Gina Nutt: “A Rescue” takes the shape of a single swooping sentence that delivers us to the wedding of a longtime friend. How did you land on the one-sentence structure? What was your writing and revision process?
Trent England: I wrote the beginning of this in one of the regular meetings of my local writer group, in response to a prompt that was simply, ‘a rescue.’ The opening words of it came to me and I just followed them, and soon it felt like I was immersed in a sentence that wanted to go on and on, and that the final period was like something that had been blown by the wind that I’d finally caught. I didn’t finish this piece in that session, but when I came home that night I worked on it more, and completed it the following morning. I intentionally leaned on a lot of internal rhyme, which dictated everything, a trickle-down effect of word choice that then influenced plot and interiority. My revision process was granular and delicate; there were a lot of things I had to keep in place — the one-sentence format, the second-person perspective, the internal rhyme. I couldn’t chop it up and restructure sentences the way I can in a more conventionally structured piece.

GN: This is also a compressed story, a timelapse whirlwind of hiccups and friction between characters. In what ways did the shorter form shape those tensions? Did you encounter any difficulties or unexpected openings in distilling this story to its most essential elements?
TE: I think the one-sentence structure is such a fun and fascinating type of short fiction. It allows for so much, but has a particular limitation: that impending period at the end of the piece is always looming, and the reader is subconsciously thinking, Make this worth it, because this structure is a little laborious to read. It’s not an easy thing to digest. But I think that’s part of what’s so wonderful about it. It’s a kind of intellectual engagement that is different from reading something traditional. So while I was working on it, I was tempted to draw it out and make it last, but I had to show some restraint. I could have made the story about so much more, and really widened its scope, but there were some plot elements - the wedding, the timing, the impending inflection between the main character and her partner - that reined me in and kept me focused on keeping the story from outgrowing itself.

GN:The use of second person here is intriguing. What influenced this choice? How did this perspective guide your writing? 
TE: Because it wasn’t a particularly long piece, I thought it would help heighten the sense of urgency. This story is a little anxiety-riddled which I think is intensified by the fact that it’s one continuous sentence. It places the reader immediately in the story, and I hope it makes it a little more immersive, that even though the you who is the reader may not be able to relate to the events that the you in the story are experiencing, I hope the effect comes across. It also allowed for some distance between myself and the main characters. I don’t always want readers to think that I’m writing my own life or projecting onto a fictional character something that happened to me.

GN:What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
TE: While I write, I like to listen to repetitive electronic music - deep house and ambient - in order to invoke a kind of trance state. I do my best work in compressed periods of time, and having monotonous, hypnotic music helps me zone in and not lose focus while I’m writing. I just finished reading The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis, which I loved. He pulled off the memoir/novel blend in a surprising and impressive way, and I think the voice of his prose is underrated. Up next is The White Album by Joan Didion, with non-fiction sprinkled here and there, like The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, which I’m also enjoying. But visual artists inspire me as much, if not more, than other writers. I envy artists’ ability to physically be with a piece in three dimensions while they’re working on it. And - to loosely quote Stuart Dybek - I like to think that writing as a lot like building, that we’re constructing something with words. It’s thrilling what moving around a word or a sentence can do to a piece of writing. How a change of title can completely shift everything. Swapping out direct dialogue for indirect dialogue. The mechanics of and music of fiction will always be my favorite thing about writing, even superseding plot and storytelling, although if I can tell a good story or write strong characters while also being proud of the design of the piece, that’s even better.