An Interview with Robert Glick, Author of Two Californias

Robert Glick is an Associate Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing, electronic literature, and the occasional course on zombies. His work has won competitions from The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Diagram, Summer Literary Seminars, and New Ohio Review; other stories have been published in the Masters Review, Denver Quarterly, and Gettysburg Review. His first collection, Two Californias, was published by C&R Press in 2019.

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Kristina Marie Darling:  Your latest book, Two Californias, was recently launched by C&R Press.  What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?  

First, thanks for reading! There are so many great books out right now. I hope you find something meaningful and pleasurable in these pages. I hope that the stories don't land too neatly—I'm one who wants a bit of visible messiness. Making treasure from trash, so to speak. 

Speaking as a native Californian, the book is less about California (though all the stories take place there) than it is about, through variation, collapsing overly simplistic boundaries—north and south, etc. While by no means autobiographical, it is more personal than I had originally realized, its spotlights drawn to the unorthodox, sometimes funny, often diversionary ways we deal with loss.

KMD:  What drew you to C&R Press for this particular project?  

They liked the book! It's so important for a press, with the complexities of media economies, to have your back, to support you and the work. I liked C&R's catalogue, their design choices, and the ways in which they wanted to collaborate. It felt ethically as well as aesthetically right, and I'm very grateful to Andrew Sullivan, John Gosslee, and the entire team.

KMD: Your fiction makes innovative use of white space, interruption, and rupture.  What does silence make possible for you as a storyteller?  

Everything. Can noise exist without silence? 

From the standpoint of lineage, the influence of white space came to me from Marguerite Duras, especially the way her blocks of text just sort of hang in air, smoke rings of meanings. For me, silence (and its physical analog, white space) is material, metaphor, tempo. Most of my stories are written modularly, with gaps, often without linear transitions, notated by white space. The reader enters this open space (well, this space is always there, but in Two Californias, it's foregrounded and encouraged) to think, to pause, to insert their consciousness/imaginations. 

The silence also reminds us that the writing, the words, the syntax: nothing but one n/mote, pointing to the more infinite possibilities. The book is not fully closed, can never be fully closed (though one might try). While white space isn't exactly an iceberg, it nonetheless points to everything unsaid. 

KMD:  In addition to your achievements in fiction, you are an accomplished educator. What has teaching opened up within your creative practice?  

Lately, teaching has taught me about the openness and possibility of process. We do a lot of collaborative brainstorming: what could happen in this situation? In what ways can X connect to Y? Writing, for me, represents what Barthes calls a "tissue of citations"—a network of meanings. In this respect, and without dismissing craft, I think about teaching as a means to work with students to be brave and critical in building their own networks. Working with the students has reinforced my own desire to slow down when writing, to pursue possibilities that aren't immediately obvious to me. Then I sneak on to campus late at night, when the classrooms are empty, to make use of the white boards :.)

KMD:  With the recent launch of Two Californias, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?  

I'm on sabbatical(!), so mostly I'm holed up here in Rochester, waiting for the deer to cross the backyard, finishing up The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane. In the short run, I'll be doing a reading/workshop at the wonderful Writers & Books here in Rochester, followed by what I'm sure will be a fabulous University of Utah reading at AWP in San Antonio. Then I head off to the MacDowell Colony in March and April, where I'll visit the oracle each day, and revel in thermoses of soup. I finish off the semester working with the smart, engaged students at Hobart and Smith College in Geneva. 

KMD:  What are you currently working on? What’s next?  

I'm finishing a hybrid print/digital novel called The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane—it should go to agents by the end of the year. 

Set in Kansas City during the 2016 presidential election race, Paradox traces the unorthodox pathways we take through individual grief, collective trauma, and social awareness. After a miscarriage, Grace, a 40-year-old anesthesiologist, must decide whether she wants to have another child, weighing her own desires and her growing political awareness against the constricting biases of suburban life. Her husband Chuck urgently wants to be a father once again. While he waits for Grace to make up her mind, he falls prey to his self-destructive impulses; his imaginary friend, whom he calls The Reckless, forces him to steal a rare, expensive model of Wonder Woman’s airplane. Meanwhile, their two teenagers stumble into dangerous intrigues with Bosnian art saboteurs and rapture-obsessed veterinarians. 

The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane is written as a set of discrete, interlocking sections. Family members and minor characters contribute their distinct voices to the collective narration. The novel also contains non-diegetic chapters, including an MFA thesis in art history (with performative scores) and characters' own creative writings (such as an imagined history of a mysteriously disappeared grandparent). As a general thematic, the novel explores versions of visibility and invisibility (technical, psychological, linguistic) exemplified by the figure of Wonder Woman’s airplane, which, in drawings and animations, requires white lines to make visible the boundaries of the plane’s invisibility. In line with my artistic vision, each section attempts to intensify the emotional and intellectual power of the novel by expressing character-based story through innovative forms of language, voice, and syntax.

Chapters of Paradox have won the Summer Literary Seminars Center for Fiction Prize and the New Ohio Review Contest in Fiction. Other chapters have been published in The Masters Review Anthology. You can read online chapters at The Collagist and The Los Angeles Review. 

While Paradox will primarily take shape in the print universe, some sections of the novel will only be available in digital form (beta).

Deceptively Understated: A Review of Sybil Baker’s While You Were Gone

While You Were Gone follows the lives of three sisters over a period of 15 years, from 1995 to 2010. It is, more than the history of a family, a portrait of adulthood in general. The drama is primarily domestic and psychological: there are no earth-shattering events, no dramatic plot twists. We are witnessing the regular lives of three normal, unremarkable people unfold gently, punctuated by all the ordinary milestones – marriages, births, deaths, break-ups, career changes. Throughout all this, adulthood is depicted as a quiet, understated process of slowly letting go of the dreams of youth, at times painful and at times peaceful.

The middle sister, Shannon, opens the novel as a teenager with grand ambitions. She wants nothing more than to go to college and escape life in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which she sees as leading inevitably to mediocrity and failure. Out there, she imagines, revolutions are brewing, social changes are waiting to be documented. But Shannon’s youthful dream of “changing the world” fades little by little: the job that was to be her springboard towards a career in journalism turns out to be dead-end; an unenthusiastic marriage proves unable to measure up with the idealized image she has formed of Ben, her old crush from college. Almost unnoticeably, every small failure results in one goal adjustment after the other, until Shannon’s aspirations, turned solidly domestic and middle-class, bear no resemblance to the idealistic dreams she started out with: “She no longer dreamed of that kind of life. She wanted love, and, yes, a child, but with a proper husband, and a job that she enjoyed.”

In contrast with Shannon, the youngest sister, Paige, seems to be living the dream – at least for a while. She writes music, goes on tours with her band, and is apparently on her slow but steady way to fame, all while living the life of the quintessential rock star: drugs, drinking, partying and multiple short-lived affairs with anonymous women. But when she is fired from her band, she has no choice but to return to her hometown. Here she meets an extremely talented but reclusive musician who refuses to record his songs and wishes to die in obscurity; his music, he believes, is only alive when he performs it. This causes Paige to have her own epiphany, one of the fine moments in the book where a personal truth expands beyond the limits of the psychological, reaching cosmic dimensions:

Was that what she was afraid of, dying in obscurity? He was right: sooner or later, everyone did. One day even earth would end. One day everything and everyone would be forgotten. Why did it matter one way or the other what her—or even her band’s—brief spot on the world amounted to? Only moments like this mattered, and they would be secret and unknowable to everyone except her and Billy.

Claire has always been the responsible one. She cared for her mother as she was dying and then took on a parental role for her younger sisters; she married early, had two children, and crafted a successful career for herself, all exactly as planned. The problem is that after years of being the person who has done everything by the book, she no longer knows who she is outside her roles – mother, daughter, worker. She somewhat inexplicably starts an affair with a young intern at her company. It is in the intensity of feeling that he causes in her that she finds what she thinks is a kind of re-encounter with her own self, unmediated by roles and responsibilities and domestic life:

…now she knew there was something unnamable, unseen. It was not the accretion of days, the small moments people claimed that mattered, it was not the daily patterns that varied so little from human to human. It was not life. It was not death. It was a force of energy that made those things feel small and sad and ordinary. It wasn’t Joseph even, it was what Joseph had brought her, what she was seeking.

Without giving away too much of the plot, all members of the family carry secrets. But the function of the secrets is not so much to create narrative tension as it is to further our understanding of the characters’ psychologies. Family, for all three sisters, is where they come for comfort, the place they inevitably return to as their life aspirations turn out to be not what they expected, yet it also represents the locus where the individual self is in danger of losing its distinctness from others. For all the characters, secrets, benign or not, symbolize their attempts at carving up a space that is only their own.

The book’s writing style is as deceptively understated as its plot. It is in the subtle depiction of change and evolution that Baker excels. A sentence or a paragraph can cover weeks or months, depicting small, seemingly insignificant actions which add up little by little into something greater that can only be fully grasped once the book is finished. The structure of the novel is just as carefully crafted. Time is measured out from one birthday of the three sisters’ father to the next. In the first three quarters of the book the narration moves slowly between birthdays; after the father’s death, time is compressed, the birthdays succeeding each other at shorter and shorter distances and losing their significance as a marker of time in the sisters’ minds. This is both a reflection of how time seems to pass faster as one gets older, and a bittersweet manifestation of how all characters have grown and let go of the past.

What is missing from While You Were Gone is a broader awareness of the social and historical environment in which the three sisters live and of the way it affects their lives. Here and there, short passages tantalizingly give us glimpses into what the novel might have been. Shannon’s dream of being an award-winning journalist fades gradually because she is “born in the wrong era”: no grand revolutions for her to document, printed press dwindling away with the rise of the Internet. The novel is populated with places heavy with the history of the Old South, with sites of lynchings and Civil War battles, with intricate family trees which reach out to the time of the plantations, but this setting does little more than providing the background for the family drama. Claire’s attempt to reconcile her motherhood with her role as a career woman occasion some meditations on the 1990s’ feminist dream of “having it all”, while Shannon’s visit to a fundamentalist Christian dentist briefly throws her into an inner monologue on privilege and difference which functions to reveal her general apathy on the issues more than it does to make any specific statement about them.

Ultimately, everything converges back into the consciousness of the characters. In one of the most poignant moments of the book, Claire, in a desperate state, seeks refuge in the cemetery. This is a place where the ancestors of her family are buried, which carries the graves of lynchers and Confederate soldiers. She has, for a brief moment, the sense that her entire known world is weeping with her: “Can’t you hear them all weeping? […] All the dead people. Soldiers, Indians, slaves. They’re all here beneath us.” But this moment represents the climax of a personal crisis, a defining point of Claire’s trajectory as a character — the weight of history is used as a device for emphasizing the dimension of Claire’s sorrow, not the other way around.

But despite all this, the relatively confined world of While You Were Gone never feels claustrophobic. Although made up of mostly mundane events, the arcs of all three sisters are gripping and even suspenseful as the reader wonders whether any of them will be able to successfully negotiate a workable path between their ideals and the reality of the world they live in. The book will resonate deeply with anyone who’s tried to navigate through adulthood, changing expectations, failures and disappointments; indeed, I would recommend it not only for the quality of its writing, but also for the cathartic effect that reading it can produce.

Sins of the Mothers: A Review of Laura Catherine Brown's Made by Mary

There is no happy ending to Laura Catherine Brown’s second and latest novel, Made By Mary, but rather an unsettling continuation after losses and distorted perceptions. This may not be readily apparent, as readers may sigh at the inevitable disappointments but assume triumphs in what remains and rises from the ashes of misplaced loyalties and intentions. We must decide if what is left augurs any hope or just a perpetuation of the misguided lineage of generations doomed to repeat mistakes and subsequent tragedies. Brown explores the classic dual desire to cling to the assumed support and security of our parents, particularly our mothers, and the need to separate and to become our own person in an ancient, perplexing conflict. Are there simply inherent flaws in the human condition that preclude us from escaping the entrapment of expectations and mutual, unhealthy dependencies? Or can we make conscious assessments and choices? Brown asks us to examine critical aspects of the mother/daughter relationship. The guilt and the responsibilities flow in both directions. She often treats serious situations, indeed life and death situations, with a subtle, perhaps even black humor. It stirs a hesitant smile within us, but there’s no hearty laughter in her astute observances of the foibles and problems that result from our inability to face truths and heal our wounds. These characters hold onto one another like pieces of a splintering life raft, and the consequences are frequently devastating.

Mary, a child of Woodstock and the sixties hippie generation, is mother to Annapurna Peace Moonlight, or Ann, as she prefers to call herself. Ann resists Mary’s values and influence every chance she gets. She responds to Mary’s open and often careless approach to life with strict, repressed attitudes and accusatory postures, much as Mary’s carefree life of avoidance responded to her own mother’s strict, repressive personality. Ann is struggling with her identity and sees motherhood as the answer to finding her value and her place in the world much as Mary once did. Born without a uterus, Ann already feels less of a woman and desperately wants a child. Right from the opening paragraph we see who she is, a pre-school teacher who merges with her little charges “…like crayons melting together in the sun.” The solace she assumes at the pre-school mirrors a desire to capture her own lost childhood. She’s out of touch with her deeper self and any accurate barometer of her own worth. Ann is a talented, gifted musician, but this is insufficient to satisfy her as she continues to measure her value against others and distorted, unrealistic standards. In one scene, Ann looks at her dog, McKenna, thinking to herself that his unconditional devotion is not enough, although “…his gaze is pure love.” It might be a subtler point, but it asks us to examine how we view love, what is “enough,” and if it matters where that love comes from. Is love only justified if we can wrest it from those who are unable to give it or are not even born yet?

Ann is married to Joel Solcombe, a musician and owner of his own construction company, who is struggling financially while building their dream house in upstate Sullivan County, New York. He and Ann are living in a trailer on the property until the house is completed. They both play in a band at local establishments, which is where they seem to derive most of their personal and creative satisfaction. Joel and Ann compose music together, which is symbolic of their true ability for mutual creation. Why wasn’t this inspired expression enough for them individually and in union with one another? Why was having children more of an affirmation of their creativity and existence?

Joel has issues with his own mother, Betty, a chain smoking, mean spirited woman, whose anger at her life and being abandoned by her husband is put upon her son, while she pins small remnants of hope on the prospect of having a grandchild. We learn that, “She would not permit Joel to live in ignorance of her unhappiness.” Joel vacillates between hatred and distain for his mother and trying to coddle up to any tidbit of emotion or concern she might offer. These feelings transfer to Ann in his desire to please her by doing anything and everything to help them achieve parenthood. Joel feels “duty-bound to Betty,” which causes him to suppress any negative feelings he has toward her and her behavior. We see how this translates into his relationship with his wife when he observes that Ann’s “contempt added to her beauty,” emphasizing how we are attracted to what we have not healed.

Joel is recognized as a talented musician and band leader but admits he hasn’t played in a while since their bass player had a child. We are shown early in the story that we sacrifice so much of our lives when we become parents. The questions Brown asks us to consider are deeply probative. How much are we meant to forfeit of our lives just to bring in another who will feel indebted to do the same? Are we simply fostering a lineage of obligation for others to fulfill us? What are our true motivations in becoming parents?

After a disastrous attempt at taking in a pregnant teenager, Jessica, with the anticipation of adopting her child, Joel and Ann find themselves embroiled in an in vitro surrogate mother situation with Mary. At age fifty and already overweight, Mary sees this as an opportunity to win Ann’s love and prove herself as a mother. She has no consideration for her own health and wellbeing in a desperate mission to prove her worth. Her litany of self-absorbed lovers, both male and female, illustrate her inability to take care of herself, and to accept her talents as a creative person in her own right. Mary feels it’s better to receive comfort from “someone who hurts you” rather than receive none at all.

It is not enough for Joel and Ann to express themselves as musicians and in their love for one another, and it is not enough for Mary to accept herself and her own gifts as a jewelry designer. In fact, she designs braided, intertwining wedding rings for Ann and Joel along with one for herself “…as if the three of them were married.” Here we see a prime example of misappropriation and intrusive interactions in co-dependent relationships. When Joel first meets Ann, he thinks he has finally found “…someone I can make happy.” He fails to realize that we are responsible for our own happiness. We can share that with someone else, but we can never make someone else happy. Huge resentments build among all the characters when they feel they are sacrificing themselves for others and are not fully appreciated for playing the role of victim in order to gain another’s love and attention. In their desperate struggles, they fail to see that this only leads to distain and anger from those whose approval they seek. It never ends well when we ingratiate ourselves to others by capitulating to their wants and desires at the expense of our own. We earn their respect and love when we honor ourselves as separate individuals with our own needs and aspirations. This may not coincide with accepted standards or a majority consensus, which is why we may need to leave those who do not accept us for who we are.

As Brown extends these issues in a larger context, she asks us to consider societal assumptions and traditions. Throughout the story we get a sense of what is expected or even obligatory from women: to revere our maternal forebears and to relish becoming mothers. Women who are unable to have children are pitied, and others become stigmatized for not wanting children at all. In order to have a baby, Ann works against all her natural instincts. She feels that “So much of her life occurred beyond her control.” That is because she has willingly relinquished control without recognizing it. Interestingly, in a book all about motherhood, no one seems particularly “motherly.” Mary refers to the children of her friend, America’s daughter Cassidy, as “rug rats,” Jessica states, “I hate kids,” and Cassidy tells Jessica that at least she “…has the wisdom to give them up.” Then later on Cassidy cries about America never loving her, and we see the way she treats her own daughter, Sky, when she observes Sky’s attempts at affection by stating, “It’s not love, it’s a survival tactic,” and that her own mother never loved anyone, “not even herself.” But they remain tethered to hopes of connection, just as dying soldiers do on the battlefield, who can’t escape that instinctual need to cry out for their mothers, as we do so often in desperate and needy instances. Jessica cries out for her mother during labor, not for Ann who has taken care of her for nine months. Mary does the same while she is in labor. Jessica’s mother rejects her, yet she shows up at the hospital for the birth and claims her daughter and her grandchild.

Ann has an unrealistic, dreamlike vision of what motherhood will be, how she’ll be different from all the others, especially Mary. Her vision of a baby becomes her personal salvation and a barometer of her worth. Yet how can she expect to love another when she is constantly so critical of herself? This is where transference of such feelings becomes dangerous and distorted. These characters live in the illusion that their will can manifest their desires. Ann sees herself as being able to “bend reality to her will” and convinces herself she is not afraid. This is deep denial, as we see nothing but fear in all of these characters. What they lack is an acceptance that we do live in a fearful and precarious world. This creates an inability to see oneself clearly and to connect with reality. It is why Mary feels better about herself “in fragments.” Most often the characters reinforce their illusions through the use of alcohol, drugs, and elaborate demonstrations that are supposed to invoke the powers of the mystical in finding answers. In another misguided instance, Ann thinks she has “lost her vigilance against misfortune,” and this undermines and jinxes her happiness. She gives away her power once again to a perceived outside force. These modalities offer escape instead of a grounding in reality. In a moment of lucidity, Ann sees beauty in simple things around her and asks herself, “You’re alive…isn’t that enough?” Unfortunately, she loses the opportunity to go deeper into that realization.

There’s a lot of New Age rituals, symbolism, and artifacts that strive to give meaning and supernatural credence to decisions and actions taken by the characters. There are communal conjuring circles, ceremonial offerings, and a lot of smoke and mirrors. Instead of relying on their own intuition to guide their paths, they seek affirmation in external signs, interpreting circumstances through the prism of their hopes and desires rather than being grounded in truth. Instead of offering clarity, it clouds their vision, and offers misguided confirmation of their choices. There’s a menstrual party that comes across as something falsely celebratory, as opposed to the mutual comfort of this monthly ritual as detailed so beautifully in Anita Diamant’s “The Red Tent.” There is a forced imposition of frantic festivities without acknowledging the mixed emotions and discomfort that accompany so much of the human condition. The hippie, New Age dictums, and actions of Mary and her cohorts seem disingenuous and desperate rather than affirmative. But all the spiritual babble, tokens, and totems never offer true solace or hide the fears that they strive to assuage so ardently. The characters lie and deceive one another time and again, something a symbolic piece of jewelry or sacred chant can’t mitigate. They can’t replace lost dreams, wishful thinking, or revisionist history, all places where these characters reside. Their memories are revised and cloudy. Joel recalls loving parents leaning over his bed when he was a child, an example of the supposed halcyon days we spend lifetimes trying to recreate when they actually never existed. It becomes “a memory of a memory.” But he continues to ask himself why he can “access the past so easily but never the future?” Mary’s insistence that Ann was born at Woodstock during the famous festival of the sixties is an attempt to escalate her own importance and infuse the birth with meaning. But it’s a lie. She knows it and Ann knows it. But she would rather live in a lie than accept the truth, and it destroys her life.

The tragic losses of this story illustrate the very selfish and misguided reasons so many people seek parenthood. So much of it is the result of what they never received from their own parents and imagine that, somehow, they’ll be able to correct and recover this in a child of their own. But without the necessary introspection and examination of their actions and desires, it begs a critical question: how many lives must be sacrificed to prove that another one has value? Of course, we can see how this plays out on a macro scale in global conflicts, battlefields, and even the horrors of genocide, just as it does on a micro level in our own private interactions and our interior landscapes.

Perhaps the book’s title gives us some of the best insights into its message. Made by Mary suggests something manufactured and less than organic. Mary feels she has “made” Ann and shouts, “…I can make another you,” as if birthing another human being will give her a second chance to correct mistakes that she has made with Ann. As Brown observes of Mary, “Genetically unable to back away from perceived disapproval, she filled it with herself.” She is in a constant mode of compensation for what she sees as her own shortcomings. This is when she resorts to magical potions and incantations in desperate attempts to fix things. We learn early on that Mary’s motives for carrying Ann’s baby are less than altruistic when she sees it as an opportunity to promote her jewelry business and to get attention.

As Ann succumbs more steadily throughout the story into Mary’s world of external, spiritual validations, her actions simply mirror her desire to align with her mother’s illusionary world. Ann sees moving forward as choosing “love and life, as Mary had done.” But it is difficult to see how Mary accomplished this. She never chose to carry Ann’s baby out of love but rather to affirm her value to Ann. And she didn’t choose life but sacrificed it.

Brown names sections of the book for the four elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire that span the years 1999 to 2000 and concludes with the section Spirit 2000. The elements are meant to help us locate our strengths and weaknesses in order to address them. Air represents intellect and intentions, earth links us to family and roots and is a grounding force, fire represents transformation and inner strength, and water is emotional release and intuitive connection. We don’t see any of these characters as particularly grounded and their mental capacities are distorted and unclear. There are moments of emotional release, but they don’t actually lead to intuitive power. The fire they experience is ultimately less than transformative. But perhaps this is Brown’s point, to show us what we miss when we choose not to see.

Made by Mary gives us tremendous insights not only into the feminine and maternal journeys but into human nature as a whole. It asks us to examine what we sacrifice for others and why; how we derail our own train by trying to hitch it to another. She asks us to examine the impetus behind our desire to create another human being when we feel our own humanity is insufficient. What does it mean to give life? To have life inside of you? Do we have no life if we do not bring another one into this world? What does it mean to live one’s own life? These are the critical questions she asks us to consider in a story that sometimes appears deceptively lighthearted on the surface. There’s a fine, delicate equivalence between outrageous humor and very serious subject matter. For the most part, Brown is successful in achieving that balance. Language is sometimes raw but is evocative and appropriately representative of certain situations. Her astute observations give depth and clarity about the misguided ways in which we interpret our own lives and sacrifice them at the altar of external acceptance and norms.

Brown shows us clearly that our fears of being forgotten and misunderstood, and our denial of the realities of death, are intense motivations behind our desire to procreate, and to live on through something we believe we have created. In truth, each soul has its own journey, and we are merely vessels in bringing them forth into the world. Creativity is not passed on through another but is an expression of the passion in each individual spirit. The consequences for characters in this story shows us that the burden of our own worth should never be put upon another. Whether we adapt or rebel, it’s only two sides of the same coin. We are still not individuals living in our own bodies and owning our own truth. We go back and forth between rejection and craving attachment. We become children again, the child inside of us who was raised deficiently and still seeks connection and approval. At times we might find it difficult to feel compassion for these characters. We become exasperated with their lack of self-reflection and their ability to deflect truth and honesty. If this angers us, it’s because we see these flaws in ourselves, which means Brown has been successful in prompting us to identify them in a very personal way.

If the reader isn’t mindful, the desire to find redemption in the losses suffered by the characters will overshadow the more crucial messages of the story. Brown has done a fine job in elucidating very pivotal issues if the reader mines the gold within. What happens when we choose family, or any other option, over truth? As Ann faces the future with her own daughter, we are left to decide what lessons she will take with her, or if she is doomed to repeat legacies of dysfunction. Rather than wrapping up her story in a neat package, Brown wisely leaves us with that question. Perhaps, the epigraph by W.B. Yeats at the beginning of the book sums it up most aptly: A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

On the Authority and Surrender of Writing a Novel: A Conversation with Laura Catherine Brown

Laura Catherine Brown is the author of two novels: Quickening (Random House, 2000), which was featured in Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers series, and Made by Mary (C&R Press, Spring 2018). Laura has taught writing at Manhattanville College, and her short stories have appeared in Monkey Bicycle, Tin House, and Paragraphiti, among others. She has attended residencies at Byrdcliffe, Djerassi, Millay Colony, Ragdale, Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Laura credits these residencies with allowing her the opportunity to complete her novels. Laura currently lives in New York City with her husband. She is writing her third novel.

Marni and Laura bridged the gap between Maine and New York City with a conversation that included Laura’s struggles and triumphs while writing Made by Mary, how she adds humor to gloom by putting the “fun” back in funeral, and finding a novel’s “secret center.”

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MB: I noticed you taught at Manhattanville College for two years. How do you find your writing life cohabiting with teaching writing?

LB: I loved teaching. I loved seeing students’ work evolve. I loved the classroom discussions and the vibe of Manhattanville. It was good for my writing life to be part of the community, to read and analyze stories and to talk about craft. The student work was almost always courageous. I had to constantly remind myself to heed my own advice about taking risks and overriding the inner critic. Self-criticism and perfectionism never fail to annihilate freshness in the work, and this was particularly obvious to me when I was teaching undergrads in creative writing and seeing how hard on themselves they were. But while I was teaching I was also working as a graphic designer, which made finding the time to write almost impossible.

MB: How does your graphic design work feed into your writing?

LB: I’m a visual person. I went to art school where I studied graphic design, and I’ve earned a living as a designer ever since.

As a designer, words are not my medium—it’s color, shape, layout, typography, concept. Most graphic designers I know are avid readers, so there’s crossover, in terms of literary interests.

Graphic design is collaborative, client-based and deadline-driven. Writing is solitary and can feel open-ended, so the two pursuits provide a nice balance.

I love designing book covers and book interiors, but I make my living doing mostly corporate design. In fact, I designed the cover and the interior of Made by Mary, which was a lot of fun. In terms of imagery in my written work, I think I’m always “seeing” my imaginary worlds and characters before any of the other senses kick in.

MB: I love that you designed your book’s cover. Circling back to teaching—because I know you teach yoga—I once had an advisor for teaching writing who said she simply couldn’t write on the days she taught because, and I’m paraphrasing, “As a teacher, I can’t be as stupid as I need to be as a writer.” I took that to mean: As a teacher she needed to have a sense of authority; whereas as a writer, she needed that authority to break down, so she could discover a story. Do you feel like you need to have a sense of authority, during your writing process?

LB: This is such an interesting question. I think it’s true that you need to be stupid and sensory, and free yourself from conceptualizing and analysis. Yet, authority seems necessary to me, in order to claim permission to tell the story. One of the people who read an early draft of Made by Mary described it as “mushy.” I interpreted this to mean it lacked a story-telling authority, and thus it lacked cohesion.

In life, you can’t stay on the sidelines. You have to take a stand. The same is true in writing. I needed as an author/narrator to state unequivocally: “This matters. Here’s why.” But I kept churning out scene after scene, somehow believing “the mattering” would reveal itself without my having to stake a claim and that if I just kept exploring stuff, the “story” would arise from the scenes.

If I’m brutally honest, I may have been living my life like that, too—with a passivity I rationalized, since so much seems beyond my control. I’ve learned that it’s important to set intentions, even if life presents obstacles, and even if intentions are not met. They can change, but it’s good to have a lodestar.

MB: What an insight—that your writing life can parallel your actual life, and authority in writing can lead to authority in life. I’d love to talk a bit more about that. What are some particular passages in Made By Mary that you recall really requiring your authority more than others?

LB: I think the Wiccan ritual scenes required giving myself permission to write, despite my fear that I didn’t know enough about Wicca. Fear is a great tool for abdicating responsibility and authority. I’ll never know enough about anything! Also, in general, I took many writing workshops because I desperately wanted someone to tell me how to shape my narrative, which seems crazy, but I was having so much trouble figuring it out on my own, so I hoped an “expert” could help. No one else can shape your narrative except you, the writer, the ultimate arbiter.

MB: What did you do to assert your authority in those passages?

LB: I barreled through the ritual scenes and revised endlessly. But I asserted the crucial authority when I finally completed a full draft. This took me a long time because I kept circling back to revise the beginning, getting lost in loops and tangents of self-doubt. Forcing a narrative forward, not knowing whether you’re leading to a dead end or a breakthrough, not knowing whether you’ll find gold or just get lost, this is a daunting and arduous and time-consuming task, and requires authority. It’s as if the writer has to be a resolute explorer at the mouth of a dark scary cave, shouting, “I’m going in!” You don’t know what you might find, you don’t know if it’ll be any good, but you have to go in and write it anyway.

MB: How did this authority in writing these scenes parallel authority you found in specific areas of your life?

LB: I think I’ve had trouble asserting my wants and desires, even to myself. I circle, I evade, I deny, I avoid. But writing the passages where all the characters are engaged in Wiccan rituals and, as the writer, inhabiting their desires and motives, freed me. Writing allowed me to recognize my own yearning, along with a wider recognition that we all have ongoing desires and agendas—it’s human. Above all, I wanted to finish the book and have it be the best book I could write, knowing it would be imperfect, and putting it out there anyway. Therapy helped a lot, too.

MB: In your website bio, there’s an interesting line: “Laura sees a common thread among the three pursuits that she’s most passionate about: writing, yoga and graphic design all require practice, dedication and constant, ongoing surrender.” I can imagine that common thread. But I’d love it if you wouldn’t mind elaborating on this idea of “constant surrender,” because I think I require it too as a writer. I’d love to know a little more about how “constant surrender” feeds into your writing process.

LB: There’s a yoga concept called “effortless effort” that I think applies to any creative or spiritual endeavor, or just life in general, no matter what you’re doing. For instance, in meditation or yoga, you have to show up on the cushion or mat—that’s your essential obligation. You strive for mastery, while simultaneously you have to accept fully where you are. I think writing and design are conceptually similar to yoga. They’re process-oriented and experiential, full of play and possibility. They have recognized forms (with infinite and ever-evolving variations). And we aspire toward mastery while having to accept where we are.

It’s paradoxical. Something is bound to happen, but it’s not entirely under your control, because the creative process simply isn’t controllable. That’s where the surrender comes in.

MB: What were some areas of Made by Mary that required surrender—were any curiously the same passages that required authority?

LB: The areas that required surrender were definitely connected to the areas that required authority, and they relate to the Wicca aspect. I knew from the start that these characters believed in a Goddess-centered animism. But at a certain point in the process, I realized that their belief system could not operate merely as a backdrop or group identity, it had to generate narrative movement and become much more real. In other words, magic had to happen. I resisted this for a long time. It felt like so much work! I didn’t know enough! Also, I had never intended to write a “supernatural novel.” But I surrendered because it became a narrative imperative.

MB: If a book were related to a child, growing, it seems the parent/writer would need to somehow be able to wield both authority and surrender with someone/something that has a will of its own but still needs guidance. Is this analogy a stretch?

LB: Not a stretch at all! I think you have to let the work surprise you, and you have to venture into the unknown, or it’s boring. Likewise, you have to allow your child to not be you, and to not be limited by who you think they are, or who you might want them to be. They are themselves, but you still have to usher them into the world.

MB: Made by Mary begins with an immediate sense of loss. The reader discovers quickly that the character “Ann” can’t have a child—and perhaps cannot adopt. Many stories stem from a problem that needs to be solved, of course, but can you talk a little bit about what inspired this work?

LB: The book arose from a story I’d read in a newspaper while waiting in line at the supermarket about a woman who gave birth to her own grandchild because her daughter didn’t have a uterus. It was a bare-bones tiny article that caught my eye, and I immediately began to fantasize: How would it feel for a daughter to need her mother in this way? And what if her mother was a dominating person? How would the father of that baby respond to the situation? I imagined this mother feeling like a goddess bestowing a gift. And the character of Mary appeared before me, fully formed. It was imperative that Ann exhaust all other options, otherwise she would never have agreed to the arrangement. Ann had to be at the end of her tether. But that plot rationale came later.

MB: Made by Mary has a strong comedic thread. I’m thinking of the character “Mary” with a smile on my face. She appears as a kind of New Age enthusiast who, though loving, is initially suspicious of her daughter’s desire for a child. There are so many ways to write about loss—and many leave out humor entirely; I’m thinking of Sylvia Plath on one end of the “serious” spectrum. How did you come to decide to add lightness to what could be considered an otherwise painful journey for a character trying and failing to have a child?

LB: I try to approach everything with humor. The saddest situations can sometimes give rise to the most hysterical hilarity. The line between laughing and crying can be porous.

Here’s a real-life example: Someone brought a dog to my father’s memorial, which was held in a small theater. And the dog trotted up onto the stage and took a shit while everyone was singing Amazing Grace. That was so funny we literally bent over in pain laughing so hard. But it was also very sad, because my father had died. We put the “fun” back in funeral. I think life is full of situations like this.

MB: Did any of your life experiences inspire Made by Mary?

LB: One of the challenges of [writing Made by Mary] was how invented it was, especially compared to my first novel, which I culled from my life. I realize I’m someone who needs to bring my life somehow into my fiction, or the text feels dead, like an empty exercise. The Catskills setting in Made by Mary is drawn directly from my past. As a teenager, I lived near the town of Bethel where the Woodstock Concert happened. Now, in the present day, there’s a beautiful concert venue there. But when I was in high school, there were empty fields surrounding a defunct dairy farm in a depressed upstate county. I mourned my fate at having been born too late and missed the crazy hippie era.

Also, my husband and I tried to have a child through IVF. It was very expensive and it ultimately failed. Nobody talks about how often it fails. It was many years ago, we’re both fine with being child-free, but those were some tough times.

MB: Was writing Made by Mary a useful way to process this experience in your life?

LB: Only in retrospect. The two processes (IVF, writing a novel) feel similar in that there’s a time-consuming slog toward what you desperately hope for (a pregnancy, a book); and you can ultimately fail at one or both of those endeavors. I’ve come to believe that failure is a good thing. It seems almost cliché to mention Samuel Beckett, but his famous quote from Worstward Ho is brilliant and, in my opinion, brimming with hope and perseverance. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

MB: Speaking of how reality does or doesn’t feed into your work, do you find the news these days too distracting? Or does it inspire you? Or even both?

LB: The news these days is so much stranger than fiction! Because I’m concerned with “ordinary” people, I have to push aside the endless chaos and drama, which is celebrity-based and reality-tv-star centered. But I also feel the urgency toward political activism and resistance. I don’t want to regret not having acted when I could have and should have. But interior lives matter more than ever, so I drag myself away from the news. I use an app called Self Control that lets me block sites.

MB: Have the residencies you have attended had a similar affect as Self Control—providing some relief from the hustle and bustle of daily life?

LB: I’m not sure I would have been able to complete either of my novels without the incredible gift of artist residencies.

Most residencies provide food, bedroom and a studio to work in, and they host artists of all disciplines (visual, musical, literary). There’s a magical cross-pollination that occurs. The freedom from chores and meal preparation is a blessing and then some. There’s time and space to sit with your work and connect to the “long thought,” which is the quality of knowledge and being that allows for a deepening and an expansion of consciousness. There’s an opening that arises. This simply doesn’t happen in my daily life with its constant tasks and interruptions.

MB: In The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, Orhan Pamuk writes that all novels each have their own “secret center”—not an actual place, but a central wisdom that a novel imparts; he argues that the act of writing and reading is inspired by the hope in both the writer and the reader to find the secret center. At what point in writing Made by Mary did you notice its secret center? And, without giving too many secrets of the book away, what would you say that secret center is?

LB: I love this concept of the “secret center.” That’s absolutely beautiful! It feels very true. I think I came to know the secret center of Made by Mary early in the process—as having something to do with the way love is passed on from generation to generation, as well as the way emotional wounding is also passed on. In the course of writing the book, I learned to focus more energy on the love and less on the wounding. I think that’s the secret center.