MFA Fiction Alumnus Schuyler Dickson on His Short Story Collection "Yazoo Clay"
In 2022, my short story collection, Yazoo Clay, won the Tartt First Fiction Award and was published by Livingston Press. I had entered the contest a year before, having heard of Livingston Press as a haven for weirdos, uncategorizable fiction, sometimes Southern. That first year, the book consisted of mostly stories I had published and written at Northwestern, plus a handful of newer stories that I cobbled together in between novel draft after novel draft.
It didn’t win that first year, but I received a letter from the editor, Joe Taylor, saying the collection was a semi-finalist, and if it didn’t get picked up by the time the contest rolled around the next year, to consider submitting it again.
The next year, I focused on making the theme of the collection more unified by writing more stories. Yazoo Clay is the ever-shifting sediment that a lot of central Mississippi stands on, and as such, it’s blamed for lots of problems, from shifting foundations to pothole-ridden roads. At the time, I’d left a job teaching to start a farm in north Mississippi and found myself compelled to rub my own nose in my own displacement. Many of the stories I wrote were fragmented on the page: stories put next to stories that talked over and rewrote each other as they went, leaving the reader the (frustrating, perhaps) job of putting the narrative together as they read.
Some of the collection’s better stories, I think, came together during this time. “Happy Birthday” is the story of a man whose daughter goes missing during a flood, who instead of going to look for her gets bogged down in an imaginative conversation with an AI-powered computer. I wrote it in the winter, when the rains wouldn’t stop and I couldn’t plant seeds.
“Blowing the Dam,” a story about three estranged brothers who meet on family land to clear the creek from a beaver dam, was inspired by having a beaver dam on my own creek, the unease of not just blowing it up, but killing the beavers when they came back to build it again, an experience highlighted even more when I talked to my neighbor across the gravel road who told me a story about a friend of his who had been bitten on the leg by a beaver, which almost killed him.
The second time I submitted the collection, it won. Still, I felt like it needed one more story, so I snuck in the last story, “Asses,” maybe my favorite, a Beckett-inspired tale of two men telling a dumb joke as the scene/landscape shifts around them. Joe and the press were cool with it, even working patiently at the hellish task of typesetting all of those columns on the page. I still feel bad, even though I sent them some home-grown beard oil and bath salts as a thank you/mea culpa.
Out of it, though, I’ve got a book that, after over a year of being out, I’m really happy with. If anyone’s looking for a home for their collection, I’d encourage them to send it to Livingston Press.