The Jejune Cruise
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Excerpt
I sip warm, white wine on the Mariner Deck of the thousand-foot vessel, Cosmos. I sip one hundred and fifty feet above serene seas. I sip beside nine hundred sagging senior citizens and eight hundred dashing deckhands in white uniforms. I sip from a novelty glass, etched with the words “Wonderland Cruises.” I sip and try not to remember that below the surface are approximately eleven thousand feet of solid, black water and that if I fell overboard, it would probably take my corpse an entire week to sink to the bottom. I sip and I think about how Kareem will absolve himself of all blame like he always does. I sip and think about the weight of all the water pressing me flatter and flatter.
Kristopher Jansma
Kristopher Jansma is the author of the novels Our Narrow Hiding Places, Why We Came to the City, and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. He is the winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize, and is the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction, distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2016, has been published in The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Story, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Kristopher is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz College. His first work of nonfiction is Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers.
Patrick Ryan on “The Jejune Cruise”
The thought of going on a cruise sends shivers through my frame. There are just too many variables: the ship might encounter rocky seas, the ship might have inconvenient technical problems, the ship might sink. The variable I most fear is the other passengers I might be sailing with. Having never been on a cruise, I don’t picture The Love Boat but a vessel filled with obnoxious, entitled people who, when they aren’t shoving lobsters into their mouths, are making way too much human noise. How would you escape?
Admittedly, I don’t go on vacation to meet other vacationers. I am, perhaps, as reluctant and standoffish as Charlie, the narrator of Kristopher Jansma’s “The Jejune Cruise.” Charlie has taken things a step further into dreadfulness, however; he’s recently gone through a significant breakup, and after gazing skeptically at the ticket his parents have bought him for a cruise (meant to soothe his wounded heart), he decides to go—alone. Alone! No one to share the experience, no one to commiserate with.
But while Charlie, a budding writer, slumps in a chair alone on deck, sipping his way through his daily allotment of wine and toying with a short story about his breakup, a shadow falls over him: a cloud, he thinks at first, but no; a precocious young girl named Elise. What ensues is a journey of ship- and self-discovery neither I nor Charlie saw coming.
Kristopher Jansma is a wonderful and precise observer of human interaction, and “The Jejune Cruise” is both a funny and moving story that defies my idea of cruises. We hope you enjoy your voyage with these characters as much as we did.
Q&A by Patrick Ryan
- PR: Where did you get the idea for “The Jejune Cruise”?
- KJ: The very first version of this story emerged way back in 2010. That year I had decided to write a series of short stories inspired by interesting words in the dictionary. I went from A to Z—or “Auto-da-fé” to “Zugzwang”—and wrote a new piece every two weeks. It was a way of forcing myself through a block, of reinspiring myself with some fresh material. Writing quickly, I couldn’t second-guess my ideas, or at least not too much. I’d experiment, and if I finished the story and never wanted to look at it again, that was fine because I had to get to the next one. Out of 26 stories that year, maybe five or six were worth revisiting, and one of those was “The Jejune Cruise.” I’m sure I was thinking a little bit about David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” both of which I was teaching back then.
- PR: How long did it take you to finish a draft you were happy with?
- KJ: By necessity that first draft probably came together in about a week. But I knew immediately that it was a special story, and one I’d keep picking away at until I got it right. I revised it later that year and tried submitting it to a few places—but no luck. It wasn’t ready. I came to it again in 2014 and I could see it inching along. The last major revision happened in 2020, about ten years after it emerged, and from there it didn’t change much, even as I continued my search for a home for it—about five years longer. This is how it goes a lot of the time. Over those fifteen years I walked away from plenty of other stories that I knew weren’t my best work, but I kept the faith that “The Jejune Cruise” would find its way, eventually.
- PR: How different is the finished story from the story you originally envisioned?
- KJ: It is still largely similar to that first draft, except in one major way. Originally, the narrator, Charlie, was straight. He had been dumped by his girlfriend. But this presented a problem for early readers, who found it creepy that this heartbroken guy would bond with a little girl on the cruise. At first, I resisted this—thinking that if Salinger could do it in “Bananafish,” then why shouldn’t I? But as I kept teaching Nine Stories, I began to reconsider. Students often were very uncomfortable with those stories for the same reasons. Eventually I became a father myself and I began to see it as a serious problem. Times changed, somewhat, and my perspective changed, as I grew older and as I understood better what it meant for these two to be running around on the boat together.
In that same span of years I’d also gotten more comfortable with writing characters that weren’t so exactly like me, and whose positions on the Kinsey scale might not be exactly my own. As soon as I tried rewriting the story from this new perspective, it came together just as I wanted it to. There’s still some discomfort around the friendship between Charlie and Elise, but not to the degree where it is all the story can be about. I know writers who would argue that catering to the audience’s comfort-level is a problem—but I disagree. We writers must be conscious of how we’re making our readers feel…that’s job number one. And we should also challenge them, but if they are going to accept that challenge, they have to be open to the story in the first place. - PR: In Charlie, your narrator and main character, you created a voice that is discontented, regretful, and self-deprecating, but never for a moment does the story feel whiny or maudlin. How did you accomplish that?
- KJ: There was plenty of fine-tuning over the many drafts and years. Charlie’s situation is both sad and comedic; he’s out of a relationship that was clearly not healthy, but he’s been left so low and lost that he’s not sure how to climb out. Heartbreak and depression can be awful, even deadly things, of course, but I wanted Charlie to be someone the reader can also enjoy spending time with. Hopefully, he will remind us of ourselves in our own low moments. Not in a good place, but still very much worthy of love. He just doesn’t know that, at first. He mentions he’s been reading a self-help book called Loving Yourself So That Others Will Too. In some ways I think this story is about turning that upside down. Loving Others So That You Can Love Yourself Too. Salinger once said that sentimentality is when you love something more than God does—a charge that John Updike later levelled against Salinger’s own overabundant affection for his characters. And yes, it can go too far, but I do think a writer’s first job is to love their own creations. If you do, a reader will, too.
- PR: Elise is one of the most charming child characters I’ve encountered in a long while. Is she a composite of children you’ve known and observed, or is she based on a particular person?
- KJ: Thank you—I’ve always loved writing child characters, and they can be very tricky. Early in my teaching career I worked with lots of younger kids. I used to go down to PS 64 on the Lower East Side to do after school homework help for grade schoolers, and I worked with middle schoolers at a CTY summer camp. And now I’m a father myself, and I have a daughter who reminds me quite a bit of Elise, even though Elise was “born” long before she was. I’m doing an after-school creative writing class at my daughter’s school now, working with third and fourth graders, and it is both a joy and the hardest thing I’ve done in a while. In fact, I just did a dictionary exercise with them! I gave them a list of strange words to use: vamoose, flummox, galumph, festoon, quibble. They loved it. And, even more, they just loved flipping through the dictionary looking up words…they were all fighting over it. I should have brought ten copies.
Kids have such incredible ideas, all the time, and more importantly they have such little fear of making mistakes. What’s that awful line from As Good as it Gets? Jack Nicholson says he writes his female characters by thinking of a man and then taking away “reason and accountability.” Ouch. But with child characters, I think you take an adult and take away some of their fear and social conditioning. It makes them so fun to write, and it’s also what makes Elise so naturally able to lift some of the weight off Charlie’s shoulders in this story. - PR: What was the biggest surprise you encountered when writing “The Jejune Cruise”?
- KJ: Well, when you and I began editing the story earlier this year, I remember thinking that after so much time and so many revisions, it would be a pretty simple process—how could there be anything still wrong with the story after all that time? I also thought I might have a hard time reconnecting to the material because it almost felt by then as if it had been written by someone else. I’m forty-three years old now and when I wrote it I was twenty-eight. Of course, I was wrong on both counts. I was surprised to find there were still important edits to make to the story—and very happy to have your guidance in making them! And as I read the story again now, I’m amazed how deeply I still connect with the voice in the story, and how it still feels like a voice of my own today.
- PR: It might be impossible to answer this without spoiling it: Do you consider the ending of the story to answer a question, or ask a question? Or both?
- KJ: I think what I love most about short stories is that they can end in this exact sort of way, with a moment where change hasn’t exactly happened yet, but has become possible for the first time.
The final moment—without spoiling it entirely—has Charlie finding himself buried in a kids’ ball pit, returning to a kind of childlike wonder of his own, thanks to Elise. He sees himself in this new way, as someone with value to someone else. There’s a change suddenly possible for him that wasn’t there before.
When I was a kid, incidentally, I used to love burying myself in the ball pit. It was like a way of disappearing, being alone for a second in the crowded jungle gym. You could still hear everyone else playing and jumping around everywhere, but you were hidden and sort of weightless. At least until someone came around and stepped on you by accident. - PR: What are you currently working on?
- KJ: I’m working on a novel right now that’s still in somewhat early stages. I think I have, at this point, a few hundred pages of material that won’t quite go together yet. But I’m patient, looking forward to a quieter summer where I’ll have some more writing time.
To stay sharp in the meantime, I’m going back to editing a few other older short pieces. I’m fiddling around with a collection of stories, which would include “The Jejune Cruise,” that are each in some way about writers, or writing. My dream is to title it You Can’t Write About Writers, which is the particularly bad advice I used to get all the time in workshop when I was coming up. Thankfully, I knew well enough to ignore that one. - PR: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- KJ: I’ve been really blessed to have a number of wonderful mentors and teachers, most of whom taught me more by showing than by telling, as good writers so often do. They helped so much just by modeling this life for me—showing me how to write and teach and be a good parent at the same time.
But in terms of straight-up advice, I think all the time about an incredibly simple imperative that Alice McDermott gave us in an undergraduate workshop: “Never write badly.” Obviously, we were all trying our hardest to write as well as possible when it came to her class, but she wanted us to see that the best way to do that was by writing as well as possible all the time. Letters to our grandmothers, grocery lists, emails to the department administrator…this was in the days before social media, but her advice has carried over now into this whole new technological era, in which casual bad writing is so profligate.
And it makes so much sense. If you want to be a good writer, and I did—and do—then make everything you write an exercise, an opportunity to get a little better. Write the small stuff well on a daily basis, and when the time comes, you’ll write the big stuff well too.
