“Night Nanny” by Emily Culp / Tupelo Quarterly
“Hi Mister Fussypants,” I exhale, reaching for the baby.
To my mind, there are two main ways to analyze a short story.
The first is through an emotional read. Does the story engage you, does it reach you, does it move you?
The second is via a technical read. How is it structured, what literary devices are deployed, does the story work?
It goes without saying that without an emotional appeal, without heart, you’re dead in the water. But the same goes for the technical. If the story isn’t rendered well, it can have a heart as big as the Great Outdoors and you’re still floating in the same lake, you’re still un-alive.
The gift of writing these weekly appreciations is that each story I cover offers me (and hopefully you) a different lesson in how to approach the whole.
So let’s get to it.
While Emily Culp’s “Night Nanny” (4,800 words) in Tupelo Quarterly is a miniature—we get a very small slice of one woman’s life—it boasts both a huge heart and a grand technical design. And as moving as the story is (and it is very moving), I was continually impressed by its technical virtuosity.
We meet the story’s main character, Sarai, in media res. We’re dropped into the middle of a phone call, and Sarai’s first-person narration carries us along as if we’re perched on her shoulder. Culp doesn’t drop into lengthy setting descriptions or deep interiority, so apart from the occasional personal observation, the idea of fiction, of literature, falls away. We live the story more than read it.
Sarai is past forty. It seems that everything that surrounds her (crib, diaper station, burp cloths, coconut oil, pumping kit) is baby-related, but there is no baby present. We soon learn she is single. The operator on the phone is from an adoption agency, and she’s confirming the bad news that Sarai’s latest prospect has “has decided to go with a family that had existing children.”
But rather than linger over that, Culp uses the idea of a missed call to get off the line with the agency and into a new story; a man calling to arrange for night nanny services with Sarai. So we need to reframe our understanding of her. Being surrounded by baby paraphernalia isn’t only to assist her in making an adoption a reality. Infant and new-mother care is also her job.
But rather than linger over that, Culp uses the caller’s assertion that Sarai comes “highly recommended to me by a colleague, Faisal,” to immediately jump into the new new-story of Faisal, a Saudi Arabian who employed her to look after his newborn son—a situation in which Sarai, throughout her employ with the family, never met the birth mother.
Then, we’re immediately at her current client’s door and another new story begins…
Each of these tiny stories-within-a-story has its own small arc, some of them more notable than others. But the effect of one after another of them combined is the feeling of careening like a pin ball off various bumpers and flippers. It’s as unsettling for us as it is for Sarai.
An equally applicable analogy would be that of being fed one tiny-story-potato-chip after another, each one deliciously salty and greasy/fatty, and can you get the next one in my mouth now, please?
We’re also building our understanding of Sarai, her situation, and the inevitable tension that comes with wanting a child, not getting a child, and regularly—through short, intense bursts—full-on being a mom-for-hire. Along with all the attendant giving, giving, giving, straight up to “thank you for your service, and you’ll never see me or my child again.”
And all of those things compound, crowding one into the next, like steam gathering in a tea kettle that’s approaching a boil, its hot whistle slowly rising.
A quarter of the way through the story, we settle into Sarai’s work with a young couple, Lea and Craig, and their newborn son, who is referred to as “Mister.” Sarai is accommodating of fathers and sons throughout the telling, but there’s a sharp edge to her take on them, and technically it’s a welcomed one. The choice feels defensible for her circumstances, personally and professionally, but it also ups the story stakes. Not acknowledging a dark undercurrent in Sarai’s motivations would ring false and—to be coldly clinical on the storytelling front—the tension it generates is needed.
Without going into detail and spoiling, I will say that Sarai reaches a will she? / won’t she? moment late one evening with the infant “mister” in her care that threatens to catapult the whole of the story out of low stakes domestic drama and into an entirely different genre, which really keeps the pages turning. Right up to and through its perfect, Sisyphean ending.
Finally, Emily Culp’s story is also journalistic. While fictional, it frames the world of the current-day night nanny—things like the shifting roles of motherhood and fatherhood, the omnipresence of Big Brother-ish “nanny cams,” the fear of allowing a stranger access to your home in an age that disdains the village we once relied upon—as a documentarian would.
We get Sarai’s first-person impression, which necessarily comes from an emotional place, but it leans toward the dispassionate. And in keeping the telling even-keeled, as Sarai has learned she needs to be if she hopes to get what she wants, it’s all that much harder to take. Which, technically, as story telling goes, is a very good thing.
Throughout “Night Nanny,” it was clear Sarai was, and had been, holding her breath.
When I finished reading, I surprised myself with a loud exhalation of my own.
Tupelo Press discovers luminous writers, gives each author the vessel of a beautiful book, and shares their passions with as many readers as possible.
In the digital milieu, Tupelo Quarterly extends and expands upon that vision, publishing work by emerging and established writers and artists of many sensibilities and styles.
In addition to a stunning poem or story on the page, they want to include work that takes full advantage of the medium. They want to honor the art as received, and to extend the scope of what a literary journal can do.
Tupelo Quarterly cultivates generous artistic community, celebrates intellectual curiosity and creative risk, and presumes abundance. As they put it: “We hold the gate open, not closed.”
Please refer to their submissions page for complete information on submission policies.
Tupelo Quarterly will respond to all submissions after the October 31st submission deadline. Their turnaround for submissions is approximately three months for any given issue of the journal.
~*~
Emily Culp has studied writing at Yale with R. F. Kuang and at Harvard with Steve Almond, Neel Mukherjee, and Laura van den Berg. She reads for West Trade Review. “Night Nanny” is her (gulp!) first literary publication! Can’t wait to see what’s coming next :) …
A big thank you Emily Culp and Tupelo Quarterly for delivering the bundle of story-telling joy that is “Night Nanny.”
Are you reading enough short stories to know what lit pubs are looking for?
Don’t have the time to search for them on your own and still get writing done?
Short Story Shoutout can help.
Subscribe and get introduced to the best online fiction weekly for the low, low cost of nothing.
Comments