by William Preston
William Preston discusses how the communal experience of reading and sharing ideas about art with others helped inspire “Aftermath,” his latest story in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]
One of my earliest memories is of running across the playground at my nursery school, shouting, like the Human Torch, “Flame on!” I was five years old. To write of this now is to advance a few worn frames of film through a machine that erodes as it projects; in showing you, I have further degraded the original image.
The only Fantastic Four comic I had read at the time was the replica of the first issue that came with the voice-acted LP; it was released that same year, also the year the foursome had their first animated show (from Hanna-Barbera Productions). I don’t remember the show, though I must have watched it. I still have the record and accompanying book.
I mention this not because my story “Aftermath” concerns our relationship with memory, though that is certainly a motif, but because so much of my creative life—in which I include childhood play—has been engendered and sustained by the creativity of others.
Creative works, of whatever medium, invite our participation, though such participation may include confusion and resistance. We imagine ourselves in that setting or as that character; sing a song from a musical as if to an audience; act in a play we’ve seen others perform; recite a poem in the silence of our house; step into a watercolor scene. In those moments, we share the creator’s breath. We see as they did and inhale the air they conjured.
For decades, I’ve enjoyed the author comments in the rearward material of the O. Henry Prize and Best American Short Stories collections; I may not read all of the stories, but I read all of those notes. Authors often tie a story’s origin to a personal event or relationship. Other times, the seed of an idea comes from another creative work. I have caught myself thinking that I am “unoriginal” or even “not especially creative” because of my reliance on the work of others in prompting me; reading how other writers are themselves moved to write provides a corrective.
We imagine ourselves in that setting or as that character; sing a song from a musical as if to an audience; act in a play we’ve seen others perform; recite a poem in the silence of our house; step into a watercolor scene. In those moments, we share the creator’s breath. We see as they did and inhale the air they conjured.
I have no idea how or when I landed on the term “springboard.” I may have first used it in teaching. Describing the commonalities between, say, Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and the argument about the suffering child in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, I might have said, “Le Guin isn’t telling the same story, but she springboards off Dostoevsky to address our moral response.” Such phrasing appeals to me—more than language such as “inspired,” with its hint of a hidden world—because it’s so concrete, and I like to think of writing as analogous to carpentry or architecture.
“Aftermath” springboards from Ray Bradbury’s “Night Meeting,” which first appeared in his Martian Chronicles in 1950. The story, written expressly for the book, presents a presumably Mexican-American colonist from Earth interacting on this dead Mars with a Martian riding a vehicle that looks like a bejeweled praying mantis; to each of them, the other is an impossibility.
My first reading of “Night Meeting” is another of my over-viewed, thin memories. It faintly exists as a scene on a summer’s day, a too-hot day in Pennsylvania when I sprawled reading in my childhood bed. “Night Meeting” is one of those Bradbury tales in which the writer maintains tight control over his sometimes-rampant figurative language; tellingly, it’s also a story in which realism and the fantastical (call it science fiction if you must) are in perfect balance. Nothing about the speculative elements is especially credible, but the conviction and concreteness of the prose along with the believability of the characters’ points of view make the thing work. My strong sense of it still—I remember this feeling—is that there is space around the words; the prose isn’t aiming to stuff you full of detail so you have nothing except what the author says. Rather, you’re invited into the temporary and liminal shared world. You inhabit this world with Bradbury and these two characters, all of you standing mystified under the stars.
My “Aftermath” is also an example of “playing in someone else’s sandbox,” though I brought my own toys to add to Bradbury’s few. What I’m evoking should be recognizable as Bradbury’s Mars, though if you’ve read The Martian Chronicles, you know that there’s no one Mars in its pages but rather a host of stories that work together despite inconsistencies, a collection of scriptures that live in tension but avoid coming to blows because they’ve been set between two covers and called canon.
Every creative work welcomes someone—maybe not everyone—into a common experience. I like talking with people who have read my work less because of any pride in the result than because I, too, experience it after its completion as any reader might; I hardly remember what I’ve done.
With this story of an impossible Mars (and another that I just finished writing), I’m inviting readers to enter my own thin recollection of reading and discovering The Martian Chronicles. I still have my ragged childhood copy; I just took it down from among my other Bradbury books, between bookends made of pieces from the late author’s attic. The pages smell old in that way we all know, the shed molecules of paper puffing upward to get in our eyes and nostrils. They smell, too, of summer at the open window and all the possibilities of life and worlds to come.
From Earth to the Stars 