Heidi Naylor’s short story collection, Revolver was released in March 2018 by BCC Press. Naylor’s fiction has appeared in the Washington Post, the Idaho Review, The Jewish Journal, Portland, the Cimarron Review, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and other magazines. She received a fellowship in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, fiction awards from Sunstone, New Letters, and The Chariton Review, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She lives in Idaho with her husband and teaches at Boise State University, and introduces her new book in her own voice below.
My father likes to memorize poems. He can be coaxed to bring them out on hiking trails or on long drives, to dust them off for any taker; but really I think they are for his own enjoyment, and I get that. What a great pleasure, repeating a verse under one’s breath or in one’s head, chiming inwardly with the rhythm, lingering over a favorite line. Very often he’s got a new one underway—here is his latest:
The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown……
[from The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene i]
I hope there are still many people who learn poems by heart. It’s the rhythm of language, the fine knocking of sound with circumstance that gives poetry such delight for me.
Several years ago I discovered this poem by Richard Speakes, about the journey of an American pioneer woman named Hannah. So beautiful I had to learn it.
Nebraska…May 25, 1852
I choose dust & ruts
the wheel that rubs, the dry axle
the spoke that dives for center.
I choose to do my own
breaking down. I’ll put hoops
over my head, hitch a horse
to my hands & then drive me
hard for the New Start,
for Opportunity, Destiny, for Last
Chances & their bodies,
their lives that are carried west,
dragged & hauled, wheeled west,
led to a bedroll at night
by hands they dream
know the way …….
….. I choose to lose my milk
In sickness, a fever that won’t break til
The curdling’s done. Sara. Baby Sara.
To make the wagon light
I choose a wheel.
[from Hannah’s Travel, Ahsahta Press, 1982]
Try saying these lines outloud, and see if you are not brought to tears as I am—they contain a whole and heartbreaking story, as the best poems do. What made this Hannah undertake such a journey, with the sacrifice it required? What did “driving hard” mean for her, and for her children, and theirs? These questions led me to imagine the life of my own ancestral Hannah, in the story “Jane’s Journey.”
Invitations to story happen in other ways; in fact, they’re everywhere! I was researching the decline of the American steel industry when I came across a tiny, 1945 news clipping about a woman in a burned-over cellar in a Russian field—itself a kind of a poem. In under five lines, the article described her encounter with a German soldier; and I wondered what would lead the two to behave as they did. To begin to understand, I imagined the story and wrote “Revolver.”
These stories, and others in Revolver, have been part of my spiritual and language journey for many years now. They’ve helped me to explore character and how it underscores choice, to manage meaning and construct sounds against silence, cynicism, and sorrow. Stories give rhythm and voice and action to questions, doubts, the vagaries of perception, and an evolving faith. I lack the distillatory abilities of the poet or the playwright—in fact, I go the other way. But my hope is to harness perceptive, poetic language in the shape and service of narrative, of understanding.
To make the wagon light, I choose a story.
Please give Revolver a try! I hope its stories will enrich you as a fellow traveler through this journey we’re all on together.