Project 2
POV Adaptation of “So Much Water” by Carver (POV shift from Claire to Stuart):
I am eating with Claire when the telephone rings. I am not really hungry, but Claire keeps looking over at me as if judging my every move, and the repeated ringing of the telephone only puts me on edge.
“Don’t answer it,” I say.
“It might be your mother,” she says.
Her persistence is fueling all of the emotions that have been building up since that day. She hangs up the phone, and I cannot take it any longer. I throw my napkin on my plate and shout at Claire for not minding her business. I say, “Tell me what I did wrong and I’ll listen!”
I know I wasn’t the only man there, and I do not see anything wrong with the decisions that my friends and I made that day. “I won’t have you passing judgement,” I say. “And I’m as sorry as anyone else. But she was dead.”
“That’s the point,” she says.
I refuse to sit here and hear her insistent arguments. She wasn’t there. I was. So, I turn to my cigarettes and can of beer with the newspaper outside, away from her — away from the judgement.
I see my name on the front page, along with the names of my friends. I am still reading this front page when I hear a loud crash of dishes from the kitchen. She knows that I’ve heard, but I do not turn around. I will not have her make me feel guilty or claim that everything is my fault, because I know it is not.
Gordon Johnson, Mel Dorn, Vern Williams, and I like to play poker and bowl and fish when we can. They are like me; we have nice homes with nice families and nice jobs. We are good men.
Last Friday, we hiked near the Naches River to set up camp to fish and enjoy ourselves. Before we had settled in, Mel Dorn was going on about spotting a dead girl near the river. We all rushed over to see. Her body was wedged into some branches near the water. Her body didn’t have any clothes on. I was so tired from hiking so late. We were all tired, and she was dead. It wasn’t like her body was going anywhere. We agreed that telling the sheriff could wait. To keep the body from drifting, we pulled her to shore and tied some nylon cord to her wrist and looped it around a tree. I didn’t think much else of it.
For the next few days, we continued to enjoy each others’ company. We fished, played cards, cooked, and drank until the sun went down. We had a good time.
When it was time to go, we gathered our things and hiked out, the body still tethered to the tree. I made the call to the sheriff, and he took down our names and collected our statements. We parted ways and went to our nice homes and nice families, shameless and guilt-free.
Claire heard me yelling on the telephone the next morning about the weekend’s ordeal. That was when I told her. That was when she started looking at me differently.
I was still outside when Claire came out. “Stuart, could we go for a drive?” she says.
I think that maybe she will come around and realize none of it was my fault. “We’ll pick up some beer,” I say.
She doesn’t say anything the whole ride. We sit on a bench so I can enjoy my beer. When she finally does talk, I feel her starting to rile me again. “They said they were innocent. They said they were crazy,” she says.
I don’t know what she’s talking about. She goes on to tell me about a murder by a river that happened when she was young. “You’re going to get me riled,” I say.
I am direct. She is not letting up. She doesn’t say another word on the road. I just try to focus on driving.
I feel Claire avoiding me every moment thereafter. I sit down with beer and whiskey to keep me from replaying it over in my mind. I am drinking when she comes back from the funeral. Her mind is busy. I know what to do. I think she knows too.
Artist Statement: I chose to modify “So Much Water” because I found the story itself compelling, and I also thought it would be interesting to write from a point of view that didn’t necessarily offer a lot of information about their personal thoughts and feelings in the original. This led to my main challenge, which was to write beyond the information that was given in the original reading. The original focused on Claire’s thoughts and assumptions about the events and didn’t provide much conjecture about how Stuart was feeling other than their spoken dialogue. Another main challenge that I faced was that I felt more connected to Claire than Stuart in terms of how they handled the circumstances presented when I read it, and it was natural for me to understand Claire’s mindset and point of view. This made it more difficult for me to think like Stuart and understand him. I managed these challenges by spending a good deal of time going through each event as Stuart and using the given information about him to make conjectures about his thoughts. For example, Stuart definitely had more of a detachment to the dead girl than Claire; in the original, Claire often referred to the dead girl with more humane nouns like “young girl” or simply “her”, but I chose to portray Stuart’s detachment by using more objectifying nouns like “the dead body.” Watching episodes of Criminal Minds even became useful for me to understand why people do certain things behaviorally, especially with forensic situations. A minor issue that I encountered was that the original story was rather lengthy and included many scenes. I edited down some of the scenes of lesser importance, but I decided to keep the work I have submitted, even though it is over the word count, to do justice to the original. I have recognized that point of view is particularly important in creative writing because it changes the entire perception of the story. Two perspectives can cause readers to perceive completely different things and feel different ways.
