CDE: I can\u2019t really pinpoint my inspiration for this piece. Some stories take me a long time, and this was one I wrote over many years. I wrote the initial scene with Leslie\u2019s name over four years ago and then set it aside. Then the form of the continuous first date came to me much later. I am working on a collection of insomnia stories, and for this story, I was thinking about the experience of playing a scene or situation over and over again in your head when you can\u2019t sleep, questioning if you made the right choices, what could have gone differently, etc. That\u2019s where I started with the story, that scene of a first date and that idea of spiraling around the same night, and the rest slowly formed around those two elements.<\/p>\n
JC: This story is told in fragments, with sudden jumps into the past and future of Naomi and Leslie\u2019s relationship. What made you choose this style of presenting the story over, say, a more linear one?<\/strong><\/p>\n CDE: Short answer is because I find that more interesting! Longer answer is that, for me, the timeline in this story is a contradictory one. A lot of the scenes in the present or future are moments I view as possibilities, not exactly hard truths. Certain facets of the first date change, which then change those outcomes. Many of the dates fail, and thus have no future as it pertains to the story. All those possible changes and possible futures become all knotted together and I wanted the story to mirror that feeling.<\/p>\n JC: So much of this story takes place on Thursdays, especially Thursdays in September. What, to you, is the significance of this?<\/strong><\/p>\n CDE: For the most part, this had a lot to do with setting. I wanted a moment in time to be our marker in this story, either as a sign that we are returning to something or to mark how far we have come. And the setting of Chicago was always clear to me. I was born in Chicago and have lived there in the past, and it is a city and a people that I love deeply. When I think about Chicago, I think of Chicago in the late summer, when it is bright, warm, and social. When I was thinking of a moment in time and space that I wanted to continuously write around, it was Chicago and late summer, and so that certainly influenced that choice.<\/p>\n JC: Names play an important role in this story, between Leslie not liking his name and Robin and Riley having unisex names despite Leslie\u2019s desire to give them masculine names. It’s an interesting theme – what does it tell us about Leslie?<\/strong><\/p>\n CDE: This is a story about the birth of a family, the various expectations of family making, and for me, gender is a big part of that. I was raised with certain ideas surrounding masculinity, as all people are in some way, and the names in this story were something I could play around with that spoke to those gender expectations. Leslie is a character who, at best, feels murky about who he is, as a man and as a person, and his name was a great way to expose that feeling. His name is a kind of live wire of masculinity that he is constantly being forced to reckon with. When thinking about the sons\u2019 names, I was thinking about how people put a lot of expectations for themselves on their children. Giving his sons unisex names was a way to acknowledge that having sons was not going to save Leslie from the work of figuring out his own character.<\/p>\n JC: There are two scenes in the story in which Naomi seems to give up parts of herself to Leslie, specifically on the train when \u201cNaomi felt two rib bones break off inside, making room for a man like Leslie\u201d and when the two of them are talking about wanting kids and \u201cNaomi plucked two molars from her mouth and offered them up to Leslie in the dim light.\u201d What does this say about the nature of relationships?<\/strong><\/p>\n CDE: I\u2019m not sure what this says about the nature of all relationships, but for this one in particular, it\u2019s a bit of a willing sacrifice. If Leslie doesn\u2019t know who he is, Naomi doesn\u2019t know what she wants, and she\u2019s willing to give up pieces of herself in order to figure it out. Naomi has the confidence in herself to not lose her entire personhood in a relationship, but she can offer up a piece here and there.<\/p>\n JC: Leslie and Naomi go back and forth a lot in their relationship, constantly separating and coming back together again, but ultimately they stay together in the end. When you started writing this story, did you know what their fates would be?<\/strong><\/p>\n CDE: Eventually, I did. For a while, the story was just a handful of scenes; I didn\u2019t know what any of it would be. But once I realized the form it wanted to take, the ending was very clear to me. In order to explore the possibilities of who Leslie and Naomi could be to one another, I had to know where they would end up. The harder work was figuring out how we got there.<\/p>\n JC: You\u2019re currently completing an MFA at the University of Virginia. What has that experience been like?<\/strong><\/p>\n CDE: The worst part is that it is coming to an end soon! I am very grateful to have had the privilege to study literature and writing for the past few years and to do so alongside some incredible writers and scholars. I have deep, deep admiration for my cohort, who are all brilliant, marvelous, and talented people. Literature and people are the most important things in the world to me, and I\u2019ve been lucky enough to spend my time with some spectacular instances of both.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Coby-Dillon English (they\/them) is a writer from the Great Lakes. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, they are currently an MFA fiction candidate at the University of Virginia. Their writing can be found in Salt Hill Journal, Moon City Review, Yellow Medicine Review<\/em>,<\/i> and others.<\/p>\n Jacob Collins is an undergraduate student majoring in English on the Creative Writing track. He says that the best thing about interning at CCR has been reading the wide variety of stories that people from all walks of life submit for publication. Outside of school, he likes reading, writing, and playing D&D with his friends.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Jacob Collins Have you ever wondered what your relationship with someone would be like if you had met them at a different time in your life? Coby-Dillon English explores this idea in their short story, \u201cFirst Date, Last Night\u201d, which appears in the latest issue of CCR. I had the chance to talk to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","uwm_wg_additional_authors":[]},"categories":[51,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-interviews","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"\nBios<\/h3>\n
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