BCC Shines a Light on: James W. Morris
Name of the piece published by BCC:
When/where was it originally published:
Oddville Press, 2021
Tell us more about your piece! What is the background of the piece? What led you to write it? What’s your process?
I’ve written more than a hundred stories and my process has varied with each. In general, I’ve endeavored to develop a habit of remembering incidents or characters or odd phrases or even dream images that interest me, and then asking myself a series of progressively more ridiculous “What if” questions about the intriguing item until an idea clicks in some ineffable, indefinable way and generates a frisson of possibility. Then I start putting words on paper to see what happens.
In the case of WIFE, I saw a pharmaceutical commercial on TV that warned about the product’s possible side effect of hallucinations, and I tried to imagine a situation in which a person experiencing such hallucinations would not find them scary, but actually comforting.
How did you feel when it was first published and how have your thoughts or feelings on the piece changed from then to now?
A lot of writers don’t like re-reading an old story—some of my earliest publications might be a little cringe-worthy to examine now—but I actually don’t mind it, as long as enough time has passed for me to forget how much work the story was to create in the first place. I’m glad WIFE is being published again; on re-reading, I find I like it just as much as when I wrote it, since it’s a good example of the kind of story I prefer making—both funny and sad. That’s my sweet spot.
Is there a specific message you would like readers to take away from reading this piece?
I blame high-school English teachers for propagating the idea that fiction is meant to deliver some sort of profound message, as if a writer decides from on high what difficult sociological problem everyone needs to hear about, and then develops coded symbols and characters to dramatize it. Yuck. It’s much more likely that the writer just began doodling around, making sentences as a way of thinking out loud about a trivial thing that interested him or her, and after dozens or hundreds of rewrites began to intuit a shadowy understanding that there could be some deeper implications of the ideas expressed. Of course, sometimes the only message an artist wants to send is “Look at this weird and beautiful thing I made for you.”
What else would you like to tell readers about your writing?
Like most writers, I started out by trying to be someone else—in my case, James Thurber, a writer I admired and tried to fashion myself after. Then I moved on to John Updike, Flannery O’Connor, etc. Eventually, I realized I was going to have to be my own weird self, and develop my own style. Besides short stories, I’ve published lots of other things—jokes, essays, poems, plays—but these days I stick almost exclusively to fiction, and take solace in the fact that story-writing is one of those rare human endeavors in which the quality of a person’s skill set peaks later in life.
Where can readers find more of your work?
