Just One Thing with Kate Doyle

Photo by Alana Davis

Kate Doyle’s flash “The Goldfish in the Pond at the Community Garden” explores fate and the power of the stories we construct of our lives. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“In part thanks to a generative class I took with Mary-Beth Hughes, and in part thanks to an ongoing experiment with my writing group, I got interested in writing full drafts of new stories in the company of other writers, all of us using some kind of shared source material and the same time constraint. We’d choose some a jumping-off point and create a handful of prompts, then write with a timer running. It used to be an in-person thing but like so much else, it became a zoom thing. I wrote this story with my friends Alyx and Sara and my partner Andy one night in the early months of the pandemic. We used the theme memories of New York, since we’d all met there eight years earlier; the way the process works, we’d each pull in details from each other’s real memories for our stories. So I have Alyx to thank for the goldfish in the pond, Sara to thank for going up the Empire State Building alone, Andy to thank for the perfect word prowl. When our time was up we each read aloud what we’d written, but I didn’t read the last line of my story, feeling like it was too weird. Andy saw it over my shoulder in my notebook and said I had to include it. I love when the collectiveness of making art can be explicitly a part of the process like this, when the influence of other artists and their ways of thinking is happening in real time.”