From the Best American Short Stories 1991 contributor’s notes edition.

I never know what my stories are about until they are finished, until they choose to reveal themselves. I merely feel their power, how they breathe on me.  I try not to write them. I prefer the rush of having them write me.  “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” wrote itself.

It is only now that I recognize this story contains elements that have long fascinated me. I once said that “Tall Tales” is my version of “Little Red Riding Hood” at the millennium in Los Angeles. It’s an ancient story, an archetypal tale, set beneath the tattered palms in the ruined California tropics under all that vivid and tawdry blue. It’s about predators in a cutting-edge city at the end of a mean thousand years.

“Tall Tales” is about the legacy of Vietnam, which continues to infect the American conscience, often in unexpected configurations.  It’s about tarnished consciousness and some unspeakable sordid pulse at the core of the American Dream. On one level, its about the irresistible lure of evil, it’s strange sheen. It’s about relationships between men and women itself. It was here before us and it will remain when we are gone. It has something to do with sexual obsession and the glamour of danger and the fragility of ordinary life.  It’s about power and survival in a landscape where the boundaries between dream and reality have dissolved, probably to a rock-and-roll beat.   

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in site, only the wind and your breaking heart.  Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.  As soon as Lenny began speaking, I knew I had mainlined it. I felt like I was strapped in the cock pit with the stars in y face and the expanding universe on my back. In my opinion, that’s the only way a writer should travel. When I finished “Tall Tales” I thought, this one is a keeper. This is a trophy brought back from the further realm, the kingdom of perpetual glistening night where we know ourselves absolutely. This one goes on the wall. 

Read the story Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta

 

Copyright 2005-2006, Kate Braverman.