Joel Henry Little shares the story behind his story, Clownboy and Me. Read it here.
IDEA
The first version of this story was inspired by a painting my girlfriend, Catherine, made in her last year of art school, of a little boy wearing a clown suit, back in ‘22. As to where the idea for that image came from, you’d have to ask her. I wrote it as a sort of ambiguous origin story, something about the unknowability of the clown boy figure and the man who happened to find and nurture him. Being a cat dad, it wasn’t hard to tap into the dynamic of deeply loving a fundamentally elusive and ambivalent creature like C.B. I never quite got my arms around the narrative voice on that first try, but I liked the sweetness and mystery of it, so I kept the idea kicking around the back of my head for a couple-three years.
DEVELOPMENT
I started rewriting the story into its current form on New Year’s Eve, after a scary but blessedly minor car accident. I’m generally not someone who approaches writing as a therapeutic act, but returning to this story was absolutely that. I needed a temporary escape, so it only made sense to crack open the old laptop and lose myself for two days in this gentle, earnest fantasy of a man and his Clownboy. A couple of the beats were there in the original draft, the search for C.B.’s parents and the movie at the end, but the rest was new. For whatever reason, I knew it had to have the feeling of a period piece, even if the period itself wasn’t stated outright, so I leaned pretty heavily into that with some of the language.
EDITING
After getting this second version of the story down onto the page, it didn’t take much time to polish it up into something presentable – about a day of not terribly transformative revision. I knew the heightened tone of the piece could only be sustained in an abbreviated form, so it helped that I limited myself to under 1,000 words (not as much material to chip away at). I heard the voice of the narrator very clearly this time, and I knew it had to retain a bit of its sloppiness to get the effect I wanted across and make it come alive, but it did take a fair amount of consolidation to make his ramblings clear enough to not alienate the reader.
SUBMITTING
I’ll admit the weirdness of the premise and its sort of arch open-heartedness made the story feel like a hard sell. It’s pretty different from a lot of the stuff I write, but I had enough faith in the quality of the writing and the depth of emotion captured therein to make me want to share it with others. It’s been a long, rocky road getting it here to WestWord, but I’m glad to have finally found a way to make this strange thing accessible to the reading public.
FINAL REFLECTIONS
II think my favorite stories are the ones where I’m left wanting to be a better person. Maybe that’s why I felt the need to return to this narrator and finish his story the right way. He’s not an angel, and he’s certainly not content with the life he’s leading; he ends the story crying, stuck within this longing for some deeper connection (with Clownboy, with Miss Hallihan, with a world so swiftly passing him by), but still he tries to move forward and do better. To be a little kinder, a little more understanding, a little more loving each day, even when it doesn’t seem to make any difference – that’s what this character inspires in me, and I hope it’ll do the same for readers, despite the absurdity.
Author: Joel Henry Little is a writer and musician from New York City. He received a B.A. in English from Hunter College, and will soon begin pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. His work has previously appeared in Ghost City Review, Maudlin House, and Heavy Feather Review.