Where a story comes from

In this brief note, I’d like to reflect a little on the strangeness of how a story of mine came to be.

It’s called “California Dreaming” and it takes place in San Quentin Prison.

I used a lot from what I observed teaching there and from what I subsequently read about San Quentin’s codes, inmates, history, and architecture.

The story’s about a prisoner who’s visited three times by a ghost. It’s a story about redemption, about injustice clothed as justice, about the borderless within borders, about a painter finding a way to paint again, about a son longing for his mother with love and shame, about returning to a home that isn’t home anymore, about the blue sky above California, about the heavy clouds over southern Sweden… those kinds of things.

I had Dickens in mind. I also had in mind, I don’t know what to call it, an urge to create an almost naive facility in how the story unfolded. I could lift heavy themes with light language, something like that, I don’t know.

Mostly I had in mind the main character, Moses Julius, the ghost, J.N. Nagel, and the prison that somehow both confined and liberated Moses.

At the same time as I started writing it, I reviewed an academic book on the school to prison pipeline in Times Literary Supplement. The book I reviewed was about a school and how it mirrored the prison system in New Orleans to basically induce behavior in black and brown children that would likely lead them to prison. In one of the prisons, run by a member of the powerful Landrieu family, inmates farm tilapia fish that’s then sold for profit.

The editor called the review “Shades of the prison-house.” I was intrigued by the title, and learned that it came from Jack London’s novel The Jacket (1915), which I hadn’t known about before.

I got a copy and read it. It’s about a prisoner in San Quentin who learns a technique that allows him to spiritually transcend his body and relive all the lives he’s lived while he’s in solitary confinement, lying in bed with a straight jacket cinched tighter and tighter by the sadistic warden and his underlings.

Not long after I started reading it, it dawned on me that the ghost of my story is the prisoner from London’s story, and all the other lives he revisited through the prison-breaking travels of his spirit, and something more still.

Somehow, the editor calling the review “Shades of the prison-house” led me to this realization: I hadn’t come up with the ghost, I was being guided by it. And when you’re guided by a ghost, all kinds of weird things happen with how you perceive time, where things come from, what they mean, and so on. These sensations I had were both mundane and incomprehensible. The story basically wrote itself.

I wondered, and still wonder: could it be that a character from one novel, or something the character did or stood for, migrated into my story? Are all stories really these migrations of the same characters, same actions, same symbols, same spirits, same meanings, and so on (everything’s been said, but not by everyone, that kind of thing)? Could it be that what I imagined haunted Moses is just one person’s (probably poor) grasp of something that haunts every convict in every prison in different shapes and forms?

When questions like these arise in me I feel like I’m gazing at the stars. Coincidentally, but probably not, Star-Rover is what the prisoner in London’s novel called himself.

Where does a story come from? Well, I can’t say where my story came from, or where it’ll go. Maybe that’s what gives it a pulse, some signal to emit.