Adam Stumacher’s story, “Supercharger,” appears in the Autumn 2024 issue of The Southern Review. Here he discusses the need for speed, the similarities between teaching and writing, and how the COVID-19 pandemic reveals our most profound vulnerabilities.
Halley McArn: Jordan seems most interested in getting a supercharger so that he can boost the speed of his car as quickly as possible. Why is this the car part he most wants?
Adam Stumacher: Research is central to my writing process. When I am writing outside my identity and experience, as I am in this piece, I want to do so with humility. I want to put in the work to get the details right. For this story, I took a deep dive on, among other things, the psychology of race car drivers, the physics of cornering, and the particulars of street racing modifications. In my research, I became fascinated by the supercharger, which I came to see as a concrete object that represents Jordan’s desire to escape or transcend everything that is holding him back.
I’m always interested in characters who are motivated by strong desire. I’m particularly drawn to characters whose desire includes complex and contradictory elements. Over the course of writing, I came to understand that while Jordan thinks what he wants is speed, what he really wants is the anticipation of speed: that perfect moment of stillness before you hit the accelerator.
HM: How does your experience as an educator shape your writing?
AS: I’ve been working in urban schools for more than two decades now—first as a teacher, then as a school leader, and now as a leader in an education nonprofit. For years, I experienced a tension between my identities as a writer and an educator: am I a teacher who writes in his spare time? Or am I an author who teaches as his day job? Both teaching and writing require everything you’ve got, if you’re doing it right. So how could I possibly do both?
In time, and in my better moments, I’ve come to understand these two facets of my identity feed each other in important ways. As an educator, I am a huge believer in the power of stories to build connection and community—whether it’s in a classroom, a faculty, or a school district—and as a writer, I find that most of my work draws inspiration from what I know best: the world of schools. Urban schools are often misrepresented in popular culture through myths such as the White savior, the hero teacher. What I try to do is depict the world of schools as I have experienced it, with all its messy nuance. So it turns out the work I do every day, which I used to think was holding me back as a writer, is my material—it’s central to what I have to say about the world.
HM: We see the virtual space of the pandemic through TikToks, Reddit threads, and complaints about Zoom class. What was it like to write about the onset of the pandemic from the perspective of a 17-year-old boy?
AS: I spent the pandemic at home with my family, supporting teachers and principals over Zoom, and it quickly became clear the kids were not alright. This was especially true for students in high-need districts like Boston. Remote school was hard for everyone, but my family had the privilege of parents who could work from home and support our kids through the process. This wasn’t the case for many, and as always, it was the most vulnerable among us who paid the steepest price. In this story, I wanted to imagine this reality, and at the same time, to explore a character who isn’t defined by the forces that seek to constrain him.
The seed of this piece was a news story I read about the uptick in street racing during lockdowns. I was struck by how these racers were defying so much about this time, taking wild risks when so many of us were staying inside paralyzed by fear, sanitizing our doorknobs. I’m fascinated by characters who go against the grain, and I was intrigued by what motivates people to get behind the wheel and risk their lives. This was the question that drove me into the writing, which for me always works best as a process of discovery.
HM: This story is so rooted in Boston, naming the streets, interstates, and neighborhoods where Jordan drives. Yet he almost feels out of place when he drives, like he’s blurring the landscape. How is writing about driving different from writing about place?
AS: I love this question. This piece is very much about a specific place at a particular time. It is part of a larger project, a linked story collection centered around a single setting. I want, in this project, to complicate the received images of the city of Boston, to get beyond the Red Sox and the colleges and the cobblestone streets and engage the complex heart of the actual city as people experience it.
In some ways, writing about driving is not so different from writing about place—both involve the strategic selection of details to convey a sensory experience to the reader. At the same time, as you allude to, driving is a form of placelessness. Your question makes me think that this might be the story of a character who wants to escape that setting through movement. That the blurring of the landscape may, in fact, be what Jordan craves when he gets behind the wheel.
HM: The worst thing it seems one could be in this story is a “bitch,” or completely consumed by fear. Fear seems to drive these characters into dangerous situations—like street racing—yet it also protects them from real dangers—like falling victim to a racially discriminatory justice system. How does Jordan come to accept his fears in the course of the story?
AS: I was thinking a lot about fear as I wrote this story. In part because, as I mentioned earlier, the pandemic was a time of such acute anxiety, and the act of street racing is a direct contradiction with that emotion. This doesn’t mean that Jordan is fearless. He is too smart not to be scared. He is constantly navigating the tension between being taking risks and being reckless, especially if he wants to keep Thuy in his front seat, not to mention survive.
You’re right to point out that fear is useful in, for example, helping avoid being destroyed by our racist criminal justice system. There is no margin of error for Jordan, like so many kids I have worked with over the years. That is also something I wanted to explore with this piece, the fact that the same people who took such enormous risks, risks so out of step with the dominant ethos of the times, were often the most vulnerable.
HM: I was moved by the connection Jordan makes between the images of the women in his life and plants. This character seems to crave the potential nourishment and interconnectedness of relationships while being unable to seek them. Why do you end the story on a scene of him racing alone rather than with Thuy?
AS: In the images of plants—as well as the animals who were starting to take over the streets during COVID-19 lockdowns—I was thinking about the sense of disconnection with the natural world so many people in cities experience. During the pandemic, I spent as much time as possible outdoors—it was a major way I coped with the stress and uncertainty of the times. I was aware how fortunate I was to have the woods right behind my house, and I wondered how people surrounded by concrete survived.
But I love this idea of connection as nourishment, which feels exactly right to me. In the end of the story, Jordan is alone because his journey is about coming to terms with his isolation. This is, in many ways, a story about loneliness. While he craves connection, over the course of these pages, he comes to recognize he is on his own. Even though he is racing alone in the car, he is imagining a future at the finish line with Thuy, and then Candace Glover, so he hasn’t given up hope for connection.
HM: What are you working on these days?
AS: As I mentioned above, this story is part of a new project, a set of interconnected short stories that center on the same fictional high school, South Boston High School, which is referenced briefly in this piece. Many of the stories are set in the school and narrated from the perspective of teachers or administrators. Others, such as this one, stray from that setting to explore the lives of parents or students, such as Jordan, beyond the school walls. The stories are arranged chronologically, with recurring characters. Both Thuy and Dante have stories centered around them elsewhere in the collection.
The pandemic cuts right through the middle of the collection, just as it cut through so many of our lives. I find it interesting how few stories or books about this period have been published, almost as though we are engaged in a collective effort to forget it even happened. Maybe it’s a trauma response, or perhaps it’s because staying inside and wearing masks isn’t particularly dramatic. Part of what drew me to this particular story was that it felt like a fresh way to render what was, for so many people, a period of boredom and isolation. My hope with this piece, as with all my work, is to complicate what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “a single story.” This kind of tangled complexity is, I believe, what fiction can offer.
Adam Stumacher’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, and the Best New American Voices and has won a Nelson Algren Award and the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. A longtime educator in urban schools, his stories have been televised on Stories from the Stage and his commentaries appear on National Public Radio.
Halley McArn is the editorial assistant of The Southern Review and an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University with a focus on prose writing. She’s served as the Poetry and Nonfiction Editor for the New Delta Review and as an editorial assistant at Speculative Nonfiction. You can find her work in Bright Wall/Dark Room.