Short Story Friday: Just Cut on the Dotted Line by Jack Weyland
By Wm | 2.27.09
For this week’s pick, I’m going to go with a story from the New Era. We’ll get to a Popcorn Popping story next week and we have several more excellent submissions of stories that appeared in Dialogue. Nothing from Sunstone so far, though. And so far no women have submitted to the spreadsheet.
Title: Just Cut on the Dotted Line
Author: Jack Weyland
Publication Info: New Era, 1997
Submitted by: Theric Jepson
Why?: Theric writes — “.
“My only run-in with Weyland to this point was his egocentric If Talent Were a Pizza self-help book. Which turned me off him as nothing else could.
“Fastforward a couple years to the final weeks of my mission. We’re in the church waiting for someone and, huh, and English-language New Era. Weird. I pick it up, read the cartoon then the fiction. And maybe it’s because I was nearly two-years fictionf ree, but I loved it. When I saw who it was written by I was shocked.
“But apparently, I still haven’t quite forgiven him for his Pizza monstrosity as I’ve never read anything else of his since.”
Thanks Theric!
Participate:
Possible online sources of stories and link to spreadsheet with current submissions
2.27.09 | 4:06 pm | comment permalink |
Unlike Theric, I’ve read and enjoyed Jack Weyland fiction in the past–though it’s been quite a while ago, so I don’t know if I would still like his stories if I re-read them.
I didn’t like this one so much. Actually, I was starting to dislike it quite a bit by the end–until the “twist” when he woke up and [MAJOR SPOILER HERE] it was the man dreaming, not the boy. That redeemed it somewhat–although it still feels a bit like a one-idea story pushed a bit too long and milked for didacticism.
Reading it through the first time, I was bothered by the fact that the POV character’s “voice” wasn’t that of a 15-year-old. Now that I know it WAS the adult dreaming he was a kid, that doesn’t bother me as much.
So what’s the point of this? I think the point is the advice that the dream-Justin receives about making plans when he’s young to marry in the temple, etc.
Two thoughts…
* I’m all in favor of good didactic fiction. But if you’re going to write a story with the purpose of teaching a message, it seems to me that part of your job should be to use the story format to make the message more memorable than it would otherwise be. I don’t see that happening in this story.
* I’m also in favor of sf stories with an interesting twist. But if you’re going to write a story where a man dreams of being a kid again, it seems to me that once the man wakes up, he should have learned something or be changed somehow from the experience. Again, I didn’t see that happening.
In short: I think there’s potential here. But I also think that potential is largely unexplored in the story as currently written.
2.27.09 | 5:23 pm | comment permalink |
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It’s interesting to read this story again a dozen years after my first reading. I was first struck by the didacticism (and not in a good way) and, like Jonathan, I thought the final twist was redeeming, but not sufficiently so.
For me, the real question here is why my reaction in 2009 is so different than it was in 1997. Of course, I’m older. My reading has been broad in the meantime. I am saturated in fiction rather than nearing the end of a long drought. I am in the position of Dr Evans rather than between the doctor and Justin.
I think it’s that last point that matters the most. I was in the final weeks of my mission when I read this story. I was thinking about What Was Next — things like marriage — things Justin got a glimpse of. I imagine this story spoke to my current situation so plainly that I couldn’t but be struck.
As I look back at my most moving experiences with fiction, they often coincide heavily with my life at that time: I was ready to fall in love. My dog had died.
On one level, I want to believe that my connection with fiction does not rely on coincidental alignment with my own life story — that I can appreciate art separate from the context I give it. But, really, is that even possible? I don’t know.
Oh. And incidentally, sorry for all the typos in my about-the-story.
2.27.09 | 5:23 pm | comment permalink |
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(my bad link above)
2.27.09 | 7:05 pm | comment permalink |
Um, yeah. That’s Jack Weyland for ya. I remember liking him when I was twelve. I ingested a lot of his stuff until I was fourteen and then realized I’d outgrown him.
As for what Theric says about life experiences influencing our reading experiences, I think it is pretty close to impossible for readers to really separate their lives from the texts they encounter. That’s sort of what make reading magical, though. How a text (modern or classic) connects to your own life is what makes books matter. Hopefully we can all be mature enough readers to appreciate something even if it doesn’t apply to us, but it’s hard to imagine a work really moving a reader without it having some immediacy.
My most recent experience with Weyland was a few years ago when I found his novel _Brenda at the Prom_ in our cabin at a family reunion. I was definitely older than the characters and nowhere near their phase of life and the story made me groan quite a bit, but it also prompted memories of the times I connected with his work and that was kind of fun. I don’t think this short story was his best work.
3.06.09 | 12:46 am | comment permalink |
Back in 1981 I played a hometeacher in the premier of Weyland’s Home Cooking on the Wasatch Range. He’s really good at goofy comedy, and there was a lot of sexual tension in this play. In one scene a guy and gal are talking about a couple of friends who just got married. “What do you think they’re doing now?” “Eating.” Und so weiter for maybe a page.
You could feel the tension with these two who are falling in love and don’t want to express sexual feelings for each other, and are embarrassed at thinking about their friends.
Only problem is, Weyland was a bishop at the time and he used to read his stuff to his stake president, and he was too embarrassed to read that section so he cut everything after what I just quoted.
Weyland pulls his punches in othere stories as well, and he’s not a deep writer. That is, he doesn’t always give himself the time or space to let a story develop.
I like the sense of disorientation in the first half of this story, but it ends much too soon. Alice has barely gotten to the white Hare Krishna and learns that she’s in a dream and never even gets to Blunderland.
(I don’t suppose I have anything against dream stories–I published a story in Dialogue about 20 years ago that begins and ends in a dream, but part of the point is that the main character is exhausted, and he’s dreaming he is in Lehi’s dream, trying to get to the great and spacious building–the BYU library.)
I think Weyland’s novels are better than his short fiction. They are often take-offs on popular fiction, but with a twist. Charley was Lust Story, but with real love, a temple wedding and the Atonement.
Sara, Whenever I Hear Your Name is the doomed teen romance like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Splendor in the Grass, but it’s also about incest and why, under Utah law our incestors might go unpunished.
The Reunion is a complex, satirical portrait of a bishop and the world around him. I particularly like the part where a woman doesn’t want her husband to confess his adultery. “Do you think I want to explain to our daughter why Daddy can’t take the sacrament?”
The Reunion and On the Run are probably his two best, at least of the 6 I’ve read. I like the premise for On the Run, a michiganhairy on the last day of his mission in Chief Sealth’s town is thrown into a North by Northwest-type situation with a young Lakota woman and they have to make their way to safety.
This is kind of a love letter to Weyland’s Lakota students at the South Dakota School of Mines and Engineering (I think it’s called), and they make their way to the reservation, where they will be safe.
Then it stops being a thriller and starts being something much more interesting. What do you do in safety and enforced solitude? Well, it’s a good time to gain a testimony.
The story is also a nice meditation on racism, Mormon and non-, and when the bucolic interlude ends and the thriller picks up again, there’s a twist. In many thrillers the killer is implacable, much more Grendle and Grendle’s mother than Humwawa, and has to be killed.
On the Run leaves us with a different question. What if a man on his way to kill someone were to hear the gospel preached?