Go Look There
Plot Summary: Go Look There is a magical-realism collection of linked short stories which take place in the South across a period of three decades. Thirty years ago, two separate and supernatural events involving children and butterflies led to one death and a community butterfly-paranoia. The butterflies, sensing fear and hate as silkworms do, stopped coming through the towns of Cryson County on their yearly migration. This stigma, as well as the tragic fates of the children, weighs heavily on Ephram Carson, school janitor and ex-mortician. He finds a kindred spirit in Angelica, the town psychiatrist, to whom he confesses his involvement in the peculiar events surrounding the banishment of the butterflies. They bond over legends of the playground and stories of the children whose prematurely ended lives have most greatly affected their own. Go Look There takes romance and urban myth to a dark place, encompassing the Devil, induction rites, peer and family pressure, delusions, insanity, the hot fever of childhood summers, and the beauty and magic found in the presence of butterflies.
Author’s Note: I wrote Go Look There in 8 days in 2007 while my family was living in corporate housing, having just moved to Alabama. As a graduation present my family bought me a MacBook (which I highly recommend), so it was basically me with my laptop locked in a room all day writing. The plot for Go Look There was inspired by an idea I had earlier that spring: My high school graduation was coming up, so I had caps and gowns on the brain, and I had just finished re-reading Silence of the Lambs where something Hannibal Lector said stuck out at me: He was describing Miggs, who had the odor of a goat, which is apparently a common syndrome of late-stage schizophrenia sufferers. My idea was this: What if there was some type of disease or mental disorder that would affect a person’s body chemistry so that they began to emit a smell that was attractive to… say… butterflies? And, because of my impending graduation, I imagined this swarm of butterflies taking place outside during the ceremony itself. I wrote out this idea and called it ‘Janey’s Story’, but it was a stand-alone, third-person short story at that point. It wasn’t until I was rewriting it during the summer alone with my laptop that I decided to change the narrator perspective from third person to first person, and Ephram Carson was born. (You can read ‘Janey’s Story’, now titled ‘The Story of Janey’ by clicking on ‘Read Sample Chapter’ above).
He came fully-fledged like Athena, and I realized this was the type of narrator who could drive the plot and link some of my short stories together in one collection. I added ‘Pledge’ (Henry’s Story) and ‘Monster’ (Shauna’s story) to it and fleshed out the plot from there. The initial draft was completed in 8 days, a record I don’t think I’ll ever beat.
Ephram’s old career as a mortician was vaguely described, as I knew a little bit about the craft from Mary Roach’s excellent book about dead bodies called Stiff, but I lacked any deep understanding into the life and job of a true mortician. That winter when my family was back home in Washington State visiting for Christmas, I was relaying the plot of Go Look There to my grandmother, and she mentioned we had some old family friends who ran a funeral home in downtown Stanwood. Thrilled, I had her make a quick call, and the next day I went down and interviewed one of their Funeral Directors about the details of his job. I learned that the politically correct term is ‘Funeral Director’ instead of ‘mortician’, but I loved ‘mortician’ so much that I couldn’t let Ephram change it (After that interview my mother and I bought sandwiches and ate them at the cemetary, keeping in theme for the day, on top of the plots my grandparents had purchased for me and my sisters should we die before we got married and were buried with our husbands. So I can definitively say that I’ve eaten lunch on my own grave).
Go Look There was the other book I put out queries for at the same time I was attempting to find an agent for Antebellum, however, Laura got to me before I could make much progress with it.
