
Trampoline
$2.50
Excerpt
The morning the trampoline was due to arrive, Mim made her daily exit from the house and out into the world, where she could encounter creatures other than her family: squirrels and chipmunks and birds and also the occasional neighbor, people she used to be close to, who now, in lockdown mode, waved tentatively from the other side of the street as she passed. It was a sunny Saturday in spring, the season that best suited her city, which donned the dazzling azaleas and dogwoods and magnolias that gave it that glamorous aura of growth, exuberant, lush, verdant and fragrant, the hedges haloed in bees, like minor saints in the city’s church, the church of growth. Growth first to last, the air humid with growth, the heat, the ever-expanding suburbs, the ever-curving streets, no grids here but windings, cutbacks, cut-throughs, growth in the city’s blood, that’s why they had moved here, to Selfridge, Georgia, an intown suburb of Atlanta, why everybody moved here: to grow.
Lauren K. Watel
Lauren K. Watel’s debut book, a collection of prose poetry entitled Book of Potions (potion = poem + fiction), was awarded the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky, and will be published in February 2025 by Sarabande Books. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and translations have appeared widely. A native of Dallas, TX, she lives in Decatur, GA, home of the intrepid Decatur High School Marching Band.
Patrick Ryan on “Trampoline”
In our new issue, set during the pandemic lockdown, a woman named Mim—wife, mother of two—leaves her house for her daily walk and steps into a kind of oblivion. What are the parameters of her identity, and who set them? Why is it that her life, at times, seems to revolve around something as mundane as preparing dinner every night for three other people? Is that what defines her? Is she still, in fact, definable?
Upon returning home, Mim finds that the trampoline she ordered for her family has arrived and been assembled; her children and husband are already on it: bouncing, bouncing. They beckon her to join them, but Mim is unwilling, or incapable, or both. “Live the questions now,” Rilke wrote, and Mim is doing just that, but the questions she has about her identity seem to be all that she knows about herself. Her family’s alarm at her behavior feels foreign to her. Her reflection in her computer screen is unrecognizable to her eyes.
In “Trampoline,” Lauren K. Watel taps into the weirdness inspired by lockdown—when the world was suddenly diminished and priorities were reassessed, when all that you had was what was in front of you, and what was in front of you was frightened and confused. That said (and said so movingly in this story), “Trampoline” delivers a surprising amount of humor. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Q&A by Patrick Ryan
- PR: Where did you get the idea for this story?
- LKW: Like almost everyone, I found the pandemic upsetting and difficult. I immediately went into overdrive, as I always do, to look after my loved ones, to keep them safe and supplied with whatever they needed. Laden with this burden, as well as all the uncertainties of that time, I developed an alarming, painful pressure in my chest. After ruling out heart issues, my doctor and I settled on acid reflux, which no amount of antacids could quell. Finally, much to my embarrassment, we both realized I was just highly anxious, and the sensation went away, though I remained anxious. At the same time, I found the pandemic startlingly magical. The lack of cars, mowers, leaf blowers, the intense quiet, the many animals emerging, including a majestic family of hawks, as well as a giant tortoise rumbling across a nearby street—so many strange and lovely moments when I wished we’d never go back to normal, and I felt that humans were bad for the earth. These two pandemic feelings, fear and awe, fueled this story, along with memories of our childhood trampoline (a massive rectangular pad with no protective netting), where I passed hours bouncing and battling and showing off with my siblings and the neighborhood kids. My mom posted trampoline rules, two of which said, “No jumping off the fort” and “No spitting.”
- PR: How long did it take you to finish a draft you were happy with?
- LKW: Because I wrote much of this story in longhand, in one of my beloved City Lights notebooks, I’m not sure when I started. I’m guessing it was early 2022. I finished a draft by April. So the answer is: a few months.
- PR: How different is the finished story from the one you set out to write? Did it always have the arc that it has now? Was it always going to land more or less where it lands?
- LKW: The first draft of the story that ended up as “Trampoline” began with dinner and had no trampoline. I really wanted to write about dinner, because “What’s for dinner?” had become a question that irritated the living crap out of me. I, and everyone else around me, assumed dinner was my responsibility, and I was increasingly resentful of the dinner load. Really, I’d come to detest dinner as a meal. Poor dinner. But for whatever reason, dinner as a story starter wasn’t getting me what I wanted or where I wanted to go. This is when the trampoline came to mind, probably because people like my sister-in-law were acquiring items—Pelotons, kiddie pools, sourdough starters, all manner of pets—at a breakneck pace, to distract themselves and their children. Who knows how these things work, but when I ditched the various dinner beginnings and started with the trampoline, then I was off, story-wise. I still managed to get dinner in there as a small thematic beat.
- PR: One of the things I admire about “Trampoline” is that it contains so much humor while it deals with some troubling subject matter. I can imagine some people reading it primarily as a funny story, while others might read it as tragic. Were you conscious of the balance between the comic and the serious? And do you feel the story tips more toward one more than the other?
- LKW: Thank you, yes, I think the story has elements of both humor and pathos. At this late date (I’m pushing 60) that’s mainly how I see the world; I’m perennially aware, both in my work and in my life, of how the comic and the serious are living side by side, like a pair of TV roommates who constantly get on each other’s nerves, but neither can afford to move out. I mean, my sister and I recently navigated our mother’s death and funeral by veering wildly from snotnose bawling to wicked/bawdy jokes and back. Both of which our mother would have approved of, by the way. I’d like to think the story never tips definitively to one side but just teeters on that fulcrum between the comic and the serious.
- PR: Do you consider the ending a sad one? A somewhat happy one?
- LKW: I’m not going to lie, after I wrote that ending, I couldn’t read it without crying. Not because I considered it sad, not really. Nor do I consider it happy. The ending made me cry because I recognize, and feel, with such painful intensity, the longing that Mim feels. The longing to be different, be better. Or, more fundamentally, to be there at all, inside yourself. For most of my life, I wasn’t exactly inside myself. I was, instead, performing a series of blundering, anxious behaviors that masqueraded as a self. As my loved ones will attest, I was unbearably bossy, controlling, judgmental of everyone, myself above all. I didn’t know how to stop managing others and start managing myself. So that moment on the trampoline—when Mim is reaching for a scrap of moon, a scrap of herself—represents something I’ve been doing for so long. Reaching. And I have such sympathy for that reaching, how badly you want it, and how far away it seems.
- PR: I know you didn’t write it for a reason, but what do you think lies in store for Mim after the last sentence of this story? Where do you see her six months from now?
- LKW: Oh, well, she’s probably eating a nuclear egg sandwich in a hospital lab, as I did when I still thought I had acid reflux. Or maybe when someone asks her what’s for dinner, she simply answers, “I don’t know,” grabs herself something out of the fridge, and retires to her office to eat in blissful solitude. That would be radical.
- PR: What are you currently working on?
- LKW: At the moment I’m writing essays. Of all the genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction), nonfiction was the one I could never bring myself to attempt. Though I had many ideas, I lacked the confidence to write critical pieces about literature, since I have enormous holes in my reading history, no notion of who influenced whom, of when or where they did what, and I often confuse writers with the same name. Regarding memoir or creative nonfiction, I felt my life was far too boring to deserve any consideration, from readers or myself. However, a few years ago, my excellent friend Greg Fraser tasked me with writing a critical piece for Birmingham Poetry Review about the work of Toi Derricotte, the marvelous poet and founder of Cave Canem. Intimidated to the extreme, I tried to decline, but he insisted. Just do your thing, he said, and what a gift. Writing that piece finally gave me permission to do my thing (lots of thinking, little to no research) and leave the heady stuff to the heady people. Also—bonus!—Toi is now one of my favorite people, and I’m heading to Pittsburgh soon to see her. Thanks, Greg!
- PR: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- LKW: Any writing advice I ever received I ignored, because I’m stubborn and idiotic and thought I was so special that the rules didn’t apply to me. Thus, the publishing of a first book at age almost fifty-eight. I would not recommend this route. So I’ll offer advice I’ve discovered for myself: When you set out to write, abandon yourself to the writing and write with abandon. Write for the joy and the anguish of it. Write to get it down, whatever it is. Write to write, and for no other reason. Writing to publish is a terrible start. Start with whatever is most urgent, inside you, around you. Starting with an idea might be fine, but ideas alone are not exciting. Start with what’s bugging you, what you’re dreading, what grosses you out, what delights you beyond delight, terrifies, pains, unsettles you. Because everyone’s feeling those feelings, all of them, so you might as well write them, get them out, onto to the page. Then go back and revise.