"Barry Knows Best" by Tara campbell

3/27/2022

Photo by Anna Dewitt Carson

Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University. Previous publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Booth, Strange Horizons, and CRAFT Literary. She's the author of a novel, TreeVolution, and four collections: Circe's Bicycle, Midnight at the Organporium, Political AF: A Rage Collection, and Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection. Connect with her at www.taracampbell.com or on Twitter: @TaraCampbellCom.

Ralvell Rogers II is the Founder and CEO of Ambitious Stories, LLC, an independent publishing company that focuses on uplifting often unheard, yet riveting voices of the Midwest, especially Kansas City. With AS, Rogers has published The Kansas City Boys Choir: Providing Hope For Tomorrow in collaboration with The Kansas City Boys Choir, and Improvise: Poems and Sketches by Kevin Rabas. Currently, Ralvell is finalizing his first book while he reviews applications for The Ambitious Stories Book Scholarship. For ambitious news, connect with Rogers on Instagram @Ambitious_Storyteller and Ambitious Stories on Facebook and Instagram @Ambitious_StoriesLLC.

Introduction to "Barry Knows BEst"
By Ralvell Rogers II

In a world that comprises a multitude of political, professional and social systems and structures, it can be quite difficult to step outside the confines of our reality and unveil astonishments in our everyday lives. For writers, what happens when they are on the outskirts anyway? Does society consume them and all their imaginary friends? Or does the writer inject their creativity into an ordinary world and mutate it into something extraordinary? Many science fiction and speculative fiction writers have continued to wrestle with this line of inquiry throughout their entire literary careers. For Tara Campbell, bread crumbs of knowledge can be found in her teachings and her body of work, both of which challenge her and her readers and students to marinate on what it truly means to “put our world in a snow globe, add a drop of weird, and shake” (Campbell).

From an early age, Campbell was curious about a world outside of the life she knew growing up in Anchorage, Alaska. So much so that for undergraduate school, she ventured off to Oregon. And the curiosity did not stop there as she received her Master’s in German, Language and Literature, and worked abroad in Germany and Austria.
“I’ve had those opportunities to live in other places, but DC is where I consider home,” Campbell recently shared with me in a virtual one-on-one conversation. “It’s where I really embraced my career as a writer.”

Even though mainstream literature formed a pillar of Campbell’s identity, reading and writing speculative fiction was always an interest towards which she gravitated. While she reflected on her previous work, Campbell spoke on her growth in approaching her recent stories with a more stringent focus on allowing characters to move the narrative forward as opposed to the speculative concepts. As highlighted on her website, “it's not about the technology and machines; it's about what happens when an ordinary person (or creature) faces extraordinary circumstances,” but this was a lesson learned by Campbell after she transitioned from reading 1950s/60s speculative fiction to reading more contemporary work from the genre.

“Now that I’m reading what type of speculative fiction is being written now, I realized that I was still trapped in the speculative fiction of then that was very focused on the phenomenon and not the human relationships behind it—that was focused on white male protagonists—that was focused on the science.”

Fortunately, the genre and the literary community has progressed in a manner that embraces more diverse stories and writers that offer attention to literary tools and restraint in storytelling that is often attributed to mainstream literary writers. These attributes can be analyzed in Campbell’s own work, especially “Barry Knows Best.”

In Campbell’s piece, “Barry Knows Best,” readers are introduced to a pig named Barry and his owner, Jordan, a woman who is not only struggling to pay her apartment rent and utilities, but is mulling over the idea of selling her boutique of bacon-based treats to make ends meet. To make matters worse, the health inspector for her boutique lurks about, the building manager where her boutique is located is raising rent, and Jordan’s apartment landlord is raising rent and has disallowed Barry from staying in her apartment, forcing Barry to sleep alone in Jordan’s office at the boutique. And just like that, Tara Campbell sets the scene that allows her to add a drop of weird and shake the snow globe of this story until by the end of the piece, readers are baffled to learn that Barry is no ordinary pig. In fact, Barry is a being, who comes off as more phenomenal than mundane as he orchestrates private meetings after dark with street rats, orders hits on human characters to protect his relationship with Jordan, and plays with his vacuum cleaner squeaky toy while unsuspecting Jordan cooks her bacon-based goodies.

“We make this separation everyday,” Campbell pointed out. “We pet our dogs, but we eat meat. So [Jordan’s] kind of mirroring what we do in society just in a slightly different way.”
The inspiration for “Barry Knows Best” can actually be attributed to a prompt proposed at a Kathy Fish flash fiction workshop at which Campbell attended.

“The prompt was simply to ‘Write The Beginning of a Story.’ Don’t think about where it’s going to go. Don’t think about what it’s about. Just write the beginning of a story,” Campbell said plainly. “And so I love bacon and possibly it was the morning when I just had some bacon—I can’t exactly remember…So I just wrote the beginning of a story and focused on my character and focused on her relationship with this little pig, and that’s all I had in my mind. Then I set it aside and it just kept coming back to me.”

Campbell went on to mention how the Kathy Fish prompt was incredibly freeing, allowing her to just focus on a scene and allow the characters to drive the story rather than the phenomenon. In “Barry Knows Best,” not every world-building question will be answered. But that’s okay, because the conceit of the piece is focused on a woman who is struggling with making ends meet financially, whether or not she should sell her boutique, and her relationship with this extraordinary pig. Of course, the more speculative aspect of the piece shines through in the socialization and humanization of Barry and the street rats, but providing the answers to general questions regarding the world Campbell built—such as the origins of Barry’s human-like characteristics or even the details of the conversations between Barry and the rats—might arguably be too focused on more outdated approaches to the genre.

“You [writers] have to have this background in your mind even if it doesn’t make it onto the page,” Campbell said. “I knew exactly what the rats were arguing about with the pig, and I knew exactly what the pig was thinking about the rats in the alley. But you know what? Whether the reader knows exactly what I’m thinking, that’s immaterial because the central story remains the same.”

With time spent across the United States and beyond (e.g. Alaska, Oregon, Ohio, New York, Washington DC, Germany and Austria) and a decade of skin in the literary game, there’s no doubt that Campbell has a bountiful amount of wisdom to offer in her classes at American University, Johns Hopkins University, the Writer’s Center, Politics and Prose, and the National Gallery of Art's Virtual Studio. Moreover, her many literary awards, prizes and fellowships (e.g. 2016 Larry Neal Writers' Award in Adult Fiction; 2016 Mayor's Arts Award for Outstanding New Artist and Arts and Humanities Fellowships for 2018 - 2022; 2017 Kimbilio Fellow; 2018 Robert Gover Story Prize) are a testament to the idea that stepping outside of systemic and structural comforts can be rewarding. And better yet, it can leave one satisfied in their work and themselves.

“If I have any parting words,” Campbell stated in her closing remarks. “It’s to be patient and enjoy your work and follow your questions and your passions. And with those four things, it may not come quickly, but it’ll be more satisfying when it does.”