Works
"Driving Lessons"
by Christl Perkins
American Fiction 17
(November 2019).
New River Press,
Minnesota State University Moorehead, MN
All Rights Reserved
Out of all of my published short fiction pieces, "Driving Lessons" is my favorite.
It's about a young woman with a suspended license who arranges to take driving lessons in order to recover her driver's license. The driving lessons become an extended metaphor for how the protagonist approaches love and life. Other metaphors, motifs, and symbols include the refinery, the moon; the setting is a character. There are also contrasts between light and dark, night and day.
If you live in the South Bay, the refineries are physical monuments as well as economic keystones. I did research that went into the technical processes. However, it was in driving, biking, and jogging around and past the refineries that put the technical processes into play and gave me the rhythm of the story.
A major theme is colorism; I use racial epithets to speak to the theme of colorism. Moreover, I wrote the story in the 2nd person POV because it adds tone - that of intimacy, furtiveness, darkness, industrial. I use the lack of emotion in the encounter as a counter to the tone of intimacy that the 2nd person POV adds. In fact, all of my 2nd person POV stories, including "Driving Lessons," I read and present in a metered, metronomic, voice.
When I first workshopped this story in 2013 in a short story writing class at UCLA Extension, the instructor was a retired ("recovering," as he called it) lawyer. He said, "take out the 2nd person POV. I don't like the thought of me in the lap of some guy. You're going to alienate a lot of male readers."
You can read the entire story on my Substack online newsletter and on Medium. I'd love to know your thoughts about the piece. You can also look forward to reading "Driving Lessons" as part of my short story collection.
Link to full story on Substack:
https://christlrikkaperkins.substack.com/p/driving-lessons-by-christl-perkins?r=1mne8t
Link to full story on Medium.com:
https://medium.com/@cperkins2/driving-lessons-by-christl-perkins-e2247080c79c
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This is a God Dream (forth coming)
Readers call my novel an "Alice Walker meets Percival Everett," read.
This is a God Dream, told through a series of letters and journal entries, is about a 24-year-old Black woman, Ja'Nay Saquoi, a prodigal daughter in post-Black era America, who after enduring years of her mother's constant criticism and control, travels to China to find herself. She takes a big leap outside of the Eurocentric view that all African Americans should be Christian or Muslim in order to reinvent her own spirituality. Set in mid 1990s China, This is a God Dream explores issues of identity, race, and spirituality against a background of Buddhist and Daoist temples and religious practices.
Ja'Nay meets a Daoist monk who appears to be an ideal person to learn from. She discovers that he has telekinetic and psychic abilities. Their relationship turns into a romantic affair. Over the next couple of years, their relationship is long distance because One leaves temple life in order to make a living. Then cultural and class differences completely derail their rollercoaster relationship.
After their breakup, Ja'Nay connects with Daoists who guide her as she recalls her original life plan and vision for herself. Through conversations and readings, she discovers and begins practicing the YiJing. Through the YiJing, Ja'Nay gains an understanding of her mother and their relationship as well as reconcile her old religion with her new thought.
Finally, Ja'Nay travels to Tibet where she finally achieves a feeling of peace. Ja'Nay decides that she has seen and studied enough to create her own meaning of life. She left the U.S., in part, due to her fractured relationship with her single parent mom. But through her journeys, she attains spiritual growth, understands how to heal, and reaches out to support her mom's path of healing and redemption.