Leopard, by Wells Tower | The New Yorker
newyorker.com
This is the first story I ever remember reading that’s written in the second person. It’s an awesome story, and it’s still what makes me think the second person is best used to make the reader uncomfortable. The only story I’ve ever had published (shameless plug!) was written in the second person, too, so it’s a tense I both love and hate.
I’d highly suggest reading this article, and thinking slowly about what makes this tense so unique and effective.
From "Down Through the Valley"
Wells Tower“We reached the car, and I held the door open for him, but he didn’t climb in right away. He stood there rocking on his crutch, gazing off at the sky and the fields and the fall trees starting to go the color of sherbet…”
“When you are revising or looking at that draft, you know where the real wood is behind the fiberboard. You know when you hit something that feels real and true and that needs to be said, and then you go back and try to make everything feel like that, which is hard. [...] At some point when you start to write seriously and start to get published, you realize that the goal is to do as good a job as you can, not merely to get your work into print. Starting out, we all think as soon as a story is published in a magazine, it’s done—especially if it’s in a fancy magazine. If they took it, you know it’s good, because they’re so fancy! But you realize no editor is going to be as hard on your work as you have to be. They don’t have the time. They don’t want to put up with you that much. ”
—Wells Tower“I'm just fucking tired. I've been pushing for twenty years. I work so goddamned hard, and what have I got? I filled out this dating thing on the computer a few weeks ago. One thing they ask 'Is if you were in animal, what would you be?' I wrote 'A bumblebee trying to fuck a marble.' It's true. Just grinding away at this goddamned thing that never gives back. ”
—Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything BurnedThe Thing With Feathers
outsideonline.comby Wells Tower
IF YOU WERE THE LAST BIRD OF YOUR SPECIES, looking for a comfortable place to evade extinction, the view flying over northern Monroe County, Arkansas, would probably not tempt you to touch down. You’d see abandoned trailer homes with saplings growing through their windows; asbestos-shingle shacks with discarded cars and appliances sinking into their lawns; rice fields sectioned into rectangular ponds like the plastic lagoons in a TV-dinner tray; and huge, insectile central-pivot irrigators patrolling oceans of soil where thousand-year-old cypress trees once stood.
Yet Bayou de View—a spit of hardwood jungle here at the uppermost tip of Arkansas’s 550,000-acre Big Woods, smack-dab between Little Rock and Memphis—is where the world’s rarest avis, the ivory-billed woodpecker, has reemerged more than half a century after ornithological authorities pronounced it dead. Seen from above, Bayou de View looks about as primeval as a planter of ficus trees at a shopping mall. Below the treetops, though, the terrain looks less like eastern Arkansas and more like rural Mordor. The water, which is the color of beef au jus, flows in labyrinthine meanders boiling with toothy gar and cottonmouths as stout as a man’s wrist.
