the lowercase

In Trying Too Hard, one of the short stories in Red: Several marvelous, sensational, absurd, visionary, peculiar, unthinkable, wicked and totally untrue stories, Rebecca Gale writes:

I’d seen Cal in the philosophy library before, bent over a book, scribbling into notepads. But I didn’t actually meet Cal until my first semester of sophomore year, a time I was contemplating studying abroad. I had visions of myself sitting at the Sorbonne, embracing French culture with an effortless nonchalance that would give me a sense of structure to my day. I would not be one of the “drunk Americans” that I’d heard traipsed across Europe, backpacking in the Alps and getting high in Amsterdam. 

We asked if she’d tell us a little bit about what went into writing that passage: “I wanted to give the main character the option to explore a life outside of her own. For a college student, I felt that would be studying abroad. I liked the idea that the character would project her own image of something exotic and different as being in a different country. Yet she goes even farther and wants to be different from the “drunk Americans” she references. 

“This was a chance to foreshadow what else the characters might want to escape from.”