just clicked into place. [The speaker] is an incredibly perceptive woman, who has dealt with what people in Hawai’i perceive of her as a trans woman, as a brown woman, as a local. As a result, she’s reasonably cynical about what a white cis man from the mainland thinks of her. He views her as just a sex object, some sort of sexual vacation while he’s on vacation, but she knows she’s so much more. I chose the second-person POV to unsettle the reader [who is] implicated with some of the man’s seedier thoughts and actions, and in being the one cursed.

I was intrigued by the section of the story where the speaker is looking to the “horizon” and thinking about their companion’s future. When the speaker snaps back, what has shifted for them?

Whenever I’m near a body of water, especially the Pacific Ocean, I love to stare at the waves and the horizon line. It’s the perfect backdrop to any daydreaming. The speaker is doing the same, daydreaming about what devastation will come to the man after he breaks her heart. Whether or not these daydreams, or visions, or fantasies, will come true is a moot point to me because the speaker [believing] she’s seeing these things acts as the curse itself. She knows the man will take the shell because that is what white men do in Hawai’i, what cis men do to trans women: take. She laughs at these visions (or daydreams) because she knows so many fathers have failed their families in the same way, and it’s just another cycle repeating itself, like the spiral of a shell.

In a recent workshop, a fellow writer asked my writing group how we know when a story is done. How do you know when a story you are writing is done?

I think of the mother from Lady Bird when it comes to knowing the writing is done: “Let’s just sit with what we heard.” When I’m able to sit with a piece and not want to tinker with it any longer, I know that that particular version of the story is done. With “The Shell,” I knew it was done after I had read it aloud three times after the surgical edits I had to do to a much longer piece and it had the rhythm I’d been writing toward all along. The “on the horizon” passage had originally been written from the man’s POV, so transforming it into this sort of incantation with the S-sounds repeated allowed me to include it while still in service of the shell’s curse. The closing line was part of an earlier draft, so I knew what I was writing toward, but until I could hear the rhythm of the rest of the piece, I knew to keep tinkering.

I love comparing my completely chaotic writing process with other writers’. Can you tell me about a habit, ritual, or ingredient that you must include in your writing process?

I love listening to music when I write and usually choose film scores to listen to. When I get the chance, I’ll also go on a fifteen-to-twenty-minute walk prior to writing to get myself out of the headspace of the rest of my day and into a headspace to write. My go-to score is the Past Lives score. For writing these responses, I’ve put on the just-released soundtrack to Queer by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. For “The Shell,” I listened to Hawaiian slack key guitar music to make myself feel at home (I was born and raised in Hawai’i). Also, whenever I’m close enough in the edit to submit, whether by deadline or by knowing the piece is ready, I light a Virginia Woolf votive candle.