Back Story: Tip Your Waiters by AJ Pearson-VanderBroek
“Tip Your Waiters” stemmed from an actual experience about three years ago. I was visiting my hometown to see family and we went out to eat at our favorite Chinese restaurant. We were immediately laughing and joking with the waiter. When he was away the waitress, who knew that the people who had just left never tipped, slipped money into the napkins on the table. When the waiter discovered the tip, he was ecstatic. We left that night and I never found out the waiter’s or waitress’s names, and I never saw them again. I thought the incident was a perfect story in itself, but it morphed into a sort of memoir-fiction. I used the experience for the main action but incorporated all the wonderful imagery and sensual details that the restaurant offered, with ideas of isolation, anonymity, and how a person’s behavior affects other people. It was interesting to reflect upon such a seemingly simple incident and transform it into a somewhat mysterious story that not even I have all the answers to.
AJ Pearson-VanderBroek recently graduated with a B.S. in language arts. Her work has been published at Rose & Thorn Journal, Anatomy, The Fertile Source, Breath and Shadow Magazine, The Legendary, and has appeared several times at Short, Fast, and Deadly. Her poetry will be included in The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets set for release in 2012 by The Backwaters Press. Visit her blog or send questions & comments her way to ajpvb@hotmail.com. Read "Tip Your Waiters" in the summer issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.
"It was interesting to reflect upon such a seemingly simple incident and transform it into a somewhat mysterious story that not even I have all the answers to."
I love what you say here. I think it sums up why we write and how we write perfectly. Some small thing can spark the imagination and characters develop and emotions and relationships ... a strange subconscious process that, I think, works best with mystery. I love not knowing where something will take me and letting that magic work.
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