“The fair!”
These were the first words I heard from novelist and short story writer Joy Williams as John Somerville, professor of English and director of the Visiting Writers Program, introduced her at Monday night’s reading for her visit Sept. 25 and 26.
Joy’s list of accolades is long — she was nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and won the O. Henry Prize twice. Her list of intriguing interests is longer. She writes often about snakes and her two German shepherds, Aslan and Noche. Her stories have been described as “modern fables and skewed vignettes [that] make the implausible plausible.” Her travel guide of the Florida Keys (Why does a famous fictionist write a travel guide to the Florida Keys?) is, according to Vogue, a “map of a vanishing world.”
And after her visit to Hillsdale, Joy has a minefield of new material for inspiration: Tuesday, in addition to workshopping with young writers and giving the customary Visiting Writer’s lecture, America’s best living writer of short stories and I took a trip to the Hillsdale County Fair.
It was all Joy’s idea.
Granted, she was half joking as she took the podium and repeated: “John, you neglected to tell me about the fair!”
But as Joy read from “Ninety-Nine Stories of God,” her most recent story collection — in which the Lord adopts a tortoise, hangs out with wolves, refuses to eat the salmon at a wedding he crashes, blesses the dreams of Tolstoy, and curses those of Kafka — I began to see that the county fair may be just Williams’ style. With her writing often noted for highlighting the surreal within the real, imagine what she could do with the “most popular fair on earth.”
She stopped in the middle of “Noche,” about a dog bred in an insane asylum: “You can laugh.”
The audience sat back and let the strange, perplexing, and darkly funny vignettes wash over them. They laughed with Joy and gave each other sly glances: Can she really get away with this?
Yes, she can. And the stories stick, too: the absurdity grabs and grows in the mind. What is she really saying there, or anywhere? (Why are we laughing at “Pretty Much the Same, Then” — about heaven and hell?)
“She wrote that a story must have a still surface with lots going on underneath,” said senior Allison Deckert, who has studied Joy’s work in Somerville’s class. “I get that sense with her stories. At face value, they’re peaceful and basic narratives, but when you think about them, things stand out that are jarring and unexpected.”
A student asked Joy if she considered herself a humor writer. She said no, or she didn’t know. She didn’t know when she was being funny. (She was being funny when she wrote an entire short story about a young woman drinking gin with a giant snake and its elderly owners: “Even my hair feels drunk.”
“We all enjoyed that she shared her stories of her daily life: it’s strange and odd and like a fairytale when you see it from a certain perspective, but we don’t always look at it that way,” Deckert said after her lunch with Joy on Monday. “Her presence brings a lens with which to view your life.”
I wanted Joy to see the fair, to show it to me through her eyes: the carnival rides, the stuffed prizes and fried Oreos, the swine and the sheep and the goats. In her fiction about God in the pharmacy and literary scholars in the local prisons, she was showing me the way I’ve learned to look at southern Michigan: quietly strange, funny and melancholy at the same time, delightful and always worthy of another glance and scratch of the head.
So when Somerville said Joy had room in her schedule the next afternoon after her writing workshops, I agreed with all the fervor of a young missionary.
“Make sure she really wants this,” he said.
She was still intrigued: “The most popular fair on earth — according to whom?”
She said she was testing the journalist on her research. I failed; this was the exact question I’ve been asking for years.
A friend and I picked her up from the Dow Center at four. It was hot and dusty, so Joy’s uniform (minus the leather jacket) treated her well: in her worn black cowboy boots and her signature sunglasses, she marched through puddles under the grandstand like a Hillsdale native, squinting up at me in the heat and asking if Hillsdale had a demolition derby. She attended one once, in Nantucket. She loved it. It inspired “Driveshaft,” which starts like this: “The Lord had always wanted to participate in a demolition derby.” The story doesn’t end well.
I am not sure Joy enjoyed the full fair experience, though she did observe it: She ate no fried food, and she sympathized from afar with a solitary scream issuing from the Fireball “amusement” ride. She talked about tortoise shell patterns outside the petting zoo. In the expo tent, we discovered that if worse comes to worst, an unfortunate writer can become a Scentsy consultant for $49. Joy was fascinated by a sign that discouraged talking with the 4H students, who “worked very hard on their projects.” Of course they did, but what sort of altercation made this necessary?
The livestock barns, though, presented a problem. We petted calves and goats and made friends with sheep struggling to breathe beneath their wool. It was cute and rural, but I sensed clouds gathering. She wandered away, peeking into stalls by herself.
“There’s such a disconnect here,” she said. “Like when you were talking about that cow’s beautiful eyelashes, and then…”
When reading a sign about the nutritional value of rabbit meat, she laughed and said maybe the signs were to keep ladies like her from running up to kids and asking what they were doing: selling these animals for dinner.
It was one of those jokes — like in “Ninety-Nine Stories of God” — that says almost too much. Joy, a vegetarian, is on the side of the livestock: In “Ninety-Nine,” there’s a story about a pig saving a man’s life.
Joy gave mixed messages about the fair: at one point after her lecture Tuesday night, she said it wasn’t “weird enough,” and at another it was “really something,” but it was never “fun” or “amusing.” For Joy, though, “fun” may not have the final word. “Ninety-Nine” seems to say that there’s something worth noticing in unsettling experiences, as well. They might be the whole point, according to her essay, “Why I Write,” which she read Tuesday evening.
“A great story wakes us up to the world,” she read. And later, “the story is not a simple one. It is synchronistic and strange and unhappy. And it must be told beautifully. Even the horrible parts — especially the horrible parts.”
In my favorite story in “Ninety-Nine,” the Lord buys a pet tortoise. He’s nervous about this whole adoption business. Talking about tortoises at the most popular fair on earth: I hope she got something out of it. For me, Hillsdale is different now that I’ve seen it through Joy
Williams’s eyes.