Aysegul Savas on the Space Between Imagination and Reality

"Last summer, I was working on a lecture on the short-story form and found that I had very little to say about stories in general. I could only think about the individual experience of writing or reading one, but couldn't extrapolate from these instances. So I decided to write a story in parallel to the lecture, to try and "catch" myself in the act."

"I told you in a past conversation that I always write short stories when I know how they will end. But for this one, I had no idea where I was going-I didn't know at the start that Marian would enter the story and certainly not that she would play a central role. I wrote it paragraph by paragraph, trying to pay close attention, and I think this is why the story keeps changing at every turn."

The narrator, a younger writer with small children, recounts a developing friendship with an older novelist and his wife, Marian. The narrator began the piece while preparing a lecture on the short-story form and chose to compose a parallel story to observe the creative process. Marian's arrival was unexpected; the narrator wrote paragraph by paragraph, allowing the narrative to shift organically. The work probes interactions between imagination and reality, the hierarchies and hopes that shape intergenerational literary relationships, and an old-fashioned apprenticeship dynamic that continues to fascinate the narrator. The narrator's in-the-moment approach produced surprising turns and deep attention to the intimate dynamics among the three characters.

Read at The New Yorker