Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Bennett Sims writes about Other Minds and Other Stories from Two Dollar Radio.

+

My new collection, Other Minds and Other Stories, contains twelve stories, written over a period of six years. Though they’re thematically related—each features characters who are curious about other minds—the stories all vary in style, structure, and genre, drawing on different literary traditions and sources. Below, I’ve picked six of the stories and outlined some of the books, movies, videogames, and artworks that I was thinking about while writing them. 

1. ‘Unknown’: Synopsis: After a man loans his phone to a stranger, he is haunted by a series of Unknown calls and uncanny voice messages, which gradually fill him with jealous suspicion toward his partner. Research: For this story I wanted to channel the spare, obsessive prose style of Brian Evenson. I revisited his story ‘A Report,’ which is narrated by a political prisoner who receives various messages in his cell. Like my protagonist, Evenson’s narrator overinterprets these messages, eventually coming to view himself as one link in their chain of transmission, an unwitting node in a symbolic order he doesn’t understand. I was also thinking about David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Robert Altman’s Images, which use media technology—phones, camcorders—as props for everting their protagonists’ unconscious and manifesting their repressed fears and desires. In both films, ghostly phone calls unleash anxieties about infidelity, possessiveness, and jealousy. Finally, I had already finished ‘Unknown’ by the time I read Ben Lerner’s own haunted cell phone story, ‘The Ferry,’ but otherwise I certainly would have borrowed from it. It, too, features eerie voice messages, whose uncanny echoes come to unravel the narrator’s mind and marriage. Like much of Lerner’s fiction, it is a formally brilliant exploration of poetic refrain as a paranoid mode. 

2. ‘Pecking Order’: Synopsis: A man tries to butcher his backyard chickens humanely, only to become absorbed into the grotesque violence of the pecking order. Research: This story was influenced by Patricia Highsmith’s own fable of chicken-human conflict, ‘The Day of Reckoning,’ from The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder. I’ve never raised chickens, so I did some light research online, looking up blogs and FAQs about backyard coops. I also read books on animal cognition: Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds (which my collection’s title puns on); Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human; Ed Yong’s An Immense World. Some details from these books made it into the story: how chickens process information from each eye differently; how stress leads to feather-pecking; how factory farms butcher their chickens. One of my final revisions to the story was inspired by Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature. Until the last draft, there was a description of a chicken’s decapitated head that read ‘both eyes were staring right, sightlessly, at him.’ Then I came across Nabokov’s peevish correction of Constance Garnett: regarding her translation of a similar description of a horse in Tolstoy, Nabokov reminds her, ‘A horse can’t look at you with both eyes, Mrs. Garnett.’ After reading this, I hastily revised my own description (in the published version, only one of the chicken’s eyes is staring). So now there is at least one line in my book that wouldn’t annoy Nabokov. Incidentally, this idea of revision as a process of preemptively imagining other readers’ annoyance (in this case, Nabokov’s posthumous annoyance) is central to another story in the collection, ‘Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.’

3. ‘Portonaccio Sarcophagus’: Synopsis: A narrator sits on a stool at the Palazzo Massimo museum in Rome and studies an unfinished sarcophagus, whose faceless figures come to remind him of his own mother’s memory loss. Research: I spent a lucky year in Rome at the American Academy, and several stories in the collection are set there. I did visit the Portonaccio Sarcophagus at the Palazzo Massimo: the story incorporates some language from the museum’s wall text. I became curious about the sarcophagus’s faceless figures and tried to read more about them (including Janet Huskinson’s article ‘“Unfinished Portrait Heads” on Later Roman Sarcophagi: Some New Perspectives,’ which the story draws from). Stylistically, the story is in conversation with W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard. It combines image with text (like Sebald) and is formatted in a block paragraph (like Bernhard). I revisited Bernhard’s novel Old Masters, which likewise takes place entirely in a museum (Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum), on a bench before a single piece of art (Tintoretto’s ‘White-Bearded Man’), and which likewise investigates the relationship between art, memory, and mourning.

4. ‘Minds of Winter’: Synopsis: As a narrator watches a blizzard beyond his window, he finds himself meditating on consciousness, pandemics, and death. Research: The story takes its title (and some lines) from Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snowman.’ Formally, I was inspired by Lydia Davis’s story ‘The Cows,’ whose narrator looks out a window and describes the cows in a field over a series of brief, meditative vignettes. Nicholson Baker is also always on my mind: here I was thinking of his novel A Box of Matches, whose narrator keeps a winter journal, sitting before a fire in the dark and describing its embers every morning.

5. ‘Introduction to the Reading of Hegel’: Synopsis: A PhD student applying for a philosophy Fellowship becomes convinced that his judge will be a Hegel scholar. Having never read Hegel himself, he worries that he will have to finish the Phenomenology of Spirit before he can even begin his cover letter, the better to anticipate what a Hegel scholar might hate about his application. Research: I resisted the temptation to reread Hegel myself. Since the POV character hasn’t read Hegel, a research-driven approach seemed inappropriate. With that said, the story’s title comes from Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, which I did reread, and I included some superficial, Wikipedia-level allusions to Hegel throughout: master and slave, the owl of Minerva, etc.—the kinds of things the protagonist would have looked up. This story is also written in a block paragraph, à la Bernhard, and I returned to Bernhard often. He specializes in blocked, neurotic narrators who can’t bring themselves to embark upon their writing projects: in Concrete, the narrator can’t write his study of Mendelssohn; in The Loser, the narrator can’t write his essay About Glenn Gould. The Loser was especially instructive in the way that it diagrams a triangular, intellectually competitive relationship, between three piano virtuosos of varying success: Bernhard’s narrator obsessively compares himself to his friend Wertheimer (the titular loser) and to Glenn Gould. My story is similarly triangular, with the protagonist obsessively comparing himself to the Hegel scholar, on the one hand, and his freshman philosophy student, on the other. There were other stories that I returned to often while working on this: Davis Foster Wallace’s ‘The Depressed Person’; Deborah Eisenberg’s ‘Some Other, Better Otto’; George Saunders’s ‘The Barber’s Unhappiness’—all beautiful performances of depressive thought spirals.

6. ‘The Postcard’: Synopsis: A private detective investigates a mysterious postcard, which his client seems to have received from the ghost of his dead wife. Research: The story borrows its plot (a widower is invited by his wife’s ghost to return to the site of their honeymoon) and its setting (a foggy, abandoned town haunted by amnesia and dream logic) from the horror game Silent Hill 2. The story is partly an homage to Silent Hill. I also used the story as an occasion to read Derrida’s The Post Card, whose riffs I tried to channel throughout. Like Derrida, the story’s narrator is interested in the way that postcards trouble the distinction between public and private, memory and forgetting, presence and absence. While drafting, I kept the following quotes from Derrida always in back of mind, so that they would form invisible epigraphs for the story, or else the addresses or destinations that I hoped the story would arrive at: ‘If I say that I write for dead addressees, not dead in the future but already dead at the moment when I get to the end of a sentence, it is not in order to play…The addressees are dead, the destination is death…No, the very idea of destination includes analytically the idea of death’; ‘there are nothing but post cards, anonymous morsels without fixed domicile, without legitimate addressee, letters open, but like crypts’; ‘the post office is the place of all affairs, all negotiations; through it the absent becomes present’; ‘Amnesia, what a force. It is necessary to forget, to know how to forget, to know how to forget without knowing’; ‘the post card is neither private nor public…the secret circulates with full freedom.’

+++

Bennett Sims was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is the author of the story collection Other Minds and Other Stories (2023), the novel A Questionable Shape (2013), which received the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award, and the story collection White Dialogues (2017), winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018–19 and named a best book of 2017 by Bookforum. He is a recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society Fellowship. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story, as well as in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He has taught at Bard College, Grinnell College, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.