Anne Elliott | April 2022

Anne Elliott

Apprentice fiction writers are often told to create more danger on the page in order to pressure characters to make plot-moving decisions. But what if danger is the status quo for a person or her community? Throwing trouble at a character might assume a kind of privilege: for a character who doesn’t generally see it, trouble breaks status quo and becomes the occasion for story. But for a character who is always watchful or guarded, letting down that guard might be a more unusual—and transformative—narrative moment. What if the catalyst for risk, intimacy, creativity, expression, or decision-making is not danger, but sanctuary?

I have been worrying over a character of my own who is continually seeking sanctuary spaces, which prompted me to wonder about the role of sanctuary in narrative at large. What I discovered was that sanctuary is not only a staple of stories I love, but that its role is essential to their narrative design. The following is the fruit of that investigation.

ONE: THE TREMBLING IN THE CUP

I’ll start with a story familiar in creative writing classrooms.

“Safe, hell! Ain’t no place safe for kids, nor nobody.” These are the words of the narrator’s father in James Baldwin’s iconic “Sonny’s Blues,”¹ a story that takes great pains to enumerate the ways the world is unsafe. We see the danger of violence and racism: the narrator’s uncle is killed by some drunken white men on a joyride. We see the alluring danger of the streets, of addiction, which leads to the incarceration of the narrator’s kid brother, Sonny. We see the danger of invisible microbes: polio kills the narrator’s toddler, Gracie. In Sonny’s words of condolence in a letter from prison, “trouble is the one thing that never does get stopped.”

And, as Baldwin understands so well, some trouble is subtler, as within a family system, where people like Sonny wind up having to mask who they really are. Even in the story’s opening, the narrator describes the child Sonny as having “great gentleness and privacy,” and later we witness why that privacy might be necessary. After their mother dies during Sonny’s adolescence, he moves in with the family of the narrator’s wife, Isabel, where they let Sonny play their piano. Says the narrator, “Well, I really don’t know how they stood it. Isabel finally confessed that it wasn’t like living with a person at all, it was like living with sound. And the sound didn’t make any sense to her.” Sonny skips school to hang out in Greenwich Village, angering Isabel’s mother, who accuses him of ingratitude. The narrator opines, “he could hardly help feeling that they had stripped him naked and were spitting on that nakedness. For he also had to see that his presence, that music, which was life or death to him, had been torture for them and that they had endured it, not at all for his sake, but only for mine.” Sonny’s practice of what he loves is only seen as weird, irresponsible, other-than-human. And, despite some effort, the narrator doesn’t really understand him either, saying, after Sonny returns from the Navy: “I didn’t like the way he carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time.” Perhaps the biggest danger of all is the gulf between brothers. When you can’t trust your brother, can you trust anything at all?

Yet this story doesn’t end in a place that feels dangerous. After a series of unmaskings, troubles mirroring troubles, new troubles making troubles of the past more visible, as in the famous line: “My trouble made his real,” the story closes in a long scene in a space that feels more like a sanctuary, where Sonny has invited his brother in to meet his chosen family of artists.

Baldwin renders the safety of the nightclub through nonverbal action: the music Sonny makes with friends who love and respect him. The friends make it safe for Sonny to play, even though his hands are rusty after time away from the instrument. They make space for Sonny to improvise, and he struggles until he hits his stride in a rendition of “Am I Blue.”

The narrator’s reaction is what signals sanctuary to me. He recognizes, finally, the spiritual power of what Sonny is doing.

Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life… Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now.

He sees in Sonny’s music an invitation. The mask of battle is temporarily released. And this music triggers grief in the narrator—for his mother, for his uncle, for his little girl. “I felt my own tears begin to rise,” he says. This swelling moment is alive with energy.

The narrator sends a Scotch and milk to Sonny on the stage—the drink to soothe a boy mixed with the drink to soothe a man—and this drink is the last thing the story shows us:

He didn’t seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother’s head like the very cup of trembling.

That last noun—trembling—is so skewed, and that definite article—the cup—so precise. All the story’s trouble is contained in that phrase. I thought I knew this story well, but in my recent obsession with sanctuary, I discovered the ending’s poetry is borrowed from the King James Bible, Isaiah 51: “Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling.”² By referencing scripture, Baldwin signals that this nightclub is not just safe, but sacred. A place where Sonny can be Sonny is a holy thing. Sanctuary doesn’t make trouble go away—but it does help you to deal with trouble, to reckon with it emotionally, to burn trouble into the language of the blues.

Or into the language of story. We apprentices of fiction all know that trouble is not just “the one thing that never does get stopped.” It’s the fiber of our craft. It’s what gives a story its weight and movement. We don’t want our characters to have easy, boring lives. But I am increasingly curious about the choice to counterweight a story’s trouble or danger or suffering with sanctuary. What narrative function does sanctuary serve? And why—at least for this reader—are scenes of sanctuary, like the nightclub scene in “Sonny’s Blues,” the ones that swell and resonate the most?

TWO: A LATE CRIER

I often think about a conversation I had before a writing class I taught in Maine at Portland Adult Ed, where I worked with a handful of so-called “New Mainers,” recent refugees from war zones seeking asylum in the immigrant communities here. Most of these refugees had wild stories of survival, involving stealth, endurance, heroism, loss, and trauma. One woman—a bright, funny young person who had come from the Congo via Europe, then South America, then crossed the US border into Texas, then finally landed in Maine—said something that haunts me: “Well, I’m a late crier.” I asked her to elaborate. She told me that all along her journey, even after reuniting with her father in Texas, she didn’t cry. Her emotions were hard to access. She wasn’t holding it in—the tears just weren’t there. But then, randomly, on a quiet, snowy day in Maine, months after the beginning of her long trek, surrounded only by silence, she suddenly found herself bawling for no reason.

We both knew she had a reason. But we didn’t discuss it. We agreed that a lot of people are “late criers.” I wondered if I am, or if my characters are. But this conversation got me thinking about the conditions that allowed her to cry. Maine isn’t an especially safe place, I suppose, but it is a quiet one. I confess that, since moving away from the chaos and stimulation of New York City, I have found myself in tears often, too, the way you do when it is quiet and private, and your thoughts have a moment to bloom.

This conversation led me to think about “On Humanity,” a TED Talk by Chris Abani.³ He talks about his mother, a British woman living in Nigeria, who managed to escape the Biafran conflict with five children and only the clothes on their backs. They made their way through refugee camps, finally landing at the Lisbon airport, where a stranger noticed them and suddenly opened her suitcase, offering her own clothes and toys to Abani’s mother and siblings. His mother broke down in tears for the first time since they had left Nigeria. Abani asks her later, Why there? Why at the Lisbon airport? Her answer: “You can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror, but the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you.”

I love this word: unstitch. I want to unstitch my characters. Does this mean I should try easing up on them? Some characters are stitched pretty tight. They have to be. Burying emotion is not just repression; it’s a matter of survival. Perhaps sanctuary—a moment of safety—is one way to allow the characters’ emotions to the surface. When you are in a constant state of watchfulness, of fight-or-flight, of problem-solving, when trouble is all you have, you don’t have a moment to come unstitched.

Our training as fiction writers is to pile on the trouble. But consider what happens when we pull it away for a moment. Like removing pressure from a wound: suddenly you can feel it throb.

THREE: ABLUTION

The two protagonists of Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West are driven from their home by armed conflict.⁴ Hamid establishes numerous dangers in the unnamed city where the story begins: areas controlled by insurgents, curtailed communications, loss of water and utilities, lack of information. Windows need to be blocked to keep stray bullets from spraying broken glass. Hamid’s first few chapters are about the escalation of this danger, and the remainder becomes about the natural human reaction: seeking safety. Leaving family behind, young lovers Saeed and Nadia buy passage through a mysterious portal, one of many leading to other continents and varying receptions. The novel follows their journey first to a refugee camp in Mykonos, then a settlement in London, then another in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the couple begins to put down roots again and rely less on each other for survival.

One of the dangers Hamid establishes early in the book is the prospect of moving through the world as an independent-thinking woman. In her home city, Nadia never leaves her apartment without a “conservative and virtually all-concealing black robe,” but her reason for it is more pragmatic than philosophical. When Saeed asks her why she wears it, though she is not religious, she replies, “So men don’t fuck with me.” The robe is nothing less than armor. She continues to wear it, even after they have fled the religious country of their origin.

So, if the armor defines Nadia, I begin to take note of the moments when she feels safe enough to remove it.

One of the portals leads them into a luxurious mansion in London, where refugees from other countries have also landed, equally disoriented, and are beginning to settle in. Danger is still everywhere, but this London mansion has a nice bathroom. And here, by herself, the dirty armor comes off:

…she went in and stripped, and observed her own body, leaner than she had ever seen it, and streaked with a grime mostly of her own biological creation, dried sweat and dead skin, and with hair in places from which she had always banished hair, and she thought her body looked like the body of an animal, a savage. The water pressure in the shower was magnificent, striking her flesh with real force, and scouring her clean. The heat was superb too, and she turned it up as high as she could stand, the heat going all the way into her bones, chilled from months of outdoor cold, and the bathroom filled up with steam like a forest in the mountains, scented with pine and lavender from the soaps she had found, a kind of heaven, with towels so plush and fine that when she at last emerged she felt like a princess using them, or at least like the daughter of a dictator who was willing to kill without mercy in order for his children to pamper themselves with cotton such as this, to feel this exquisite sensation on their naked stomachs and thighs, towels that felt as if they had never been used before and might never be used again.

In a few breathless sentences, Nadia transforms from “savage” to “princess,” luxuriating in this mountain fog so much that she doesn’t want to put her smelly clothes back on. For Nadia, sanctuary is found in solitude, in the body, in the senses. But Hamid uses the language of violence, from the water “striking her flesh” to the imagined dictator father. Looking at the way trouble has transformed her body is not easy. It’s a reckoning. What I learn from this scene is that sanctuary might be both beautiful and difficult. The difficulty is in the recognition of where you have been and how you have been harmed. The pause allows this recognition.

Nadia’s lingering in the bathroom worries Saeed, who urges her to hurry as he guards the door, but she resists long enough to wash her clothes.

What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered, and if necessary was worth a fight.

I am struck by how direct this narration is—this message is so important that we receive it in plain discourse. Sanctuary is no less than recognition of humanity. Claiming sanctuary as Nadia does by lingering in the bathroom—and being willing to fight for it—is a powerful recognition of one’s own humanity. It is an act of resistance.

I ask myself what narrative function this moment of sanctuary serves, beyond its philosophical argument about claiming one’s humanity in the midst of desperation. The bathing scene becomes a significant turn for this character. This cleansing reminds Nadia of who she is, reminds her not to let the demands for survival keep her from being herself. And, notably, this survival will include pushing back against the one person she can trust: her partner Saeed.

By offering Nadia—and his readers—this unexpected, temporary moment of sanctuary, Hamid deepens Nadia’s characterization and her individuation. The bath is a sanctuary unique to Nadia. It allows her a moment to come unstitched.

FOUR: THE ANNEX TO THE ANNEX

I recently found myself referencing Anne Frank in my fiction and decided to reread Susan Massotty’s translation of The Diary of a Young Girl.⁵ The danger for the people in this book is obvious: the Frank family, Jews living in Amsterdam, are hiding in a secret annex behind a business, waiting out what they think are the last days of WWII. For years, they keep quiet in the annex, sharing the space with two other households, studying independently, eating carefully to manage shortages, relying on trustworthy friends to bring them everything. The families were discovered and deported to camps just before Amsterdam was liberated, cutting off the journal abruptly. Anne did not survive to see the publication of her book, which was kept safe by one of her Dutch supporters, until her father—who miraculously survived—gave it to the world.

Obviously, the book is an important artifact of war, giving later generations a firsthand peek at one group’s system for survival. And, obviously, it is not fiction. But I find lessons in it for the fiction writer. The book is worth studying for its construction. I also found it a fitting work to read during the events of the last two years: large segments of our population suffer ongoing, reasonable fear of the state; families are cooped up for long periods, managing shortages, cutting their own hair (with mixed results), growing addicted to the news. Yet, although it is a secret place, I don’t think of Anne Frank’s annex as a sanctuary. Free expression is not possible. She can’t even cough. She is in constant conflict with her mother. All of the others make fun of her interest in celebrities. She has no access to friends her own age, no one she trusts to confide in. Her pals are still out in the world, and she is worried about them. The annex is a place where stakes are high, danger is constant, and this adolescent does not feel free to be herself: “It annoys me to be so dependent on the moods here,” she writes:

If I’m engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange. As you can see, I’m currently in the middle of a depression… This evening, when Bep was still here, the doorbell rang long and loud. I instantly turned white, my stomach churned, and my heart beat wildly—and all because I was afraid.

The annex is a place of tension, conflict, self-censorship, fear, and despondency. “Thank goodness the others notice nothing of my innermost feelings,” she confesses to her diary. Anne grows accustomed to masking herself around others.

The plot of the story—let’s call it that—turns on the shifts of feeling she has toward Peter van Daan (a pseudonym), the only nonrelated teen in the annex, whom she initially finds awkward and boring. He sleeps above Anne in the attic of the annex, where she goes during the day to find bits of time alone with her diary. “I take refuge in the attic,” she tells her diary. “When I’m there, or with you, I can be myself, at least for a little while.” Jealous of the privacy Peter has, Anne makes an arbitrary decision to approach him: “My longing for someone to talk to has become so unbearable that I somehow took it into my head to select Peter for this role.” (She’s hilarious. I just love her.) Her chase is fruitful; one summer evening, they finally have a serious talk as friends.

Anne sets up this meeting with an atmosphere of quiet magic, and here’s where it starts to feel like sanctuary:

He was standing on the left side of the open window, so I went over to the right side. It’s much easier to talk next to an open window in semidarkness than in broad daylight, and I think Peter felt the same way. We told each other so much, so very much, that I can’t repeat it all. With snippets of dialogue, Anne renders the essence of their first real, private conversation, in which they compare notes on their families:

At one point he asked, “You always give each other a good-night kiss, don’t you?”
“One? Dozens of them. You don’t, do you?”
“No, I’ve never really kissed anyone.”
“Not even on your birthday?”
“Yeah, on my birthday I have.”
We talked about how neither of us really trusts our parents, and how his parents love each other a great deal and wish he’d confide in them, but that he doesn’t want to.
How I cry my heart out in bed and he goes up to the loft and swears.

Anne’s evening trip into the attic becomes a ritual: the attic is the annex to the annex. She brings pillows up after dinner and sits with Peter. This room kept dark for invisibility’s sake becomes an emotional sanctuary, where no topic is off limits. They talk about sex, comparing notes about bodies and feelings. Soon, her heart beats wildly for a reason other than fear. Their friendship becomes a romance, largely rooted in pity, on Anne’s part:

Peter needs tenderness… for the first time he’s seen that even the biggest pests also have an inner self and a heart, and are transformed as soon as they’re alone with you… He’s never had a friend before, boy or girl.

Their mutual longing for intimacy blooms in the privacy of the attic, and when they leave the attic, they keep their sanctuary a secret.

But this sanctuary, as do many sanctuaries, proves temporary. We—and Anne—start to figure out that they aren’t very well matched. The only thing these two have in common is that they are teenagers, and they are stuck in this annex together, hiding from the Nazis.

Peter’s ambition is nowhere near hers. And she confesses this observation to her diary:

I know you’re wondering about Peter, aren’t you, Kit? It’s true, Peter loves me, not as a girlfriend but as a friend. His affection grows day by day, but some mysterious force is holding us back, and I don’t know what it is.

Kit, or Kitty, is Anne’s nickname for the diary. Almost all of this document is direct address to her imaginary friend, recipient of confessions, the only place where Anne truly has no reason to hold back. To Kitty, she lays bare her feelings about Peter:

He just doesn’t have a goal, plus he thinks he’s too stupid and inferior to ever achieve anything. Poor boy, he’s never known how it feels to make someone else happy, and I’m afraid I can’t teach him.

Their views on religion don’t mesh. His attention to gambling is distasteful. She loses interest before he does.

To Kitty, she is candid about her culpability, too:

I know very well that he was my conquest, and not the other way around. I created an image of him in my mind, pictured him as a quiet, sweet, sensitive boy badly in need of friendship and love! I needed to pour out my heart to a living person.

The verbal friendship is short-lived, replaced by the romantic intimacy of touch, which Anne finds initially thrilling, but ultimately unsatisfying.

I never broach the subjects I long to bring out into the open. I forced Peter, more than he realizes, to get close to me, and now he’s holding on for dear life. I honestly don’t see any effective way of shaking him off and getting him back on his own two feet.

Anne’s self-knowledge is admirable here, and I believe it is due to her time in that other sanctuary—the virtual one—her regular, ritual confession to Kitty, the only safe ear in her life. To Kitty, she says, “I know you’ll keep a secret, no matter what happens.” (That irony gives me chills—this beautiful book has been translated into over seventy languages.) Kitty, the diary-confidante, is the annex to the annex to the annex, the true sanctuary, where Anne can express her emotions and opinions naturally.

The physical danger of Anne’s time in the annex is a constant throughout the diary—it is the same danger faced by all of the others in hiding. But her emotional danger has a large, individualized, plot-like arc. It is a document of a person’s growth, not just a story about war and survival—underscoring Anne’s humanity and, by extension, the humanity of all people trying to survive genocide.

FIVE: SANCTUARY IN CONTEXT

I am aware of three common contexts for the word sanctuary.

The first: religious. A religious sanctuary is a consecrated space, such as a special part of a church or temple, designated for ritual. It often looks, sounds, or smells beautiful, triggering contemplation and emotion. Practitioners engage with the space in movements of the body: chanting, prostrating, kneeling, singing, making offerings to spirits. The beauty and engagement of the body calls practitioners back to the space to repeat the ritual.

The second: political. A political sanctuary is a space protected for vulnerable people, such as refugees, undocumented persons, or those who have lost the safety of home, often built in defiance of the government or culture at large. Recognizing vulnerability, especially in the context of tyranny or dehumanization, has long been a cornerstone of resistance.

The third: ecological. A nature sanctuary is designated for a vulnerable species, flora or fauna. The promise of this kind of sanctuary is to trust that nature knows what it is doing. It is a space designated specifically for wildness.

Ritual, resistance, wildness. All three of these things are elements of character. Perhaps building sanctuary in our stories allows these elements to come to the fore.

Let’s unpack “Sonny’s Blues” for these aspects of sanctuary. Ritual: Sonny’s jazz performance is call and response, prayer and amen. His body returns to the familiar, ritual movements of piano practice. Resistance: Sonny finds his tribe away from his family of origin, pushing back against propriety and religion, laying claim to his humanity despite those who might try to deny it. Wildness: an improvised performance is a wild thing. “Am I Blue” is anchored to the original song, but what Sonny does with it feels free. He and his chosen family are making freedom, pushing back against trouble, through the ritualized, resistant wildness of jazz. This sanctuary is not just about safety. Something bigger is happening here.

These three elements—ritual, resistance, wildness—are unique to character, too. In Sonny, they manifest in music. How do they manifest in your characters?

SIX: A SPACE FOR RISK

Let’s turn now to something a little newer: a single-story chapbook by Han Kang entitled Europa, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith.⁶

Europa is narrated by a salaryman who has just been discharged from his military service. He has had a long friendship with a woman called In-ah, who has been discharged from an unhappy marriage with a monetary settlement, hinting at some wrongdoing by her husband or his family. The narrator has never been married, and he has held a torch for In-ah for many years. She cooked things for him during her marriage but has since renounced the kitchen entirely. Says the narrator, “Every single thing In-ah made was delicious, yet in that period of her life, which I now think of as the ‘cooking years,’ she always looked somewhat unhappy, so I have no desire to taste her food again.” His desire is for her happiness. He loves her but has not confessed it.

The two of them eat breakfast at a cafe in Seoul, then automatically go back to her sparsely furnished apartment, showing a level of trust between them. Says the narrator, “I step through the door behind her into the flat whose stretched, fleshless layout reminds me of In-ah herself.” Inside, he notices how her private things are not visible from the front door: the single bed, the dresser, the makeup stand. In-ah is a cautious person. But something catches his eye, hanging in the open, “a deep green knitted dress I haven’t seen before.” At his urging, In-ah tries it on for him, and he laughs: “It looks like a sack on you.”

The dress triggers a memory for him of listening to In-ah sing a song about one of Jupiter’s moons, “Frozen Europa.” As he puts it, “It’s untrue to say that was the moment I fell in love with In-ah. When her song suddenly finished, I simply recognized the intense craving that had oppressed me for the past twenty years. Her song slid the bolt from across my heart and my craving stepped out into that dark, run-down alley to look me straight in the eye.”

What suddenly becomes clear to the reader is that his attention to her clothing runs deep. And in the sanctuary of his dear friend’s apartment, the two of them engage in an experiment. The pace is expansive; the moment alive with wildness, physicality, and intimacy:

“Close your eyes.”
I obey In-ah’s command. Black eyeliner moves quietly over the rims of my eyelids.
“Open them.”
I gaze at the face in the mirror, familiar and yet not so as it looks back at me.
“Close them again.”
In-ah rubs the eyeshadow stick over the fleshy part of my eyelids, then uses her index finger to softly blend the colour up towards my brows.
“I’ll do the lashes.”
“You want to?”
In-ah hands me the mascara. Slowly, I roll the brush up my lashes. I study them in the mirror, now thicker, a deeper black.
“You want to do the lips as well?”
I reach out to take the palette. In-ah steps back from the makeup stand to sit on the bed. Having given me her new dress to wear, she is in a white tracksuit. Her sallow skin looks more pallid than it did against the green.
After carefully colouring my lips, I stand in front of the full-length mirror. Black stockings conceal the hair on my thighs and calves, a pale-coloured scarf lies against the deep green dress, and I stand with my hands clasped neatly in front. I look like an air stewardess.
The narrator (who refers to himself as male, so I use he pronouns) doesn’t just want to wear her clothing, doesn’t just want to wear her makeup—he wants to try applying the makeup himself, risking a clumsy mess. In her sparse apartment, coaching in her tracksuit, In-ah provides a safe space for her dear friend to experiment with identity.

This experiment turns into a ritual, the practice of going to In-ah’s house, getting dressed up, then going out into the city to walk. In-ah wears comfortable training shoes; the narrator wears a pair of high heels he has purchased for himself—again, risking clumsiness on the rough pavement—and a wig. He pauses to look at feminine finery in shop windows. “In-ah enjoys looking at them with me, but they don’t send her into the same ecstasy. You shouldn’t trust that stuff, she said to me once.” The walks become an exercise in flexing the identity, toughening up, walking right into the bustle of the night metropolis.

The most important thing these night-time strolls teach me is how to endure the stares. I walk forwards, never responding to what I sense in their eyes: preconception, hatred, contempt, fear, some frank and others furtive. If I encounter a stare which seems especially intense, In-ah might then speak to me, link arms with me or take my hand, looking up at me with her smiling eyes.

The streets are quite dangerous, and the moments spent in the sanctuary of the apartment, getting ready for this trouble, are necessary to the story. The risk the narrator takes in private makes the public risk possible. And the generous feeling between these characters, which In-ah refers to as sisterhood, is empowering in its recognition of human vulnerability. In-ah opens her home to make room for the wildness and resistance of the narrator, expressed, finally, through the ritual of their night walks through Seoul.

SEVEN: SOME LOOSE RULES

You may be seeing the same pattern I do in the examples I have chosen: stories of migration, war, coming of age, individuation, finding and forging identity—maybe these kinds of stories benefit especially from sanctuary scenes, but maybe they are just the kind of stories I read. I did recognize patterns, however, in the execution of compelling sanctuary scenes, prompting me to define sanctuary in the context of fiction with a few loose rules.

1. A sanctuary is separate from the character’s home, particularly the home of origin.
    If the character takes sanctuary for granted, the story is likely to be inert and lacking in conflict. More dynamic narrative happens when the character finds or forges this sanctuary. Sonny’s sanctuary is hard-won, for example, through years of practice and collaboration. Nadia’s sanctuary is an accidental discovery, allowing surprise. Not only are both sanctuaries characterizing, they also show evolution or liberation of character, making them essential to the narrative design.

2. A sanctuary is removed from a danger that is otherwise constant in the character’s life.
    I believe if the character needs the sanctuary and if they have given up hope in the possibility, then when sanctuary arrives, it charges the scene with earned feeling. It’s a release. It feels like grace in the Christian lingo. The danger outside can be mortal, or it can be emotional. For example, I would hold that, in “Sonny’s Blues,” despite the real mortal danger all around, the story’s primary dramatic danger is emotional. Sonny’s humanity is not fully recognized yet by his family. Finding sanctuary gives this story of brothers its shape.

3. A sanctuary is a place where the character can experience emotions naturally.
    Again, nature knows what it is doing. Natural human emotions are complicated and not always logical. Sanctuary allows this complexity. The narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” celebrates this complexity in his emotional moment at the nightclub, gratitude and grief rising at the same time.

4. A sanctuary is a place where the masks and armor of everyday life can be removed.
    This is true for a guarded, watchful character like Nadia in Exit West, but it might also be true for a character who is the class clown, who always needs to perform a self, like Anne Frank. To watch such a character feel safe enough to put aside that performed self is disarming for the reader.

5. A sanctuary is a place where creativity, epiphany, intimacy, or risk-taking is possible.
    For me, these are the most exciting moments of sanctuary, the ones that swell with resonance: when characters try something they ordinarily would not. Applying makeup. Confessing a secret. Touching another person. These narrative moments are life-changing, which is the essence of plot.

6. A sanctuary is fortified by rituals, objects, or other things the character values spiritually.
   The ritual of a city walk, or a private chat, or playing music with friends, or bathing alone with fragrant soap. Ritual indicates that the sanctuary provides a cleansing, or an emotional inoculation from the world at large. The individual nature of ritual illuminates character, of course, and shared ritual builds relationships between characters. All of the above is story gold.

7. A sanctuary (perhaps most importantly) is temporary.
    I see the real narrative power of a sanctuary after the character leaves it: she is not the same person she was went she went in. Again, if the beginning, middle, and end of a story all take place in a stable sanctuary, then you’ve got no trouble, so you’ve got no story.

Despite all of my obsession with sanctuary, I am still a believer in trouble as the fiber of fiction. Maybe I’m just indoctrinated. But the power of sanctuary, to me, is in its ability to push against trouble. It creates resistance in the story, which is a kind of electricity. Injecting sanctuary in an otherwise troubled life is itself creating narrative conflict: danger vs. safety.

It makes a story more dynamic, not less.

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Anne Elliott has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and is the author of The Artstars: Stories and The Beginning of the End of the Beginning. Her short fiction can be found in many literary reviews. Elliott teaches online fiction workshops, and she has been awarded support from the Story Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Normal School, Table 4 Writer’s Foundation, and the Bridport Prize.

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Notes