Making the Book #003: Two Weirdoes, a Shovel, and Lots of Open Land (Video)

Making the Book is a Web video series where I read and discuss my written work. Each week, I look back at how the stories I’ve published came to be and offer advice based on my experience as an adjunct English instructor and a lifelong writer. This week, I’m reading and discussing “Two Weirdoes, a Shovel, and Lots of Open Land,” a short story first published in The Bradford ReView and later collected in Those Little Bastads.

“Two Weirdoes” was written as a reaction to the pretentious workshop commentary provided by a particular subset of my Introduction to Fiction class at Bradford College (circa 1996). The message of the story was “let’s all stop taking ourselves so seriously,” and, while most of that class found little humor in the jokes being made at their expense, the story went on to find an audience with people who, while they didn’t necessarily understand every in-joke, found great humor in the absurdity of a thirsty suburbanite pow-wowing with two Beckett-quoting weirdoes in the middle of an open field. They may not have known that the inscription on the story’s gun was a nod to Joyce Carol Oates, but it turned out that not knowing that didn’t matter.

If you’ve read Those Little Bastads and would like to suggest which story I discuss next, .