Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Christopher Linforth writes about The Distortions, published by Orison Books.

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I had moved to the US after a life in the UK and some periods residing in the former Yugoslavia. Living in another country because of a woman is perhaps the worst and best reason anyone would do such a thing. For me, located in Zagreb, navigating a post-war country at a young age was an alienating experience. I spoke little of the language, and when I did it came out like the ramblings of an illiterate foreigner. Luckily, the woman was a translator. She saved me many times.

It was only many years later that I first wrote of these experiences. The stories that emerged were not autofiction but shards of past lives, mostly imagined, constructed from my efforts to process my former life without writing explicitly about myself. Half-memories of Croatia, Slovenia, and the lands bordering Serbia swirled in my mind, unreconstructed, adrift, lost in another time. My first efforts were almost a pastiche of what a colonizer might write about a former territory. Though the UK never ruled Croatia, the country had been part of many former imperial empires: Roman, Byzantium, Austro-Hungarian, Italian, and Yugoslavian.

With the help of Denis Johnson, two of the stories — “Zorana” and “Restoration” — came into focus, and finally I realized I had something to say, something to offer other than being an illiterate foreigner. I tried my best — the best an outsider could — to write about the post-war landscape with evenhandedness, but also without being didactic or exploitative. I created characters from whole cloth — ex nihilo — and explored dramatic situations that hewed as accurately as possible to the repercussions of that brutal war. On the other hand, I also invented storylines that veered from documented reality. This was fiction, after all. I had in mind writers that I grew up on: Chekhov, Sartre, Murdoch, Hesse, Nabokov, Camus, Márquez. I read more, of course. I read history books and contemporary accounts and tranches of documents. Then I turned to the fiction writers from the former Yugoslavia (Josip Novakovich, Aleksandar Hemon, Téa Obreht, and Dubravka Ugrešić, among others), and embraced their interrogations of the war, Slav identity, and the ravaging destructiveness of nationalism.

Over the last few years, I wrote more stories, thinking more about toxic masculinity, the nature of capitalism, and the contradictions of social class in socialist countries. I further expanded the range of story styles, characters, and locations, drawing in other countries outside of the former Yugoslavia: the UK, Hungary, Norway, the US. I had breakthroughs, both artistically and professionally, but still I felt unsatisfied with the collection overall. I excised weaker stories and proceeded to build and rewrite the better stories, strengthening the themes and connections, deepening my research, and allowing fuller complexities to emerge.

When the collection won the Orison Books Fiction Prize — selected by Samrat Upadhyay — I was both stunned and pleased. Little did I know so much more revision was to come. During the editing process, working with the publisher and his fiction editors, we worked hard to emphasize the narrative thrust of each story, while also remaining true to the cultural and historical contingencies of that time and place. Clarity came, eventually, and we moved onto the cover. After a while, I came across Vjenceslav Richter, an important Croatian artist and architect of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Finally, after several language- and Covid-related issues, the Museum of Contemporary Art — Zagreb granted the press permission to use one of his stunning graphic works from the 1970s.

It is almost twenty years now since my first time in the former Yugoslavia, and I have remained friends with that woman from Zagreb. Though she no longer lives there but travels the world as a sailing skipper, she read my book and offered corrections of my cultural mistakes and historic peccadilloes. I gladly took her notes. In the end, I dedicated the collection to her, a changer of my life: Sasha.

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