I would love for you all to read Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s story “Taylor Swift” from 2014, winner of the Barthelme Prize. Here is another story I study and hold dear to my heart as the years go by. This too is what I think of as a masterclass in what a story under 500 words can do. In the words of Barthelme Prize judge Steve Almond, the author has created “a world in which the passion of the individual overrules death and existential dread of even the modern self-inflicted nightmare of fame.” I agree fully with Almond that the story is deeply funny, and I’ll add, it has an unexpectedly serious ending. The ending makes it real. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find the last line of the story to be sobering and mysterious.
Lastly, the story was prescient. Reading it now, in 2024, the author could not have known how ever more famous and iconic Taylor Swift would become.
I’ve created a prompt inspired by “Taylor Swift” below the story.
Taylor Swift
by Hugh Behm-Steinberg
from Gulf Coast, Winner of The Barthelme Prize
You’re in love; it’s great, you swipe on your phone and order: the next day a Taylor Swift clone shows up at your house. It’s not awkward, it’s everything you want. She knows all her songs, and she sings them just for you. When you put your Taylor Swift to bed (early, you got a big day tomorrow) you peek over the fence into the Rosenblatt’s yard, and the lights are blazing. Your best friend Tina has three Taylor Swifts swimming in her pool. She has a miniature Taylor Swift she keeps on a perch, a Taylor Swift with wings. You’re so jealous. She’s not even paying attention to them, she’s too busy having sex with her other Taylor Swifts, they’re so fucking loud it’s disgusting. You hate Taylor Swift.
So you wake up your Taylor Swift and put her to work doing your chores. Why are you being so mean to me she asks you, but you won’t look her in the eye. Instead you ask your mom for an advance on your allowance now that all the chores are done, and with the money you get three more Taylor Swifts. When they arrive you make them do nothing but cardio and kickboxing training for weeks on end. And steroids. They look all sweaty and hard and sexy but, unlike some people, you know all about delayed gratification. You make your Taylor Swifts sleep in separate crates.
You call your best friend Tina and say wouldn’t it be great to have a Taylor Swift party? We could bring all our Taylor Swifts, drink Diet Pepsi and smoke pot. Tina says that sounds like fun; let’s do it this weekend, my parents will be gone all weekend.
Saturday, you let one of your pumped up quivering Taylor Swifts ring the doorbell and who answers but Taylor Swift. Come on in, we’re all by the pool. By the pool all of Tina’s Taylor Swifts are naked, getting tan, they all look so sweet and lazy. They’re drinking Diet Pepsi while Tina is lighting an apple bong. So, she says, passing you the apple, what shall we do with all these Taylor Swifts?
You look at her, she’s just glowing, you’ve never wanted to be with anyone else but her in your entire life. And there goes your plan to have all your Taylor Swifts beat the crap out of all her Taylor Swifts. Let’s go to your room, you tell her. There’s something I want to show you.
A little later, the Taylor Swifts smile as they hear the two of you. The one with wings stretches and practices her nightingale routine. She knows that one day the real Taylor Swift will see the videos she uploaded, and the videos will be so beautiful, so perfect, that the real Taylor Swift will send her limo driver to pick her up and take her to the real Taylor Swift’s tower in New York City, where at last she too will be loved.
***
Prompt inspired by “Taylor Swift”: Write a story about a character’s relationship to a celebrity or superhero, but make the REAL story about a domestic relationship that is having trouble. Feel free to take this into surreal territory.
Random prompt words: glow, stretch, tower, pizza, coffee mug, lips.
Recipient of a Wallace Stegner and NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of two collections of poetry, Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press; 2nd edition by Doubleback Books) as well as three Dusie Kollektiv chapbooks: Sorcery, Good Morning! and The Sound of Music. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize for short fiction, and his story “Goodwill” was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. His fiction can be found in such places as Western Humanities Review, X-Ray, Heavy Feather Review, The Pinch and The Offing. He teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts, where for ten years he edited the journal Eleven Eleven. Animal Children, his third book originally published by Nomadic Press in 2020, is a collection of prose poems and microfiction.
Oh, that final line is perfect indeed. There were earlier hints about that deep-down loneliness (with a manipulative and controlling side to it), which I think was great.
Not to take this in a political direction (heavens, no!), but it is impossible not to make a connection to this recent humorous piece about Taylor Swift published by McSweeney's:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-day-in-the-life-of-taylor-swift-as-imagined-by-right-wing-conspiracy-theorists
Isn't this the greatest! I read it when the issue first came out, never forgot it, and have been trying, mostly failing, to cross into that strange territory ever since.