A Most Serendipitous Snap: How One Photograph Led to an Acclaimed Story
by Ronald Zajac
Editor’s note: Zajac was a finalist in the Blank Spaces 2021 Fiction Anthology Contest. The story he refers to in this article is published in The Things We Leave Behind, released by Chicken House Press on April 30, 2022.
Serendipity is the phenomenon of discovering something great by chance. It’s the one word that best describes my experience of the 2021 Blank Spaces 50/50 contest, and the anthology it produced: The Things We Leave Behind.
This anthology is home to some amazing fiction, encompassing the Canadian psyche even when the action is in Colombia, and encompassing humanity even when the protagonist happens to be canine or supernatural. I am humbled to find my story among these – humbled enough to consider what kind of magic allowed me to land in such good company.
In a word, serendipity.
In this case it began a few years back with a most serendipitous snap.
Workers had been slowly tearing down a deconsecrated Anglican church in my small city to make way for a multi-unit dwelling. In my day job as a journalist, I’m used to taking feature photos that stand alone in the paper, illustrating moments in the life of our community. For months, the slow work of taking down that former church became a reliable source of stand-alone photos that would interest the many readers who had once worshipped there, or gathered for other reasons in its spacious hall.
On one of my trips down to this demolition site I arrived just before the excavator swept a flattened piano off the edge of what remained either of the church’s sanctuary or community hall. A battered frame, with white-and-black keys twisted into a perversely bumpy road, slid to the ground in a clash of dust and debris; I snapped it in mid-fall. Judging this image, after the fact, as a bit too much for the paper that particular day, I posted it on my Facebook feed instead. I titled it “The day the music died.”
Ronald’s original photograph
But it couldn’t stop there. That piano sliding to an undeserved end was a story. What magic did it create in its time?
The answer came to me with a second serendipitous discovery, a short, understated, quietly sentimental piece by Maurice Ravel: “Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn.” Ravel wrote this small solo-piano piece on commission in 1909, to commemorate the centennial of Franz Joseph Haydn’s passing. The piece translates the letters of Haydn’s name, with some modification, into musical notes. To me it evoked something entirely different: The image of a beautiful young woman playing elegantly on the piano, a woman who existed not in the reality of the present, but in the idealized form of a sentimental memory, returning to someone older in a moment of rare grace.
A story had to be told about someone responsible for destroying that piano, and the guilt he might feel at seeing that happen as he remembered someone who once played it.
It started as a flash fiction piece, titled the same as the Facebook post, though the Don McLean reference really didn’t fit. Not quite pleased with how it turned out, I let it sit on my hard drive for a while.
Then came the third moment of serendipity: A short story contest with the theme “The Things We Leave Behind.”
That flattened piano, brushed aside with mechanical indifference by a giant metal hand, had clearly been left behind, but the contest theme made me think of what else was left behind with it: A love interest, a Rosary, a creative path not taken, friendships… All of that led to the despair of someone seeking things left behind, knowing there is no hope of recovering them. Soon flash fiction became short fiction.
In 2021 serendipity proved a generous muse; its fourth visit happened when, on a whim, I responded to editor Alanna Rusnak’s compliments on my story by sending her an email with the photo that started it all. Serendipity is how that image ended up on the cover of the anthology.
If, like me, you believe in a higher power, you might be tempted to think of serendipity as the servant of Providence. But I tend to think of it as one of Providence’s jokes, a kind of divine trick that gets you what you need, but in an oblique way to keep you humble. And curious...
“Whether or not coincidences exist could be the subject of another fiction contest. But either way, serendipity responds to persistence. Fortuitous discoveries have a way of happening more often to those who set out repeatedly to discover things – even if they set out with different discoveries in mind.”
And so you keep looking, taking as many pictures as you can, listening to the music that calls to the soul, and remaining open to the Fifth Serendipitous Mystery that could be waiting beyond the next snap.
To support Ronald’s writing and to read the rest of his story — “Five Sorrowful Mysteries” — purchase your copy of The Things We Leave Behind from the CHP bookstore. A Kindle version is available through Amazon and a KOBO version is available through the Kobo store.
Interested in the 2022 Anthology Contest? Learn more HERE.
*this post contains Amazon links - any purchases made through these links returns ad dollars to Chicken House Press
You can listen to Ronald explain a little more about the photo in this clip from the winner reveal event. (Beginning at 59:34)
