Origins: A Few Thoughts on Springtime on Mars: Stories

By Susan Woodring

Growing up, I only knew my grandmother as an old lady living alone in a small, pink-roofed house in Crescent City, Illinois. She played cards and wore clip-on earrings and kept rolls of winter-green Velemints in her purse.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I became interested in her life before the pink roof. Even then, it appeared there wasn’t much to learn: my grandmother was a farmer’s wife from the early thirties, when she, as a teenager, married my grandfather in small, Depression Era wedding, to the early seventies, when my grandfather passed away and she moved to town. She worked cleaning houses in the early years of her marriage, but, for the most part, she was a housewife living in the middle of a cornfield for forty-odd years of her life. Most days, she rose, cooked breakfast for her husband and her three daughters, sent the girls off on the school bus, saw her husband out the door, and then moved around the house by herself for seven or eight hours, sometimes fixing a big sit-down lunch for my grandfather, sometimes slipping into a pair of his work boots at noon to bring him a sandwich. I began to wonder about those hours, all those years before the frozen Christmas cookies, what silences and boredoms and exhaustions she must have faced, what she wore, what she thought, what she listened to on the radio. Every window she looked through was filled with miles and miles of monotonous farmland.

My musing over my grandmother’s housewife years grew into my first short story, about an old woman whose husband has had a stroke and now exists in a sort of catatonic state, seemingly unaware of the world around him. The woman tells of going through their things, what all she finds, sometimes speaking aloud to her husband, sometimes just keeping everything in her thoughts, and though the story itself is pretty awful, buried deep in my desk drawer, it gave me this: inside every character, even the most ordinary—boring, even—there exists the exquisite, the invaluable, the suffocation of normalcy, the brilliant and the ugly—the something that longs to be expressed.

In writing the stories in my new collection, I labored to bring this core quality to crisis, to portray the ordinary and the extraordinary in the same strain of light. A handful of these stories take place in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s and feature the technological marvels and global concerns of the day. I wanted to take something as familiar as a television set and give it a prequel, show its true magnificence—in the early ‘50’s, it was amazing to behold, and a bit eerie to watch people move around inside a box in your living room. There was good cause to fear Russians in those days, and the idea that extraterrestrial life-forms might come down to harm us was not as far-fetched then as it is today. At this time, science was striving to oust God and in doing so it left an empty spot—what does one believe in when God is lost and science gives only partial answers? By showing characters struggling with these now-debunked fears and the cultural recession of religion, I sought to closely examine fear and faith, to pin down what scares us, to show how human it is to seek out faith, to believe.

I also have attempted to portray my grandmother moving through her empty house, her husband out in the fields, her children miles away at their school desks. I wanted to show the strength and heartache in relationships, how the absence and presence of loved ones affects us. Often, I first come to a story through its closing image: a mother in a white nightgown chasing a swarm of bees through a cornfield, a father tossing his teenaged daughter into a swimming pool. Two of the stories began as segments in a failed novel about a girl and her boyfriend running away from home. One is about an expectant mother who fears the birth of her children, another about an empty-nester who struggles to adapt. Very few of the stories are based, at least not consciously, on real events. The title story, however, is in my mind a convergence of the biblical story of the prostitute washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and a local story about a boy who is hit by a van while goofing off at his bus-stop. It was a boy I knew from years ago when I was a middle school teacher, and I found I could not stop wondering about what really happened that morning. The real-life boy survived; the fictionalized one I hope challenges us to consider the prejudices we harbor and to think on what feats of compassion each of us is capable of.

Lastly, as a writer, I have come to adore the short story as an art form. I love the work of crystallizing that one most crucial moment in a character’s life, to prick that character with the essential conflict or realization, to capture all of it in the span of just a dozen or so pages. And then, to assemble these stories, to bind them together and find a common heartbeat pulse through the set of them is to discover something about myself, to boil it all down to the one thought worth sharing.