NER fiction editor Ernest McLeod speaks with contributor Sam Simas about combatting cultural exclusion, imbuing queer fiction with new life, and the flawed narrator of his story “Simple Instructions” from issue 45.2.
Ernest McLeod: “Simple Instructions” opens with the narrator observing his husband in the kitchen: “Harold is hacking the onion with a bread knife, again.” It captures so much in so few, carefully chosen words, as an opening line should. Are you a writer who likes to nail a first sentence and then go from there, or are your first sentences more apt to be in flux?
Sam Simas: My first instinct is to say: I wish I could be the kind of writer who experiences a line or a story as bright and loud as a lightning strike. But I don’t want that, not really. Committing too early to the first line paralyzes me. If I feel like I’m shoehorning the piece into shape rather than being open to how it develops, then I lose the sense of surprise and discovery that keeps me writing.
I’m happy with how I stumble through writing. I never know where I’m going until I get there, if I get there. Even then, I’m apt to wonder, Is this where I meant to go? This approach also means I don’t hang onto anything too tightly—for example, I nixed the high-speed school bus road rage from this story (for the better). Not to mention, I’m entirely incapable of the genius and foresight that a driving first line requires.
For me, the process of writing, especially the early drafts of short stories, is like putting together an Ikea bookshelf. I’ve learned that if I tighten each screw too tightly as I go then I end up with lopsided shelves. Fixing the mess becomes difficult. So, I try to keep it loose at the beginning, then tighten the piece through rounds of revision. The first line is usually one of the last that I write.
EM: The reader quickly learns that the narrator has given Harold “simple instructions” for getting the necessary ingredients for a cod dish the narrator makes each year for his Tio Silvino on the anniversary of his Tia Amália’s death. Harold has failed to follow the “simple instructions” and has purchased an enormous mushroom instead of cod/bacalhau. I always appreciate it when food is used in fiction to tap into characters’ familial and cultural traditions. Why was cod the right choice for this story?
SS: Aside from pastel de nata and bifanas, I can’t think of a more quintessentially Portuguese dish than bacalhau. Nevertheless, it is challenging to find the salted codfish outside of Southern New England and California. I have not found it in Cincinnati, where I recently moved, although I must say I haven’t put much effort into finding it. I don’t trust landlocked states with fish. Why would I? There is not a culture of fishing and maritime life in Ohio, which, I think, points to the heart of why cod was right for this story: there are numerous ways we can be made to feel like outsiders; culinary tradition, like sexuality, is one of them.
The ingredients available in our grocery store reveal our community’s socioeconomic status and ethnic background. Those goods also force outsiders to assimilate. If you are Portuguese and can’t find pastel, bifana, bacalhau, or allspice, you either make it yourself or find the next best option. Harold, who does not share the same cultural touchpoints as the narrator, does not know what to do. He is kindhearted but oblivious. He does not realize that his picking a mushroom—maybe the most antithetical ingredient to bacalhau I could think of—exerts a painful assimilating influence on the narrator. His misreading of the importance of traditional food also signals the lopsided dynamics of their relationship that cause the narrator to be continually subsumed by someone else’s desire.
EM: The narrator’s Tia Amália had told him that “loving well is a matter of not looking too closely.” It’s advice the narrator has a hard time following. He tends to dissect what he perceives as his husband’s flaws. There were points in the story where I wondered if Harold was getting a fair shake? I imagined he might dispute some of the narrator’s criticisms and assertions. This raised a question about first-person narrators: Should a writer feel any pressure to soften or balance his/her narrator’s views to maintain a reader’s sympathy, or is digging into a narrator’s point of view, even if it’s stubbornly lopsided, intrinsic to first-person narration? Or perhaps it’s more about allowing the reader to see different sides of a narrator?
SS: One of the most appealing challenges of writing a first-person narrator is negotiating the dissonance between the narrator and the subject of their narration. Misreporting, misinterpreting, omissions—these frictions and evasions are, I think, as important to the narrative as the causal events. Narrative slippages are useful for inciting the reader to ask questions about the situation and the narrator’s perception of it; they can serve to characterize the narrator as the story unfolds and suggest another, perhaps more subtle, story within the story. Because of the usefulness of first-person narration in creating texture within a story, I am hesitant to suggest that softening a narrator’s views to maintain the reader’s sympathy is generally useful or necessary. It can be, depending on the story.
Much of the pleasure of reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day comes from watching Stevens, the first-person narrator, deflect and evade and rationalize the events of his life. He does his best to present himself in the most judicious light possible. As a result, he is, to me at least, an extremely sympathetic narrator—especially as we learn that his obliviousness or sense of duty has cost him the love of his life and a parting moment with his dying father. Allowing Stevens to be convincingly flawed, neurotic, a bit arrogant, and evasive creates texture in the story. We read not only the history of the fall of landed gentry in England, but also the internal torsion of the butler as he tells the story.
This next example is a bit of a counterpoint and pretty low-hanging fruit: Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s Lolita. It is safe to say HH is unsympathetic. He has no concern for humility, softness, or tact. He lets the reader see only one side of him, but his narcissism and megalomania are dazzling and mystifying. We are drawn to him because he is so different from us and so deeply deplorable. He is like a charismatic cult leader who somehow convinces the reader to follow his discomfiting charm through hundreds of pages and terrible violence.
All this is to say, I prefer my first-person narrator flavored, flawed, and as fucked up as I believe most people are. An interesting person telling an interesting story is, well, doubly-interesting. If objectivity is the goal, then a third-person narrator might be a better option.
EM: I’ve read several of your stories and all of them have what I think of as overt imagery—or, to make a sound-recording analogy, the imagery is at the front of the mix. The plot of “Simple Instructions” is—true to the title—simple, but the imagery is quite complex and layered, with variations on certain images repeated, echoing through the prose. (I’m thinking of moths and beetles, the paper napkin burning in the restaurant scene, followed by Tio Silvino’s blanket in the window catching fire, the flickering display light in the shop . . .) Is imagery an important jumping-off point in your creative process and how do you see it functioning in your stories? I’m also wondering if the echoing I was referring to tends to be instinctive for you, or very deliberate, or some combination of both?
SS: I’ve never heard that analogy before, but I like it!
You know . . . I never noticed a connection between the blanket and the napkin. I wish I had something clever to say about the way images “function” in my stories, but I don’t; they are just there and are, I think, suggested by the stories themselves. I know that sounds mystical as hell, and I try not to be mystical when talking about writing, but this is one of those elements of storytelling that feels intuitive to me. I can’t describe it, only feel it.
EM: In your bio you identify as a queer Luso-American writer. How does that identity inform your writing choices and your sensibility in this story and/or in your work in general?
SS: It used to pain me to adopt any identity in my author bio. I disliked feeling as if I were offering my credentials to legitimize my claim on a story. Now, I rationalize my decision to signal myself as a queer Luso-American because I think of it as a “bat signal” rather than a proof of authenticity.
An important bit of context: Luso means anyone from a Portuguese speaking background. My roots, on my father’s side, grow from Vila Franca do Campo on São Miguel in the Azores—an archipelago in the mid-Atlantic; it is an autonomous region of Portugal.
There are few Portuguese-American writers, fewer Azorean-American writers, and even fewer of either type who openly identify as queer in what is still a conservative, Catholic Portuguese culture. Of the few Luso-American writers in the United States, many of them have been brought together by Oona Patrick and Katherine Vaz at DISQUIET International’s “Writing the Luso Experience” workshop.
I have had the distinct honor of attending that workshop twice. What has struck me each time is that, regardless of whether the participants came from Brazil, Canada, South Africa, or the United States, most of us have never met another Luso writer. We believed we were alone. There are too many cultural and socioeconomic problems to disentangle the reasons for our isolation. But the most succinct summary is that our cultural background prioritized labor, not art, and had taught us to view writing as a profession of privilege in which we did not belong.
So, I make myself visible as a “queer Luso-American” with the hope that someone like me, or like my friends from that workshop, might recognize himself in my work and feel a little less alone, a little more empowered to write.
EM: When I was coming of age as a reader decades ago, so many stories I read with gay/queer characters dealt—not surprisingly—with how the characters’ sexuality conflicted with familial and societal norms. In “Simple Instructions” the characters’ sexuality is simply a given, and the family conflict comes not from outside the relationship but from within because the narrator feels that his husband doesn’t fully get or respect the importance of his family traditions. The queer fictional landscape seems so much broader now. As a younger writer, is this evolution in queer fiction and fictional territory something you consciously think about or is it—like your characters’ sexuality in this story—more of a given and something you don’t overanalyze?
SS: Yes, I absolutely want to represent queerness and homosexuality as a given in my stories. I was and have been troubled by the long history of queer stories in which gay men meet horrible deaths—imprisonment, castration, murder, suicide, AIDS complications. For decades, those were the expected outcomes for gay characters in fiction. Homosexuality was always presented as a problem. I am grateful to the authors of those stories, like James Baldwin, Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer, Edmund White, to name a few, who reflected the American cultural obsession with the naughty homo. They are still important, and there is still space for them, but theirs is not the kind of story I want to tell.
In my stories, I do not want “gayness” or “queerness” to be the problem. Coming out and social ostracization are not the only painful major life events queer people endure. I would like to offer stories that imagine what it could be like for queer people once they have crossed the threshold of those particularly harrowing experiences, even if their lives are not happy. Those circumstances and events can and should be normalized in literature. LGBTQ+ people have as much a right to unhappy relationships and lives as their heterosexual counterparts, and it does not always have to be a result of their sexuality or gender identity.
EM: Final question: Are there writers who have especially impacted you personally and as a writer?
SS: This is my favorite question because I get to fangirl. I’ve mentioned a few throughout the interview, but here are some more: I adore canonical writers like Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Kazuo Ishiguro, and José Saramago. And there are the writers whose work doesn’t receive as much acclaim as I think it should, and who have been mentors, guides, and friends like Katherine Vaz, Josie Sigler Sibara, José Eduardo Agualusa, and Mia Couto.
Ernest McLeod is a writer and artist living in Middlebury and Montréal. He is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His writing and photography have appeared in The Sun, Men on Men 7: Best New Gay Fiction, Salon, F-Stop, JPG, File, as well as in numerous Vermont publications. He’s served regularly on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has been a longtime reader for NER.
Sam Simas is a queer Luso-American writer. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Southern Indiana Review, Hunger Mountain, and other literary magazines. He is the recipient of Copper Nickel’s Editor’s Prize for Prose, placed first in CRAFT Literary’s First Chapters Contest, and has been selected as a 2024 Luso-American Fellow at DISQUIET International. He is a PhD student in fiction at the University of Cincinnati and the contributing fiction editor for the Ocean State Review.
Photo courtesy of Sam Simas