Today’s post is written by Kelly Shire. We published her creative nonfiction “Streets of Bakersfield” in our Fall 2017 issue.
I wrote the first incarnation of “Streets of Bakersfield,” in the mid-1990s in a creative writing class taught by writer Barry Hannah at the University of Mississippi. (How I, a native of southern California with no family or friends in the region, came to be a twenty-six-year-old undergrad at Ole Miss is a much longer story for another day.) Back then, I exclusively wrote short fiction – it was my preferred genre, even if nearly every story I produced was somehow based on events from my real life.
That first version of “Bakersfield” was a quick slice of flash fiction – as in my essay, the protagonist is the new girl in town – but that girl barely mentions her parents at all, and the action centers upon a fraught encounter with some bullying kids after the narrator gets lost in the maze of cul-de-sacs in her neighborhood. Written in the second person, probably in an unconscious attempt to further distance myself from the protagonist, it was a good story: it earned an A+ from Mr. Hannah, and was part of the application packet that gained my admittance into an MFA program a few years later.Continue Reading
