Amanda Rea discusses Among Men, a short story featured in the Summer 2024 issue of Colorado Review, with associate fiction editor Jennifer Wortman.
Amanda Rea’s stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Best American Mystery Stories, One Story, American Short Fiction, Freeman’s, the Missouri Review, the Kenyon Review, The Sun, Electric Literature, Indiana Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She has won fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Institute of Creative Writing in Wisconsin, Jentel Artist Residency, Marble House Project, and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. She earned her MFA at the University of California-Irvine. She has taught writing at the University of California, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oakhill Correctional Facility, and elsewhere. She lives in Colorado.
Jennifer Wortman: “Among Men” tackles a difficult subject: a grown man’s unsavory attachment to an eleven-year-old girl. This summation recalls Nabokov’s Lolita, but your story takes a much more sober approach to its material. Did Lolita enter your thoughts as you wrote “Among Men”? What considerations did you keep top of mind as you wrote it?
AR: Yeah, that’s a great question. I wrote the story over such a long span of time—I don’t even want to admit how long!—that I wasn’t aware of Lolita at the outset. Later, when I read the book, I hoped to learn from Nabokov’s handling of a monstrous (and unreliable) narrator. But much of what I learned didn’t apply to Grant, who isn’t nearly as sophisticated or self-aware as Humbert Humbert. He’s just an average or sub-average person, an idealist and wannabe hippie who doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about his own impulses. In part, this is what I was trying to write about—the way monsters can appear in the form of regular people, and regular people can do monstrous things. It was also important to me that the girl in my story have no sexual experience. Lolita is described as precocious and seductive, and whether we believe this or not, there is a bit of room for the reader to question her complicity. In “Among Men,” I wanted no question of the child’s innocence.
JW: Not only is your character, Grant, unlike Humbert Humbert, but you also use a different point of view than Nabokov’s first person to tell your story: Grant is the main point-of-view character within a third-person narrative that also goes beyond him in moments of detachment and omniscience. In other words, you make some pretty fancy point-of-view moves here! How did your point-of-view choices serve your larger narrative aims?
AR: Thank you for calling it fancy. I was often criticized as a young writer for inhabiting this wild omniscient voice I didn’t know how to control, so for many years I relegated myself to first and close-third. Lately I’m returning to my early instincts, and it’s been fun.
Here, I was less interested in the psychology of one disordered guy than I was in the larger context of the girl’s life. I grew up on a bankrupt ranch near the border of New Mexico and Colorado and my imagination is still influenced by the vastness of the high desert, the silence, the wind, and the odd characters who are attracted to living in a place like that. I wanted the reader to have some ironic distance from Grant, but mostly I wanted the omniscience to emphasize the girl’s smallness, her isolation, her vulnerability.
JW: The setting is such a potent force in the story. You recently taught a seminar on class at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Class often embeds in place. How do you think setting, class, and plot intersect in “Among Men”?
AR: Class and place set the plot in motion, or at least that was my intent. Just as it does in real life, social class informs how each character behaves, what they believe, and what they’re capable of imagining. Having grown up in what we might call “rural poverty,” I’m endlessly interested in the ways we perceive and navigate class, and how it can put blinders on us.
Here, most of the characters live at the edge of society. They can barely see it from where they are, let alone conform to it. They don’t have traditional jobs or credit scores. They don’t have access to healthcare. Grant comes from a more comfortable, mainstream background, so he’s able to project his desires onto this place without being bound by its limitations. He’s essentially a tourist, and this brings with it a kind of arrogance. He finds the locals both quaint and maddening. As much time as he spends watching them, he never really sees them, and this ends badly for him.
JW: Did you always know how this story would end, or was getting there part of that long process you mentioned earlier?
AR: Oh, I had no idea how to end this. I’d been feeling a kind of menace coming off of Javier’s character, but I didn’t know what to do with it. Then I remembered a story my dad told once, about a pedophile who’d become interested in him as a boy. He’d been about five at the time, and a strange man had started walking up the road to visit him in the yard. My grandfather ran him off, and when he caught him on the property again, he beat the hell out of him with an irrigation shovel. My grandfather was an artistic soul, but he was also capable of real violence, so I imagine the guy was lucky to have escaped with his life.
This anecdote, combined with my sense of Javier’s rigidity, made me think of him as an anti-hero. He’d already been hanging around the story with a shovel, so I started thinking about his longing for a more traditional world, his resentment of a certain kind of frivolousness, his intense isolation. I knew he wouldn’t act on the girl’s behalf necessarily, but perhaps he’d act on his own sense of moral rectitude.
JW: Grant and Javier cover two of the men that the girl, per the title, lives among; her father makes the third. How do you view the father’s role in her predicament? Given where the story leaves off, what sort of future do you imagine for her?
AR: The father is really the cause of the predicament. If he were less consumed by his own problems—chronic pain and addiction being two of them—he might protect his daughter. Instead, he goes into denial. It’s wild to me that our brains can prevent us from seeing things that would cause us great distress or force us to act, but it happens all the time. People see things the way they need to see them. I’m not super sympathetic to the father, who is failing at his only job, but I also don’t think he has the capacity to do better. His best just isn’t very good.
Still, I’m hopeful for Atty. If Grant comes back from that ride with Javier, he won’t be visiting her again. She’ll be free of him. While there are still plenty of challenges ahead, she’ll have escaped a significant trauma, and that’s what I wanted for her. Just a single stroke of luck.
Jennifer Wortman is the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. (Split/Lip Press, 2019), named the Westword Best of Denver 2020 pick for best new short-story collection, the 2019 Foreword INDIES bronze winner for short stories, and a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards and the High Plains Book Awards. Her work appears in TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Glimmer Train, Electric Literature, Brevity, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and elsewhere, and has been cited as distinguished in Best American Short Stories. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell, she lives with her family in Colorado, where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and serves as associate fiction editor for Colorado Review. Find more at jenniferwortman.com.