Raul Palma is the author of A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (forthcoming from Dutton). His short story collection In This World of Ultraviolet Light won the 2021 Don Belton Prize. His writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction at Ithaca College, where he is the associate dean of faculty in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
You can preorder Raul’s forthcoming collection here.
From Editorial Assistant Ryan Hopkins: “Stand Your Ground” is told retrospectively by the narrator about his life, and the events surrounding September 11th. But, the narrator is speaking from a time nearly twenty years later, after the death of Markeis McGlockton in 2018. Why did you choose to have the narrator go back to 2001 to discuss American history and Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law?
Raul Palma: In the early stages of a draft, I tend to ask questions like: Where is my narrator located in time and place? What is the event at the story’s center, and how much time has passed since the event occurred? What is the narrator willing to share, and what do they hide and refuse to disclose?
These questions help me understand the intention behind the narrative (and narrator), and they generate a few complexities and uncertainties that give weight to the story—aspects about the narrator that are meant to be unknown, and that even I will not pin down in a character sketch. For me, what the narrator does not disclose about himself casts a shadow over the story and demands that I ask: Why are you telling this story? Why put this narrative into motion?
So, part of the reason why the narrator’s vantage point is some twenty years removed from the event is because something happened all those years ago that the narrator hasn’t gotten over, and which he feels especially compelled to revisit. In that moment when the narrator alludes to contemporary violence—or superimposes the violence against Sohail’s father over the news headlines of his own moment—I think the stakes of the story, at least, partly rise to the surface.
I should add that I also see this story as fitting into a category of stories around the theme “on becoming educated.” There are some things that the young narrator neither understands nor appreciates, and there’s a cynicism and even fatalism to his worldview during college. Time allows him to look back at the events from a more informed position and to see connections between that first semester in college and his own life 20 years removed. Some of this is off the page, but hopefully implied—and some readers may, no doubt, trace a large constellation of events that go back even earlier in Miami’s history, back to the Arthur McDuffie murder.
RH: There's a lot to unpack in this short story beyond the primary narrative. For example, we see the economic reality for people who struggle to advance their socioeconomic status through the narrator, who supports his mother by working 30+ hours a week while also being a full time student. While this theme appears briefly, others carry on longer through the piece like Rafa’s feminist activism, or the narrator’s reflection on Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law. How did you choose what themes to layer into the piece to create such depth? What themes and details about your characters, if any, were left on the cutting room floor? And are these themes to serve in building the characters, or building the society in which they live?
RP: Thank you! I really appreciate this question, and I hadn’t given it much thought until now. In part, I don’t plan too extensively around what themes to include or layer on. My themes derive from a certain sense or the tangible aspects of the story world. As my characters engage with their environment, I pay careful attention to what sorts of elaborations or baggage a particular image or scene might carry. I might ask: How does my character read the image? In what ways might a reader examine the image through allusion or extra context? And what’s my intent behind the image? If the story is driven, primarily, by the narrator’s ambitions, then the themes are more likely the places where my own politics come to the surface—where I can play with an image or situation by framing it in a particular context, most often through association. I tend to really appreciate dramatic irony—or opportunities where I can wink at the reader and bring a certain impression to the story that may, in some case, differ from the narrator’s own view.
A good example of this dynamic, I think, is the scene when Rafa recounts why he’s so offended by his creative writing classroom. He brings up two examples: a poem one of his male peers wrote that objectifies a woman in the class; and, in addition to this, the professor’s privileging of a Eurocentric aesthetic. The story is explicit in that Rafa is only beginning to learn about the history of colonial violence, so even he cannot fully describe why he feels slighted. But since the theme arises, it gives me an opportunity to present the moment in a way that spotlights the major commonplaces. Latinx readers, for who the story is written, may bring additional context to this moment, recognizing their own discomforts in “traditional” creative writing classrooms, or in the way that whiteness and masculinity, in class spaces, can engender domination and appropriation.
In an earlier version of the story, I had also sought to amplify themes around sexual violence—with an eye toward Latin American history and economies of whiteness, but I found that it, ultimately, changed the focus of the story—and I scaled back some of that sub-narrative. The story still alludes to sexual violence, though not as explicitly as in earlier drafts. Frankly, I was not sure whether this was the right move at the time, but I’ve come to appreciate the revision.
RH: You’ve managed to take on many hot button cultural issues including racism, police brutality, sexism, and bigotry in “Stand Your Ground.” However, you’ve done so without sensationalizing them, or falling onto scenes of gratuitous excess. In fact, beyond the use of profanity this piece could be rated PG, making it palatable to a wide audience. Do you believe that an artist's message can be lost in sensationalism and are there situations where it can be used as a tool to amplify the message?
RP: In the story, the characters gradually increase the magnitude of their vandalism. They begin with mailboxes and small American flags, and they end up causing far more destruction. I think if I had leaned into the acts of violence too early and too provocatively, this might have impacted how the rate of escalation is perceived. I think, too, I was wrestling with how to represent the post-9/11 world. I worried that too sensationalized of an approach might have created too much distance between my characters and the implied reader. I wanted the story to create a bridge—that is, for the implied reader to feel uncomfortable, but, at the same time, to empathize.
I don’t have strong opinions around sensationalizing moments in a story. I’m often drawn to the performative aspects of narratives—the way that these structures can impose a mass and energy of their own onto the story and/or the reader, that creates an emotional experience. I’m reminded of John Rechy’s City of Night, which doesn’t sensationalize either, but which offers these beautiful passages that far exceed a story’s capacity to relay information. In my collection, In This World of Ultraviolet Light (forthcoming in the spring), I have at least one story that absolutely sensationalizes an act of violence. It occurs at a mulch manufacturing facility, and the violent act draws out all the hidden conflicts and assumptions, and arrests them in broad daylight. The violent act is rendered with the sorts of poetic devices that would usually be attributed to beauty: assonance, imagery, rhythm. I think of this moment as an event that the reader encounters, and sensationalizing the event makes it something that the implied reader is asked to go through. In this sense, it certainly amplifies my intent, though I’m certain this also makes it the hardest story in the collection—the one that requires the most, emotionally, from the implied reader.
RH: Your biography states that you lived in Miami for 25 years, and that you also lived in Key West which is a popular place for writers to include Judy Blume, Ernest Hemingway, and Tennessee Williams. How did your time in Miami influence “Stand Your Ground” and how has your time in Key West influenced you as a writer?
RP: Strangely, my time away from Miami has had the greatest impact on me. I moved to Chicago when I turned 20, and for a short while I lived alone. And it was during this time that I missed the city of my youth, the sound of traffic on Tamiami Trail, the warmth of my community. It took moving away to really appreciate what I’d left. And, interestingly, it took returning to see that the city of my youth no longer existed—not as I’d crystallized it in the fantasies of my nostalgia. Miami is always in a state of flux. Lately, I think of Miami as a place where every available space is under threat of being filled or taken or fenced off. In my own lifetime, there has been a significant decline in the number of available free and open public spaces. And what I feel is that, gradually, the city is closing itself off to me. Perhaps, through an urban planning perspective, it is also doing this to itself. So, when I write about Miami, I can access the city in ways that are not always possible in real life. And gaining access to the city—and writing “Strand Your Ground” for example—allows me to subvert the touristic images that conceal Miami so that I can explore the city as a place that is not always beholden to its touristic legacy.
Key West, on the other hand, has a special place in my heart. I lived there for short periods of time. I was married there. I worked in Key West. And some of my earliest memories were of going down there with family and friends. I remember that it used to be the case that one could stop anywhere in the Florida Keys and see, right off the main road, such a diverse bounty of sea life. But something has changed in recent years. It’s hard to visit the Florida Keys—or Miami for that matter—and not think about rising sea levels, rising ocean temperatures. I’m influenced by this, and my next project will, most certainly, contend with the future of South Florida.
Ryan Hopkins is a fiction writer from Red Lion, PA. He is a senior in the BA in English Literature program at ASU, and interned as an Editorial Assistant at Hayden’s Ferry Review.