Feast

Here are some questions I was asked about “Feast,” one of my stories, as part of a class called Writing for Social Change.

• What inspired you to write this short story? Was there an event that led to it?

No specific event led to the story. I’ve been giving homeless people cash for years and wondered, usually in the act of trying to be helpful, if I was doing a good thing. At least once, my son and I have been together and been asked for help or decided to be helpful. A friend from New York, while visiting Salt Lake City, commented on the number of homeless men here. Members of my immediate and extended family have debated the issue. I have relatives who are working, in their way, to alleviate extreme poverty in developing nations. The question of how to best be helpful, it seems, ought to be a more important one. Rather than an event, the collection of influences listed above led me to the story.

• What did you hope to understand about social class by writing “Feast?”

I was less interested in understanding social class than in presenting the experience of a character. Social class is undoubtedly one of the forces active in that character’s life, an extremely important one, one more influential than he knows, but it’s not the only force acting on him. He needs to make decisions about what kind of person to be, what kind of relationships to have, with a range of forces seeking to influence him. Part of what I wanted to do was capture his experience within this web of forces. This seemed worth doing because most readers will probably be living within a similar set of forces or influences. The character’s hypothetical experience can be something readers consider in light of their own lived experiences.

• Was this piece meant to be about social change? Or, how do you think it fits the category of writing for social change?

I remember, as I wrote it (in 1989), not being sure how it would end. I remember asking myself why the sorts of events I was trying to describe didn’t happen more often in the real world and then what would happen if they did. Those questions led me toward an ending. Sometimes the ending seems like a literal cop out.  I remember not wanting the story to be didactic. Didacticism is counterproductive. Years ago, I reread the story and felt it was. This morning, it didn’t seem so, or at least not in terms of homelessness.

The story is about social change in that it poses a question about a problem. Fictional characters model a hypothetical solution, rather than proscribing one.

• Do you think that fiction is more effective than academic writing/argument? Why or why not?

There are several ways of thinking about this question. One is that fiction is argument by another means. It appeals more directly to ethos and pathos, for example, than academic writing and argument. The difference between fiction and argument is one of degree, of which appeals are emphasized and which strategies are used. Fiction brings about social change, perhaps, using a different set of tools than more overt arguments.

Another way of thinking about this question is that fiction generally encourages empathy, shapes group identities and reinforces cultural norms. While they are revisable, these identities and norms are also foundational, glacial. They suggest who gets to be human and who gets to be, among other things, fed. Who is treated how, in other words. These narratives need to be questioned, revised, and shaped, but such changes happen extraordinarily slowly. The stories we tell each other, in tiny but persistent ways, influence larger cultural norms. Whether parables or fairy tales, part of the reason stories are persistent is that they are memorable and that they are repeated and recycled often.

Academic writing and arguments also influence these larger norms, but not at the glacial level. Academic writing and arguments happen within a context shaped in part by cultural norms and those norms have in turn been shaped by stories, some of them extremely old and some in dire need of revision.

• In your own words, what is the message you hoped to convey to your readers?

These aren’t my own words, exactly, but I like them: “Be excellent to each other,” especially, I’d add, when doing so is difficult.