Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Jamey Gallagher writes about American Animism from Cornerstone Press.
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People in Places on the Edge
Maybe the first collection of short stories published by a fifty-three year old writer who’s been writing since he was sixteen is bound to be pretty wide-ranging. Some of the stories in American Animism were written more than fifteen years ago, while others are much more recent, and they all, even the ones that are most distant from my actual experiences, stem in some way from my life. They are set in nineteen different places, and their narrators/protagonists are men and women, mostly working or middle class, who live in places on the edge.
In my fifty three years, I have lived in six states. I spent thirty years in New England, ten years in New Jersey, and the past almost fourteen years in Baltimore (both County and City). I want to think about how the places I’ve lived have shaped the stories I’ve written.
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New England
I spent the first thirty years of my life in New England— mostly New Hampshire— and New England means many things to me. It is the suburbia of my hometown, Salem, New Hampshire, and more specifically the nearly identical split-entry houses, edged by what seemed like wild woods, of my childhood neighborhood. New England is also mountains and mystery. It is the coast of Maine and the cold chop of the Atlantic Ocean. It is Lawrence, Massachusetts, the working class milltown of my father and grandparents with its abandoned factories and its social strife. It’s the place where I started a family and became a father. It’s Exeter, New Hampshire, where we could walk to a library, a bookstore, and a soup place. It is dark winters and wilderness. It is hunting UFOs and getting fucked up with friends as an irresponsible and self conscious teen. Childhood, adolescence, young adulthood.
Forty percent of the stories in American Animism take place in New England. It is both the place I know best, and the place that holds the most mystery for me, a place I don’t know at all. It’s a place I keep coming back to in my writing, whether I want to or not.
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New Jersey
I lived only about ten years in New Jersey, but it sure seems like much longer than that. (No offense, New Jersey.) My ex-wife, my two kids and I lived in a single-street town called Marshallville, beside the Tuckahoe River. New Jersey is where I was a stay at home dad and where I managed to finish my bachelors degree online and then, traveling first to Philadelphia then to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, earned my MA and PhD. We lived in New Jersey, but it was very specifically South Jersey, the Jersey of sulfur marshes and pine barrens. It is a place of (more) mystery and strangeness, white power grafitti, wild turkeys, and train bridges. It is Atlantic City with its clashing international and local populations. It is “shoebies” and endless stretches of straight roads and cranberry bogs, hunting clubs and kids who told my kids they were going to hell because they didn’t go to church. It is also the place where I got my first teaching gigs, first at a high school then at the local community college.
Thirty percent of the stories in American Animism take place in New Jersey, a (to me) surprisingly high percentage. I appreciate the weirdness and peculiarity of South Jersey, and I think maybe I started to understand it, just a little bit, before moving away.
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Maryland
Only three stories in American Animism take place in Maryland, one in a neighborhood in Baltimore called Forest Park, one in a fairly generic version of a Baltimore County town, and one in the rust belt town of Cumberland. Maryland is still a bit of a mystery to me, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to set stories here as naturally as I set stories in New England or New Jersey. Forest Park is a neighborhood I lived in following my divorce, in which I was one of the only white residents of the area. The homes were old, three-story, either very well maintained or boarded up and falling down, my two neighbors older women who were kind and welcoming. The house across the street burned down one night, so fiercely I could feel the heat through the picture window. The town I set the story “Lost Mothers” in was based on the town I moved to first in Maryland, and Cumberland is a town I visited for a weekend with my partner. Walking to eat breakfast at the Rock of Ages Christian Night Club inspired me to write “Lakes and Rivers.” Maryland is Baltimore to me, but it is also the rural towns that are an hour’s drive from Baltimore. It is the Civil War battlefields and Maryland woods, darkness, the Bay Bridge, various hikes in various places. Maryland is where I settled into my first full time teaching job at a community college and where I fell in love. I’m not entirely sure what Maryland is to me yet.
These places have all been important to me, and I’m glad I left my hometown (which often felt too narrow, too small, and too constricting when I was growing up) in order to experience them. The places are not more important than the people I’ve met, but they have shaped the people I’ve met, the people who find their way into my stories. Those strange and wonderful, desperate and ordinary and extraordinary people who live on the edge of mystery.
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Jamey Gallagher teaches writing at the Community College of Baltimore County. He has more than fifty pieces published in literary journals, including CutBank, Bull Fiction, and DIAGRAM. He lives in Baltimore.