Interview: Andy Duncan on "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse"

John Joseph Adams | March 12th 2008 at 2:21 pm

Andy Duncan, whose story “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse” from Eclipse One is a finalist for this year’s Nebula Award, said in an interview that the story was inspired, in part, by one of his favorite fiction writers, who had a brief celebrity as a child when she taught a pet chicken to walk backward. "[That] feat that was captured by newsreel cameras," Duncan said. "After she achieved more lasting fame as an adult, she liked to joke that everything since the chicken had been downhill. (I think she was joking.)"

It was tough for Duncan to decide whether or not to reveal the child’s eventual celebrity identity. "In a historically inspired story such as ‘The Chief Designer’ or ‘The Pottawatomie Giant’ or ‘Zora and the Zombie,’ the celebrity of the title character is impossible to avoid; the character’s celebrity is, in part, what the story is about," Duncan said. "That’s not the case with this story. I seriously considered omitting the fast-forward final scene, for fear of reducing the whole thing to a Paul Harvey ‘Rest of the Story’ anecdote. I eventually decided I needed that final scene because I had no ending otherwise – or, more accurately, had no place to put the emotion that I wanted for an ending. But in my first draft, the final scene was much longer, and wrong."

Duncan’s wife, Sydney, told him that he had devoted too much space to the celebrity character and lost track of his protagonist. "Just as I had done in the first draft of ‘The Chief Designer,’ which every editor in the field rightly rejected before I rewrote it," he said. "This time I did the rewrite before sending the story out (Progress!) and much improved it, thanks to Sydney."

The idea to use that "unique chicken" in a story stayed with Duncan for a long time, but the premise didn’t occur to him until Michael Bishop was putting together A Cross of Centuries, a fiction anthology about alternate Jesuses. "Mike asked whether I had a Jesus story, and immediately into my head popped my old friend’s chicken, which I hadn’t thought about in years, and with it came the realization that the chicken was, of course, Jesus Christ – in some sense," Duncan said. "I didn’t get the story written in time to make Mike’s book (which was published in 2007 by Thunder’s Mouth Press, and is excellent), but I owe Mike for the existence of this story, nevertheless."

What happens to the priest at the climax of the story, in the chicken yard, happened to Duncan as a child. "[It was] on my last venture into my grandmother’s chicken yard in Batesburg, S.C.," Duncan said. "Writing that scene enabled me to relive that experience from the safe remove of 35 years."

Duncan purposely did next to no research, beyond what he already knew, which was both unusual and uncomfortable for him. "I wanted the story to be somewhat sparse, like a parable, a rabbinical tale, a story you’d be told from a pulpit, and I knew if I did my usual research I’d wedge it all in there and lose that loaves-and-fishes effect," he said. "(Richard Butner once wrote in the margin of one of my manuscripts, ‘Naked research!’ and he was right, of course, so I cut out, oh, maybe a third of it.) I do have a seminarian named Penny Crall to thank for Matthew 23:37, which she mentioned in passing one day during our book-discussion group at the Osborne Newman Center in Frostburg, MD, not realizing how badly I needed a poultry-related scripture at that point."

Much of the first draft of this story was written in longhand in Sydney’s rooms at Wadham College in Oxford, England, in summer 2005, Duncan said. "[I] then read from it a few days later at Interaction, the Worldcon in Glasgow, to an audience of about a half-dozen utterly silent and mystified people, and if you had told them this story would be a Nebula nominee one day, they’d have laughed you into the River Clyde," he said. "On the other hand, during that same convention, when I told Gwenda Bond, Gavin Grant, Kelly Link, and Christopher Rowe the title of the story, their response was so gratifying that I found the strength to go on."

For more information about Eclipse One, click here, and to download the entire text of "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse," visit our downloads page.

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