Rowan Beaird’s story “Lights” appears in the autumn 2019 issue of The Southern Review. Here, she discusses her exploration of class, gender, and intimate friendships through her characters.
Preety Sidhu: Your story is about three young men, high school friends who are now college freshmen, reconnecting while they are home for winter break. What drew you to writing about male friendships from this perspective? Were there particular challenges to writing across gender?
Rowan Beaird: In high school, all of my close friends were girls, and we spent hours and hours interpreting the words and gestures of teenage boys. When I made a few close male friends in college and was finally able to ask why boys did certain things, what they meant when they said certain things, a constant refrain I heard was: “we’re not that complicated.” As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that is total bullshit. And especially so when it comes to male friendships—a subject that often feels unexplored. Based on my experiences, these relationships are often fascinating because of what boys and men don’t say to one another. What they withhold, what they feel but leave unsaid. And that is how I approached the story. I wanted to take a situation that felt incredibly male, incredibly juvenile—aimless driving, petty vandalism—and think about all of the knotty, complicated emotions that could run underneath. Things that boys would feel deeply, but be unable to say to one another.
As a result, the main challenge was in the dialogue. How Adam understands Jason is all through tone and gesture. I knew that they could not ask one another how they were feeling, that they wouldn’t talk in any meaningful way, even after something horrifying has happened.
PS: Was there anything especially liberating about writing from this perspective?
RB: A lot of my fiction has deeply reflective characters, characters that find themselves paralyzed for one reason or another, and so it was liberating to have characters that were driving around, ready to—can I say this?—fuck shit up. I found joy in focusing on their physicality: throwing bottles out of windows, climbing up gutters, even the simple act of having one of them remove their shirt before they go to sleep. So much of writing from the perspective of women is feeling a heavy consciousness of our bodies. I enjoyed letting that consciousness go.
PS: We know that Daniel goes to a state college on a baseball scholarship. Jason “only” gets into a technical college, and his family is in danger of losing their house. From the way Adam shares these details, we might infer that he goes to a fancier school and comes from a more financially stable background. How do you see social class as functioning in this story?
RB: I grew up in a northern suburb of Chicago, a stone’s throw from the wealthiest zip code in Illinois. Even in elementary school, there was an understanding of who lived in what part of the suburb, and what that meant about their family. For me, this did not dictate friendships—I had friends whose families lived in houses that looked like mine, and I had friends whose families lived in mansions with private beaches on Lake Michigan—but it deeply colored how I felt about my own life. It feels absurd now—my family owned a house, we were perfectly comfortable—but sometimes small class differences feel immense, and of course, my friends and I never spoke about them. I wanted to explore that with Adam and Jason. They are not so different—neither is living on the wealthy street that they target, but the fact that Adam is going to a more prestigious school, that he has a more stable home life, are small markers, enough to make the friendship begin to fray.
PS: Adam and his friends’ relationships balance bonding over acts of delinquency and boneheadedness (like Daniel trying to pee into a jar while driving), with an incredible intimacy of attention paid to each other’s approval and needs and emotions, which comes through in gestures like checking one another’s collars for sewn labels or helping each other crack eggs properly. On the other hand, Adam is clearly aware of the care and effort that the families put into decorating their houses and the joy this brings the neighborhood, but never once feels guilty about ruining it. How did you approach the question of Adam’s empathy, and where it does and does not get apportioned?
RB: First of all, I appreciate you calling out that intimacy! I wanted to heighten that feeling of physical closeness—something that often looks so rough between teenage boys, but that can also be delicate, almost sensual. To me, this question of empathy connects back to class. Even though there are small class differences between the boys, one thing that does unite them is an us vs. them mentality when it comes to the residents of the wealthier part of town. The houses are signifiers of what the boys don’t have, not real homes. So the vandalism isn’t about destroying someone’s personal property, it’s about destroying the idea that someone has more than you. This is part of what drives Jason’s action at the end—having this deep well of anger, and having no idea how else to express it.
PS: This story is full of great sensory details that really help to ground readers in that car, in that night, for example the “cloud of frost” that enters as Daniel steps out to pee and, a moment later, the liquor bottle with a top “sticky as syrup.” From a craft perspective, how did you decide which moments and which sensory details were worth slowing down to include?
RB: I tend to be very self-indulgent when it comes to these sorts of details, and have to ruthlessly edit to winnow down to what feels essential. I print out the piece, I get out the red pen, I read it out loud. I wish I had a great rationale for what does and does not make that cut, but so much of it is just a gut feeling (and, full disclosure, my gut is not always right).
PS: The image of Jason slitting the snowman’s throat with a broken blade is simultaneously violent and noir-ish, and also a little bit unavoidably comical and juvenile. At what point in the writing process did that climactic image come to you?
RB: That image was actually the entire basis of the story! It was stolen from an anecdote I heard at a party, and when it was told I could so clearly see the boy holding up the shears and hear the sad wheezing of the deflated snowman. The story had the whole room laughing, but I found something so deeply disturbing in the image, and kept thinking about what would drive a person to do that sort of thing. As you say, it’s juvenile and violent, which led me to think about a boy who could not say what he felt, or ask for what he needed. It also made me think about friendships, and how one moment can reveal how little we know about one another.
Rowan Beaird‘s work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Joyland, and The Common. She has received the Emergin Writer’s Award in fiction from Ploughshares.
Preety Sidhu is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and an MFA candidate in fiction at Louisiana State University. Originally from the eastern shore of Maryland, she earned a BA in Astronomy at Swarthmore College before working as an independent school math teacher in the New York and Boston areas. She is currently hard at work on her thesis, a novel.
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