Notes on “Wrestling the Bear”
I have vivid memories of Gordon Connell, 8th grade science teacher and legendary high school wrestling coach, pacing around a ring in a textbook grappler’s stance shouting, “I want the bear!” It’s the highlight of the school year: the day in late May when he would wheel in a TV and show his students a grainy video from the late 70s. He is younger and thinner, with ropy muscles but the same haircut he sports decades later, and he gives it his best for a few minutes before the 600-pound bear knocks him out of the ring and brings the match to its inevitable conclusion. The only problem with this memory is that I never took Coach Connell’s 8th grade science class, and I never got to see the video. I can only assume this is the Mandela effect at work: a tale built up as local folklore passed down from class to class such that the rumor of the event is just as valid as the real experience. Nevertheless, bear wrestling was a real thing back in the day, and I try not to rely too much on historical accuracy in my storytelling. That’s the beauty of writing fiction. If it didn’t happen exactly as I remember it, so much the better.*
But of course, Wrestling the Bear isn’t really a story about bear wrestling anyway. It’s a story about the past and the future—the imperfect recollections of the most important endeavors of our lives and how those aspirations evolve as our circumstances shift. Bear wrestling is just the hook.
This story went through a number of drafts before anyone got to read it. I tried it with Everett as the protagonist, but soon settled on the idea that it was really Murph’s story. Everett had already changed, while Murph was the one who was at a crossroads. I then wrote a version in first person with Murph as the narrator, but it felt too limited in scope and was careening toward a story I didn’t want to write, one in which Murph and Becca were struggling in their marriage because he was bored with his station in life. All the while, I was going back and forth trying to decide how I was going to shoehorn in a bear wrestling scene.
While I was working on this story, I happened to re-read Lauren Groff’s “For the God of Love, for the Love of God” in her collection Florida. It’s one of those stories I could read a hundred times and come away with a hundred different things to think about, but this particular time, I was inspired by the omniscience in the voice. The point of view moves around to various characters as the story develops, and all of them have their own agendas and desires in the course of a short weekend. I thought that might be a fitting technique to try for this story, given that I had envisioned Murph, Becca, Dale and Everett each having their own sense of how happy they are with the way their lives had panned out to that point. Everett’s surprise reappearance in their lives struck me as a great inflection point for them to undergo a little self-evaluation, so the opportunity to explore each character’s voice really opened up the story for me. In the end of Groff’s story, the POV moves over to the au pair they pick up from the airport, someone outside of the story thus far, and it’s a surprising yet powerful shift. I tried something similar and far stranger here, which I won’t spoil except to say that sometimes weird ideas work, and if they don’t, there’s always a delete key.
I’m absolutely thrilled that this story got picked up in the Southern Review, one of the nation’s finest lit mags. Big thanks to editor Sacha Idell and his colleagues who were again great to work with. Also thanks to Jason V. as well as my cohort at the inaugural StoryBoard workshop for their valuable feedback on early drafts of this story. If you’re interested in ordering a copy for yourself, head over to the Southern Review’s website.
* After finishing the story, I did consult Google to see if I could find anything about Coach Connell’s bear wrestling exploits. Turns out, he did, in fact, wrestle a bear, though the tape has not made its way to the internet yet.