What I Didn’t Know

by Beverly Burch

It started with stories, a series of short fiction over a period of years. Some I published in literary journals, some lived on my computer, but the characters began to recur. I didn’t know they were going to do that. In a story with a new character, a woman from an earlier story said quietly:You know that’s me. It went on like that until I realized a set of maybe ten characters had populated my mind and would speak insistently as each new story emerged. Finally there were twenty stories, with these ten characters moving into each other’s stories, and I saw the links as as collection, something like Olive Kitteridge or A Visit from the Goon Squad. 

They wanted that kind of echoing, but a few beta readers, people who read well, concurred that they couldn’t track these characters, each of whom had their own arc. An editor agreed. I wasn’t facing the reality here. If I wanted to publish it, I had to remove some characters, delete their stories (gnashing of teeth), and let the rest morph into a novel. 

What You Don’t Know. It was a title to capture the characters’ roads to places they never expected to go. It was my road as well. The path to the unknown requires a state of mind willing to change, recalibrate the way my GPS frequently must do, i.e., with a spirit of inquiry: see what you find out there, adjust, look around, find a road.

I spent the next years on the project, five revisions, each time working to understand where the story really began, who my main characters were, and what the deeper links were. I learned a lot about differences between short and long form fiction, how a novel needs to stretch its legs the way a story cannot. A couple of revisions focused mostly on language, the sentences themselves. 

Already I’d published four books of poetry, where image and word and music are everything, more important than narration or even cohesion. The music of prose is not so compressed though, not so precise. It carries a voice or voices beyond an author’s voice; the sounds alter and resound pages beyond their first appearance. The attention to image, diction, syntax of poetry is still vital. The slip into humor then the weight of gravity strikes suddenly. 

Emotional authenticity and discovery are equally important in prose and poetry. Their focused labor is similar labor, but the novel wants its voice sustained, while a poem quickly gives way to a new poem with a different voice. I realized how changes in my life prompted my shifts to new genres. 

I wrote non-fiction years ago, two books close to my years in academia, with an emphasis on rhetorical argument and analysis. Some of that transferred surprisingly well to poetry which I’ve loved since adolescence but feared as an author. A lot of work was needed to free my language from reason and argumentation. Freedom to roam, contradict, imagine, listen, visualize—what a relief it was, but what a struggle against reason. The declarative and the logical disguised themselves enough to stick around, because, with a contrarian’s mind I couldn’t let them go. I discovered poetic logic obeys different rules; it is not a reasonable beast but it manifests through the mind of the poem, which must be there to reach the mind of a reader. It’s hard to define; it relies on the residue of an image or metaphorical logic or the refrain of the music. Or something impossible to pin down. 

Also—an important piece of biography—I had a child by then and didn’t have long stretches of time for writing. A poem could be short. It could be revisited later, often better for the time away from it. I could write something in thirty minutes that might be a mess; it was something I could work from. The practice of poetry is happy with that pace. At least sometimes. With a few hours to myself I could wrestle with it longer, and like Jacob with the angel, make it reveal itself, a process as sweaty as it sounds.

As time became available again, I found myself reading more fiction and writing stories. I loved Flannery O’Connor the most, but found others equally enthralling, and poured through the fiction in old New Yorker magazinesI found everywhere until I succumbed and subscribed. I sat with a story for hours and hours, returned to it quickly if interrupted. The story, like poems had done, was still working in my head whatever else I might be doing. Writing is like that, at least for me, with a grip on you that won’t let go until you’re done. Or done enough. (Are we ever done?)

When I began the novel, I knew it would consume me. No child at home now, I let myself be happily consumed. I spent more time with these characters than with anyone in my life. They were my people. If someone asked how I was or what I’d been doing I wanted to say I’d been with Chloe all week and she was really struggling, her life had gone astray, she was sad, she was mad, she was falling in love, she had gone to therapy. Or Rosie, Rosie was hearing ghosts now, she was wildly jealous, her teenage son was like a wound to her. Whatever was happening to Chloe or to Rosie, that’s what was happening to me. 

To free myself again, I created a Substack (burchb.substack.com) where again I can write whatever I choose. They found their story. I can finally let them go. 

 

What You Don’t Know, published May 2025 by Sibylline Press

One contrary ghost, two women, three triangles, four children: What You Don’t Know is a bisexual love story from the Music City, the Blueridge Mountains and the Bay Area.

Chloe, beautiful, whip-smart, flees a difficult childhood and sexual betrayal to the Bay Area where she falls in love with a woman. Afraid of this love, she devotes herself to making money instead. At 29 she moves to Nashville and meets Peter, a producer whose wife Angie recently died. Angie still seems to be around though, quietly coaching Chloe about Peter and helping her twin sister Rosie through grief. Rosie is devastated by the loss of Angie and dislikes Chloe immediately, that is, until she becomes intrigued by her. After Chloe marries Peter, their relationship grows close, displeasing Angie. Chloe realizes she’s in love with Rosie, creating yet another triangle. A terrible accident ensues that upends everyone’s lives again, but bringing Chloe home to her true desires.

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Beverly Burch has spent her life working the gaps between the conscious and unconscious, both as a writer and a psychotherapist, loving words for their music, their meaning, and the way they point to places language doesn’t easily go. She has closed her therapy practice to have more time for writing. A native of Atlanta, she lives in Oakland, CA now with her wife and two Maine coon cats. www.beverlyburch.com 

 

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