I wanted to take a moment to give a couple of my readers thanks. It is beyond thrilling that any of you would read a single story, let alone all 9 of Stimp, the Prophet Man. I know you could spend your time doing plenty of other things, and it means the world to me that you spend it here. Frank and Michael Chandler, I waited with bated breath for you to read the ending. I had my fingers crossed it would not disappoint, and both of you were so kind and generous with your comments. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Last week, I finished my last installment of Stimp, the Prophet Man. It’s a long, short story that I revised and broke up for purposes of serialization. A couple of dedicated readers followed along each week, and one asked me the following:
…would you consider writing a bit about the roots of this story and the journey that it has taken to come to this place and in this form? I want to know everything there is to know about Stimp! Did the character come to you so fully fleshed out as he appears to us here? Have there been iterations? Is there more to his story that may not have had a place here in this work?
(Shoutout to
of )I have to admit, I’m a real sucker for this type of request. All creation is magical, but writing made-up stories has a particular mystery to it. When I go back and read stories I’ve written, I’m always surprised. I’ll even try to remember writing certain parts, but often can’t recall certain aspects of the story, as if a strange amnesia replaces any working memory. Even as I write them, the characters sometimes make choices I didn’t think they would when they first emerged as two-dimensional beings with a sentence or two in my head.
Trying to piece together how Stimp came to be is, as with most fictional characters, complicated.
posted a question about our latest work and where it came from on Notes a few weeks back, and because I was mid-serial, I wrote a couple of thoughts about Stimp then.If I really think about it, he’s been in my mind for years now. The beginning of the story, where Stimp wakes up on a park bench, was solid in my mind starting maybe four years ago. But really, Stimp started long before then.
My mother has always treated homeless people with complete dignity. She gives money when she feels like she should, offers food, and most importantly, talks to them. She’ll happily engage for an hour, even when the conversation goes sideways as it often does. (I remember in particular, one man earnestly warning her about the dinosaurs he sees on the other side of the highway.)
So it should come as no surprise that I have a very early memory of being at a park downtown with her when one of these conversations occurred. I must have been three or four years old, and my mom, ever the chatty Cathy, had struck up a conversation with an old man on a park bench. He was a pastor who did homeless ministry of one kind or another. He was at the park to hand out pamphlets or what-have-you, when a dirty, homeless man shambled by him on the sidewalk.
“God bless you,” the old pastor said.
The man turned, his face a grimace of pain and anger, and kicked the pastor in the shin. I clung to my mother’s leg. The only thing I remember him saying was that God had never done anything for him, and then he spit on the ground.
Some of that anger carried over into Stimp’s character. Stimp has a good heart deep down, but he’s also proud. A little entitled. And he definitely doesn’t feel that he owes God anything. Why should he, when his life is so stark?
When I was seventeen, I worked at the local soup kitchen for a day. It wasn’t because I was a good person. I was doing community service for, of all things, a curfew ticket. In good adolescent fashion, I had stayed up all night—literally all night—before heading downtown to work my eight hours. As you can imagine, it didn’t go well.
While waiting for the doors to open, I fell asleep, my head on the table and my arms spread to hide the light. The head of the operation wasn’t impressed. If he could have dragged me out by my ears, I’m sure he would have. He kicked me out. This was before cell phones (well, they existed in the form of the Nokia brick, but I didn’t have one) and my mother worked all day anyway. I was stranded downtown for the next six hours or so.
Feeling my newfound freedom, I made my way to a coffee shop, then sat in the park across from the soup kitchen to eat and figure out how to spend my day. I had twenty bucks and not a lot to do. The park was filled with homeless people waiting for the place to open so they could grab a meal, but in the morning light I felt perfectly safe to sit in the grass and think things over.
A man sat next to me. He had long, graying hair and a huge backpack. His eyes were kind, his face sunken.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Oh, I got kicked out of the soup kitchen. I have to wait for my mom to get off work and pick me up.”
“No, why are you sitting here, in this park?”
“Why not?”
He looked around. “There’s a lot of bad people here.”
I looked around as well, not seeing what he was seeing, but nervous now.
“They don’t look bad.”
“A young girl like you shouldn’t be alone in a place like this.”
We went on to talk about other things while I ate. Why he was homeless—he was a Vietnam vet who gave up on society and refused to have a government I.D.—and why I was doing community service—a mild curfew violation I didn’t know was a thing until the cop pulled me over. And when I finished I went on my way. Maybe to coffee, maybe to another park. The day was honestly a blur of sleepless meandering, but his words stuck with me. I still wonder about him to this day, though in all likelihood, he’s dead.
The final piece that brought Stimp’s story together happened more recently. I was leaving a drug store with my daughter when a tall man approached me.
“Ma’am, ma’am, can I talk to you for a second?”
I turned without thinking and looked at him. His eyes were fitful, his movements uneasy. He was at least a foot taller than me.
“Can you read this?”
He passed me what looked like a little scroll, rolled up receipt paper he had written on. The handwriting was small and difficult to make out, but it said something about God. I looked up at him.
“And God is very mad. God is very mad.”
A man who worked at the store came out then and told me to go to my car while he talked to him. I hurried away thinking how stupid I had been to turn. My default is to engage, a trait that can get you into trouble with strangers.
On the drive home the question that births most stories popped into my head: what if he was telling the truth? What if that man was one of God’s prophets, desperately trying to get the word out about his judgment, only to be brushed aside because he is homeless? What would happen if a man like that, a social outcast, started to do signs and wonders?
Stimp, the Prophet Man was born.
This is the pattern for most of my stories. Something strikes me, a sentence or a memory, an interaction while I’m out, and it gets buried somewhere in the dark before resurfacing a changed thing. If I can’t get it out of my head, I know there’s a story there. I don’t actively ruminate on it. I let it drown, and if it bobs to the surface again, I snatch it up, steal it from that place of mystery, study it, and throw it flailing back into the sea.
Oh, and thanks for the shout-out!
It’s so fascinating that things from years ago, even all the way back to childhood, can act as inspiration points for a story. Thank you for sharing this.
I’ve been trying to think of how to explain how helpful it is to gain these sorts of glimpses into a story’s creation, and been unable to come up with any real explanation. But there is something about hearing about this journey that you have had with Stimp that resonates, and encourages. So thank you again for sharing.