This Far Isn't Far Enough: An Interview with Lynn Sloan

We met at a faculty retreat, Lynn Sloan and I, quite a number of years ago. Lynn taught photography at Columbia College Chicago, where I teach creative writing, and I still remember her speaking about the potential for narrative in series of photographs. (I wonder if she really did talk about that, or if I have revised that memory in order to encapsulate both her evocative photographic images and her deeply engaging fiction?) Our paths cross often in Chicago, this remarkable literary city, and each time we meet, I am reminded of her kindness and curiosity, two traits a writer of any merit should have, I think.

We had the chance to talk story a bit, on the eve of the release of Lynn’s new short story collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough from Fomite Press. These stories—full of “powerful yearning” (her phrase, not mine, although I wish I could claim it)—are so smart and so masterfully crafted, it was delight to hear her talk about how they came to be.

*

Patty McNair: Your stories are populated with characters we readers feel we might know. They could be our neighbors, our colleagues, a friend of our mother, a customer, a family member. These are people engaged in the daily business of their lives, but often at a moment when a choice must be made, an action taken. And therein blooms the drama. I wonder, Lynn, what comes first for you? Character or dramatic moment?

Lynn Sloan: I suppose that it’s dramatic moment, in this sense: what comes first for me is a question: Why? I overhear a conversation, I encounter a situation, I read an item in the news, and I wonder, Why? Or, What’s behind this? For example, “Ollie’s Back,” the first story in my collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough, started with a feature story in the paper about a food critic who’d amassed a vast cookbook library, and who hosted a series of dinner parties, cooking from those books. Afterward he insisted that his guests take home armloads of books until finally his library shelves were bare. Why? The article said he was moving to a smaller apartment. That didn’t explain it for me. Naturally I came up with lots of possible reasons, all of them springing from his desire to move away from his past. Someone connected with food wanting to move away from his past, that was the beginning of “Ollie’s Back.” Ollie, my protagonist cook, does give away much of what he owns, but this gesture is connected to his future, not his past. Where I start when I start a story is seldom where I end up.

McNair: How do you find these characters? What sparks their existence for you at the writing desk?

Sloan: I like to write about characters who, in life, would be easy to overlook, those who are neither successes nor exquisite failures, people on the periphery of the middle. The lonely mother of a disabled son who can’t get a date in “Grow Animals,” the aging actor who plays second fiddle to his famous actor wife in “Call Back,” the old woman who feels imprisoned in the retirement home, the feminist in “The Collaborator,” who is regarded as a tedious bore—she might look different in this #MeToo era—these characters engage me. I make them up. My secondary characters are sometimes based on people I know, but my protagonists start with an idea, then, as I write, whoosh, they become round and full, the way those little capsules, grow animals, dropped in water, become something else.

McNair: While these stories are not linked in ways that some collections are—no recurring characters or obvious settings repeated—there do seem to be certain emotions that connect them. Your characters face loss and longing, a certain kind of aching love, regret. And the tug of these emotions often leads your characters to a desire for escape, a desire that they give in to in a whole variety of ways. I wonder if you were aware of these emotional threads that run through the stories, or if they emerged as you wrote them, as you collected them, as you considered which of your many stories should be part of this collection, which should be left out?

Sloan: Joan Didion said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” Me too. After I’d written and published a few stories, I looked back and discovered that no matter what I thought I was writing about, it all came back to yearning. I thought I was exploring very different characters and situations, men and women, young and old, clever and not-so-smart, sophisticated and earthy, and yet, what is central is their powerful yearning, their unmet desires. My editor at Fomite, Marc Estrin, a brilliant writer and editor, remarked that all my stories revolve around the character failing to outrun their pasts. He’s right, although I hadn’t seen it that way. You say, and you’re right, that my stories are about seeking to escape. But for me, the thread is one of yearning.

McNair: One of the things that I particularly admire in these stories is that your characters are not young. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the young protagonist, my stories are full of teenagers. I think that might be—for me—because there is a certain ease in creating characters who face moments of change, and teenagers are ripe for it. In this collection, your characters are often on the threshold of something, and you masterfully allow them to face this with a depth of knowledge and experience, and yet—each story feels as though your characters are discovering something entirely new. This collection put me in mind of some of Tessa Hadley’s short stories, and of Roddy Doyle’s collection Bullfighting. Stories that are a kind of “coming of middle-age.” Why do you think you are drawn to this life stage in these stories?

Sloan: What a smart observation! I hadn’t realized this. I have written a few stories about children and teenagers, but they are all flash pieces. I wonder why. You’ve given me something to think about, maybe you’ve even given me a challenge. What I know is that I like reading about the young and I’m grateful to writers like you, who write so well about growing up, in your story collection, The Temple of Air, and your recent non-fiction collection, And These Are the Good Times. But adult life just holds my focus. When I was a kid, I had no interest in books like The Secret Garden or The Chronicles of Narnia. I preferred James Michener, Herman Wouk, Daphne du Maurier. My parents did not approve. I sneaked these books, and others with racy covers. Adult life is so interesting, and, it seems to me, that it’s always about coming-of-age. “Coming of age” isn’t one stage or several stages of life, it is life. At every age, more is demanded of us than we are prepared for. Each of my characters confronts a moment, a situation, a series of situations that are particular to the “now” of the story, and this “now” is different than previous times because the character has lived through those earlier times, and has, in fact, come to a new age.

McNair: “Safe,” a story that is rather quiet on its surface but hints at a violent history between a mother and son, depicts a brief and tense reunion between the two after a long estrangement. Karen, the mother, says to her son Ben, “I tried to take care of you.” When I read that line, I couldn’t help but think how many of your characters in these stories could say the same thing to another character. It implies both good intentions, as well as possible missteps. There should be a question here, but I guess there isn’t a precise one. Maybe you can talk a bit about that dynamic—characters trying with one another, and characters failing. How does that help to create momentum in the narrative and/or complication in the story’s psychology?

Sloan: Failure is, I think, what drives stories. Succeeding, never failing, might be what we want in life, but in stories what we want, I want, is to fall into a world where characters are faced with troubles. I’m not interested in cataclysmic events. I don’t care about runaway trains, avalanches, murderous villains. What I want to write about is what happens when basically good people need what can’t be given or are denied what they want. Then what happens? That’s what I want to discover as a writer, and as a reader. “Safe” is story that has elicited responses that surprise me. At one reading, some of those listening argued heatedly that the mother was a bad mother, and others that the son is a sociopath. I, the person who made up these characters, couldn’t make sense of either opinion, which makes me think that this story hits some people hard in a place that hurts. It’s not a safe story.

McNair: Lynn, when we first met, I knew you as a photographer. You still are that, and I was delighted, after reading these stories, to skulk around a little on your website, see the visual art there. I was particularly attracted to the collection of photos called “Abstractions” where you have taken pictures of ordinary objects through fascinating vantage points that reduce (or perhaps elevate) the objects to shape and line. Also, there is a collection called “Carnival World,” that shows realistic images of carnival rides and attractions, but they are infused with other images that are altered in some ways, making the real and the dreamlike intermingle. To me, each of these collections remind me of things you are doing with your stories—shifting vantage points, merging the real with the imagined, the dreamed of, seeing the familiar in new ways. Does your work in photography inform your fiction writing? Do you see these creative practices as interwoven in any way? How do (did) you move from one art form to the other?

Sloan: Oh, this opens up so many angles! Photography, I love photography. I love how the world looks. I made photographs that I believe hinted at what lay beneath the surface of the world. All of what was included within the frame of the picture was held in suspension to be examined as long as necessary until it yielded its facts and its deceptions. But after a time, I wanted change and movement and time. I wanted not just this one moment depicted in the image, but the before and then the after. I wanted people doing things and feelings things. As a photographer, I was frustrated by what I couldn’t reveal. I couldn’t reveal what was underneath the visible. As a writer, I’m often frustrated that I can’t bring everything together at once.

On a practical level, I have to guard against my love of the visual. I can spend paragraphs describing the way the reflections dance on the surface of coffee. Reader alert—I cut out those paragraphs! As Elmore Leonard said, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

McNair: This Far Isn’t Far Enough. What a wonderful title. How did you find it; how did you choose it? What are you hoping we will understand about the collection because of it?

Sloan: I’m so glad you like it, author of And These Are the Good Times and The Temple of Air, two great titles. Titling is hard for me. My story collection was accepted for publication under a terrible title that my editor said had to go. I made long lists of titles, all of which were terrible. A friend suggested that I skim my stories for nice phrases, but I got caught up with reading. I tried again, starting from the back pages and moving forward. This Far Isn’t Far Enough came from near the front of the book, so I had to read backward a lot of pages before I found a title I liked. This Far Isn’t Far Enough says something essential about this collection: in each story, the characters believe they are free of their pasts, and they aren’t.

McNair: Let’s talk endings. You know how when you go to a classical concert, and they ask that you don’t applaud immediately after the last note has been sounded, but to wait until it entirely dies away? That is how I felt reading your endings. It wasn’t as though you used them to conclude anything, to bang a final downbeat, but instead to create a sense of resonance, a vibration that would play out long after the last note. Some of this has to do with your final sentences themselves, to the way they employ both rhythm and breath in their syntax. Some of it has to do with the possibilities your characters understand—in these final moments—are still ahead of them. A bear may or may not be waiting in the woods and shadows outside a woman’s house. A mystery lover appears in the doorway of a lonely, exhausted mother. A mother and daughter sing what they remember of a hymn as they spread the ashes of a loved one. “Neither one of us knows the words to what comes after,” the mother says, the final note. Wow. Do you write with an ending in sight? Do you discover it along the way, polish it once you do?

Sloan: I’m going to save your comments, so that next time I’m agonizing over an ending, I can re-read your words and . . . No, bad idea. I will feel even more intensely that I’m not up to writing the ending that I want to write, the ones you are describing.

When I start a story, I don’t know where I’ll end up. About halfway through the first draft, I’ll get an idea, often an idea that I know is lame, but I aim toward it trusting that as I draw close, I will figure out what must happen. Once I’ve figured this out, figured out the facts of what happens, then I try to find the words, the rhythms, sometimes suggestions of the unspoken, that reveal these facts and also will evoke emotions. An ending must ring like a bell, the sound and its aftermath, the facts and the feelings. You described this perfectly, “after the last note has sounded” waiting for it to die away. Thank you.

McNair: This collection is your second book, the novel Principles of Navigation your first. Does your process for writing short form differ from what you do when you are writing long form? And do you know right away if a story wants to be short or novel-length?

Sloan: Before I begin, I do know whether I’m starting on a story or a novel. When I start with a puzzle, the question of why that I mentioned earlier, I’ve got a short story in the works. If I begin imagining a large social landscape, then I’m on to a novel. Within that large landscape, there will be lots of why questions. I’ve never had a story that wanted to go big, although I’ve seen that happen with some writer friends. With novels—I’ve got several novels in boxes that should never be opened—I begin with a vast muddle and write, toss out, write more, toss, until I discover a lean story that makes sense. This is the first draft. Then I start again.

McNair: What’s next, Lynn?

Sloan: I’m finishing the first draft of a novel. Now that I understand what it’s about, I’m eager to revise. But I might pause on that, and take a short break. I believe you challenged me to write a story about a young person.

Skating on the Vertical: An Interview with Jan English Leary

Jan English Leary and I met in the mid-1990s, in Fred Shafer’s short story-writing workshop in Evanston, Illinois. Week after week, we’d sit next to each other and compare notes: about writing, about reading. We drank lots of coffee. We talked about our kids. Jan had already been working with Fred for a few years, and as her classmate, I was immediately struck by — and inspired by — the assurance of her prose, which combines evocative description with a clear, direct voice. These qualities are abundantly evident in her new collection of stories, Skating on the Vertical (Fomite Press), a sympathetic exploration of what it means to be a teen, the connections (and misunderstandings) that exist between the generations, and the very human quest to find one’s place in the world. Jan and I chatted recently about the book, its themes, and her caffeinated beverage of choice.

* * *

JD: Your new collection, Skating on the Vertical, draws together stories from different points in your career. The stories’ themes—connection, belonging—are timeless concerns; do you think your perception of these themes has changed in the years since the first of the stories was published?

JEL: Yes and no. Since I’ve matured as a writer, my writing has changed and, I hope, deepened. On the other hand, connection and belonging, as you say, are timeless. I just think I’ve found new ways of exploring them in my writing. I like to think that I’m always learning about myself and about the world. Plus ça change….

JD: You taught writing to high-school students for several years. You are a parent to two boys, now grown. Jan, you have an uncanny sympathy for what it means to be a young adult; how do you think your experiences as a teacher and parent have informed this understanding, and thus the work?

JEL: Of course, my experiences have shaped my writing. My entire career was spent teaching high school. I enjoy that age and am drawn to situations involving someone on the brink of adulthood. We all pass through adolescence, and the strong imprint of that formative period stays with us for life. But my fiction also deals with issues such as marriage, infertility, infidelity, and miscarriage. I sometimes find it easier to explore a character whose experience is different from mine: an infertile woman who paints graffiti on the windows of her town, a man who has had an affair, a woman who cuts herself to ease her psychic pain. I think that my life experience as a teacher and as a mother has fed my writing, but I also think that being witness to the dramas of life around me has influenced me just as strongly.

JD: Your stories are distinguished by powerful, insightful endings. Do you generally know the ending when you begin a story, or do you “find” your way to it while writing?

JEL: Endings are hard and absolutely crucial, obviously. I tend to have an idea of the ending early on. That’s how a story often occurs to me, but I also think it gives me an anchor. The ending sometimes changes, but I like to know where I’m going, even when I don’t necessarily know how I’m going to get there. And I have to be open to changes along the way; otherwise, the whole thing can feel too determined and therefore rigid and lifeless.

JD: The book’s title, Skating on the Vertical, is drawn from a story of the same name in this collection. What prompted you choose this as the book’s title?

JEL: For a long time, I planned to name the collection Frequent Losers after a story I particularly liked. I thought it reflected the losses and missteps of life. However, that story left the collection and was revised to become a chapter in my novel. I needed a new title, and I toyed with Eunuchs because I also like that story, but my editor, Marc Estrin, didn’t think it represented the collection as a whole (and he was right). Besides, I wanted my husband, John, to give me one of his paintings for a cover image, and I don’t know what he would have done with Eunuchs! So I chose Skating on the Vertical because it evokes disequilibrium, movement, and energy. And it’s a title I’d never heard before.

JD: What was it like to revisit stories you wrote earlier in your career? Did you revise those earlier stories for this collection, and if so, what do you think informed the changes you made?

JEL: It was both satisfying and dismaying. There were things I liked which pleased and surprised me and other things I found clunky. I did what I could to hone the language while still keeping the original feel of the stories. I didn’t want to undertake major overhauls. That seemed both overwhelming and unnecessary. With practice, every writer improves in terms of craft. I tried to bring what I’ve learned into the older stories. And I removed some stories I thought didn’t quite work anymore. In that way, the stories felt fresher, and the process allowed me to re-engage with the material more deeply.

JD: Preparing this collection has brought you back to the short story form, after a recent focus on the novel (Jan is the author of the novel, Thicker Than Blood, published by Fomite Press in 2015, and is currently working on a new novel). How did that feel? Does working on short stories versus a novel demand different habits or approaches, in your view?

JEL: The short story is still my first love. I like the process of working on a novel, of having a big mass of material that I can stretch and manipulate and into which I can thread strands. I like the task of building a world and populating it with more people than I can comfortably put in a short story. However, I also love the tautness of a short story, the intense payoff of the shorter time frame, the small dramas that have large consequences. I like being able to hold the arc in my head and tighten the elements, the language, and the rhythms. They say novels take longer to write, but I spent about seven years on the novel while the short stories span nearly 20 years of writing.

JD: What is your writing routine at this time? And I’ve got to ask: coffee or tea when you’re writing?

JEL: Chinese black tea only these days. Too much caffeine is no longer my friend. I am a morning writer, almost exclusively. I can revise in the afternoons, but the mornings are my best times for generating material. I mostly write at the Writers Workspace, which is a cooperative space three blocks from my house. I am lucky to have that resource nearby. It’s a great quiet atmosphere where I can really concentrate, unlike my home where I’m easily distracted.

JD: Can you tell us a little about what you’re working on now?

JEL: I am working on a novel with two alternating points of view: two women who grow up in the same rural college town. They exist on parallel tracks due to social class, but their lives intersect over a shared experience. I am interested in the ways in which two people can grow up in the same small town but because of income and family expectations, their lives take very different paths. There’s been a lot of attention lately given to the “Two Americas,” and I want to explore this theme in a “town-and-gown” setting. I enjoy research, and this project has allowed me to read about the Iraq War, homeschooling, and the anti-vaxxer movement, as well as Caribbean literature, Greek mythology, and massage therapy certification programs. Ultimately, it’s a novel about forgiveness and what constitutes home and family.

An Interview with Chris Wiewiora

I first met Chris Wiewiora in 2008 when he was still an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida. I was the managing editor at The Florida Review. Chris came on as our assistant editor on work-study and quickly proved that he was one of our hardest working staff members. His work ethic and editorial chops were one thing, but soon I got to see some of his stellar early writing and we started exchanging comments on each other’s fiction and non-fiction essays.

In the years since, we’ve grown in different directions. I’ve gone on to pursue a career in information security, and Chris has ventured onward bravely to see his non-fiction anthologized in Best Food Writing and The Norton Reader, and non-fiction essays about things like marriage, bus driving, killer whales, good pizza, and the water supply published in all sorts of excellent places.

So it’s a pleasure to get the opportunity to revisit this interview I did with Chris regarding “Riding Solo,” one of my favorite essays that I’ve had the opportunity to help Chris work on.

*

EB: “Riding Solo,” your essay just published by Thought Catalog, brings together a lot of disparate themes: motorcycle riding, recovering from an injury, a failed relationship, pornography, casual sex encounters. How did you start writing it?

CW: There was an epigraph from another creative piece I was using as a diving board, a jumping off point, about motorcycling. The epigraph was from “Novorapid” by Tyler Enfield, from The Florida Review issue with the underwater woman’s face on the cover.

“… death is sexy when you are twenty-one, when you are invincible, when your skin is electric with the glory of youth and you are clueless, vital, assured.”

I have a folder an inch thick of all the drafts. I outlined the essay too, which was weird, because I don’t think I had done that before. Originally this started as a story, I think it was first called “Riding Solo,” and then it changed to “Now,” and finally it went back to “Riding Solo.” It was first written as a mid-length essay that primarily had to do with the relationship and motorcycling. Then it brought in more of the casual encounter and the pornography and those different worlds. And as those sub-worlds expanded the narrative world, that made the essay longer. At one point it was nine thousand, ten thousand words. Then at one point I cut it down to fifteen hundred words, when it was just about monikers of casual encounters. At another point I cut out all the Kisha stuff, all the motorcycling stuff, which was very weird. So it’s gone through a lot.

EB: You described stories to me as pearls before, where there’s a grit at the center. What do you mean by that?

CW: The grit is the little piece of sand that an oyster creates this nacre around, and that’s called mother-of-pearl, and it hardens. I’ve thought of that as the origin story of essays. There’s always a little piece that rubs against you, like a pebble in your shoe, and then you’re creating this protective layer, and out of that comes this pearl.

EB: So after you had said that to me so long ago I went and read about pearls.

CW: Oh, am I way off?

EB: No, no. The story we tell, of course, is that they are grits of sand that turn into a beautiful pearl. But I read that it’s most often a harmful parasite, or an infection, and the oyster creates the pearl to quarantine itself against it. It’s an immune system response.

CW: I like hearing that it’s not sand, that it’s a parasite the oyster makes a pearl around. The best writing that I’ve written is when I feel uncomfortable. I’m getting at those things that need to be discussed.

It’s uncomfortable and it takes work, but it’s necessary because at the core of it there is this thing fucking feeding off of me. And I think that’s many times what essaying is about. It’s cathartic, like recovery.

EB: So what was the thing at the center of this essay that set it off?

CW: Well, the story isn’t the traditional inverted checkmark of rising action, climax, resolution. It’s this mirrored, opposite checkmark. More like a plummet. Everything gone bad: My relationship with my girlfriend Kisha, gone bad. Addiction, gone bad. Using people, gone bad. Motorcycling, gone bad. The despair of this empty situation, everything is being destroyed and then just at the end it’s maybe redlining, topping out on the motorcycle. No recovery, it’s just survival.

I remember driving with my buddy DJ a few months before I wrote this essay. I think it was when Kisha and I were sleeping together, fucking each other. DJ and I were stuck in traffic, and he said, “Sometimes I can’t wait for a relationship to be over so I can write about it.”

And it was just such a fucked-up thing, where you can steer your life to be able to make that into a story that later on you’re going to write about. For him, it was fiction. For me, I was a nonfiction person, and I could say, “Wow, I could change the way I interact with somebody because later on I could write about it and it would be better.”

So later I asked myself, “Did I end the relationship so I could write a story about it?” And the answer is no. But those are the grits that rubbed me a little wrong.

EB: I remember in an earlier draft we talked about the difference in the diction in the sex scenes, between “sex” and “fucking,” the words themselves.

CW: Yeah. That was an eye opener for me. I think I was just writing whatever, put “breasts” there, put “sex” there, put “fucking” there. And then I realized through the drafting process that the language is defining the action, and this is seeping in. Why not just say what it is? Fucking each other.

The draft changed, then. You know, Kisha and the narrator fucking each other, they’re not having sex. When sex changes to fucking, and “I love you” means “Thanks for doing that.” What’s spoken is not true to the actions in the way that language has to be accurate to portray what’s going on truthfully.

EB: The story begins with the search for a casual sex encounter, one you eventually find with the character Ashley. What was it that pushed you toward seeking out casual sex, and how was it that you came to use Craigslist to search?

CW: Right. There’s a plummet from porn and the relationship to the casual sex. From the beginning there’s an awareness that there’s another world out there. I don’t believe the theory of evangelical groups, like Focus On The Family, when they said that Jeffrey Dahmer had used porn when he was younger or maybe even as an adult and that that had led to tendencies that then led to the murders.

I don’t know if porn leads to behavior. It does affect people, for sure. It’s something that people do when they’re wanting to find something, but it’s not a substitute.

I remember the relationship was over and then being a young American male—it’s very accessible. You can just search “casual encounters” and see the photos and the possible thrill. I thought, being in a college town in a big city, that maybe I could do this activity without anybody knowing and find somebody else, maybe not like me, but in the sense that they want the same thing. It’s inherently wild and dangerous.

The question is when you cross that line: When is it that you transition from looking at the photos to setting up an e-mail account and trying to find somebody? And then when you do find somebody, how do you react?

In the essay there are four responses: There’s “Zorro Couple,” there’s “Barb,” there’s “College Girl” with the black bar over her eyes, and there’s “Ashley.” And then there’s a lot of fake ones and spam. There was even one that I thought was funny, a posting that turned out to be a suicide hotline number. And at the time Craigslist was having trouble with prostitutes. They’d be vague, and you have to call to set up like it was a dentist’s appointment. Instead of your annual teeth cleaning, call for your blowjob. And sometimes I got responses that were women saying how much it costs, and I would say that I’m not going to pay for sex, and they cursed me out, saying I wasn’t going to find sex for free. It’s almost a challenge.

It’s way more difficult for a man to find a woman. Let’s say you do a post, in about a day your post is cemented down by a hundred other posts by other people. So you have to constantly repost. And you want to have a catchy post, you don’t want to be like everybody else. So you’ll look at the others and say, “Okay, everyone’s just putting up a picture of their dick.” It’s like marketing yourself.

One of the eeriest things was, and I didn’t write about this in the essay, I actually saw some guys I knew on the men looking for women list.

EB: Wow.

CW: Yeah. I was like, “Holy crap, I don’t want to put a picture of my face on there.” Still, there is a certain security in place. You’re not going to talk about somebody who’s on it because if you say that, then they know you’re also on it. It’s like, “You don’t talk about Fight Club.” Well…not quite.

EB: You mentioned that when you do something like a casual sex encounter, it’s because you’re looking for something.

CW: You’re looking for something that you think is there and that you can’t get elsewise. There’s a cost to that.

EB: What’s the cost?

CW: The cost is that it’s not real. You’re putting on a mask and you’re protecting yourself. Think about the names, the usernames. You’re not Chris Wiewiora. You’re verbChrisverb. You’re not Ashley. You’re “Black BBW.”

EB: The black boxes over College Girl’s eyes.

CW: Yeah, you’re hiding yourself. Not only are you not showing yourself truly to somebody else, you’re also deconstructing yourself to a certain degree. Breaking yourself down to “I am this: ____.”

EB: Sounds a little like writing nonfiction, doesn’t it?

CW: Right. It’s like, “I am this, this physical characteristic, and that’s it, that’s all I have to offer. That’s all you want. That’s all I’m going to give you in this moment. If I give you more than that, then this moment is not what it’s supposed to be.”

EB: What do you think Ashley was looking for?

CW: You know, there was a certain sweetness, I guess, to the moment. I think everybody wants to be found this way, be accepted, even despite their faults or perceived faults. And what happened was that moment changed from being an encounter, a desire, to being more. Ashley asked if I wanted to make it a regular thing. And I said, “I don’t ever do this more than once.”

I think for her she wanted to find some kind of acceptance of who she was. But that’s not the way to it, that’s not a moment of love.

EB: One of the most striking things about “Riding Solo” is its uncompromising honesty and intimacy. For example, the sections on your relationship to pornography might have been glossed over by a more timid author. What is the impulse behind being so honest with the reader, sharing things that are not so sterile or flattering?

CW: Writing in this kind of shockingly honest way, it’s not confessionalism. Even though I talked about it being cathartic, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have to write this.

I write about these explicit things because it’s what happened. People won’t necessarily be in those situations. Not everybody rides a motorcycle or has an interracial relationship that fails or goes online to find casual sex. So you write it as is, because you want it to be like they were there. Writing is constructed. It’s like a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional object. I know it’s three-dimensional. And I’m saying, “Hey there’s things creating this image on the wall with fire behind it and there’s shadows, I swear to you it’s three-dimensional.” That’s my contract with the reader. This is the best way that I can tell you how it was and what happened. That’s what I’m doing.

EB: So you’re recently engaged, soon to be married. Has Lauren, your fiancé, read the essay?

CW: She has read this essay as part of a larger collection. And we’ve talked about it, just briefly, to say that this is something wild that I’ve done before, and it doesn’t perturb her that much. It’s just kind of one of those passes you get for being younger.

One of the reasons I wanted to marry Lauren is that I love her for who she is but also that I love that she allows me to be who I am and I don’t have to hide that. She respects me. She’s the first person I’ve been in a relationship with that has read my stuff and is also just fine about being written about. I wouldn’t be. I’d be pissed. I’d be like, “Don’t put me in that, I didn’t say that, I didn’t think that, this isn’t written well.” I’m the worst person to turn the tables on. I’m a pushy editor, and I push back against editing.

EB: “Riding Solo” occupies an interesting place in your overall body of work. This essay is about struggle and so it takes us to some darker places. We get that plummet and then it ends on disconnection. But many of your other works, on The Good Men Project and in literary magazines, show a return to a connected life—stories that talk about love, Lauren, spirituality, and family. How does “Riding Solo” fit into that?

CW: A lot of what I write now is about being younger. It’s not as much about who I am immediately now. I rarely have written about things that have happened in the past two years. This essay “Riding Solo” is from a collection called Toro! which is about failed relationships, masculinity, illness, faith, all things that happened to me when I was younger.

There are other stories in Toro! that are moments of failed or failing relationships where the narrator recognizes the start of that plummet, and that recognition stops him from going down again. It’s a reminder to myself of making it through. It’s a survival story, and that needs to be told. Constantly saving yourself, getting out.

Lives in the Wake of Loss: An Interview with Hannah Gersen

The first I read of Hannah Gersen’s writing was her non-fiction for The Millions, an online books and culture magazine where Gersen is a staff writer. Her elegant prose and unique critical insights made me a fan instantly. I was also drawn to Gersen’s work because, well, her sensibility was so similar to mine. She seemed to have a special appreciation for fiction that takes its characters seriously, no matter how small or ordinary their lives may be—Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, Stephanie Vaughn. I wasn’t surprised, then, to discover that Gersen’s short fiction is marked by a deep sincerity that reminded me of those writers. Several of her short stories—which appear in publications like Granta, The Carolina Review, and The Chattahoochee Review—are linked, focusing on a family in small-town Maryland. In one story, nineteen-year-old Louisa, home from college for the summer, plots to sneak off and visit her boyfriend in Martha’s Vineyard. In another, told from the point of view of Louisa’s adolescent sister, Annabel, the family visits the girls’ grandparents in North Carolina, and while tension builds between Louisa and her mother, Annabel wonders where she fits into her family, and what kind of independent identity she can claim. These are deeply felt stories that astonished me with their ability to capture the indelibility of certain life moments. And there was a cleverness about them: how was Gersen able to make everyday small-town life seem so high-stakes? And what made these seemingly quiet stories resonate so powerfully?

But if Gersen’s stories are quiet, Home Field (William Morrow 2016), her debut novel due out on July 26th, begins loudly, with the unexpected death of Nicole Renner, wife to high school football coach Dean and mother to soon-to-be Swarthmore freshman Stephanie. We spend much of the novel watching Dean and Stephanie try to regain control over their lives in the wake of loss: Dean struggles to handle the demands of his job and battles loneliness while trying to help his increasingly aloof son, eleven-year-old Robbie; Stephanie, meanwhile, tries to adjust to college while balancing her new independent life with family obligations. Gersen writes Dean’s and Stephanie’s perspectives equally convincingly, letting us experience their complex, messy inner lives as they find their way in a suddenly very different-seeming world.

Gersen and I spent a few weeks e-mailing back and forth. We talked about Home Field, her short stories, writing small-town life, and the relationship between her fiction and non-fiction.

Steven Williams: Did you have specific goals for Home Field when you began working on it, e.g., certain subjects or ideas you knew you wanted to wrestle with?

Hannah Gersen: I wanted to tell a story about small town life, and a family coming together after tragedy, though I guess those are somewhat vague goals. The most specific goal I had was to show girls playing sports and to have it be a part of their emerging identities rather than a point of conflict. That’s not a very literary goal or especially dramatic, but thinking back on books I’ve read and TV shows and movies I’ve watched, I realized how rare it is for female characters to participate in sports in a casual way, as part of their daily lives, whereas it’s fairly common for male characters. So I just wanted to show that aspect of girls’ lives.

SW: Can you talk about your decision to have the novel’s point of view alternate (for most of the novel, anyway) between Dean and Stephanie? Specifically, I’m interested in your decision to switch between their perspectives within chapters, rather than alternating chapters or dividing the book into sections. Something about that narrative style made me feel like I was watching a TV show. Was that effect intentional?

HG: Originally the novel was going to be from Dean’s perspective, but after a few chapters, I felt it was unfair to Stephanie because when I was in Dean’s point of view, I could only show her sullen teenage actions and couldn’t give a sense of how she was really feeling. Once I brought in Stephanie’s voice, I realized that she had knowledge of the family, and of the community, that Dean didn’t have and that could help fill in some of the holes in the story. It was also an easy way to pick up the pace of the novel because I could just jump ahead in time when I was in Stephanie’s point of view. Early in the book, I stayed in either Dean or Stephanie’s voices for a relatively long periods of time, but I knew that once the reader got to know them I would have more license to switch between them.

This dramatic structure was probably influenced by television, because TV scenes, especially dramas, are often written and shot from the perspective of one particular character. In a show like Mad Men, for example, you’ll have a scene with Don Draper, then you’ll check in with Joan, and then maybe Peggy and one or two other characters, depending on the plot lines. Time passes as you switch points of view. Only occasionally do you get an ensemble scene with the entire cast that gives a more objective view of the characters and setting. I can’t really claim that I borrowed this structure intentionally, but I was watching a lot of TV when I wrote this book! I also like to write in close third person and that’s the perspective that a good actor can give you.

SW: Why did you decide to make Dean Stephanie’s stepfather, rather than have them be blood relatives?

HG: That idea was in place from the start, and much of the backstory grew from it. I’m not sure why I made the choice, except that I thought it would be an interesting dynamic to have a father and daughter who, in a way, chose each other.

SW: How did you come to title the novel “Home Field”? Does titling your work come naturally for you or is it a struggle?

HG: Funny you should ask this because I’m in the middle of an essay on this topic. The original title of this book was actually “Count It All Joy”, not “Home Field”, and coming up with a new name was an interesting process. In general I don’t have a strong feeling about what my titles should be, so I just try to pick something that arises naturally. “Count It All Joy” comes from the Bible, James 1:2: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.” Once upon a time, there was a scene in church where the minister quotes this verse, but I cut that scene because it wasn’t working. I liked the verse, though, and decided it would be a good epigraph. And then I eventually thought it could make a good title, too. My editor liked the title and other people seemed to like it, too, but I noticed that people had difficulty remembering it. Even worse, a lot of people could not get it upon first or second hearing, which was really awkward. My editor noticed the same thing. We decided we had to go back to the drawing board because book titles are often passed by word of mouth.

What followed were several weeks when my editor, my agent, and I were all brainstorming titles. I remember my editor asked me what the working title was because sometimes the working title—i.e. the file name—is great. But my working title was “Sports Novel”. (In general, my working titles are incredibly generic.) My editor ended up making a list of football words and “Home Field” was on that list. I was uncertain about it, at first, because it reminded me of baseball and I thought it sounded too much like a movie title. But then it grew on me. I like that it is simple, but has multiple meanings, and I also think it gives the reader a good sense of the setting and themes. One thing I learned from the process is that titling a book is completely different from titling a short story. People don’t need to remember short story titles, so they can be pretty fanciful and/or obscure. They can even be a part of the story, or a part of the puzzle of the story. But a book needs a title that is solid and can be attached to something outside of the world of the book. Now I understand why there are so many one word titles!

SW: Before publishing Home Field, your debut novel, you published several short stories, and a lot of these stories are linked, featuring the same characters at different points in their lives, which gives them something of a novel’s feel. I’m wondering if you feel more at home writing in the longer form. Is it your preference spend a lot of time and space with a given character or world, rather than writing stand-alone stories?

HG: Yes, I prefer the form of the novel because you can write a little each day and slowly build a world and create characters in a more detailed way, showing them in different situations and moods. Once I’ve done the imaginative work of creating a setting and a character, or a family of characters, I want to stick with the material for a while and see where it takes me. That said, some of my most formative reading experiences were short stories. I love fairy tales, the stories of Roald Dahl, and above all, John Cheever’s short stories.

SW: I’m not sure whether I’ve mentioned this to you before, but the thing that made me want to find your fiction was that essay you wrote for The Millions about Friday Night Lights (a show I’m a huge fan of) and its influence on your writing. You write about the show:

I always find myself thinking, these people live such big lives in such a small place! But then when I think about what feels “big” about their lives I realize that the plot points […] are quite ordinary. No one on Friday Night Lights has a secret identity. No one is working for the mafia. […] Instead, they’re drinking too much. They’re sleeping around. They’re saying stupid things and trying to make extra money in stupid ways. They’re founding Christian rock bands.

Now, when I read your stories and your novel, I think to myself that one could say the same thing about your work. In your stories, your characters do mostly everyday things, and while I’d have a hard time pointing to what makes it feel like the stakes are so high, the outcome always feels important. I also found that in your novel, though it begins with an extraordinary tragedy, your characters again are doing mostly things like coaching high school track, trying to find their crowd at school, etc. Can you talk about how you’re able to sustain drama through a 400-page novel while writing about everyday small town life?

HG: First, I’m so glad that my essay had that effect! And I’m beyond flattered that you tracked down my short stories, since they aren’t especially easy to find.

In my short stories, I am often thinking about memory and identity and trying to home in on moments in characters’ lives when something fundamentally changed for them or maybe tilted them in a slightly different direction—but it’s not a moment they are necessarily aware of as being important. When I look back on my own life, it’s like that: the experiences etched in my memory aren’t the big milestones. The Richard Linklater movie, Boyhood, does a really good job of showing that. The plot of that film (and most Linklater films) is quite mellow, but by the end of it you see how the boy’s life has been profoundly shaped by relatively simple experiences: his relationship with his parents and sister, obviously, but also exposure to certain ideas, landscapes, cultural events, and the people outside of his family who come in and out of his life.

I think for the characters in Home Field, the stakes are high because of what they’ve lost. They’re in a lot of pain and trying not to fall into despair. Their identities are at stake, especially Dean and Stephanie, because they’ve defined themselves so much in terms of their relationship to Nicole. Still, when I was writing the book I worried that these concerns were too internal. I did what I could to ground their struggles in specific actions even if those actions seemed laughably minor—like, for example, Stephanie dropping a class. Big deal, she dropped a class! But for her it’s a big deal because she’s never really given herself a break. That’s the beginning of her being able to make some space for herself in the world. Another small moment like that is when Dean gets back from his first cross country meet and decides to go to his office to check his files for track workouts. It’s a big gesture because it shows that he’s thinking about investing himself in this new team, and a new version of his life. He’s found his lifeline even if he’s not totally conscious of it.

SW: You’re a writer I associate very strongly with a place—small town Maryland. Did you know right away when you started writing fiction that this was what you wanted to write about, or did it take you time to find your subject matter?

HG: I actually did know right away that I wanted to write about small town Maryland and some of my first short stories took place in that setting. But I was so disappointed with my first efforts that I shied away from the material for a long time. I finally came back to it in my late twenties, after one of the women in my writing group observed that whenever I wrote descriptions of Maryland or Pennsylvania, my writing came to life. Around the same time, I edited a column, Dispatches, for the literary magazine, The Common, which has a particular focus on place. Editing those pieces—which ran the gamut from reported essays to personal essays to poetry—got me thinking about place again, and how to write about it.

SW: You say that editing this particular column helped you think through ideas about place. Does writing non-fiction—such as the reviews, criticism, and personal essays you write as a staff writer for The Millions—also help you explore or work out some of the ideas that you then go on to write about in your fiction?

HG: Yes, though when I’m really deep in a draft and making up a lot of stuff on a daily basis it’s a bit hard to switch back to nonfiction mode, where I have to be analytical. But when I get stuck, it helps to do come critical reading and writing. I read almost all of Andrew Solomon’s nonfiction while I was writing Home Field, because he writes so well about illness, depression, and parent-child relationships, subjects that all come up in my novel. When Solomon’s first (and only) novel, A Stone Boat, was reissued, I used it as a springboard to write about the relationship between his nonfiction and his fiction. I ended up doing a lot more research than I expected for that particular essay but I think it probably helped me think about my book. I was also drawn to some books that deal with trauma and/or mental illness and wrote about them for the site: Irritable Hearts by Mac McClelland, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimar McBride, and Loitering, by Charles D’Ambrosio. But The Millions is also a place where I can take a break and write about books that I find interesting for other reasons.

SW: Have you been working on any new fiction? Would you care to describe your current project(s)?

HG: Yes, I’m working on another novel. It’s set in contemporary times and follows three women over several years as they navigate issues of friendship, work, love, marriage, money, motherhood, etc. I also have a couple of short stories on the back burner that I’d like to return to one day.

SW: Can you describe Home Field’s path to publication?

HG: Before I wrote Home Field, I put together a collection of short stories—the linked stories you mentioned earlier. Those stories are what led me to my agent, Emma Patterson. We tried to sell those stories and came close at a couple of places. Several editors said they might be interested if there was a novel attached. At that point I was already working on Home Field. I was also feeling really discouraged because it seemed like such a long shot to write a whole book in the hopes of selling a short story collection. When I finished Home Field, we sent it out to a small group of editors, mostly ones who were waiting on the novel or had asked to see more of my work. I got several rejections within a week or two. I was surprised by how quick those responses were, because as you probably know, when you send short stories to magazines, you wait for months for an answer. The early rejections hit me hard and I started to panic. But my agent remained calm and soon we had interest from Margaux Weisman at William Morrow, who really seemed to get the story. She suggested that I add some new scenes, and some of the scenes she suggested were ones I had written but left on the cutting room floor for fear of writing a book that was too long. Margaux was not among the editors who had previously read my stories—and I wonder if that worked in my favor because she didn’t come to my novel with any particular expectation—but it felt good to be in Margaux’s hands.

In retrospect, it was actually a pretty quick sale, but during those few weeks of waiting and early rejection, I was unbelievably anxious. It felt like my career was in the balance and I wasn’t sure how I would keep going after two book rejections. I’ve seen writers deal with this at all stages of their careers so I know it’s just part of the experience but it’s still tough. There is just no way to predict how editors will respond to a book and how you will feel about it.

SW: Can you describe your process and habits as a writer? Do aim for a certain number of words each day?

HG: For writing nonfiction, my process is pretty straightforward because it’s dictated by other people’s deadlines and expectations. Once I get an assignment, I will schedule time to work on it and sometimes, if I’m procrastinating, force myself to write a certain number of words. (Or I’ll procrastinate by working on a different nonfiction project.) I need a certain amount of outside pressure for nonfiction because otherwise I wouldn’t do it. Fiction is different. I would do it no matter what and don’t really need deadlines—which is not to say I don’t drag my feet! I do. But for fiction, deadlines and word counts don’t motivate me. Over the years I’ve found that I just need to make space for writing fiction and the stories will arrive. The first step is turning down nonfiction assignments or at least spacing them properly. The second is turning off the internet! Ideally I turn on Freedom and don’t go online until the afternoon, maybe an hour before I have to pick up my son from school. That gives me a chance to check in with email, blogs, news, etc. But when I’m really working hard on a draft, I try to schedule my time so that I go for a day or two without the internet or email. In general, I don’t do social media because it’s way too addictive for me. Even Instagram is a problem and lately I’ve been deleting it off my phone until the weekend.

The other thing that helps to make space for writing fiction is reading fiction. Recently, I’ve been scheduling an hour or two first thing in the morning, or after lunch. It felt decadent when I first started doing it but I’ve noticed that it calms my mind to an extraordinary degree, almost like meditation or taking a walk. The internet becomes less alluring because I get into a mellower headspace and it’s easier for me to shrug my shoulders and not give into temptation.

SW: What have you been reading lately?

HG: If you’ve been following my Proust Book Club on The Millions, you’ll know I’ve been working my way through In Search of Lost Time. Right now I’m just finishing up volume III, The Guermantes Way. I’m also reading Oliver Sacks’s memoir, On The Move. In addition, I’ve been hoarding books for an upcoming vacation: Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, and Light in August by William Faulkner. I’ll probably end up reading at least one title before vacation, because I can never wait, and then when I get to the beach I inevitably read something someone left behind in the beach house.

Gamut Kickstarter: An Interview with Richard Thomas

I met Richard Thomas when we selected him as a participant in the 2012 Flying House show – a writing and art collaboration project my husband and I host in Chicago each year. In his application, Thomas submitted two short stories he described as surreal – or was it magical realism? – or maybe neo-noir? He was still, I think, finding the space he would fill in the literary world. He was already a great writer, and a fantastic participant in our show, and also one of the hardest working writers I had ever met – but that was also seven award-winning books ago, 100+ published stories ago, before he became an editor of four anthologies, a columnist, an Editor-in-Chief at Dark House Press – you get the idea. He works hard. And, now, he knows exactly what his literary pursuits entail.

As of February 1, Thomas has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Gamut, an online magazine of neo-noir, speculative and literary fiction he hopes to unveil in January of 2017. He wishes to support voices that aren’t getting enough recognition, especially edgy fiction that straddles the fence between genre and literary fiction. If you’ve followed any of his columns, you know Thomas doesn’t write for free, and doesn’t think you should either, so he plans to pay a great rate to his authors – both solicited and not – and he also wants to include columns, non-fiction, art, flash fiction, poetry, and maybe even a serial memoir or novella. This excites me. But let’s hear a little more from Thomas himself…

*

Hey there, Richard. I know you’ve probably been talking up your new lit mag nonstop lately, so let’s start somewhere different. When I first read your work, like I said above, it was as part of an application, which meant I was reading blind and it wasn’t until later that I heard your take on your writing. At the time, I thought it was interesting how you described your work as speculative, when I would have called it literary. Maybe I don’t know enough about speculative fiction – so what is it? 

Hey, Megan! Thanks for the kind words. I know speculative fiction covers a number of genres (such as fantasy, science fiction, and horror) and that it typically isn’t grounded in reality, but based on characters, settings, and elements that are created out of human imagination and speculation. For me, that also includes magical realism, and possibly other genres, such as transgressive, and neo-noir. And then of course you have literary horror and classic horror, and everything in-between, the same with fantasy and science fiction. I mean, what exactly do you call Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or The Road? This can’t be just straight literary fiction. You could call them westerns or post-apocalyptic, or even thrillers. What about Joyce Carol Oates and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” There are some supernatural elements in there as well, hints of a demon or devil, ESP, cloven feet maybe? And really, that’s what I’m most excited about as an author, editor, teacher and publisher. I love authors that straddle the fence between genre and literary fiction, taking the best from both. I want compelling narratives, that keep me turning the pages, a sense of wonder, as well as the thoughtful, insightful, more philosophical elements. An author like Benjamin Percy, for example, can publish in both The Paris Review and Cemetery Dance. Or people like George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, even Toni Morrison. 

Fantastic. For me, your description elevates my idea of genre fiction into the literary, and I had probably been a bit biased against genre fiction in the past, thinking of them as “fast reads” or formulaic (even if I love me some genre every now and again). I think speculative writing is becoming more popular, just as fan fiction and vampire fiction and Pride and Prejudice with Zombies fiction is growing in popularity. Do you agree? Have you encountered any of this snobbery along the way while writing crime/horror?

Oh there are snobs for sure. And there are genre fans that hate literary fiction, too. I mean there is innovative work being done in all genres, and really back writing in every genre as well. I see a lot of nose wrinkling in academia, but then again, there are programs that embrace it, such as UC-Riverside, which I just visited as a guest author—a fantastic MFA program there. Seton Hill has a Popular and Genre Fiction program, as well. I mean, I think it’s important to study the classics, to read Cheever, Carter, JCO and Nabokov. But there’s a lot to learn from reading King, Grisham, and Rowling, too. I see more and more speculative fiction easing its way into the Best American Short Storiesanthologies, into The New Yorker, and other places. With certain genres, there are definitely expectations—with horror you want to be scared, with mystery you want to solve something—and that’s fine. I understand wanting an “easy read” for sure. But the novels and stories that move me the most, they find that sweet spot between dense and fast-paced, between emotional and gritty, between lyrical and entertaining. For MFA programs to ignore genre fiction is—I think it’s irresponsible. Look at The New York Times best seller lists—you know what’s on there? Mystery, romance, horror, fantasy, science fiction, YA, and literary. 

I agree with you. That sweet spot between “dense and fast-paced, between emotional and gritty, between lyrical and entertaining” is what I call being immersed in a good story. And the easier a writer can make their world seem to the reader, the better writer he or she is. What is it about this kind of writing that made you want to write in this genre?

Well, I grew up reading Stephen King, and he’ll tell you he’s a great storyteller, but not exactly a lyrical author. I think I sought out a range of voices, such as early Ray Bradbury leading me to William Burroughs and on to Chuck Palahniuk. I like to be surprised, I like to be moved, and I want to be hypnotized by the characters, the story, and the voice. When I first discovered Palahniuk, he got me to some neo-noir authors—Will Christopher Baer, Craig Clevenger, and Stephen Graham Jones. I loved how dense they were, how lyrical, but they weren’t boring or expected. They weren’t formulaic. When I write, I want to pull you into the story, to be the protagonist, experiencing what he (or she) is going through. I want to scare you, make you laugh, turn you on, enlighten you, and leave you spent. I want you to go hug your kids, lock the doors, and then stare out into the darkness wondering what might be possible, both the tragic and hopeful, the vengeful and mystical. I used to read a lot of mysteries, but over time, in a series, it’s all the same thing. If you pick up Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, I guarantee you’ve never read anything like it. The perfect blend of the horrific and the fantastic, the mix of light and dark, lyrical and visceral—it’s just amazing. 

I haven’t read Perdido Street Station, and now I will. What you say about pulling your reader into the story is right-on though. In your book, Disintegration, especially, I felt your protagonist pull – demand, force, coerce – me into his world in such a great and powerful way. A visceral way. A visual way.

Thanks. When I finished that book I broke down and started crying. I thought I might throw up. I’d BEEN him for so long, this unnamed protagonist. I guess you’d call it “method writing,” having sat in that place for so long, taking the advice of Jack Ketchum, and writing what scared me the most—seeing my wife and kids killed in a car accident. It was pretty intense. It also helped that it was set in Wicker Park, where I lived for ten years, in my old apartment, and old haunts. I could picture the rooms, the aqua stove, the people on the street—I could hear the Blue Line “L” train go by.

That takes some guts. Also – I’m pretty sure we were neighbors once upon a time. Small world.

I’ve noticed when your books are in the final stages of editing – or your anthologies – there’s quite a bit of hype around the artwork that will be included. More so, I think, than I’ve seen outside of the horror/crime/mystery category. Do you agree? Do you think that this is because this particular genre is so closely tied to the physical, visual world?

I do think the fantastic, the horrific, the magical, begs to be seen, and to be drawn. Whether it’s Neil Gaiman or Lovecraft. I think my personal attraction to art in the anthologies I’ve edited and published comes from two places—my desire to give my readers something more, the illustrations adding to the experience, and my background in advertising for twenty years as an art director and graphic designer. I want the books to look nice, to be fun, to be well designed—you should pick them up and hold them, turn them over, enjoy the imagery, all of the elements. I’m a very tactile person. I’ve also seen so many horrible covers, especially in horror, that I knew I wanted to use original photography and illustrations on all of my books. It’s important to me.

Does this have anything to do with your interest in including artwork in Gamut?

Definitely. It’s the same way at Gamut—there will be original drawings with every story. Luke Spooner will be doing that—he’s done most of the interior work I’ve published at Dark House Press. I can say, “Draw me a crib,” and it’ll be the coolest, creepiest crib you’ve ever see. And we have other perspectives, too, from George C. Cotronis, Daniele Serra, Bob Crum, and Jennifer Moore. They’ve all done cover art or other projects for me at Dark House Press. 

So…we’ve uttered the word, Gamut. Tell us what you are most excited about – the first thing you want to tackle – once your Kickstarter is funded (because I hope it will be!).

The stories! I have a list of reprints that I’m dying to get to, work I couldn’t publish in other places. These are my favorite authors, so I want to go get those dark tales and share them with the world. And the new work, man, I really have no idea what they’ll turn in, which is really exciting! I know a story from Livia Llewellyn or Laird Barron or Damien Angelica Walters will be something special. It’ll be new, just for our readers, and I can’t wait to share these with them. I’m being a bit of a patron (or maybe I should say fanboy) here, too, supporting the voices that matter to me, that inspire me, that push me to be a better author. 

Nothing wrong with that! It’s so important to support and encourage the writers we love.  

For sure. If people didn’t support me, encourage me when I was just getting started, I’d never have written anything. Craig Clevenger really pushed me to send out a story I wrote in a class of his, entitled, “Stillness.” I didn’t have any faith in it, but I sent it out. Of course, I sent it to all the wrong places at first, but eventually it landed in Shivers VIalongside Stephen King and Peter Straub. But I needed that initial push, that support. 

You’re a writer. You’ve edited a bunch of books. You’re more than qualified to start a lit mag, and you’ve told me you’ve been working toward this for years – so what’s standing in the way? I’m thinking you’re going to say money. Is it money?

Money, yes. That’s the big one. But really, I wanted to start this project WITH people. I didn’t want to do it alone. This isn’t about me, it’s about being a part of the landscape of excellent publishing that’s already going on—at Tor, Nightmare, Cemetery Dance, Apex, F&SF, Clarkesworld, Shimmer, etc. I’ve been inspired by editors like Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, Paula Guran, John Joseph Adams, Michael Kelly, and many others. Not only did I want to surround myself with talented authors, but I wanted the original patrons and supporters to be a part of this as well. I want them to suggest people to me, to have an open discussion, and I want them to send in their work. With a vehicle like Kickstarter people are invested—literally. And whether it’s $30 or $130 or $1,030 this is where we all come together to create something new, and exciting, and interesting. A few places have closed, recently, and others are no longer taking submissions, so it seemed like the right time to step up and take this chance. We’re going to pay ten cents a word, which is more than most, and we’re going to embrace dark, weird, literary stories, which sometimes have a hard time finding a home.

Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahnuik, Marcus Sakey – they’ve all backed you. A mile-long list of authors have given verbal agreements to write for your magazine. A host of editors and artists have signed on to help once the magazine is up and running. It has to feel great knowing this dream of yours is about to come to fruition – or are you too worried to enjoy the love?!  

You know, Megan, if I wasn’t bipolar when I started, I probably am now. As we speak it’s day two, and we’ve raised almost $8,000. I’m both thrilled with that and also disappointed. I go back and forth. One minute I think we can’t do this, the next I think this is definitely going to work out. So, yes, I am pretty worried, but if everyone who says they want to change the industry, everyone who says there aren’t enough paying markets, actually steps up and contributes, we should be able to make this happen. I don’t want people to do this for me, I want them to do it for the authors who are going to write the stories, for the artists who will draw new work, for the writers who will now have a new place to submit and get paid—and for themselves, to create a new magazine for entertainment, enlightenment, and fulfillment.

I can’t wait to see how your Kickstarter project works out – and even more so how the launch of Gamut goes. Thank you for the interview, Richard, and best of luck!

Thanks, Megan, I really appreciate the continued interest and support. Means a lot.

An Interview with Carmiel Banasky

Carmiel Banasky and I sit at Crema Bakery & Café in SE Portland a couple days after her recent reading at Powell’s City of Books. We chitchat about Portland (where she’s originally from and where I currently live) and the giddy significance of reading at a landmark like Powell’s (a bit more on that later). After the interview, we talk for a while about agents, publishers, writing conferences, and things you might say when seeing somebody’s baby for the first time—like “hope he doesn’t grow up to be a serial killer.” Carmiel’s a delight, and her book is filled with the same wit, weirdness, and touches of humor.

Carmiel’s debut novel, The Suicide of Claire Bishop, is out now from Dzanc Books. It’s a story with two concurrent protagonists: Claire and West. A decades-old painting binds these two characters together. Claire is the original subject of this 1959 painting; fast forward to 2004 and West becomes obsessed with the idea that it was painted by his ex-girlfriend, the enigmatic Nicolette. The more West weans off his schizophrenia meds, the more real this connection becomes. As the story progresses, coincidences and clues pile up, and the reader wonders whether West is onto something. The novel moves deftly across generations and crafts an interwoven narrative of two lives, inexplicably bound together yet worlds apart. The novel delights in its own contradictions and challenges the reader’s assumptions of truth and untruth. In short, it’s a book about doubt; it’s about negative space; it’s about the fragility of the human mind. So where to begin? When the tape recorder rolls, I decided to dive into the most obvious question first; I’ve heard Carmiel answer this question before, but she always has more to say on the subject.

*

James R. Gapinski: Why did you write a novel about schizophrenia?

Carmiel Banasky: I have been trying to find new ways to tell this story, but the basics are that I had two friends who were diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was just blown away by their experiences, but mostly I was blown away that I had never heard of those experiences before, and I had never read those experiences. I was just trying to write something that I wanted to read, and I wanted to write an experience that they could recognize on the page in a way that they might not have read before in literary fiction. It was also about my own fear of their experiences too. These were my friends, who I had known on both sides of their diagnoses—and just seeing how fragile the mind is—I wanted to investigate my own fear of madness too, and our own fragility as humans and our bodies. If I ever had an agenda, it was to make sure that West was relatable and that this disease was not so off-putting. The images that we see as schizophrenia are so often linked to violence because that’s what makes the nightly news, you know?

JRG: Yeah, I know what you mean.

CB: We’re not going to see a peaceful portrayal of schizophrenia on the news, so I just wanted to offer this other narrative.

JRG: We’re not seeing that on the news for sure—but we’re also missing it in other literature and pop culture too. I feel like people get this one view of what schizophrenia means, and it’s used in a specific way on the page for this over-the-top effect. Besides these sorts of violence stereotypes, what other preconceived ideas did you have to fight against or research more?

CB: Colloquially schizophrenia—the term schizophrenia—is used completely wrong. It’s used to mean multiple personality disorder. When you hear someone say “I feel so schizophrenic,” what they mean is “I feel of many minds” or something, and they feel like a different person one day to the next, but that’s not what schizophrenia is at all. That was interesting to realize. The other thing about schizophrenia is that when it has been portrayed really empathetically—like in the film A Beautiful Mind—the hallucinations were portrayed visually. Because how can you portray hallucinations on the screen if not visually? Usually with schizophrenia its actually aural hallucinations. Those kind of sound hallucinations might translate and feel visual or of this space [Carmiel gestures to the café table and surrounding physical space], but it’s more like sounds that you hear echoing throughout the day, dialogue you might’ve heard that morning, it feels like it’s happening right now. That’s how some people explained an episode, or feeling like a metaphor is real. Like if someone feels like their heart is broken metaphorically, to a schizophrenic person it might feel like their heart is physically breaking. I had to figure out ways to show West’s hallucinations on the page without making them visual.

JRG: And you mentioned earlier about an intrigue with how fragile the mind is. Without giving anything a way, at a certain point in the book you get into Alzheimer’s too. Did that all stem from this same exploration of the mind, or is that a personal connection too?

CB: I did know somebody with Alzheimer’s, so a lot of my research was recalling my time with her. It was another avenue to explore how easily our mind’s change. Alzheimer’s was another way to explore how we change and ask the questions “How can we trust our own selves?” and “How can we know our own selves” if our minds can so easily change. I think about that a lot about. I tried to write a short story that I think failed—it’s in a drawer somewhere—about someone with a brain tumor who becomes a pedophile because of this brain tumor pressing on their frontal lobe, but that wasn’t who they were before this growth on their brain which completely changes them, changes how the world sees them, and their family, and how their family sees them. Just finding ways to ask that question and explore it.

JRG: You mentioned some of the research involved with Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, but what sort of research did you do into different time periods? The book jumps between time periods, but the reader is with you and accepts it.

CB: A lot of it was trying to figure out the language of the time, and reading things from that time—like newspaper articles—and I read a lot of Village Voice articles from the ’60s, and language from then to now isn’t that different, but little key signifiers are important to both gain the reader’s trust that we are in this time period and to point out that context but without drawing attention to itself. That was important, and usually that was just through one phrase or one terminology. Also watching how Claire’s own language changes throughout the book. She calls black people in 1959 “American Negroes,” and in the ’60s she finally has to talk to a black person for the first time in her life. Thinking about that and how Claire changes—it was as much about character development as setting development. Listening to music, reading memoirs, but also interviewing. That was fun. I got to interview a lot of people who were both young enough and old enough to remember the ’60s and ’50s in New York City, and they loved talking about it and wanted me to use certain stories and details.

JRG: New York is prominently featured, so are different locations like Port Townsend, Washington. There’s a definite sense of place. How much of that was born out of your residency-hopping versus research, or pulled out of thin air, or what?

CB: I lived in New York for four years—all over the city and in Brooklyn—but I didn’t really start writing about New York until I left it. I think that leaving New York was a way for me to get back at it and to be able to write about it. It was the people at residencies who I met that I interviewed mostly—the older writers and artists who I met there. Of course, between residencies I always went back to Port Townsend, and I started working at Goddard in 2011. But I’d always gone to Port Townsend at least once a year. It was probably where I really first took myself seriously as a writer at the Centrum Writer’s Conference. Port Townsend had to be in the book. I tried to cut out Port Townsend completely—for a while West did not go back home. There’s two homecomings in the book—Claire’s and West’s—they both go back to their childhood homes. I fought leaving New York and tried to cut that section out, but then it didn’t seem full or whole anymore. We had to leave New York—just like how I had to leave New York—to come back to it. To come full circle. Does that make sense?

JRG: Yes, of course. There are too many novels that are all about New York anyway.

CB: Yeah, there are a lot of New York novels, that’s true [Carmiel laughs].

JRG: What are some books or authors who have influenced you?

CB: I love Michael Ondaatje, he was a huge influence. Coming Through Slaughter had such an impact on me. Colin McCann—especially Let the Great World Spin—and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Specimen Days. Stylistically those . . . [Carmiel pauses and grins] . . . those three white men [both laugh] were very influential on this book. But the first stylist who I think influenced them—and me in turn—was Virginia Woolf. With Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, how she portrays his view of the world, and how everything’s interconnected, and the language she uses to show his ideas of interconnectedness—I learned a lot from that on how to portray West’s ideas. The way she shifts between points of view. I love Mrs. Dalloway so much—not everybody does, but I do—and also some of Virginia Woolf’s books are not accessible, but that one is. A lot of modernists are not accessible, so learning from her on how she can still have everything she wants out of her prose and still write with such beauty. She’s always putting story first with Mrs. Dalloway, as opposed to Orlando which is maybe more about rhythm and sound than story. Also Ursula K. Le Guin. I love her work so much. We exchanged a couple letters many years ago, and that had a huge impact on me as a writer, and what it could mean to be a writer, and how to just do what you want.

JRG: What sort of context? Like “fan letters” or what?

CB: [Carmiel laughs] I totally wrote her a fangirl letter, but then it became a correspondence. I spent weeks writing as beautiful a letter as I could. Then she wrote back and told me how beautiful the letter was [both laugh], and that made my life. Then we wrote back and forth and then switched to e-mail. It was just really important to me—that tiny exchange, which lasted around seven exchanges or something. We talked about Karl Jung; we talked about love and characters. It was good. It was special.

JRG: I think a lot of writers are more accessible than people think as soon as you actually reach out and say “Hey, I like your work” and make the attempt.

Writers want to hear from readers—or some do anyway, and some are standoffish, but most want to connect with people and that’s why they’re writing. A newer writer who has influenced me is Melinda Moustakis, she’s really wonderful. She’s an example of someone who just writes so beautifully and experimentally but is also super accessible—the writing I mean.

JRG: This whole first book whirlwind thing: is it exciting or just long and drawn out and tedious?

CB: [Carmiel laughs] It’s anxiety provoking and exciting. I guess there’s tedium in there. I haven’t been writing for the last couple months. I’ve been sending e-mails about my book with all my spare time. I’ve been as proactive as I possibly can be, but it really takes a lot of time and energy to do that. But yes, it’s exciting. I’m never going to have the kind of homecoming that I had in Portland for any birthday or even like a wedding. It felt more like a bris or something the other night at Powell’s. Seeing all the people and love that I have in my life and the community that supports me and is excited for me—that has been really special. There’s ups and downs. There’s this weird high. This spotlight that I never had or ever sought out, so there’s obviously a come-down from that. Thinking about reviews, and will the book get reviewed, and questions like that—you know, questions about sales—mostly, I would like to just be protected from any information that I don’t need to know and just go about doing the events that I can and sending the e-mails that I can, but that’s in the back of my head too.

JRG: Even after you’re hit with the logistics and the reviews and numbers, then you still have this lull between your next release when you’re just working and not having all this spotlight.

CB: I’m looking forward to that—the quiet—because I would like to get back to writing and really living in the next book rather than mostly in this book and a tiny bit in the next project. That’ll be nice.

JRG: You had mentioned at Powell’s that you have a couple things on the burner. Do you know where you’re probably focusing or what your next project will be?

CB: I don’t know which one I’ll really dive into and spend the most time on yet. I have a couple things. I have drafts done of the fantasy book and of a TV pilot that I wrote—which my editor told me I should turn into a novel and then rewrite as a pilot, and I don’t know, I’m not sure how I see it anymore. But the thing I’ll probably write—which I did not mention the other night, I don’t think—is another book about suicide. And I don’t feel like The Suicide of Claire Bishop is about suicide, but it has it in the title [both laugh], and this next one is actually about suicide. I don’t really want to pigeonhole myself as a suicide writer—that sounds horrible—but that’s the story that I really want to write and has been really difficult to write. I’ve been writing it for years now, just in really short spurts, because it’s really sad and has been hard to write. I need to just do it. Maybe now is not a good emotional time to do it, but we’ll see. I think a lot about self-care for writers, so I’ll just need to figure out what I can do for myself to make sure it’s okay to write this thing.

JRG: What’s your usual self-care?

CB: I don’t have a ritual, but I do think about rituals of others. Like my friend Melissa Chadburn is writing a novel that comes out next year about a serial killer—from the point of view of his victims—and it’s so dark. So she lights a candle when she’s ready to write, and she writes for a couple hours, and then she blows out the candle, and it’s just a symbol to not take that darkness with her into life, into her every day. That helps her a lot, so maybe I need a ritual like that. Also things like making sure I’m exercising—I don’t exercise at all—but I need to be in my body, especially in times of writing dark things and being completely in my head. Meditating. Going dancing. Getting out of your room and going to be part of your writing community and talking to people who get it. That’s all part of the self-care.

*

If you’re interested in getting out of the apartment, connecting with the writing community, and practicing some self-care, a list of Carmiel Banasky’s upcoming events are available on her website. The Suicide of Claire Bishop is available now.

How Much We Compromise: An Interview with Vanessa Blakeslee

RACHEL KOLMAN: Before Juventud, you’ve been known primarily as a short story writer. How was the process of writing and putting together this book different than your collection, Train Shots?

VANESSA BLAKESLEE: I don’t find one form particularly more challenging than the other—just different challenges, and I enjoy both. I found constructing the novel with the compactness of a short story to forever be a challenge—I’m an over-writer, certainly in the long form, and so I have to cut and cut and cut. Even when I think a scene or passage is tight, chances are I have to cut. Hopefully I’ve learned something about this when I sit down to draft the next novel, about focus and concision. On the other hand maybe that’s just my process, and those tangents shed light on other characters or as-yet-unforeseen places where the story needs to go. Occasionally you can repurpose what you cut, although not most of the time.

I see the main challenge between the two forms residing within the impulse at inception—asking myself what container the conflict is calling for, and what kind of meaningful satisfaction am I chasing? For the satisfaction of writing a short story is entirely different than that of a novel. I love both, I can see myself working in both for the rest of my life because I’m a dedicated reader of both forms. And yet there is nothing quite as gratifying as an epic story well told. As humans we are awed by sublime creation on a grand scale; it’s embedded within us. Or so Longinus pointed out centuries ago. I tend to agree, although that just may be my mood of late—a longing to lose myself in a bigger world, an epic story.

RK: This novel is heavily rooted in history and the Catholic Church, and is remarkably researched. Can you tell me about the research that went into this novel? How much of the story was formed before research, and how did the story evolve through the process of research?

VB: When the premise for Juventud took root in my imagination and I knew the story largely took place in Colombia, I had two main concerns: 1) how to set high dramatic stakes (life or death) and 2) how to keep my own interest in the material for the months or years it takes to write a novel. Many Americans have a cursory, if erroneous, understanding of the conflict in Colombia, gleaned from sound bites they’ve picked up about the drug war, cartels, perhaps the FARC, but little else. The more I researched the history of the guerilla movement and the formation of the cartels and the key incidents on the timeline, both on the Internet and in fairly dense scholarly works, the more riveted I became in telling a story that more truly captures the sociopolitical landscape of Colombia—one that shines a light on the atrocities of the paramilitaries as much as the guerillas, and includes the millions of displaced alongside the wealthy. The depictions we’re so used to seeing from the movies play up the “sexy danger” of Latin America: armored cars, bodyguards, lavish estates, gorgeous women. Those exist in Juventud, too, but in a way that I hope is much more balanced, lyrical, and revelatory.

Not surprisingly, the more facts I unearthed in my research fed the shaping of the characters: their wants, actions, and the eventual themes. I studied everything from YouTube videos of Colombian peace rallies from the time, to AP releases on hostage crises, to interviews with paramilitary leaders. I also reached out to Latin American Studies experts for the most recent, reliable, and often dense, texts on the subject. The brutality of the guerilla and paramilitary atrocities’ in the lives of peasants is unbelievably horrifying, and propelled me onward—the book became much more than a love story I wanted to tell, but about the voices of so many in Latin America who scrape by day-to-day in terror, and are silenced. I wrote a lot that didn’t end up making it into the final manuscript, but I hope that those who are moved by the novel will seek to uncover more about that part of the world on their own.

Characters are literally born from whatever fictional earth your story takes place. And in that sense, I felt it was inevitable that Diego have been a cradle-Catholic who came into manhood at the height of the cartels, lost his faith, and when ego brought him down, struggled to reclaim it. And when I came across the event in spring, 1999, of the ELN kidnapping the congregation of La Maria Church in the wealthy Ciudad Jardin district of Cali, I knew this had to affect my characters in some way, and La Maria Juventud was born. I had been wondering what kind of occupation—or preoccupation—to give the young man who was to become Mercedes’ lover, that her father wouldn’t like but would make him sympathetic to the reader, and this was it—that Manuel and his brothers would head up a youth movement for peace, and Manuel would reveal himself to be a natural leader. Through this lens, I found I could also explore other facets of Catholicism in a natural way—that the sexual awakenings between teenagers would clash with the Church’s doctrines on birth control, marriage, and the like. Mercedes is an atheist at the book’s beginning which allows her to observe her Catholic friends (and father) neutrally, although I see her as more of an agnostic by the end.

From early on in my research and drafting, I understood that to not include the Church would be impossible, if I was to be true to the story and the setting. Colombia is an overwhelmingly Catholic country; the very philosophy behind the guerilla movements in South America is that of Marxist liberation theology, which interprets the Christian faith from the perspective of the poor, and in the early days of the guerilla movements, the 1950s and 60s, adopted Marxist teachings in their advocacy for social justice. I was also in the midst of shifting away from the fervent Catholicism I’d been practicing in my mid-twenties because I couldn’t reconcile my personal stance on women’s and gay rights with the Church’s doctrine, but found myself reluctant when it came to Catholicism’s stance on social justice—a cornerstone that I believe Christianity, but especially Catholicism, very much gets right. I’m a huge proponent of “faith in action,” in that respect—the only way spiritual principles make sense to me is if they are lived out in practice. Otherwise, what’s the point?

The Catholicism also prompted me to bring in the Jewish thread to the book—I’m always looking how to complicate threads further to create more contrast and meaning. Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, if her mother is not only American but Jewish, and if her mother is on an identity-quest of her own, and if Mercedes eventually goes to visit her in Israel? And then we have the contrast between another decades-long conflict, that of Israel and Palestine, and the Colombian civil war. So in the latter half the book expands outward to reflect not just the issues of social justice and violence in South America, but the global conflicts still raging today. The common ground between Judaism and Christianity is unearthed, but also the divide between the religious and secular. Not to mention the resonance of what Mercedes has escaped from, after she learns the history of her maternal Jewish family prior to World War II.

RK: Tell me more about Mercedes, our narrator. Spending so much time in her voice, I imagine you grew very close to her. How did you develop her character? How was it to write her as fifteen, young and in love in Colombia, and then again as an adult?

VB: From the beginning the voice posed many challenges, not in the least that I didn’t know the ending to the story—the adult section—for quite a while. When the why? behind the story eludes you, the answer lies in probing the dramatic question more fully. Because the dramatic question focuses on how the events of her youth, and most crucially, how she sees them, impact her life long-term, the story belongs to Mercedes. Once I got there, I felt more certain that the book speaks solidly to a mature audience, not excluding the sophisticated younger reader. I suppose I could have structured the narrative differently—say, three third-person narratives, one following Mercedes, the others following Manuel and Diego—but I was more interested in Mercedes as an embodiment of the global citizen of today, the highly-educated Millennial who inhabits several different identities and cultures, and how she navigates the paths available to her. Education and access to birth control are enabling women around the world to make strides and command their destinies for the first time in human history; I found myself more invested in giving a female protagonist full rein, seeing how her roots in a conflicted country leave their imprint on her emotionally as she otherwise achieves success. I wasn’t so much interested in following Diego or Manuel as closely; their inner struggles wouldn’t have touched so much on the identity issues I was intrigued by in Mercedes. Structurally, I felt it should be fully Mercedes’ story in that it is presented as a memoir she’s writing—there’s a self-consciousness about the narrative, then, which hopefully allows the book to transcend the themes of love and career and illuminate her relationship with herself.

By following her out of Colombia and into adulthood, we also get the parallels and contrasts between the developing world of South America and the U.S., the violence Mercedes grew up with in 1990s Cali and that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when she takes her birthright trip to Israel. Much can be learned, I think, from studying how some countries long ravaged by war, corruption, and atrocities eventually do arrive at a lasting peace—even though this hardly means that the inequalities, prejudices, and the like have been solved. Far from it, but if this novel illuminates how no one escapes unscathed, by no means the elite, then I’ve done my job.

RK: There’s a great theme in this novel about the power of the truth and the idea of using lies to protect the ones we love. Was this a concept you meant to explore, or did it sort of fall into place? To you, how important is the idea of finding “the truth?”

VB: I love mind-bending novels where you find out, at the end, the way things happened turns out to be very different from what it seemed: The Blind Assassin, Atonement, Never Let Me Go, The Secret in Their Eyes, to name a few. In such stories perspective is key. So I wanted to explore those limitations, but didn’t exactly know how, nor if I could pull it off. I do believe that sometimes, it’s necessary to have reservations about what we divulge to those we care about. As a fiction writer, I’m always fascinated by the grey zone of moral ambiguity and how we navigate that as humans.

There are different types of truth: the kind we perceive, which is shaped by our own perceptions and flawed by our limitations, the truth that resides in facts and evidence, and the emotional truth. The diligent research required of the project only emboldened my interest and commitment to the book, for the more facts I uncovered, the more harrowing and urgent and true I found the themes. Juventud translates to “youth” in Spanish, and speaks to not only the singular world of the novel at a certain place and time, but the ongoing humanitarian crises in South and Central America—tens of thousands of children illegally crossing the US border, the continuation of horrific cartel violence in Mexico and other nations. Eventually Mercedes flees Colombia for the U.S. and her mother’s family, fully embraces her American identity, works first for the State Department and then becomes a journalist. I can’t think of another major work of literary fiction that so vividly illustrates the outcome of neoliberal economic policies in South America, their impact on the guerilla and paramilitary violence of late 1990s Colombia entangled with drug cartel operations, and how through these characters, the crises facing Latin America today are precisely and poignantly illuminated. In Juventud, landowners and upper class such as Mercedes’s father, Diego, Uncle Charlie, Ana’s parents and others wield a firm grasp on their wealth by secretly funding paramilitary armies who violently “cleanse” the countryside of uncooperative peasants or those they believe sympathetic to the guerillas’ (FARC and ELN) cause. Through the artifice of fiction, the novel stirs up disturbing and necessary questions about the decades-long crisis in Colombia, and the very “grey” role played by the United States in the implementation of solutions.

My hope is that readers of Juventud will gain a sharper understanding of what it means to live in Colombia and to greater extent, Central and South America, where the disparity between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is much greater than in the US—although the gap is widening here, quickly— and how violence and bloodshed arise from such disparity to negatively affect everyone, rich, poor, and in-between. This is also a story of how our perceptions very much shape our desires and decisions, not always to our own best interest. Inevitably we are molded and driven by what happens to us in our youth and how we perceive those events, a perspective which is limited and therefore flawed, yet unbeknownst to us at the time, and often for many years afterward. Through Mercedes, the novel reveals how we grapple to make sense of these formative individual experiences – and how as adults, we have the opportunity and means to gain clarity, responsibility, and forgiveness, and ultimately understand and transcend our past even if it will always remain part of us.

RK: The novel also explores some great feminist issues: there are times that even the 15-year-old Mercedes can see how she is being controlled and stifled. How does feminism inform your writing? Do you feel it’s important as a woman writer to contribute to the feminist conversation?

VB: First, I’m so glad to hear Mercedes’ cognizance of how she’s being manipulated at times by the men around her came through; getting her burgeoning awareness to hit the right notes took numerous drafts. I am a feminist, and I am a writer. Your questions remind me of the quote by Flannery O’Connor, from her wonderful collected writings, Mystery and Manners: “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.” Because I believe in a woman’s right to have control over her own body, no matter what, in access to safe and affordable birth control, that as soon as any state power gains the ability to control a body, it has then seized control of the individual, male or female—these beliefs naturally trickle up through my imagination and into my fiction. Was I to consciously impose them upon the work, the whole experiment would turn brittle and fall apart, because the rules of art won’t allow for it.

Prostitution remains much more peripheral in the novel than the contraceptive subplot, but no less important. The openness and prevalence of prostitution in Latin America is perhaps what shocked me most during my travels. Colombia has laws similar to Costa Rica regarding prostitution, meaning that it’s legalized and regulated to certain zones, bars, brothels, etc. This, along with mandatory STD testing, serves to protect women (and society at large) as well as eliminate pimping. I hesitate to say “empower” because I find the practice of selling sex hardly healthy or empowering; if you’ve ventured into any of these “whore bars,” the mood is unmistakably sad. Mercedes’s brief brushes with putasare crucial to contrasting the different social classes: paths available to women, and lack thereof. This, I hope, illustrates the privilege of Mercedes and her circle—there are only so many jobs with airlines, hotel chains, or zip-lining tourists through the jungle, and far more women who must fare for themselves and provide for children, with far more limited options. I hope these subtle, more tertiary notes shed greater light on Mercedes, her dreams and fears. At one point when her plans to flee to Medellín with Manuel are taking shape, she mentions her fears of ending up in a barrio among prostitutes and the displaced. How quickly may any of us fall, without a safety net? Again, in this context, her fixation on a flight attendant career path ought to make more sense. I hope astute readers will see some of the broader social justice issues that the storyline barely scratches.

I also wanted to explore the assertiveness in Mercedes’s character through her sexual coming-of-age—to show a young woman who is comfortable enough in her body and her relationship to be proactive about losing her virginity in a healthy way, and up front about experiencing and deserving her own pleasure. She and Manuel “wait” a respectable amount of time before having intercourse, so they get to know each other’s character; I saw them as trusted friends by that point, and hope readers will, too. There are too few instances, in books and on the screen, that tastefully depict young men pleasuring young women, which prompted the bedroom scene with Manuel and Mercedes on the night of her birthday party. I’m not aware of cunnilingus concluding a chapter elsewhere in literature. Please enlighten me if such a scene exists!

RK: The second half of the book shows Mercedes in her twenties, with many of her decisions informed by the way she views her past in Colombia. I love the idea of how our misconceptions distort our worldview. Can you talk more about that idea and how it played into the novel?

VB: As we grow older and gain experience, we witness our ideals smacking up against practicalities that compel us to bend, to compromise if we want to keep after our missions at all, versus throw in the towel. When we’re young we usually can’t see the other factors at play, or if we’re aware of them we can’t yet understand the gravity nor nuanced entanglements that come along with the territory, and so it’s easy to profess a cut-and-dry approach. I suspect this reflects the gulf in generational thinking and subsequent behavior across the globe, cultural differences aside. The younger generations organize protests and take grassroots action; the elders legislate and hold summits. The youth cry, “Do something now!”; the elders say, “Let’s step back and discuss first.” To act wisely requires making decisions from somewhere in the middle—from the head and heart, so to speak.

How much we compromise, now that is the stickler, isn’t it? For I believe young people’s ardent convictions are a crucial reminder to older generations of the human spirit not standing for what is unjust, absurd, against liberty and basic human decency, and to press forward to behave better. So the trick as we age is to learn how to bend and accept realities that we can’t change, those that are relatively benign, and still work feverishly with the end goal in mind, without growing jaded and bitter.

Moreover, the overarching lesson in Juventud is a warning about what happens when emotions are running high, and we jump to conclusions and react impulsively. Nothing can change the past, and Mercedes has got to reap what she—and La Maria Juventud–have sown. But I think it’s also important to see the events through the cultural milieu, and consider that in a nation rife with corruption and vigilantism, “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” is not necessarily in the citizens’ mindset—and likely wouldn’t have been in Mercedes’, until she came to the U.S. True to her upbringing as the daughter of Diego Martinez, in ultimate crisis teenage Mercedes learns to “take matters into her own hands” and unfortunately pays the price.  But I think it’s very possible for her to forgive herself and heal the rift within her family.

RK: Some of my favorite parts to read were the moments of gorgeous imagery: walking the streets of Colombia, lying in Manuel’s bed with the fan whirring above, the image of her father in his bandana. Do you have a favorite moment or scene in the novel, or something that is of particular significance to you?

VB: The scene where Mercedes is on her way to Ana’s engagement party, and her driver stops on the valley road for her to talk to Papi as the sugarcane burns ranks among my favorites for imagery and lyricism, but also emotion. Still, whenever I read that passage, the poignancy of the moment between father and daughter moves me almost to tears.

RK: What were you reading while writing this novel? What works inspired you?

VB: Caucasia by Danzy Senna helped me hone the voice in later drafts, as Senna’s is very much a novel about identity and estranged parents, and how the narrator perceives her reality as a child vs. how she later comes to view those events as a young adult. Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, also about memory although structurally different and rendered in present tense; I often turn to Atwood for her astounding imagery, and smart, fresh, often funny turns-of-phrase. I suppose The Lover was an influence, for the lyrical way Duras depicts a fifteen-year-old’s discovery of forbidden sex in the tropics. The Kite Runner, for plot and story; even though it centers on a friendship and not a love affair, the novel still deals with the subject of the now-Americanized global citizen returning to a homeland long ravaged by war, confronting individuals from the past, and navigating family dynamics. And many more of course: Julia Alvarez, Ben Fountain, the Greek playwrights, all at some point influenced Juventud.