We’re pleased to have published Cat Ennis Sears‘ story “Shipyard Incidents” this week at Fringe. To learn more about the story, read the following note from the author. If you enjoyed “Shipyard Incidents”–and hell, why wouldn’t you?–let us know in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

I’m thrilled to be included in this issue of Fringe and thank the editors for the opportunity to write a little bit about the “behind the scenes” of “Shipyard Incidents.”

Perhaps it would be good to explain the bigger world of this story. It is part of a collection of linked stories about Lara, Otto (her handler / boyfriend) and Christine (the madame). Otto’s story, “Action and Reaction,” can be found at Corium Magazine (thanks to Salvatore Pane and Lauren Becker). Christine’s story, “You Stopped Galloping,” was read aloud at Champs Not Chumps (thanks to Tom Dodson).

I like to think of my stories as patchworks from various sources and things I’ve read. Here are some of the things I was thinking about when I wrote “Shipyard Incidents.”

First off, I had recently moved from Richmond, Virginia to Boston and I was fascinated with the industrial history of New England. I took an archival research class at Emerson and read a lot about the mill girls of Lowell, Massachusetts. I started with a story about Christine, the madame of the brothel, and her journey from the Canadian prairies to the New England mills to a Boston brothel. I then thought I’d like to write about the prostitutes in the brothel, and that made me focus on Lara.

The impetus behind the circus came from an unexpected place. I was learning about the history of teaching composition and read a book called Textual Carnivals by Susan Miller. She writes about how composition has been pushed to the outer realms of the university and subjugated to literary studies because student writing is “improper” and threatens high literary discourse. Similarly, towns push their undesirables into carnivals on the outskirts of town and then make them safe by making them entertainment. I was really intrigued by that and wanted to write about a cast of “undesirables.”

I was interested in power relations when I wrote this story. Otto thinks that Lara’s weight makes her dependent on him. Yet it makes her feel powerful, and it is this weight that she uses as a weapon against him and as a tool for making money as a prostitute in Boston. I was interested in how women sometimes put themselves in subjugated positions and then subversively use these positions for their own benefit.  (“I’m so dumb, I just don’t get math, please do my math homework for me!”)

Another source for the story was Victorian smut, which was hard to get out of the Boston Public Library. I had to fill out a request at Book Delivery and wasn’t allowed to check it out. I had to look at erotica in the reading room at BPL, which made me feel like a real pervert. What struck me was the timelessness of porn. There was one photo of a woman standing naked next to a river. She looked like a hippie nudist from the 1960s. But the caption said 1850 something. So I was imagining these photos when thinking about the brothel and the photographs Christine takes of Lara.

Herman, the sailor with the Polynesian facial tattoos, is based on the 1846 novel Typee by Herman Melville. (Not a very imaginatively named character! I guess I could just call it an allusion…) Melville based Typee on time he spent in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands after jumping ship. The narrator describes the pressure to get facial tattoos, but he didn’t want to be outcast from American society, so he came back without the tattoos. I was interested in crossing cultures and borderlands, and how Herman can’t really come back because of his experiences in another world.

I was also reading Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics at the time and I loved the way that he describes incredibly insane things happening in such a matter of fact way. The flood at the end was my attempt to have a realistic, historical world where crazy things can happen.

I love fiction that makes me feel weightless when I read it—fiction that takes advantage of its fiction-ness, and tells lies. I hope that “Shipyard Incidents” does this.