Scott Garson’s Comments
“Young Frankenstein”
The new online journal Titular, which probably would have been the
next stop for this one, publishes stories that borrow titles from well-known
novels,
films, or TV shows. According to the Web site, these stories “do not
need to relate to the original entity from which the title came, but should
be inextricably tied to the title itself on a semantic level.” When
I first read that, I had a conservative sort of response. I wondered if stories
of this kind would stand alone, if readers would place the same value on
their relationships to them. Then, like two minutes later, I had the idea
for “Young Frankenstein.”
“Diversion”
FRiGG Connection: I wrote this one using an exercise I read about in Claudia
Smith’s comments on her stories in the winter 2007 issue.
“Ditched”
As a kid, my mom “summered” at a cottage on a lake in northwestern
Iowa. It’s still in the family, and when she’s up there she tends
to tell lots of stories,
though she doesn’t at other times. “Ditched” comes from
this. I was thinking it would be really easy to write, a story that would
probe
an experience
and take from the experience its shape. I was wrong. At one point, the
editor of a print journal expressed interest in running it with other shorts
of mine maybe, but by then it was in pieces in its Word doc. That was
its normal state for a while.
