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Breakwater Stones: How Stories Are Shaped by Erratics

    Eric Scholz

    The following is a guest post by Eric Scholz, whose short story “Three-Day Bleed” appeared in Issue 16 of Typehouse.

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    I find a certain poetic beauty in the fact that my first visit to Lake Michigan served as the catalyst for a story set at the New Jersey Shore. The story’s ubiquitous setting amalgamates the various beach towns of my childhood, but the breakwater stones that characters Louise and Pete climb on make their way into the story like glacial erratics (Latin errare, meaning “to wander”) >—giant rocks carried hundreds of miles and dropped in new lands by advancing and retreating glaciers. I was on tour with my band, A Film in Color, and feeling very homesick. Jumping between those big stones with my best friends on the shores of Milwaukee’s McKinley Beach, I finally felt like I didn’t totally hate my life, despite the gnawing fear of slipping and falling into the lake. As I lay across the backseat of our 1990 Chevy Beaumont deathtrap en route to the next show, I recorded all my thoughts about those breakwater stones. In this blogpost I’ll analyze some of the other erratics that found their way into “The Three Day Bleed.”

    “The Three Day Blow” by Ernest Hemingway”

    The story’s title came to me one afternoon while flipping through Hemingway’s Complete Short Stories as I waited on the porch for a bass to arrive in the mail. I noticed a story called “The Three Day Bleed.” Of course, no such story exists. I noted the misread in my phone and it resurfaced in my consciousness months later when I was home from tour and expanding my breakwater free-write into a proper story.

    “Franny” by J.D. Salinger

    A lot of the protagonist’s naivete is the result of me not knowing what things are called, but Louise’s real spiritual ancestor is Franny Glass. I was reading Franny and Zooey and thinking a lot about my mother, who, over the course of the 2010s underwent a number of surgeries to remove skin cancer caused by sunburn, leaving scars across her nose and cheeks. I was in my late twenties and beginning to understand the horrible ways in which decisions made by our younger selves come back to disfigure us. This is why Louise and Pete tease one another about sunscreen in much the same fashion as Franny is teased by her beefheaded boyfriend, Lane.

    “‘Am I dying?’: The miscarriage that leveled me, and brought us closer” by West Moss

    West Moss was my first real writing mentor, and her collection, The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, is one of my all-time favorites. This essay predates the aforementioned collection by at least three years, but it is every bit as moving. I remember sitting in Moss’s fiction workshop and listening to her read the essay aloud and thinking I could never write something so emotionally stirring. In the essay, a younger Moss learns she is pregnant and excitedly tells her partner. The two laugh and then panic, and her partner blithely asks: “When are the adults coming home?” Weeks later, Moss learns she will miscarry. She calls her parents, but her father answers the phone. She tells him the news, and he responds: “Wait… I don’t have my hearing aids in,” before handing the phone off to Moss’s mother. If I learned one thing from Moss (the lessons I learned from her are countless) it’s that well-placed levity enhances the emotional impact of a scene.

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    Eric Joseph Scholz is a writer and musician from New Jersey. He holds an MFA in Creative and Professional Writing from William Paterson University and plays bass in A Film In Color and Heavy Sigh. His work has been featured most recently in Typehouse Magazine, Construction Literary, Watchung Review, and the New Jersey Bards Anthology. In 2019, his fiction was awarded the NJCEA Graduate Student Writing Award. He teaches composition, literature, and creative writing.

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