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.

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