Author Notes: Aurora Brackett

Aurora Brackett, after finally finishing page eleven of "The Edge of Mercury."Aurora Brackett, winner of the Second Annual Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for fiction, talks about her winning story, “The Edge of Mercury,” published in Puritan XXIII.I wrote the first draft of this story twelve years ago. I was house-sitting for some friends of my parents, and I had this feeling that their house was haunted. The house had an orchard attached to it and it was summer, and I liked to sit outside and watch the stars. At some point I sat down, thinking about ghosts, and wrote the first sentence of the story, which then was, “Emma looked up from the newspaper and saw her husband in outline.”  The ghost came into the story later. At first it just started with this woman looking at her husband and realizing she had been living alone, sort of oblivious of him.  It was one of those story-writing experiences where I felt like I was in a kind of trance, seeing things unfold. The first draft is pretty awful, but a lot of the story is there.I started this story when I was still just writing on my own, and when I went back to school, I used it as a way to learn what fiction is—how to shape something, how to clear out all the excess.  I rewrote the whole thing so many times. I studied astronomy and read biographies of astronomers. I created histories for these characters. I remember being at a residency and working on this story—I was stuck on page eleven for a month. It became this big joke. People would come up and ask “How’s page eleven?” I don’t think that was really the best way to work. I’m a bit tenacious. I had friends threaten to steal the story and send it out, just so I would stop working on it.A couple of years ago, I was reading more about astronomy, and I read about how the first real proof for the big bang came when these Bell Telephone scientists who were just listening for telephone satellite signals heard this persistent noise they could not identify. It turned out they were listening to a sound from the origins of the universe. And then I wrote this scene where Emma runs away and Henry is thinking about the sound of the big bang coming over the phone. For some reason when I wrote that, I thought, okay, I’m done now. I sent the story out and got a lot of really nice rejection letters.But then this year, I realized my astronomy was wrong. The story was originally called “Orion” because at the end, Emma and Henry were looking up at the constellation Orion. But I realized that this was completely impossible unless they were in the southern hemisphere. Orion is not visible during the summer here. So I went back and changed the end, and changed the title.  Now, maybe it is done. Though I won’t be surprised if I pick it up in ten years and rewrite the whole thing again.Our Second Annual Thomas Morton Memorial Prize fiction winner, Aurora Brackett lives in Las Vegas, Nevada where she is a PhD fellow in fiction at University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Black Mountain Institute. She is a recipient of the San Francisco Browning Society’s Dramatic Monologue Award, the Wilner Award for Short Fiction, a nominee for The Pushcart Prize and a 2013 Sozopol Fiction Seminar Fellow. Her work has appeared in Nimrod Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, The Portland Review, Fourteen Hills, and other magazines. She is currently fiction editor of Witness Magazine and was an associate editor of Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives, published by Voice of Witness/McSweeney’s in 2010.