Field Guide to Quarterlives
An introduction to the new collection from Cairo Smith.
Quarterlives is out as of November 20, 2024 in print and digital on Amazon. Find it here.
The first time I directed a play, I was surprised to learn that the producer expected me to go out ahead of the first performance and introduce it to the audience. David Lynch once said, “The film is the talking,” and this is my natural inclination as well. The custom was to speak, though, and I’ve always found it valuable to stay close to custom when starting out in a new place or medium. So, I put on my suit and floral tie and tried not to sweat too much as I spoke a few minutes on the two-man show we’d assembled.
The next few shows, I still wore the suit, but I’d found enough of a groove not to sweat as I laid out my vision for the hundred-some people in that little black box theater.
Now I’m here to do the same for my new book, Quarterlives. You can’t see my tie or my combed-down hair, but I can clean up my prose with the same modest professionalism I’d use to clean up my appearance. Just as an introduction does not precede every performance, this guide to Quarterlives will not be included in the run-of-the-mill copies of the collection. You, however, have found it, and I welcome you to settle in as I break down the vision for each story. The theater space and refreshments will need to be provided courtesy of your own mind’s eye.
The dedication, the first dedication I’ve written, is to archetypes. Of course, archetypes are drawn from life. They loosely correspond to individual stories in the collection. My thanks to all who have supported me physically and spiritually through the completion of this work.
“Hunters” is a story I wrote in a night and day after meeting the author Matt Pegas for the first time in the San Fernando Valley, just blocks from where I’d lived five years without ever knowing he was there. I had been trying to get a feeling out onto paper, with the setting of Valley streets as a scaffold. Talking with Matt after reading his novel, Dragon Day, finally cracked it. A lot of fiction work starts with a feeling, and the brunt of your effort then becomes finding the story that will let that feeling pass to the reader intact.
I was a bit unsure about publishing “Hunters,” but it got possibly the warmest reaction of any story in this collection, which is probably why it's first. It also got some astonished confusion, with one person commenting, “Bro, wtf did I just read?” I count that under praise, since it means the intended feeling was transmitted to the reader intact.
One of the risks I took with “Hunters” was writing in first person, since the narrator is obviously neither admirable nor someone I’d want associated with myself. Again, it all comes down to working in service of the intended feeling, and, as Paul Verhoeven says, you have to go with the flow.
There's a certain hubris to graduating college and being stronger, healthier, and more restless than the Smart and Final homunculi around you. Watch out.
If “Hunters” is the most acclaimed, “Network States” is by far the most popular. Every week or two I get an email or DM asking to be admitted to the fictional hobby group depicted in the story, or asking me if I can somehow make it real. The internet journalism tone of the piece gives it a sort of “War of the Worlds” authenticity.
“Network States” is based on a real pitch I made to the Hearts of Iron subreddit, which was soundly rejected as stupidity. Sometimes, what we can’t do, we do with prose. “I write fan fiction of life, I can write you a happier part,” Christian Lee Hutson sings. It's all either warnings or wishcraft, and “Network States” is both.
There’s a long discussion to be had about how to write about internet communication, how to format it, how to reconcile the chaos of emoticon syntax. I’m sure Katherine Dee or Claire L. Evans would have smarter thoughts than me about the intersection of hypertext and Chicago grammar. I did what I felt was right for “Network States,” not according to my own taste but according to the taste of the narrator, since it is ultimately an epistolary work.
“Spirit of ‘87” was also inspired by a night with a friend and written in two days’ time, before the feeling could expire. I think it might speak for itself the most of any story in the collection. The prose is third person, focused, non-experimental. The premise is clear and the execution is open-and-shut. If you’ve never heard the songs mentioned, they’re worth a listen.
As with most of this collection, it is a reflection on young adulthood and its inevitable death. The actual Formosa Club from “Spirit of ‘87” is Break Room ‘86 in Koreatown, Los Angeles. As far as I know, it was never a restaurant, did not exist in the eighties, and does not contain any g—.
“Locked In” started as a story about Ukraine, drawn from the long hours I’ve spent reading about and watching the harrowing combat between underequipped Russian penal soldiers and Ukrainian FPV drones. Ultimately, I decided Ukraine was beyond the scope of what I could write with confident authenticity, and I felt that the dead and living men in those trenches would not be served by my use of their war as a setting for speculative fiction.
At the same time, I realized I did know Oregon, and I knew countless people online and offline who would gleefully enlist to fight a forest war against their political opponents if one were ever to break out in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a whole written backstory to the war in “Locked In” that did not make it into the finished piece, because the hapless half-understanding of the reader is supposed to match that of the unlucky conscript protagonist. As with “Hunters,” the objective is to unsettle, and I hope I achieved my self-set mission parameters.
“Zach Dinesen’s Ghost” was the first story written for this collection, and the first story published in Futurist Letters. I wanted to write something I could lend verisimilitude, since I was entering a new domain and introducing myself to a new audience. I also wanted to break the convention of my usual third-person voice by forcing myself to speak through a more conversationally casual character.
The ending on its own may skew ambiguous, but in the intertextual nexus of weird internet rabbit holes I think it becomes quite clear, and it works either way.
“From the Branch” owes a lot to a couple specific people online, one of whom has read and enjoyed it, and the other of whom probably doesn't know the first thing about me. These people aren't the deuteragonists themselves, they just lent a certain flavor and texture with their eccentric mannerisms. As you can surmise, a big goal of writing Quarterlives was capturing some things that were novel and current and real.
I also owe Vincent Gallo and Buffalo ‘66 in particular for some of the construction techniques used in the ending.
I’ve never been to Canada. I spent a lot of time on Street Maps and Yelp planning out the settings of this story, and it was fun, like a digital vacation. I hope these stories can be a digital or paperback vacation to you.
“Lizard Man” is previously unreleased, not available anywhere else. It's probably the silliest and most sincere at once. It's my other half’s favorite, of the ones she’s read in this collection.
As “Locked In” uses a near-future, “Lizard Man” uses a sort of comic book near-past. It might be the closest I ever get to writing something involving superheroes without being paid up front.
“Portrait of Camille Oken” is the smallest story in the collection, and the last one. I thought the final image would be a good closing note for Quarterlives, with the protagonist literally escaping the text to remind us the words are not the real thing that they describe.
This one was written in a moment where I realized, no longer submitting to literary journals on account of my disagreeable streak, I could put down on paper whatever I wanted. It's a double-layer epistolary piece, with editorial notes on a draft of a profile article. I’m glad to have been a newsroom editor in the only environment where newspapers are still financially stable—a college campus. That experience informed the way I give notes, which has certainly helped me at Futurist Letters.
That's eight stories total. A year of work. A sequel to No Return. Something rosy violet for your shelf as a time capsule of 2024. Thank you for your readership and support, and I hope you enjoy.
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