"Pagan Night" was written during the second of three consecututive summers my family spent in Idaho. The town was lyrical, on the Snake River and strange, a farming town with unusual effects. It was like a Mormon Nepal. We had a track house on two acres. I saw the same silos every day from the window where I wrote, the fields of potatoes and wheat. My twin silos and I loved them, and the thunder storms and constant yellow heat. There was a trellis we would cross to fish the Snake and it terrified me, the thought a train might come. It gave me nightmares.

I wrote "Pagan Night" by going out to stalk it. I call that method writing. I went out armed, with a tape recorder, to hunt, outwit, wound and then capture the story. I roamed all day, starting with a walk by the river, then I saw a couple, flagrantly punk in so conservative a mileau, and I began to inhabit her, the stranger with magenta hair. I went to the zoo. By then, I was carrying a fictional baby. By night fall, I had the entire story on four tapes and I was delirious.

In the rented house with its twin silos and fields, I would intermittently transcribe a tape, and then stop the machine as I found places where I wanted to riff. I love rewriting. It's an entirely improvizational event. It's like playing guitar with an album, adding sound, filling out the sound, harmonizing, developing melodies..

The tape recorder frees you from the page. It liberates you from the "study." It frees you from the patriarchal assumptions of what literature is and how it is made. I was trying to divest myself of conventional narrative and its limitations. As a millennial writer, there is only time and space. Time as internal thought or the rush of consciousness, and space as landscape. I believe thought is plot and landscape is definition, shape. Though I should mention my editor, Howard Junker, cut four pages from the beginning of the story and that really sculpted it. It was like a face lift. He brought out the good cheek bones of the thing.

With the tape recorder, the writer the world as she writes. It is the end of passivity and walls. The more kinetic, the better. It's like playing with two kinds of fire. The artist as arsonist. I've got tapes of stories where I'm running, bike riding, sailing, and I'm breathing so hard, I can barely transcribe them, can't hear the words over my breath.

The great aspect of the tape recorder is that you speak faster than you write. If you're doing internal work, you're closer to the actual spin of the mind, whirl of the words, the fantastic speed of association. You're on the flow. You know what the river knows. Print of blue heron. Scar of moon. You open your arms and drift to god.

read the Best American Short Story Award Winning "Pagan Night"

Copyright 2005-2006, Kate Braverman.