Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Rachel King writes about Bratwurst Haven from West Virginia University Press.
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More Innate and Intimate
1.
As someone who often writes historical fiction, I’m used to doing traditional research. For a story I wrote at age eleven about Jews escaping during World War II, I distinctly remember the map of Poland in a hard-copy encyclopedia, the description next to it of Hitler’s invasion on September 1, 1939. In my early twenties, when writing a novella about two friends on either side of the 1850s Rogue River Wars, I studied books from interlibrary loan and hand-drew maps of the rivers and tribes across Southern Oregon. For my novel about the tenants’ movement to own land in 1830s Prince Edward Island, I corresponded with a professor in PEI, and drove there for a night to experience the landscape. For my first published novel, which includes characters working for and against the 1967 Oregon Beach Bill, I pored over newspapers on microfilm, checking that every object and word was of the time period.
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2.
For Bratwurst Haven, my linked collection of short stories about sausage factory workers in Colorado, the research was more innate and intimate. It might have begun with my maternal grandfather quitting high school to support his family as a butcher, of him being a unionized worker in the boiler room of a paper mill for almost forty years. It might have continued with my paternal grandfather railing against unions after working up to the head of sales in a lumber company, with my dad detailing the labor-intensive jobs he’d held before he became a real-estate agent, with my mom being a home daycare owner, teacher, and homemaker. It came from my sisters becoming nurses and my brother becoming a bartender, from my husband working in a sausage factory, from my paternal grandmother’s obsession with beautiful objects, from my maternal grandmother lamenting to me that she’d wished to become a beautician instead of a bus driver, and me vowing that if I ever had the chance to pursue beauty over practicality, I would.
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3.
I wrote the first draft of the first story in Bratwurst Haven in 2016 when I was 32, the year I returned to my hometown of Portland, Oregon. In the first 14 years of my adult life, I’d lived in 14 different spaces in 5 different states and 2 countries. I’d owned 0 smartphones and lived for 6 years in apartments without internet. I’d driven across the state of Kansas 5 times. I’d found 4 apartments, 3 jobs, 2 cars, 1 bike, and at least 10 pieces of furniture on Craigslist. I’d held at least 17 different jobs, at least 5 of them paid 8 dollars an hour, and at least 3 of the 8-dollar-an-hour jobs I’d held post-college. I’d found at least 10 friends who’d made life worth living, at least 5 coworkers who’d made mind-numbing jobs bearable, and at least 3 married couples who, if needed, would allow me to crash with them. I’d officially been in relationships for 4 years; I’d loved a few men but had told only 1 of them. Two of my girl friends came out to their communities in their late twenties, 1 of my guy friends had never come out to his family, even after marrying another man. I’d skipped at least 5 good friends’ weddings because of the cost of travel; my parents had paid for at least 5 plane tickets for me to visit Oregon. I’d witnessed at least 2 close friends and 2 close relatives dealing with mental health issues. For 10 of those 14 years, I’d pursued beauty by taking my writing seriously even before it became good: I’d written 1 middle-grade novel, 2 young adult novels, 1 adult novella, 2 adult novels, a few dozen stories, innumerable poems.
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4.
In 2005, when I was twenty-one, I decided I was an existentialist, a U-turn from the Protestantism I’d been raised in, and still believed, but from then on, I wanted new truths I embraced to come from experience, not from theology. After college, I moved from Oregon to Baltimore, Maryland for a job and slowly figured out how I wanted to live.
In 2011, I wrote some experiential realizations in my notebook. Here are a few:
- I can’t change or save anyone.
- I refuse to date many guys because I think they’ll limit my independence.
- Success is often dependent on who I know and when.
- Driving takes me as much inside myself as to a different place.
- I can control a lot of the time how those around me treat me.
- There are many ways to lose someone and some are seemingly worse than to death.
- Intimacy isn’t just about sex (and vice-versa).
- I’m a Westerner, specifically a Northwesterner, and nowhere else will feel quite like home.
These truths surfaced several years later in the lives of some of my characters in Bratwurst Haven. Like when Aaron says his future kid is better off with the mom, where they’ll learn how to be savvy, ambitious, and connected: that so far, at twenty-six, he’d only blindly worked hard. Or when Cynthia says she’d dated mainly peripatetic men because she wants to retain her independence, or when Pavel says because he lives away from close friends no one is around to call him out for being self-destructive, or when Elena resists intimacy because she doesn’t want another person close to her to fear her.
Values from my family of origin are folded into this collection, too. Characters almost always take pride in their work. Any job is worthy of respect. But it doesn’t matter, really, where my lived truths begin and my innate ones end. What matters is the reader encountering a character, as they might a person but on a more intimate level. What matters is the beauty in the structure of each story and the beauty in the structure of the collection, how the characters interact with one another, how the reader absorbs it into their consciousness. Of the reader hopefully nodding in recognition and delight, of the reader hopefully saying that’s how it would be, that’s what they would do; yes, that’s how life is.
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Rachel King is the author of the novel People along the Sand, the linked short story collection Bratwurst Haven, and two poetry chapbooks. Her short stories have appeared in One Story, North American Review, Green Mountains Review, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Oregon and West Virginia University, she lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.