thinking about the story

I don't really get why the formatting gets weird when I copy text from another source. Anywho...doing some writing for my thesis paper, working out the section of the paper where I talk about the story and underlying themes. Very very first draft material here.

The Story

For Wintonbury is a collection of fictional short stories about the inhabitants of Bakers Street in Wintonbury, Massachusetts.  The reader is introduced to vignettes of the lives of seven characters in a neighborhood of connected stories, beginning with the writer in first person omniscient, Annabel Olive.

There are five houses on Bakers Street. In the first house, Henry and Walter reside. Henry is a young boy who has recently lost his mother, and has, thus, gone to live with his grandfather, Walter. Walter is a lonely widow who is now trying to take care of his grandson. Harvey and Theo are brothers. Harvey is a young boy who is nonverbal, and Theo is a college student who feels a responsibility to stay at home and take care of his family. Elizabeth, in her twenties, has just been cheated on. Sophia has recently moved to Wintonbury to get away from the town she grew up in. In the last house, Annabel Olive is a writer who has just moved into her great aunt’s house to take care of her great aunt and focus on writing.

Themes addressed in the collection of short stories include: family, love, loss, problems in communication, loneliness, and dealing with reality. Each household on Bakers Street has family problems, whether it’s a loss, a burden of responsibility, or the lack of a sense of family. Regarding love is a love of family or a significant other. Loss of life, innocence, and love is addressed. The characters are dealing with their own realities, whether that means facing problems, avoiding and temporarily replacing, or running away.

The tone is that of everyone attempting to sustain some illusion of normalcy and deciding how to go on with life. Every character is going through something different that’s not great, but the characters all connect in some way throughout For Wintonbury, making life a tad more livable. The stories don’t exist solely to entertain or to serve the visual art. We live in a culture where the narrative is an everyday aspect of life. One’s life and personal reality may be difficult to face at times, and I believe we turn to stories in the form of books, television, movies, and other forms in order to feel less alone.  

When I began forming the concepts behind For Wintonbury, I was considering the larger picture of what I desire for my art and writings to be about. My fatal flaw is that I have always put people, loved ones, first --before work, studying, or art --and I’m unapologetic about it, because in the end, whether it means a few stressful days or late nights, the work will get done. I’ve been consistently reading about David Foster Wallace and listening to his interviews, and Wallace was interested in what it means to be a genuine human being. He was concerned with characters’ sincerity. He once said, “. . . hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human . . .” I wanted to make stories about characters who are not necessarily happy, but they have a sincere yearning for human connection. That is why all of the characters on Bakers Street connect, and why the writer, Annabel Olive, is first person omniscient so that the reader can take a look into the minds of the characters and see them behind closed doors. For Wintonbury is about community. No matter how isolated the characters think they are, they need others to be able to function. For Wintonbury is about decent people trying to do good things, and how disparate people in a town connect. There is a simplicity and an innocence, and as David Foster Wallace would say, “. . . to be really human . . . is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic.” Hopefully, between the short stories and the objects, color palettes, and very humanly awkward aspects in the painting, the viewer will be able to connect, too.