Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, DeMisty D. Bellinger writes about All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere, winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction from University of Nebraska Press.

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Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things happening.
— Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland

All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere is a short story collection years in the making, and months in compiling. I wish I could say that I had some grand plan when writing the stories in this collection, but I did not. Some of the stories are similar because I was planning on other cycles, but that’s kind of where the similarities end. I love novels in short stories, but this is not one; it is a collection of what I believe to be some of my strongest short stories.

So what? So research. Did it happen at all when writing these stories? Some, I’ve written over a decade ago and only remember the circumstances that inspire me to write, or maybe I remember where I was living at the time I wrote the piece. A few, especially the more recent stories, did involve research. Some more than others, but all requiring work outside of my own head. Which stories? These: 

• Black Girl’s Magic
• A Lost Day
• Awesome Everywhere
• The Claimer of Bodies
• Ballad of Jane
• Ballad of Frankie 
• All the Dreams You’ve Yet to Have, and
• An Opossum Tale.

Methodology involves anything from a Google search, to going to the stacks. Literally. Or calling someone with knowledge. Briefly, here’s the background for these eight tales.

“A Lost Day” is a love story, sort of. Since I am a musician, albeit a mediocre one, music often makes its way into my work, implicitly or explicitly. Here, it’s explicit: a violinist falls in love on her way to the music store for a repair. I don’t play violin (I’m not that vain! Okay, not all violinists are vain, I know, but there is some level of holier-than-thou about violinists. Did I write that aloud? Okay, not that stuck up, but they are the ones with the pretty solos and, most of the time, with the melodies. Am I saying this because I’m a violist? Am I saying this because, technically, the viola is a more difficult instrument to play? Am I saying this because you have to be stronger, you have to be a thinker, you have to know how to listen and count and play at the same time as a violist? Nooo! I only say that because, well, I’m not a violinist, and the woman in the story really needed to be a violinist. That way, no one would mistake this as autofiction. It’s not. I play the viola. NOT the violin. And she acts like a violinist.), so I had to look up a virtuosic violin concerto and I had to do some learning and refreshment on string instrument repair. 

“Awesome Everywhere,” the titular story, also involves music. I did not do a lot of research for this story except for musicals, especially Sondheim musicals, and in particular, Into the Woods. So, I looked up a little about Sondheim and the musicals just to get an idea of my main character’s daughter. I also rewatched the Bernadette Peters version because I wanted to make some parallels, even gossamer parallels, between what was happening in that play and what is happening in my story.

“The Claimer of Bodies” grew from me reading an LA Times article about the large number of unclaimed dead. Depressed the hell out of me. The research didn’t move much beyond the article, but enough to help fill in the missing pieces.

The “Ballad of Jane” grew from obsession with wanting to see a black bear. Eventually, I thought that I wouldn’t really want to see (but I really want to see!) a black bear. Then I thought about bear hugs and how dangerous black bears are. Even after writing the story, I really want to see a black bear! The other ballad in the collection, the “Ballad of Frankie Baker,” came from some deep diving into the real story behind Frankie and Johnny. Did you know they were Black?

Three of the stories, “Black Girl’s Magic,” “All the Dreams You’ve Yet to Have,” and “An Opossum Tale,” grew from research for another project. I wrote a novel (now being shopped) involving old religions from Western Africa that were brought over to the Americas, especially Voudon. Stories I wanted to tell but that did not fit in that book made their way into these three stories. Some of the details are pure popular culture (like Voodoo dolls and needles), but some borrow ideas from Voudon and similar practices. Lastly, “All the Dreams You’ve Yet to Have” is my attempt at reclaiming the zombie story.

When compiling these admittedly disparate stories into one collection, I separated the stories into six sections. I didn’t want to name these sections, but I wanted to show the readers how the stories related to each other. So I pulled quotes from some of my favorite public domain documents which offered some kind of commentary on the contents of each section. For example, the quote above from Lewis Carroll signals that this first part are my bisexual and queer stories. The second section, which includes a Cole Porter lyric (“If I should take a notion/ To jump into the ocean), is suicide/death/grief. 

Creating these six sections forced me to rethink my stories. I myself had to reexamining the collection and in doing so, I discovered some overarching themes I forgot that I was exploring, such as survivals of suicide and embracing one’s sexuality. I loved doing this! It was like completing a jigsaw puzzle without a box, or doing a reverse research project. It was an enlightening way to revise.

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DeMisty D. Bellinger is the author of the novel New to Liberty, the poetry collection Peculiar Heritage, and the forthcoming short story collection All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere. Her work can be found in various journals and anthologies, in print and online. DeMisty is a creative writing professor and a mother in the middle of Massachusetts. She lives at demistybellinger.com .