Author Stuart Dybeck was the final judge for the 2006 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. I imagine his delight when he read Naomi Benaron’s original and moving collection Love Letters from a Fat Man. How could he not have chosen the volume as the winning manuscript? From its title story, which comes first in the collection, to the last of the 14 stories in her collection, Benaron engages, entertains, and moves us. Using her power of observation and threading the lives of fictionalized characters with the truth of her experience, she encompasses her readers in a world of human yearnings.

In an interview on the BkMk Press website, Naomi Benaron mentions that the authors she likes to read are lyric writers: Faulkner, Anne Michaels, and Ken Saro-Wiwa among them. It is not hard to see that her reading feeds her own poetic sensibility. Describing the shock of seeing one’s mother dying or the need to bear witness to the most awful of events is best done in poetry–or Naomi Benaron’s prose.

Author Naomi Benaron employs images and details from her two trips to Rwanda where she sponsors a child in an orphanage, her parents’ families’ Holocaust tragedies, her science background, her parents’ work as psychiatrists and her mother’s bi-polar condition to make her characters and settings palpable and absorbing, her themes enduring. Her fiction is “truth and lies all mixed up” with a strong thread of her childhood:

I am a fiction writer, which means I am a liar. But it also means I am a grazer. Real events serve as seeds for me, and I steal from them wherever I can; then I mix them up with my compulsive lies and put the product on the page. I am always on the lookout, always writing things down…

In addition to offering us an unforgettable reading experience, I believe that Naomi Benaron offers those of us who write from personal experience strategies to follow that will allow us to organize our experience in stories and use lyricism to open the veins of feeling in our stories.

I discuss three of this collection’s excellent stories to help foster your writing. For each, after a synopsis of the story that includes many of Naomi Benaron’s sentences and phrases, I offer a writing idea to use whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction.

 “Love Letters from a Fat Man”
This story is a compilation of emails from Otto to the late Marlene Dietrich. Once a slim man, Otto now weighs 433 pounds and is hell bent on eating himself to death. His son died and his wife divorced him. He spends most of his time watching Marlene Dietrich films while eating buttery popcorn with Hungarian paprika sprinkled on top. He emails Dietrich about the space robots’ landings on Mars, his research into her life and the parallels he finds between their lives. He writes about his German father who hid “the insignias of the Reich” in a velvet pouch and he writes about the end of his marriage:

I followed her from room to room, kissing her shadow. I cooked her elegant dinners and waited till eight, till nine, drinking wine at the table, playing Chopin, listening to the unanswered ring of her phone. I consumed her portions as well as mine and stewed in my own rage. I devoured desserts. Late at night, when she came home, I watched her from darkened doorways, a cigarette nearly burning her fingers while she read a book, traced the arc of a circle with her toes. I sniffed at the air for the hint of a man, the soured perfume of an embrace.

After several emails and having developed a feeling that Dietrich has become an intimate friend, Otto writes about his son:

In 1992, the year of your death, I had a child: a son…

I had a son, and when he was seven my wife left him in my care while she attended a conference. He had a delicate nature and was prone to exaggeration. A nick on the finger became a war wound. So you can understand why I assumed he had a touch of the flu, an insignificant sniffle. My own father drove me from my bed when I shivered with fever; it was all I knew.

I had a son, and when he was seven he developed an infection, and the infection went to his heart, and beneath his pale and sweating skin his heart silently expanded until it now longer had the strength to pump life through his body. I had a son, and my wife left him in my care, and she barely had time to kiss him goodbye before he sighed and left us childless. When I held him in my arms, he was weightless as a little bird.

Despite his personal loses and his desire to eat himself to death, Otto has been learning about his helper Marta’s life: she had a child she was made to give up for adoption after her father beat her.

In his last email to Dietrich, the subject line reads, “Water on Mars!” He addresses her as “My poor Marlene” and writes about learning of the way she died, withdrawn and alone in her apartment, drinking herself to death. And then the parallels in their lives end: Otto is delighted that evidence of an ancient sea is discovered on Mars, that Marta has encouraged him to lose weight with a promise of going together to visit the Marlene Dietrich Collection at the Film Museum in Berlin. “The possibilities for life,” he says, “are found in the most surprising places.” We are happy for his renewal. We realize he has written his way to a new vision, to a coming out of grief.

Writing Idea
Think of an issue in your life–a loss, an obstacle, a desire you’d like to fulfill someday. Choose someone who does not know you at all, someone alive or dead, and write four to five emails to him or her about your sadness, your dilemmas, and your daily life. Include information you are finding out about the other and how it makes you notice specific things in your own life.

“A Thousand Dances”
In this story, a celebrated national Rwandan dancer named Ingabire has come miles to bear witness to the slaying of her mother, father, sisters and nephew by Hutus. In and out of consciousness, she has reached a refugee camp just over the Rwandan border in Zaire, her body engulfed by fever and dehydration, part of a toe missing. Her family’s story is told between subtitles that contain the names of four of Rwanda’s hundreds of dances–The Dance of Umuliro, Fire; The Dance of Ukuguruka, Flight; The Dance of Amagufa, Bones; and The Dance of Amahoro, Peace.

In the Dance of Fire, Ingabire dreams she is dancing, that her “arms wave like papyrus in the breeze.” She imagines she sees her family, all but her five month-old nephew, who is not bundled in a sling to her sister’s breast, as he should be. Instead he is in a pirogue, a dug-out canoe, gliding on a lake’s surface. She feels her lungs fill with blood.

In the Dance of Flight, Ingabire remembers seeing Zaire across the border:

The bones of her feet are hollow: the bones of a bird. Faster and faster she leaps. Volcanic rocks scoop the skin from her feet until the shores are red with her blood. She follows the rocks out into the water, out toward the far shore where the country of Zaire rises. Zaire is a green jewel in the distance. Zaire is a gaping mouth waiting to swallow her. Urupfu rurarya ntiruhaga. Death eats and is never full.

“Mama,” she calls. “Papa.” She hears only the silence of stones. She slips; her feet kick and jerk as if she were dancing on logs. She looks down to see arms and legs entwined like gnarled roots beneath her feet. Lake Kivu is choked with bodies, and Ingabire dances to Zaire on this bloated sea.

In the Dance of Bones, the “earth grows dark with blood. The cries of her people rise through the soles of her feet and she slashes the air with the blade of her fury.” She “dances a thousand stories with her body…for the uncounted people mixing their bones with the bones of the hills, their blood with the blood of the hills.” No one from her family answers her calls; the abazimu, spirits of the dead, watch from the edge of the forest breathing icy breath, reaching fingers of smoke.

To Ingabire, the camp doctor’s face “floats on the lake’s surface.” She sees “he is waiting to drift into her terrible words. The bubbles of her story rise from her mouth”:

When we got to Nyungwe Forest we thought we would be safe…still we crawled like worms through the underbrush…We could not drink from the streams because of the bodies. They looked like strange water plants with billowing shirts and pagnes…I remembered when we were children we came here. We ate our lunch by the water. The streams swirling over the rocks made a sound like baby’s breathe. Mama taught us to weave baskets from grass, and Papa taught us about trees.

I don’t know how many days we had been walking when the soldiers rose up from the earth…Hutu or Tutsi, I thought when they asked us. What am I? What are you? What is anyone in this accursed country?

Physically tortured, repeatedly raped and then shot, Ingabire awakens with her sisters’ dead bodies on top of her. She sees her infant nephew in blood-red cloth with his head folded in against itself and remembers her parents words, “Someone must be left…Someone to tell the truth.” And Ingabire does this, when she sees “the blue tents rising like waves from a river of mud and blood.”

In the Dance of Peace, the weakened Ingabire joins her dead family. She sees “her mother picking ripened ears from the tall stalks” of maize. She sees her father descending a hill. Her sisters walk behind him and her little nephew is big now, running in and out of the bushes. A cloud of yellow butterflies rises from the ground:

Ingabire feels the wind from their wings. There are more and more until the air is so thick with butterflies she is carried along in the river of their flight. They fan out until they cover all the hills. A thousand butterflies, dancing the one thousandth dance of Rwanda.

I am not aware of any prose more lyric than Naomi Benaron’s when she portrays Ingabire’s feverish thoughts, her hallucinations and memories.

Writing Idea
Naomi Benaron relates the story of a whole country through the story of one of its national dancers. Each segment of the story is under a name of a national dance.

What larger story would you like to tell that you might write through using the art, craft or profession of one being? Think about historical events and times like recessions, wartimes, earthquakes, fires or hurricanes. Think about tragedies that have befallen your community. Which person’s viewpoint will you use to tell the story of what happened? What will you use to organize the tale lyrically–if not the names of dances, then perhaps the names of streets, or you various newspaper headlines, or names of the movements in a piece of music or menu items or cooking terms or chapter headings from a famous novel that seems parallel in some way to the story you are telling. You might even use lines from a famous poem and write your passages between the lines.

Where and when does your story begin? What has your main character (this might be you or someone whose viewpoint you are writing from) seen and experienced prior to the start of the story? How will that experience be related in the various parts if this story? How will the character use the language of his profession or art to articulate events and his or her response to them?

“Directions”
This story is made up of “you” statements and commands, a device used by those who are writing about painful topics and need distance between themselves and the material in order to articulate the moment they are writing from. The form allows them to pour images onto the page that the more personal “I” might be hesitant to write. Though the speaker giving the commands here is fictional, her plight is autobiographical and we become intimately involved in her sadness as a consequence of the use of the second person.

The story opens with a telephone call; her mother is in the CCU:

Although you keep trying to form the words your father pronounced, you won’t be able to fit your lips around the sharp edges. In the Yellow Pages is a list of airlines to call to find the fastest plane. But the person you really need to call is your mother.

Mama, you want to tell her, I am lost at sea.

The narrator tells you that during the call, you are to notice the small details in your surroundings, a crock next to a measuring cup of brown rice, colored fruits in a bowl, green-tinted light from a glass half filled with water. The image of arriving at the airport and being greeted by your father will be “stored in your heart under L, The Last Still Life of My Familiar World.”

You must, she says, when you arrive at the hospital, “Go ahead. Cross the threshold into her room and force air into your lungs…Let your fingertips find their way through neoprene branches to touch her forehead…Talk to her. ‘Mom, I’m here.'”

You’ll remember, you are told, “following a pair of blue and yellow fins in front of your face mask as they undulate through tendrils of sea grass…your mother’s hair spreading out in ripples red as ink. As blood. The refracted blaze of sunlight catching coral and fish on fire.”

You will “Forget about sleeping.” “Don’t close your eyes, because the moon is dangerous. Its lambent light slithers across the floor, slinks into corners where escaped dust notes gather, creeps across the bed rails, greedy to steal a mother’s last labored breath.” In the morning, “Rub life into your face. Stumble into the hallway chanting, Coffee, coffee, coffee.” “Take a scalded and bitter sip and start making lists.”

“Grip the doctor’s hand firmly when he comes in to talk to you.” “Make up lies…tell the truth…Resist the urge to tell him you have spent your life fighting the fierceness of her love.”

The narrator asks you to leave the hospital: “Two nights in the uncomfortable chair are enough. On the third night, go home with your father…Take two pictures from the crumbling shoebox filled with photos…The first is labeled Zurich, kindergarten, 1921…you will find a pressed rose and a picture of a dark-haired man standing next to a motorcycle. The leather jacket he is wearing is familiar. A vaguely remembered conversation about a boy who died in a concentration camp will float back.”

The next day you will leave again to go out for air. You’ll “Follow a path that leads through a neat garden lined with evergreens and oaks…The last time your mother came to visit, you took her to the butterfly exhibit at the Wild Animal Park… As you wheeled your mother through the thickness of butterflies, she spoke of her brother who had died before she was born, taking with him her own mother’s heart.”

The narrator says you will have a memory of your mother speaking about something from her girlhood. She’ll say, “I used to watch my mother…I knew she was waiting for her son… That’s when I decided to become an explorer…I came to believe that he was on another planet, alive and well.”

You remember asking, “And did you ever find him?” You remember her answer, “Of course. All this time, he’d been on the moon.”

On the path where you are running that ends in “a clearing of grass, “you will be “face to face with the setting moon as it slides down titling mountain ridges”:

And there emerging from the shadow of a crater, will be the image of your mother as she looked in her childhood photograph. She will be wearing explorer boots crowned with tufts of lamb’s wool, a leather aviator cap, and a flowing woolen scarf. By her side is a boy, red hair floating in the freedom of weightless space. They are leaping across the shores of lunar seas with long, confident strides. Your mother is leading her brother home.

Writing Idea
Many of us want to write about endings, about the last time we saw someone we love, about what rises to the surface as we live through loss. Taking on the command form offers the sentence level distance we can use to carefully describe not only the loss but something that will stay with us forever and sustain us.

Put yourself in the experience of losing a loved one or of having to say goodbye for awhile to someone you love. Write using the second person and give directions for how to be in the moment of parting–of course this moment is not literally one moment but a series of moments containing ones that led up to an action (going home for instance or driving to an airport or receiving word of military or transfer orders) and ones you experienced when you saw your loved one knowing you would have to say goodbye and ones you experienced when you left your loved one’s side still thinking of nothing but him or her.

Write as if your life depended upon remembering these details.

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Thank you Naomi Benaron for your lyric prose, your sensitivity, and your willingness to write the sadness of human life as well as the beauty we can find when we lean toward love.