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.
Robert Garner McBrearty’s first published short story “The Dishwasher” appeared in the Mississippi Review in the early eighties and was selected for the Pushcart Prize. Since then he’s gone on to publish many stories, including in The Missouri Review, StoryQuarterly, New England Review, Narrative, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Several of his favorite stories first appeared in North American Review. As well, he’s published three collections of short stories and a novella, and his writing awards include the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, a New Mexico State Arts Grant, and fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Robert taught various writing courses at the University of Colorado for over twenty years, but now is writing full-time and teaching short story courses at Lighthouse Writers Workshop North in the Denver area. He has two grown sons and lives with his wife in a small town in Colorado.
Robert Garner McBrearty contribtued his story, "A Cold Night in Waterloo," to North American Review, Volume 304.1.
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.