Rebecca Makkai, "The George Spelvin Players"
It’s December 25. Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers, could’ve sworn she left that porridge bowl right over there.
How would you describe your story?
REBECCA MAKKAI: A small-town theater company is surprised when a former soap star moves to town and wants to join their production of A Christmas Carol. He is very much not okay.
When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?
RM: I wrote this story in... 2012? 2013? I had published my first novel, The Borrower, in 2011, and I was asked to write a story that was tangential to that book. The project I was aiming it for fell through, and so I put the story aside for a while and revisited it a year or so later. It was eventually published in the journal Pleiades.
The Borrower is about a children's librarian who inadvertently kidnaps an unhappy ten-year-old boy. (We meet the librarian, Lucy, in "The George Spelvin Players," and we meet the boy, Ian, just at the very end.) I had originally invented this whole theater as the background for Lucy's living situation, and Tim has a fairly big role in the novel. I wished that I could write more about the theater, but it wasn't the focus of my book and Lucy leaves town fairly early in the plot... so it was delightful to go back and dig in on these characters. That process felt different than starting a story fresh, needing to conjure up the world from scratch. I'd already done so much of that imagining, and now I was free to play with what I'd already created.
The name George Spelvin, by the way, is a theater-world joke. It's a traditional pseudonym, particularly used by actors who didn't want their name associated with a truly horrible show.
What kind of research went into this story?
RM: I have a lot of friends in theater, and I remember crowdsourcing a few questions about the specifics of what stage managers do, etc. I also got my hands on a couple of different theatrical scripts for A Christmas Carol, for paraphrased pillaging.
What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?
RM: There are so many ways I could answer this, but one that feels relevant here is that in a short story, we can have a point-of-view character who is really fundamentally just a lens on the story. In a novel, we'd want loads of backstory and motivation and emotional history. Here, we can just meet someone on the page and be along for the ride. A short story narrator is like an Uber driver. You're going to learn a bit about them, and they're going to take you where you need to go, but this doesn't need to be a serious relationship.
Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?
RM: My website is www.rebeccamakkai.com.
What's the best gift you've ever been given?
RM: My husband found an old library card catalogue and refinished it for me. It has some drawers, and some spots where drawers are missing so I can just cram outdated computer cords in there.
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