Peter Ho Davies, "What You Know"

It is easy enough to predict how the media will respond when the next school shooting occurs: there will be interviews with distraught parents, indictments of confused and harried administrators, glimpses of tearful students placing cards and bouquets at hastily assembled memorials. These stock images succeed in providing a visual record of how people respond to such tragedies; what they can't do, however, is offer a more complex account of the emotions that are evoked when violence enters the schools and the media comes to town in search of a story. Peter Ho Davies, the author of two collections of short stories, The Ugliest House in the World (1998) and Equal Love (2000), uses fiction to explore this issue in his story, "What You Know," in which a teacher struggles to understand what motivated one of his students to go on a suicidal shooting spree.

Davies has said, "One of the things I enjoy about fiction is its slyness. The ability to slip things in. Working with historical material, where there's already some factual basis, accentuates that slyness for me. It spurs my imagination. I tend to find that I'll come up with two or three facts and then I'll be inspired to join the dots between them with my fictional imagination." In "What You Know," Davies starts with "two or three facts" about a schoolyard shooting and then using his imagination to tell a story that poses a series of pointed questions: What would you need to do to understand another person's motives? What does it take to make violence and suicide seem like appealing options? What is it that teachers know about their students? What can they know?

In her review of Equal Love, Jacqueline Carey has written that what makes Davies' stories remarkable is that they arise out of Davies' "profound respect for the power and vitality of human connections, however complicated. He captures these connections with economy and steely grace." Davies' own history is marked by the complicated connections he explores in his fiction. Born to Welsh and Chinese parents, Davies grew up in Britain before moving to the United States. He holds bachelor's degrees in both physics and English from the University of Manchester England, and a master's degree in creative writing from Boston University. Currently, Davies is a member of the faculty of the English department at the University of Michigan.

Davies, Peter Ho. "What You Know" first appeared in Harper's Magazine, January 2001, 82-89.
Digital image drawn from The Atlantic's web site.
Quotations from Jacqueline Carey's review of Equal Love, by Peter Ho Davies, "Ties that Grind," New York Times Book Review; New York; March 19, 2000; Katie Bolick, "On the Sly: An Interview with Peter Ho Davies." Atlantic Unbound. Dec. 16, 1998.

Links to Explore:

On the Sly: An Interview with Peter Ho Davies: this web site features Katie Bolick's 1998 interview with Peter Ho Davies about his motives and methods for writing.

Hope: Healing People Everywhere: this organization was formed by the families of the students and teachers who were killed in the shootings at Columbine High School.

School Violence and the Media: a brief written by Gene I. Maeroff for the Institute for Urban and Minority Education that documents how the media have elected to represent the problem of school violence.

The Associated Writing Project: this is the home page for the Associated Writing Project, an organization dedicated to assisting creative writers and creative writing programs.

Questions for Learning:

• In his interview with Katie Bolick, Peter Ho Davies says that he plays "fairly fast and loose" with the line separating history from fiction. Has he done this in "What You Know?" What is it, ultimately, that you come to know from reading fiction?

• At the end of "What You Know," the narrator finds himself reading through notes that students have left behind to memorialize those who died in the shooting at the high school where the narrator teachers. What would the narrator think about the Hope: Healing People Everywhere site? How would Davies react to this site? And what do you make of the site designers' efforts?
  
  

• In "What You Know," Davies offers us a fictional account of a school shooting and the response that a series of imagined characters had to this shooting. In School Violence and the Media, Maeroff explores how the news media (print, television, cable, and the Internet) have represented actual school shootings. What would Maeroff make of Davies' treatment of school violence? Does Davies' story have any policy implications? Does Maeroff's analysis require "creative imagination" to be understood?
  
  

• In "What You Know," the narrator offers a number of observations about what is involved in being a successful creative writer and he distinguishes himself, on a number of occasions, from his students because his relationship to the "rules" for writing creatively differs from theirs. How is the craft of writing represented on the The Associated Writing Project's web site? Does this organization share the narrator's view of what goes into the teaching of fiction and poetry? Do you think that one can be taught to write "creatively"?
  

Questions for Connecting:

• In "The Core of Art: Making Special," Ellen Dissanayake acknowledges that "[f]antasy and make-believe may well be important safety valves for modern humans mired in the discontents of civilization," but she believes that the urge to make art is more fundamental and has a much longer history. With Dissanayake's definition of art as "making special" in mind, consider whether or not Davies' story stands as an example of a kind of play or as the kind of art Dissanayake most values.

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