On "Cold Night in Waterloo"

My story “Cold Night in Waterloo” always seemed inexorably headed for North American Review.  After all these years of writing, I’m still fascinated by the genesis of stories, that gentle nudge that starts the story in motion. Okay, not always such a gentle nudge. Some stories arrive like a bang on the door: I’m here! On those occasions we can almost see the story in our minds. Or maybe we recreate an experience or relationship from real life, oh, maybe change the names of the streets and turn the tall guy in the family into a short guy, transform the dark hair to red, throw in some freckles to retain plausible deniability: hey, it’s not you, really!

Sometimes, though, a story begins with an urge, an itch, a rumbling somewhere in the vicinity of the heart. There’s a kind of hunger and longing to tell a story without yet knowing what the story is. I had that strange longing as I drove with three friends from Colorado to the hundredth anniversary conference of the North American Review a few years back. The other guys in the car were a lot younger and maybe that had something to do with that feeling as we rolled along Highway 80, past fields and old farmhouses, a little fluttering in the heart at rest stops and coffee refuels at fast food restaurants, wondering glances at the sky, sharp, clear, as I recall, but who knows now, memory fails, might have been overcast. I was just turning sixty and here I was on a road trip with the younger guys, my first road trip in many moons. It was a kind of turn the clock back kind of feeling, seeing the adventure both through my present day eyes and the eyes of my young friends and the eyes of my own past, and I didn’t know what the story was yet, but I sensed it had something to do with being younger and being on the road and I knew it was set somewhere in the Midwest and there seemed to be an old white farmhouse in the picture and the potential of something ominous happening. 

Maybe the longing had something to do with a kind of homecoming. I went to grad school in Iowa, one of my sons went to college in Iowa, my first published story was inspired by the Hamburg Inn in Iowa city, so there is a special feeling for me when I am back in Iowa. And there has been the special relationship I’ve had with North American Review which has now published five of my stories. I feel a kind of welcome here as a writer which is heartwarming to me, so it seems fitting, perfect somehow, that this story has found its own sort of home here.

I did not yet know, though, on that road trip, what the story was. I will say this, too, about that certain longing and hunger; it comes with sadness. I can’t explain it, but there is sadness in the longing; it could be in the knowing that whatever the story is, it may not be what one wants it to be, that there is still some story ahead, some story one may never get to.

Waterloo. As we pass through Waterloo, Iowa, the name haunts. A little tingle in the head now, somewhere around the temples, that fluttering in the heart, and now a sensation like the crown of my skull is lifting and separating from the rest of my head. Whoa boy, something there but what the hell is the story!    

What a lovely conference it was, with much good cheer and comradery and inspiring classes and conversations, but through it all, that kind of haunting and then passing through Waterloo again, and damn, again that strange tingle in my temples and fluttering in my heart, and that haunting all the way back home with my traveling friends. But my stories are often years in the making, and it would be some time before I kicked a young man out of a car and into a freezing night, left him walking alone on a country road, full of his own hurts and longings, hoping for some kind of light and warmth ahead.

Illustration by: Clay Rodery. Clay Rodery is an illustrator who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Clay’s illustrations have been featured in many issues.