Homicide Survivors Picnic

Lorraine M. López teaches at Vanderbilt University. She has won the Paterson Prize for Fiction, the International Latino Book Award for Short Stories, and the inaugural Miguel Marmol Prize for Fiction (selected by Sandra Cisneros and awarded by Curbstone Press, for a first book-length work of fiction of a Latino/a writer). Her new book, Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories (BkMk Press, 978-1-886157-72-9), was published last month.

A free download of the story, "Women Speak" is available below. López wrote the following introduction to the story for the ForeWord Book Club:

For this story, the details emerged before the characters and their actions. A glass eye, a swallowed goldfish, a Santa’s elf, and the chickens—oh, those chickens!—compelled me to write the piece. Lately, lists of such details comprise the genesis for my stories, and they work as a mnemonic code or short road map, reminding me where I hope to go. As it happens, these details presented themselves to me in my experience while teaching at a liberal arts women’s college in Northeast Georgia. The characters, while perhaps inspired by that experience, and their actions are mostly imagined.

But I do confess to having a Romanian art student, who was remarkably talented, a studious girl of impeccable integrity who aroused suspicion, and even hostility, in the other students, struggling to communicate appropriately in their first language. I admired this young woman extravagantly and longed to recreate her in this narrative, partly just to see her again. The fictionalized character prompted me to research Romanian women artists in the United States, and of course, this was how I discovered Hedda Sterne, the one woman in the famous photograph of the Irascibles, the only living survivor of that group. This was a thrilling discovery for me since the story pulled toward the problem of feminism in these Post-feminist times.

As to the details, the swallowed goldfish came to me secondhand from a wonderful colleague who is herself a great storyteller. She reported having a student pluck the finned creature out of water to pop into her mouth during a class presentation. The Santa’s elf is inspired by another colleague, and that is all I will say about that. I imagined the glass eye. It appeared to me in a slate-colored jewelry box—luminous as a moon drop. Those marvelous chickens! I have followed the chickens a long time. Like Professor Aragon in my story, I would drive behind truckloads of the hapless birds on my way to and from a college I once taught at, and I have spent much time thinking about the doomed birds, lamenting their conditions, their fate. I hope I memorialize them well in this piece. They deserve at least this and much more.

In composing this story and any story, I draw upon three strands: experience and memory, imagination, and an aesthetic shaped by books and stories I love best. With each piece, I aim to write the kind of story that I like best, and “Women Speak” is a favorite of mine.