My ‘new’ short story’s long road to publication

Today, a short story I first drafted in the 1990s–and that began as a stubborn idea some 45 years ago–has broken free of its chrysalis and flung itself into the world.

“Shah Mat” makes its long-awaited (for me, anyway) debut in the latest issue of a new literary magazine, The Orange Rose.

“Shah Mat” is one of several writings I drafted in the mid-1990s, in a flurry of creative activity over several months, then set aside as I started to focus more on my career and other writing endeavors. Most of those drafts remain in that form and may never see publication, for good reason.

But “Shah Mat” was one that, to my way of thinking, held promise. Even though it is set in a time and deals with issues that now seem eons ago, I thought the story had good bones and might be worth revisiting and revising. And I always hoped the story would remain relevant all these years later.

“Shah Mat” was born from personal experiences and encounters during my junior college years (1978 through 1980), when I was a recent underachieving high school graduate trying to discover my own path into the future. While the U.S. economy staggered under the weight of inflation, beyond America’s shores, one of our longtime allies in the Middle East, Iran, was in the throes of a revolution. There were a lot of Iranian students attending that junior college in those days, and I hung out and became friends with many of them. I worked with a few of them in the kitchen of our town’s KFC, partied with them at friends’ apartments, played chess with them, and watched as their demeanors changed and their naive optimism faded when the Iran they left to study abroad transformed quickly into a theocracy.

In the years following the Iranian Revolution, my mind kept returning to those experiences and friendships, and I wondered about how their lives turned out. I wanted to capture a fragment of those times in the form of a short story. The idea wouldn’t depart from me. So finally, I committed the idea to a Word document. (Actually, the early draft was written on WordPerfect, which was a popular word-processing software in those days.)

“Shah Mat” is about two young men–one American, one Iranian–who are intently playing a game of chess in the American’s apartment while a party swirls around them, and the ongoing turmoil of Iran swirls around the characters at the geopolitical level. The geopolitics is not a central theme, but it’s in the background, or maybe as an undercurrent, unobservable but ever present. I had the idea of the chess match as a metaphor for the geopolitical gamesmanship that was happening in the world at that time, but I didn’t want to push this idea to heavy-handedly. Whether the metaphor works or not, I think (hope) the story stands on its own merits.

After several weeks of focused revising and rewriting on the story, I started sending it out to literary magazines for their consideration. Fourteen of them said “no thanks” before The Orange Rose decided to pick it up. After that acceptance, I quickly withdrew “Shah Mat” from consideration from four other publications that had not yet responded to my submission.

And now, “Shah Mat,” a story some 45 years in the making, has a home.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this story. Please comment below. And after you’ve read “Shah Mat,” please spend some time exploring some of the other excellent writing in this current issue and the previous issue of The Orange Rose.

Cover image via Pexels.