At the same time, her story’s inventive structure exemplifies her narrator’s inability to ossify the past in a way that would be constructive to her present and future.Ĭlaire, the narrator, states in the second line, “And at the end I can’t help thinking about beginnings.” That plural of “beginning” becomes a totem: over the course of the story, the narrator will “begin” at least eight times. In fact, the first half of her story can be read as a series of prologues, each leading to and hinting at an inevitable present where her narrator exists. Likewise, Claire Vaye Watkins’s “Ghosts, Cowboys” is concerned with the relationship between history and agency. Hidden in plain sight within Antonio’s sentiment, however, is a belief in individual agency. He makes this claim in order to seduce Sebastian into believing that history determines the future, and therefore, they ought to commit murder. “Whereof what’s past is prologue,” Antonio famously tells Sebastian, “what to come / In yours and my discharge.” Readers of The Tempest know Antonio is a devious sort.
To support the continued conversation at The Hopkins Review, subscribe today, at 15% off until April 15, 2022-four issues for just $29.75, a $50 savings on the retail price: Note the role that university and independent literary magazines play in the life of a story, from its first publication to its continuing literary conversation. Her much-discussed essay “ On Pandering ,” which appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of Tin House magazine (which published its last issue in 2019), critiques her own motives for writing the stories in Battleborn.
Since then, Watkins has won a Guggenheim Award and published two novels, Gold Fame Citrus (Riverhead Books, 2015) and I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness (Penguin Random House, 2021). Three years later, the story opened her debut collection of short stories, Battleborn (Riverhead Books, 2012), which won the Dylan Thomas Prize, The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, The Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, The Story Prize, and The Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. “Ghosts, Cowboys,” by Claire Vaye Watkins, was originally published in THR 2.2, Spring 2009, when Watkins was still a student in the MFA program at Ohio State University. This essay launches Samantha Neugebauer’s “From the Archive” series, in which she revisits fiction first published in The Hopkins Review.
0 kommentar(er)
