2020: Five stories. Five experiences. Sue staats interviews the authors. (One of two posts)

​2020: Five stories. Five experiences. Interviews with the writers featured at our December 18 event, Twenty Twenty. 
(This is the first of two posts.)

​By Sue Staats

If there’s one thing the stories submitted to our first ever anthology have demonstrated, it’s that nobody, in this year like no other, has experienced 2020 in the same way.  We asked writers to submit stories thematically connected to the year, for an anthology to be published next year, and received over fifty astonishing pieces. It was a difficult task to select among so much excellent work submitted.  We were able to pick five to feature in our upcoming virtual event, by these writers:

Elison Alcovendaz, in “#girldad,” used a news event, and his daughter, to craft a meditation upon the fragility of life.
Diane Kallas, in “My Teeth Will Go On,” was inspired by a magazine advice column on how to achieve sanity during lockdown to create a comic, wistful story about a random event that upsets a couple’s well-ordered applecart.
​Deborah Pittman, in “Dear Neighbor,” put anger and truth into a searing letter to a neighbor.
Kevin Sharp, in “The Coffin,” blended an abandoned refrigerator and a breakup, for a comic take on a bad-news year made even worse by this unlikely combination.
Maia Evrigenis, an elementary school teacher, told us about her day in, “Just Another Day at School.”
 
Although the five stories are all thematically connected, they’re also all very different, and I wanted a little more. So I asked these authors to dig into the experience of being a writer in 2020 – starting with the spark that inspired their winning story. Some of the answers begged for followup questions, which I’ve highlighted in red. 

The basic questions were these:

1. Your story was inspired by the theme, “2020.” But I’d like you to elaborate on that a bit. What inspired you to write this piece? And what inspired you to submit it to us?
2. Is there anything in this past year that has influenced your writing? What have you lost? What have you gained?
3. With enforced confinement – are you writing more or less?
4. What do you miss most – as a writer? As a person?

The answers – as you’ll see in this series of interviews – ran the gamut. This post includes the first two of five interviews, with authors Elison Alcovendaz and Diane Kallas.

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Elison Alcovendaz
"#girldad"

What inspired you to write #girldad"? 

E. Getting to our daughter had been a difficult path - miscarriages, a high-risk pregnancy, a NICU stay, depression, marital stress, health issues for both mom and daughter, and a bunch of other crap (including the accident I mention in the essay). By the end of 2019, we had finally gotten out of those years of muck - we were all healthy, medically and emotionally - and the start of 2020 brought more hope than I've felt in a long time.
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That free, untethered hope didn't last, and it was a big loss for me, personally. When Kobe (Bryant) and Gianna passed, my mind drifted to the car accident we'd been in, and the rest of the 2020 has been a reminder of that - how tenuous everything is, how things can just be taken in a blink. When I saw the call for submissions, and the theme of 2020, I knew I wanted to write something about how shaky life can be, and how that is most represented for me in my relationship with my daughter, Emmy, and how much I try to protect her.

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And what inspired you to submit it to us?
E. I also loved the idea of someone being able to take my words and make them their own. Stories don't belong to an individual, after all, so the idea of an actor lending their own interpretation and experience of 2020 to their performance was appealing to me, as well. It's a special way of connecting during a year when connection has been tough.

Is there anything in this past year that has influenced your writing? What have you lost? What have you gained?
E. Once COVID became more real, with stay-at-home orders and such, I thought this could be a time for my writing to flourish. More time at home would lead to more time in front of the laptop. I thought I might finish my memoir or novel. Hopeful thoughts. The exact opposite happened. With all the anxieties and grief and frustration from this year, I found I could not get in the right mind or heartspace to write much of anything that was meaningful. Instead, I found myself binging TV shows I would have never otherwise watched, playing games on my phone I would have never otherwise played. Writing had always been that thing that kept me going during times of struggle, so the loss of that, while it might sound like a small thing to others, was a huge thing to me. 

What have I gained in my writing life this year? Well, I've re-learned how much writing means to me. 

With enforced confinement – are you writing more or less? 
E. The cliche of the writer is the person hunched over their desk, alone, solitary, pounding away at their keyboard or scribbling away on their notepad. I have never been that kind of writer. I've never been the writer that could just show up to the desk for hours at a time and write anything worthwhile. I've always needed the energy of the world. I needed to be around people. I needed to hear their conversations. I needed to see how their bodies moved, how their voices changed, how their faces contorted into different expressions. Enforced confinement has taken that away for the most part, which in addition to what I mentioned above, has made writing so much more difficult for me. 

What do you miss most – as a writer? As a person?
E.  I miss having choices. I miss having true, unfiltered hope. Maybe those are the same. 

Does the news of an imminent, effective Covid 19 vaccine change your attitude about this at all? 
E. The news of a vaccine does provide some hope, I think, but not as much as I would... hope. Like many things, the idea of a vaccine is a divisive issue. If so many people don’t think COVID is real, or don’t believe in vaccines, how effective can it be? I imagine a world, at least for a while, where we need to know who has had the vaccine and who hasn’t. Are we going to have to flash our vaccination cards when we walk into a building? Can we compel people to do that? We need to accept the world will change in ways like this (say, temperature checks before getting on a plane), but I think I’m so used to waiting for the next shoe to drop, I’m just wondering what it is. 

That being said, I know I’m lucky to have what I have, to live where I live, to not have to deal with many of the issues that others have had to deal with, especially this year. And I’m grateful for that. Maybe if I sit with that gratitude a little bit more, it’ll feel a little like hope. 

More about Elison at https://elisonalcovendaz.com

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Diane Kallas 
“My Teeth Will Go On”

What inspired you to write this piece? 
D. One of the reasons I wrote this piece is that at the beginning of Covid isolation there were lots of articles suggesting that establishing a daily schedule or regime would aid in staying sane. This seemed both alluring to me and impossible to attain. My family is extraordinarily random in all its activities, for example, when the kids were little, we dyed Easter eggs and hid them every day for more than a month, and then we never celebrated Easter again. We don't eat three meals a day. We snooze until three in the afternoon, and nap, and stay up all night, except on the days when we are in bed by ten and up at dawn.

The idea of approaching the day in a ritualistic way, therefore, seemed wholesome and sane, until I tried writing about it. The piece became my answer to the question, "If your days are orderly, do your emotions become disorderly."

And what inspired you to submit it to us?
D. I submitted it because it seemed to be a fit, and I have always enjoyed the SOSS experience of listening to actors read literature.  

Is there anything in this past year that has influenced your writing? What have you lost? What have you gained?
D. I don't think so. I may have lost the inspiration of other people's stories. I have gained a new computer and modem. Also, I started to sort my drawer of short stories, but then the cats started sleeping on them and I never finished.  

With enforced confinement – are you writing more or less?
D. I'm doing everything less. When unencumbered time is in front of me in a cat-stretch of cozy choices, I tend to waste most of it. I do better creating under pressure. 

What do you miss most?
D. With the announcement of a vaccine, I asked myself this exact question, and found I had no answer. I think I miss restaurants and live theater, but I also am happy to have spent time cooking new recipes and watching theater on the computer, while in my pajamas. Really, if I have to return to wearing actual clothes once the threat has subsided, I don't know that I will be able to cope.  I miss some people. I have had many four-to-five-hour phone conversations with acquaintances, and in a Freudian analysis couch kind of way, I think these have been richer than in-person chats (wearing real clothes, sitting in chairs! Chairs are a horror!) with people I actually know. 

This isn’t a followup, but an additional question. I noticed that you’ve changed your Facebook handle from Diane Procrastinator Kallas to Diane Elizabeth Kallas. Has this year somehow resulted in your becoming less of a procrastinator? 
D. Yes, I changed my middle name from "Procrastinator," to "Elizabeth." Why? Because I read this book about the way our brains cling to, and enforce, long-ago acquired and generally unhappy or inaccurate self-images, that then limit our ability to do things like arithmetic or astro-physics, or seduction. I realized that seeing "Procrastinator" out of the corner of my eye several times a day, was probably unhealthy for me. Just like I had to give up Candy Crush because every time you fail a level, the words "You FAILED!!" come up, and that just can't be good.
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I know this explanation is in conflict with the self-deprecating, collapsed version of self that I like to project, but there it is. I'm trying to better myself. 

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You don't want to miss the sure-to-be-amazing performances by actors Brennan Villados and Atim Udoffia, of five stories inspired by the theme "2020." The event is live, via Zoom, December 18, 2020, 5:00 pm. Pour your favorite libation, pull up a chair, and join us for Stories on Stage Sacramento's last performance of the season!

register for the december 18 event

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Sue Staats is a Sacramento writer. She directed Stories on Stage Sacramento for six years, from 2013 to 2019, and now contributes interviews and blog posts to the website, and cookies to the events (when they aren't virtual).  She’s currently looking for a home for her short story collection and getting her feet wet in a couple of other projects,  with the hope that eventually one of them will draw her into deeper waters.
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Sue's fiction and poetry have been published in The Los Angeles Review, Graze Magazine, Tulip Tree Review, Farallon Review, Tule Review, Late Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets, Sacramento Voices, and others. She earned an MFA from Pacific University, and was a finalist for the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction and the Nisqually Prize in Fiction. Her stories have been performed at Stories on Stage Sacramento and Stories on Stage Davis, and at the SF Bay-area reading series “Why There Are Words.”

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