Finding the Form with Pamela Hensley
For me, the seed of a story is often the question: what if? Something I see or read or become suddenly aware of sparks a feeling that I cannot shake. My mind begins to wander. I reimagine the situation, only worse, the worst it could possibly be. I slip into another life and push it to the edge.
I wrote my story, Paulina, from a place of fear. Just before the pandemic we moved to Colorado with our daughter, who was in high school and didn’t want to go. Within weeks, she had withdrawn from us and everything that had once seemed simple and easy became difficult and strained. She was at the age when a child pushes back from her parents but we were close to her, we had always been close, and part of me thought we might breeze past this little phase. Was it moving that altered her agreeable nature? Or was it bound to happen anyway? I have no way of knowing but can only report that the change we experienced was so sweeping and sudden that I’d wake up afraid of what the day might bring.
The house we bought and lived in for eighteen months was in the foothills outside Denver. It’s a part of the country where the landscape is stark and the views all around are breathtaking. I’d go for a hike across the edge of a canyon, wade through wildflowers beneath a pretty, blue sky, then pick up an angry daughter from school. I was not thinking of a story at this time but of how to fix our problem. I tried many things, none of which worked, but took comfort in the knowledge that it would surely pass. Until that annoying little voice asked: what if it doesn’t?
In April 1999, the tragedy that was the Columbine High School massacre took place in a building around the corner from the library where I now went to borrow books. My story got its legs when I saw that name and felt an ice-cold chill whip through my heated car. This is where it happened. I thought, my god, what came before that day? What tangle of benign events could form such a deadly knot? I read old articles about the shooting. I learned the names of the perpetrators and their parents. The killers were teenagers in grade 12. They seemed to come from ordinary families.
“While I was writing Paulina, I kept asking myself: what’s so different about me and the mothers of those Columbine teenagers? What’s so different about any of us? Paulina is a story that contains hard truths I think anyone who’s been a parent to a teen will recognize.”
When I started to write, the words came out in spare, melancholy paragraphs, which I loved. At the time I was reading the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, famously depressed, and this helped build the mood even further. I had a few scenes, not yet connected, and some wonderful contrasts I knew I should combine: the beauty of the landscape and the danger within. The rest was a game of invention. The mother became Dutch, the father absent, and the daughter just as cruel as she should be. I worried about using Columbine in the story, in case it might be seen as a gratuitous reference. I worried about writing a “domestic” story. I worried about people thinking it was autobiographical.
I never wanted to write about a school shooter but about that unsettling period when the parent-child relationship shifts and you don’t know where it will go. While I was writing Paulina, I kept asking myself: what’s so different about me and the mothers of those Columbine teenagers? What’s so different about any of us? Paulina is a story that contains hard truths I think anyone who’s been a parent to a teen will recognize. By the time we left Colorado, I had finished the first draft and our lives had moved on.
Pamela Hensley is the Managing Editor of yolk literary journal and host of the podcast How I Wrote This. Her fiction has appeared in the Queen’s Quarterly, The New Quarterly, the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, The Montreal Review, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, EVENT Magazine, and elsewhere. To find out more about her podcast, visit www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com or follow her on Instagram (@howiwrotethisthepodcast).