Readers often ask where the idea for a story came from. Here, veteran fantasy author Dave Smeds offers a peek behind the scenes in the creation of his wonderful short fiction piece, "The Wind's Kiss." Its first publication was in Lace and Blade 4, which I edited. It's a marvelous story, exquisitely written, full of pitch-perfect heart. Now it's also available in Dave's collection Swords, Magic, and Heart (see the cover below).
A Story’s Genesis: The Wind’s Kiss
by Dave Smeds
The headstone — as you can see in the photograph I’ve included here — stood alone, at least thirty paces from any other marker in the little one-acre graveyard. Still, it was there, intact and still upright, and I was grateful for that fact. The cemetery had been used for less than four decades, from its founding in 1881 to the final burial in 1920. Once the small chapel on the accompanying acre ceased to exist, no one consigned their loved ones to rest there. The place became so forgotten that its decorative lilac bushes grew into a huge patch, concealing nearly all of the stones. People would drive right and be unaware of the nature of the site, even though they could have thrown a tennis ball out a window and the ball could easily have landed on one of the graves. Nowadays local volunteers keep the shrubbery trimmed and mow the turf. If not for that, even I, who knew where to go, might have struggled to find it.
I had always meant to stop there, sooner or later. The problem was, I had kept saying to myself that I would do it when I happened to be passing through Nebraska. But given that I live in California and always have, I reached my sixtieth birthday having found no occasion in my adult life when I had cause to be “just passing through” Nebraska. My path-of-least-resistance approach was inadequate. I had to make the goal a bucket-list item.
In 2016, I was in Kansas City, MO to attend the World Science Fiction Convention. My wife joined me on the final day, and the next morning off we went on a long, snaking course to visit family graves in not only Nebraska, but South Dakota and Iowa as well — all three of them states outside the scope of previous explorations on my part, or hers. We arrived at the lonely little graveyard on the third day, reaching it about ten minutes after we had rolled through the forlorn village of Creighton, population 1125. After paying our respects, we would go north about three miles to Winnetoon, population 63. Vacant as those communities were, we would see encounter smaller ones the next day, including, as we crossed into South Dakota, the hamlet of Wewela, population FIVE.
It may sound like I’m being dismissive of these places. Quite the contrary. They all held meaning for me. Each time we stopped in some isolated, nearly-abandoned locale on that road trip, we were acknowledging a site where my kinfolk of dead-and-gone generations had resided, and in many cases, where they had gone through some of the key experiences of their lives. In the case of the relative commemorated by the headstone, it was where she had lived her entire life. If, that is, you can call five months an entire life. She is described on the stone as “Infant Warner, dau. of C.A. and M.E. Warner.” She was afflicted in some drastic way from birth. It was obvious to her parents she would not have a lengthy life, hence their choice not to give her a name.
“C.A. Warner was Charles A. Warner, the youngest brother of my great-grandfather John Warner. Charley and his wife Mary Elizabeth Maurer had come in 1884 and settled upon a homestead a mile northwest of the little cemetery. They brought along their three little girls, welcoming a fourth daughter in 1886 and then suffering the loss of “Infant Warner” two years after that. Arriving with them in 1884, and founding an adjacent homestead, was Charley’s sister, Minta Warner and her husband, John Ladd, and their kids. Plus, and most important to me, the two young couples brought along sixty-year-old widow Marancy Alexander Warner, my great great grandmother, the mother of Minta and Charley. Of all the graves I visited on that trip, the only one that belonged to a direct ancestor was that of Marancy. I had already over the years paid my respects at the graves of my mother’s other seven great-grandparents, and with my father’s great-grandparents’ graves out of convenient reach because they are located in Finland, you can see one reason why standing represented a checking-off from the bucket list. “Paying my respects” isn’t just a phrase for me. It is a privilege and a duty, and I needed to honor each and every one of the members of that generation. Now I finally had.
Life in Nebraska had been hard. The worst of it was the drought that plagued the area for five years in the first half of the 1890s. Across the state, most homesteaders who had come in the 1880s, moved on. That was the case with Minta and John Ladd. By the mid-1890s they turned their acreage over to Charley and Mary and retreated into Creighton, and later went on to Hot Springs, SD. Mary would ultimately keep trying to maintain the double-sized farm into the late 1910s before she gave up and moved back to Illinois. Charley was only there with her for the first part of that stretch. He developed stomach cancer and died in 1898. Marancy perished in 1901. By the time of those deaths, the family was too destitute to afford to have a stonecutter create a headstone, much less two. Charley and Marancy are buried on either side of Infant Warner, but you wouldn’t know it from visiting the cemetery. I knew it from family correspondence. That was another reason why I felt compelled to pay the visit. No locals would have cause to engage in a gesture toward my great great grandmother’s resting place. There is no visible sign a grave is there to be acknowledged.
As I stood there beside that surviving marker, I looked out across the landscape. Even if you’ve never been to Nebraska, you know it’s flat. There are places where a ridgeline pretends to poke skyward, and there are streambeds that cut into the terrain. None of that stops the wind. It typically comes from the northwest, given energy by the jetstream. It caressed me. I couldn’t help but feel as though the land was alive, and the wind its means of expression.
And there was the genesis of a story. I would go on to compose a tale of an imaginary realm in which the wind is conscious — a lifeform that dominates what I chose to call the Folded Prairie, and influences the lives of the humans who share the territory.
The tale has more to it than the setting, of course. It’s a romance, and a story of fortitude, and a paean to the bond between a parent and a child. But the characters, the plot, the tone, the subject matter, all flowed naturally from me as soon as I had the place envisioned in my mind’s eye. In many ways I believe it was a story I was destined to write, and of all of the hundreds of stories I’ve written, it is my favorite. I call it “The Wind’s Kiss.” It is the opening piece in my new collection Swords, Magic, and Heart, available from Book View Café (and elsewhere) forty-eight hours after this blog goes up.
No comments:
Post a Comment