An Interview with Julie Zuckerman, author of The Book of Jeremiah

In 2011, shortly after I settled in Raanana, Israel, I reached out to American-immigrant-writer, Evan Fallenberg, about writing groups. Evan connected me to Julie Zuckerman, who invited me to join hers. The handful of writers met in my town, a 45-minute drive for Julie. Despite other commitments—four children, a full-time job, mountain biking and running time—she showed up. But never alone. Every meeting, she brought Jeremiah: as a no-goodnik preteen, as a cantankerous retiree, as a contented professor. When anyone questioned Jeremiah, whether his character, behavior, action, intention, or decision, Julie never wavered. She knew him through and through. When anyone asked about the book’s structure, she answered clearly. Julie’s dedication to, curiosity about, and bafflement with Jeremiah shines through each page.

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Jennifer Lang: How long have you been writing about Jeremiah? Did you know from the get-go that you were trying to write about Jeremiah’s entire life or did you craft your first story as a standalone?

Julie Zuckerman: I wrote the first story in 2010. At the time, I was taking a fiction class with Evan Fallenberg, and he gave a prompt to write about someone who is “definitely not you” but who does something in which you’re interested. I wrote about an African-American woman who has her own business as a landscape architect; I like gardening, but don’t know much about it. I enjoyed writing that one so much, I used the same prompt for my next story. This time, it was a bit closer to home: an older Jewish man who takes up baking, which I do know something about. As soon as I wrote “MixMaster,” ultimately the final story in the collection, I knew I wanted to go back and unravel Jeremiah’s life.

JL: Who is Jeremiah? Is he based on anyone in your life? Who inspired his character?

JZ: Jeremiah’s voice was inspired by my father-in-law. My father-in-law is a lovable man, a true mensch, but at times he has a gruff exterior, and I was trying to figure him out. His parents had fled Germany in 1933 for France, where he was born in 1937. Thanks to wealthy friends in New York, the family was able to flee Europe in 1941. Three months after arriving, his father died of a heart attack, leaving his mother with four young boys. I often wondered how this early loss has affected his personality. I figured Jeremiah had experienced a similar trauma.

JL: How did you decide on the chronology?

JZ: I played with the order many, many times; I had at least six different possibilities. When I attended a writers’ conference at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015, my instructor, Ellen Lesser, helped me strategize, telling me to think of the collection in thirds—younger, older, midlife. I had to balance the stories told from Jeremiah’s POV and from the POVs of others. I made flashcards and rearranged things and wanted to make sure there was a thread that carried through from story to story.

There’s an excellent essay “Stacking Stones” in David Jauss’s book Alone With All That Could Happen, in which he discusses the various ways one can structure a collection. “…we need to find a way to order [stories] so that they ‘expand and elaborate’ each other, and ultimately, become one unified work… Essentially, a successful short story collection is an elaborate system of parallels, contrasts, repetitions and variations that creates unity out of diversity.” Long before I read two of David’s story collections (also published by Press 53) and before he wrote a blurb for my book, I aligned with his advice.

JL: Is the book modeled after anything you’ve read?

JZ: Absolutely. I had recently read Olive Kittredge and loved how every story revealed new layers of Olive’s personality, even those in which she plays a minor role. My hope is that readers will find similar delight in getting to know Jeremiah.

JL: Did any part of this book involve research? If so, what?

JZ: For the stories that take place before the 1980s, I did a tremendous amount of research. There’s a story set in post-war Paris, another one during the tail end of the Vietnam War, another one during Freedom Summer. I read the archives of The New York Times, transcripts of press conferences, academic journal articles, eulogies of historical figures, accounts of what combat nurses and Signal Corps soldiers did during the war, and so on. I Googled things like “Depression-era Bridgeport” to picture what Jeremiah’s hometown (and my own) looked like in the 1930s.

Some of my research was on a lighter note, too: Jeremiah’s older brother Lenny is one of these kids who is obsessed with baseball, just as my own son was at the time. Ask me anything you want to know about Game 4 of the 1932 World Series, and I can probably answer.

JL: How long did it take you before you knew you were done telling his story?

JZ: I thought I was done in 2013/14 but ended up rewriting one of the stories completely. The only thing that remains the same from that earlier version is the year and location. I Googled to see happened in America in the summer of ‘64. Immediately, I found news items about three missing Civil Rights workers – Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney – whose bodies were later discovered in a Mississippi dam. We’d just had a horrific summer here in Israel, in 2014, which began with the abduction and murder of three teenage boys, Gil-ad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach and Naftali Fraenkel. I was struck by the parallels of the missing persons posters and knew I had my subject matter.

At some point in early 2015, I rewrote the last third of a different story. Between writing the first story and finishing the last significant revision, it took about five years to write the entire collection.

JL: What was it like writing about a character of the opposite sex?

JZ: I didn’t find it that difficult, to be honest. That’s one of the things I love about fiction writing, getting into the mindset of someone else and striving to find the connective tissue that bind us together, without regard to gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and so on. That being said, there’s one sex scene told from Jeremiah’s perspective which I was pretty nervous about. What a relief when the male instructor of a class I took through Catapult told me I’d aced the scene!

JL: What was the hardest chapter to write? Why?

JZ: Ironically, the hardest story to write was “The Dutiful Daughter,” which takes place in Israel. It’s told from the perspective of Hannah, Jeremiah and Molly’s daughter, on her first trip to the country, as an adult. The details about the setting in Israel were relatively easy, but it was a challenge to find the right balance between Hannah’s story and Jeremiah’s.

JL: How did you decide when to write a chapter in present/past tense?

JZ: I didn’t think about tense much when I first started writing the stories. Most were written in past tense, but during the revision process it felt more natural for certain stories to be told in present tense. I know some people look down on stories told present tense, but I went with my gut.

JL: Point of view shifts too. How did you decide who was best narrator for each chapter?

JZ: It evolved organically, just as with the varying tense shifts. From the outset, I knew I wanted to explore Jeremiah’s life from different perspectives. There are chapters told from the POVs of his mother, brother, wife, daughter and son, and originally there were more of those. But I found that my favorite stories were the ones told from Jeremiah’s POV; for reasons I’m not sure I can explain, I enjoyed being in Jeremiah’s head more than the others.

JL: What was one of the most surprising things you learned—about yourself, your characters, the craft—in writing this book?

JZ: I remember hearing craft advice about continuing to nurture your characters because if you don’t, they’ll wither and die. The first story in the collection, “A Strong Hand and an Outstretched Arm,” was one of my favorites, but it faced a lot of rejections. I didn’t want to give up on the story, so I kept revising and revising, ad nauseam. Finally, after four years of working on the story, the right ending clicked into place. Writing is an exercise in patience; often, you need to sit with a story for some time. It was a wonderful, gratifying surprise when I cracked that one open.

An Interview with Daisy Johnson

Daisy Johnson is the author of debut short story collection FEN as well as her first novel, Everything Under. The East Anglia native currently lives and writes in Oxford, England, after earning her Master’s in Creative Writing at Oxford University. She won the AM Heath Prize in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Berlin Prize that same year. Her first novel, Everything Under, has been longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. I spoke with her over e-mail about FEN and Everything Under, her creative process, and going from writing short stories to writing full novels.

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A. Poythress: I’ve been reading Peter Orner’s Am I Alone Here? for my writers on writers class with Patricia McNair, and in it he says, “finishing is agony because you know you will never again read this book for the first time”. I know I felt that way when reading FEN. I put off finishing the last three pages because I didn’t want it to be over. Are there any books like that for you?

Daisy Johnson: I love that, almost elegiac, feeling. I’m pleased that FEN did that to you. The Bone People by Keri Hulme made me feel that way, I think, because I felt as if I was a different reader after I’d finished it, saw the world in a different way. Also a lot of Stephen King because of those shock, gasp moments. I’ll never forget the first time I read The Shining.

AP: Place plays such a pivotal role in FEN. How could it not? The fen becomes a character in its own. How did you develop this characterisation?

DJ: The characterisation was there already because it is the way I feel about that land. I grew up there so my memories of it are tainted by those strange teenage years. I did really want the land to feel like a character in its own right though, I think maybe that’s where there are so many stories about language in the collection: I wanted it to feel as if the land could speak. I tried to develop it by intensify a few characteristics the fen has: it’s flatness, the fact that it used to be under water, it’s isolation from other places. 

AP: Do you think that specific small town claustrophobia felt in FEN is a universal feeling for all small towns? Or particularly locked into East Anglia/Eastern England?

DJ: I think it’s probably something that everyone in small towns feels at one moment or another. I imagine in the States, or Australia for example, you must feel it even more because there is simply great distances between places. I think what is specific about FEN is that these are characters who, because of who they are, really feel the isolation; a lot of them are teenagers who can’t drive and if they could would have nowhere to go anyway. The rest of them are trapped for other reasons and I think their claustrophobia comes from this, from knowing that they will probably always feel this way.

AP: When I first started reading “Starver”, I sat back with some overwhelming feeling that told me pay attention. Why did you decide to start FEN off with “Starver”?

DJ: Starver was actually the first story I wrote. I had been working on and off on a novel and I needed the immediate gratification of a story, the joy of actually finishing something. I think it, also, is a good introduction to the collection, to the landscape. The protagonist, is an observer, a quiet watcher and she — I hope — invites the readers in, shows them what they might expect in this strange, weird place.

AP: How long did it take you to figure out the order of the short stories in FEN?

DJ: It took a while. I tried a lot of different orders based on themes in the stories or the similarities in characters. One of the difficulties was trying to read the collection as a first time reader would. In the end I think the collection is based, loosely, on age. The women in the second half — after the long middle story — are a little older, a little more isolated.

AP: The Guardian review of FEN describes you as having “restraint of [your] language”. I must wholeheartedly agree. Yours are not the lengthy short stories of yesteryear. Was that restraint a natural style or a difficult and deliberate choice?

DJ: It is probably both just the way I write and also a consequence of the sort of short story writer’s I was reading. Writers such as Sarah Hall and Kelly Link.

One of the things I love about short stories is how little can be left out, how much exists in the gaps and the spaces.

AP: Would you consider FEN a horror collection?

DJ: That’s an interesting question. Particularly as my third book, which I’m in the early stages of, is a horror novel. Writing FEN didn’t frighten me the way writing this one did. I spend a lot of time jumping at noises in the house or writing by the back door so I have a good exit strategy. But I think FEN and everything else I write shares tropes of horror; those beats of unease that gradually grow and grow until they’re unbearable, that way of putting characters up against something and seeing how they deal with it.

AP: In both “The Hunt” and “The Cull”, it’s the men who hunt the foxes while the women come to live with them. Is there a deliberate relationship between women and animals as co-conspirators while men and animals are seemingly natural enemies?

DJ: I think a lot of the collection focuses on characters that are otherwise often silenced and that this is why there seems a relationship between the women and the animals. In the collection they are given a voice and the ways they use this voice are often a violent retaliation. A lot of the collection is about taking or stealing language, about trying to gain autonomy and often the men come out worse.

AP: I’ve seen many reviews compare FEN to works by Angela Carter. How do you feel about this comparison?

DJ: It’s obviously a great honour to be compared to someone like Angela Carter. She did things that no one else was doing at the time and her short stories are fireworks of weirdness. However I am always, I think, a little flinty when the comparison comes up. There are so many fantastic female short story writers doing amazing weird things and I think we need to make sure we are reading them, are comparing ourselves to them. I was not reading Carter when I was writing FEN, I was reading pretty much solely contemporary short story writers.

AP: Did you always believe you would write short stories? Personally, I always thought I’d write novels that would change the world, but more and more lately, short stories have consumed me.

DJ: I am a child of the creative writing workshop so my first encounter with writing was the short story. I understand that urge though; while studying I was always working on a novel in my spare time. It was only, really, in writing FEN that my love for short stories became fully fledged. A good short story can, I think, change the world in the way a novel can.

AP: Once a reader finishes FEN, it seems almost like a novel as opposed to a collection of short stories. Possibly my ignorance is showing — I read anthologies instead of published collections more often than not, and novels more often than most — but that surprised me. Was this an intentional choice or incidental?

DJ: It was intentional. I wanted — to add to the feeling of claustrophobia — to set all the stories in one, imaginary, town. The characters rarely encounter themselves but they frequent the same pub, hear the same anecdotes. I wanted the reader to come to know this place, to believe that it was somewhere where strange things happened.

I do think, though, that short story collections that are not linked can certainly feel novel-like. One of my favourite things about reading collections — which you get in a very different way with anthologies — seeing the links, the things the writer returns to again and again, the way they have structured the collection to lead us through these links.

AP: Do you feel FEN is a feminist story collection? Or just a collection that happens to centre on the female?

DJ: In the same way as, I suppose, everything I write will have threads and threats of horror in them I think everything will also be feminist. What, though, do we mean by that? That the writing will focus equally, if not more, on women as well as men? That the female characters will not be limited to roles as the girlfriends and wives and mothers of more interesting male protagonists? Sarah Hall was once asked why she wrote so many female characters and she replied that she would stop doing it when they stopped asking that question. I feel the same way. No one calls out writers for having too many male characters.  

AP: You said in an interview with The Guardian, “I didn’t write thinking that it would ever be published”. I think a lot of writers feel, or at least start off feeling, that way. But what compelled you to write these stories if you didn’t think they would be shared?

DJ: Good question. I suppose the same reason any of us do creative things in our spare time. For me reading was certainly the beginning, a joy of literature, a curiosity in seeing if I could do what my favourite writers were doing. I will say, also, that I am a guilt ridden worker. My degrees were churned on the back of guilt and a lot of what I have written is spurned on by it too. Also, though I certainly wasn’t convinced of their publication, the stories were being shared with those around me, particularly the other writers on my MA.

AP: Has your process for writing your new novel changed from how you wrote FEN? Does anything feel easier? Do you feel more pressure?

DJ: Oh god! My second book, Everything Under, which is out next year, has been the bane of my life. Is that too extreme? It’s been a hard slog, four years from conception to copy edits. A lot of time spent weeping in cafes and at my desk. There are probably enough words cut from this novel to make up three more. I love it now but I didn’t always love it. I hope everyone will love it too! And yes, of course, there was that old pressure in knowing that short stories were well and good but the novel was the important thing and I had to write one to start to make a living.

However: my third book is a novel and so far it’s a joy. I float to my desk. On good days I can write 5,000 words. I’ve learnt, of course, from FEN and Everything Under, I’m hopefully making less editing work later. I also think though that some books, as with some stories, are just harder to write. They need to be harder.

AP: You said in American Short Fiction, “Maybe that is the landscape I like writing about: where it’s so quiet you can hear the strangeness you might not in other places notice”. I don’t have a question about this — I just think it’s profound and speaks to why I like writing about isolated settings as well.

DJ: I live in Oxford now and it’s always what I notice when I go to visit my parents who still live close to the fens and very much in the middle of nowhere. It’s so quiet until it’s not! That strange switch from the quiet of the day to the hunting, noisy night.

AP: I know you stated that while reading FEN, you read collections primarily written by women. Is this the same for your current project?

DJ: I think I tend to read more by women anyway but yes there were a couple of books I returned to while writing Everything Under. Evie Wylde’s All the Birds Singing, Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, Weathering by Lucy Wood. I also read quite a bit of Alice Oswald’s poetry. Everything Under is an Oedipus rewrite so I also read books that rewrote in that way. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is fantastic and I would really recommend The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski.

AP: You say writing “seemed accidental” in American Short Fiction. I think all writers who are voracious readers first feel that way — I know I certainly do. Do you have a certain “how-to” guide for your writing? Stephen King says, “write every day,” but does that work for you?

DJ: I try and not over think it. It’s easy to get caught up in the ritual of writing and then not to write anything. That I suppose is my how-to guide: just do it. At the start of a project don’t think about publishers, agents, magazines, competitions, editing: just write.

There are some things that I’ve learnt work best for me though. Writing a lot is a good one but also having days off, giving the project time to work itself out in your head, feeling that wonderful anticipation of going back to it growing. Carrying a notebook around, particularly on those days but all the time, letting the work compost and gestate, allowing it to change and mutate. Changing where you write, being adaptable. I love my desk and the quiet house when no one else is there but sometimes that’s a bit much. Cafes are good, pubs with happy hours you can work towards are better! Finding other writers to write across the table from was quite momentous for me. Their hands are moving so fast so you keep yours moving too. Each project is different so it’s feeling your way forward, groping around until you find what works.

AP: Do you try to limit yourself to one project at a time? I know personally if I work on too many things at once, I end up jumping ship and never finishing anything.

DJ: I agree. I have very bad memory and working on more than one project makes my brain feel very mushy. I’ve got better, though, at editing one project while writing another. I think the processes are different enough to do both. 

AP: I now have a list of authors a mile long to consider because of past interviews of yours. Who else are you currently reading/obsessing over?

DJ: I’m having a good reading time. I really enjoyed The Good People by Hannah Kent. I haven’t read much sci-fi but V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic was really great. I’m also, while writing a couple of new short stories, rereading some of my favourites: the Sex and Death anthology is really wonderful.

Despite myself — I was wary — I also liked My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent whose amazing writing definitely saved this from being another book by a man about a girl being abused.

My to read list is also rather massive. I’ve just discovered Anne Enright who has changed my life, I’m also really looking forward to: All Rivers Run Free by Natasha Carthew which is out next year and a lot of the books that were longlisted or shortlisted for the Booker including Elmet by Fiona Mozley and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

AP: I found FEN because I was wandering around a bookstore café and the cover design called out to me as being stark and creepy — just the mood I was in for reading. Then I got hooked. Are there any books that have been like that for you?

DJ: I came to the US this year and this happened to me a couple of times in bookshops. Seeing amazing covers and sneaking them up to the counter before I could stop myself. A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume got me because it has a fox on the front and I can never resist foxes, I really enjoyed that. Communion Town by Sam Thompson was another book that really drew me in by the look of it. 

AP: “Daisy Johnson was born in 1990.” Every time I see that, I feel both hopeful and despondent. I was born in 1991 and all I can hope is to one day have a collection half as good as yours out. Do you see other people our age and younger performing and producing and get inspired or feel the push to do more?

DJ: I can’t wait to read your collection! Yes of course. I get jealous all the time, sometimes or prizes etc but mostly of other people’s writing that is doing something I would like to do.

Though there’s a balance to find in productive jealousy and the sort that just makes you feel a bit sad.

AP: What’s the strangest thing that ever happened to you? The most FEN-like thing?

DJ: I’ve always been a bit of a weird sleeper. I used to sleep walk (or run actually I think) around my room when I was younger and it’s only got worse as I’ve got older. The story in “The Cull” of a woman waking and thinking she has a fox on her chest happened to me. Sharing a room with my sister at Christmas apparently she woke up and I was walking around her bed shining a phone light and saying: they’re here, they’re here. She won’t share a room with me anymore. My partner, however, doesn’t have a choice. I’ve woken him screaming or shouting that there’s something on his shoulder. It comes in waves, right now I’m not even dreaming, and I’m sure it can be attributed to many things but it always feels, in the middle of the night, as if there actually are things in the room. On the bad nights I leave a light on. On the really bad nights I get paralysis in my mouth and hands, won’t be able to feel myself moving even though I’m told later I said things I don’t remember.

AP: I think you would do well in this class, Writers on Writers. We have to do what you seemed to while writing — see how a writer does what they do, think analytically with one finger on our own writing. Any tips for someone going from academic learning to this new way of reading?

DJ: That’s tricky. I suppose read authors whose writing you feel is similar to your own in some way, read for pleasure but with half an eye on what you like and, perhaps more importantly, what you don’t like. Don’t read at your desk because then it will feel like work and really you are trying to read like someone who has just picked this book up for fun. Talk to other people about the books your reading, share them, see what people agree and disagree with about them. Steal, steal ideas and lines and characters. You can always cut them later or you can make them your own enough no one will notice. 

AP: Did you always know you wanted to Be A Writer?

DJ: I couldn’t do very much else which made it easier I suppose. I was good at all the subjects no one is supposed to be good at. Art, Drama and English Literature. Luckily my parents were really supportive, they never would have suggested I did anything other than what I wanted to. I’m also good at dog walking and recommending books.

AP: Sometimes you feel a story deep down in your bones. Did you know FEN would be made up of connected short stories when you set out to write it?

DJ: No that was a thought that came later, perhaps about half way through writing the stories. I always knew all the stories would be set in the same landscape but not that they would be so linked.

AP: Is writing and completing a novel more difficult than short stories? Do you feel the short story mentality creeping in, sometimes?

DJ: I love that image. Short stories are creepers, getting into your head, they stay with you. I think what I learnt from FEN is that the way I wrote short stories and novels are similar in many ways. I’m a messy drafter and my editing is often more like rewriting. Rewriting a short story is obviously a lot easier than rewriting a 70,000 word novel. A short story I’m working on always feels different, somehow, in my head. I can hold it all in my mind in a way you can only really do with bits of a novel.

Still I think the rules are the same. Don’t worry about your first draft, think about your character arc, read aloud, edit freely and madly and a bit wildly.

AP: And now for a silly one: If there was some sort of worldwide calamity and you could only save two books from being wiped out of existence, which would they be and why?

DJ: Such a good question! We have something over here called Desert Island Discs that I think you would enjoy…. There is one book that I read when I was a teenager and that has stuck with me. I buy it every time I go into a charity shop because I give it away so often. It’s called Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg. I’d definitely carry that around in my pocket during the apocalypse. I think maybe some poetry would be a good end-of-the-world read. Sharon Olds or Robin Robertson.

AP: What was your final process for Everything Under?

DJ: The final few months of working on Everything Under were a strange time. I think often writers spend so long with a piece of work that it is easy to forget anyone else is ever going to read it. The editing process had been mostly entire rewrites, tens of thousands of discarded words, but towards the end it was small line edits, moving punctuation around, reading each sentence out loud to see if it worked.

AP: And how did you feel when you learned that Everything Under was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize?

DJ: The day I found out about the Booker Longlist I was babysitting for some friends. My editor phoned and said she had something to tell me and could I go somewhere private. I immediately thought something awful had happened. She told me what had happened and I danced around the garden screaming.

AP: I know Everything Under has just come out, but are you still working on your third novel?

DJ: Amidst the madness there is, as ever, writing to be done. To get back to my desk after a busy day is calming, to bury myself in the story once more. Except that the next book I’m working on is a horror novel set in Yorkshire and writing the scary bits disrupts my sleep, makes me sleep walk. I’m hoping that is a good sign.

AP: Thank you so much again for agreeing to be my interviewee. I’ve been telling as many people as will listen to read FEN, so hopefully this interview will push them to do it. I’m so, so excited for your novel, Everything Under, and everything else you produce in the future.

DJ: Thanks so much Amanda!

I Appear To Be Having a Human Emotion: A Review of Kristen Arnett's Mostly Dead Things

I’m not a crier. Not at all. It’s a matter of principle. And self-control. I’ve been accused of being emotionally constipated on more than one occasion; it’s usually my mother leveling those accusations. Cries have to sneak up on me from behind and surprise me, conking me over the head. And so when I reached the final act of Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett, at the scene where our protagonist, Jessa, breaks in to her childhood home to care for her grieving and traumatized mother—bathing her, holding her, literally picking her up off of the floor—I was startled to note that tears had begun dripping off the tip of my nose and onto the page. The book had enticed me with it’s strangeness and it’s hilarity, but had come round behind and made me feel things. Sneaky.

I began by laughing and delighting in the weird, breathtakingly specific world created by the taxidermy shop, the run-down and odd Central Florida town, and the Morton family home. In the middle part of the novel my emotions morphed into a prurient, morbid fascination at the slow-motion disaster underway amongst this cast of characters. And by the end I was aching for everyone in the story. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a story in which grief and childhood and how we are loved and damaged by our loved ones are more devastatingly examined. I certainly can’t think of one. It got me right in my soft, meaty bits.

Everyone is awful and wonderful: so human that the book aches with it. At one point Jessa’s mother remarks that: “It’s hard to talk about the ugly parts. How we can be that terrible and still worthy of love.” This feels right. This feels like so much of the point. Everyone is fucked up but everyone is trying so hard. And there’s a real beauty and tenderness in that trying.

There’s also a very specific kind of beauty in the unvarnished realness with this the place of the novel is rendered. It’s so specific and so evocative. I can smell the beer, the unwashed hair, the fried chicken, the roadkill. I can feel the heavy, Florida heat and hear the crickets. The Morton house is like every house I spent any measure of time in as a child. I admit I have no prior context for gators, but the writing is sure enough that I don’t need one to see and smell and hear it all. Nothing in this world is gleaming and moneyed and perfect—nothing is heightened to the unreality of wishful thinking you often find in fiction—it is lime buildup on the shower heads, and crumbs rubbed in to old carpets, and water drunk hot and chemical tasting from a hose. Wash cloths are faded. Clothes are dirty. Bodies have stretch marks and fat and skin tags and blackheads and odors.

On the surface Mostly Dead Things is a story in two tracks. One: a family headed by Jessa—an emotionally unavailable Floridian taxidermist and frustrated lesbian who inherited the family business—dealing with the aftermath and grief of the father’s suicide, the grieving mother’s madcap, sexed taxidermy art, and the abandonment by Brynn—Jessa’s sister in law and also the only woman she, or her brother, have ever really loved. Two: the story of how the family got to that point.

Mostly Dead Things brings the dead things early. “How we slice the skin:” is how the novel opens, and what follows with a detailed description of how one might prep a dead animal carcass for preserving and taxidermy. And the “dead things” in the novel do start as the animals in the family taxidermy shop being worked over by Jessa and her dad, and even at times her brother and her niece and nephew and mother. And the detail with which the act of taxidermy is described is right on the money—trust me, I’m an (amateur) taxidermist. But soon the dead things are the grieving family, their intimacy and love (“Our intimacy was an uprooted plant, shriveled and withered.”), Jessa herself (“Nostalgia carved out my insides, padding my bones until my limbs stuck, splayed. Frozen in time, refusing to live.”), and those lost to them.

And still this novel about loss and pain and actual dead things ends on a hopeful note. A pretty odd one, involving two siblings giving a trio of taxidermied peacocks a beer-soaked “Viking funeral” at the gator-infested lake in the local park, but a hopeful one. Or maybe a human one. And damnit it made me cry (just a tiny bit) again.

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett is out with Tin House Books in June of this year (2019). I promise: it will surprise you.

"I think Truth is a kind of purpose": Elizabeth Powell & Terese Svoboda in Conversation

Terese Svoboda: Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of J. Crew Catalogues has Wolfgang, a failed photojournalist-turned-fashion-photographer; describe the motivations of the two models in great sensuous detail for a shoot he is conducting. “Perhaps this is your first kitchen together, the first time you’ve ever shared a kitchen, and you’ve just made love while cartoons played in the background.” Meanwhile the male model has an erection, one of the women is thinking about hunger — and sex — while the photographer conjures up another scenario about smoking endless joints with the women in a cabin. Thus begins this piercingly accurate confection of a novel about desire. Did you write short stories as a warm-up to this, or were your books of poetry preparation? If so, how?

Elizabeth Powell: At one point in time all of the fiction I was writing was determined to be something else, something hybrid and poetic. The novel was all my poetry’s idea. My poetry is always right there looking over my shoulder. The lyric is mighty. But, yes, the novel started out as a short story that I published in Black Warrior Review. I couldn’t let go of the characters, they still had some investigating into the human heart and soul to do. Wolfgang, in particular, was insistent, and kept turning up in my prose. He is very roughly inspired by a photographer cousin of mine who passed away. I tried to continue my conversation with my cousin about image after his death in my own writing, not only as a way to grieve, but to continue on the relationship beyond the constrictions of time.

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Elizabeth Powell: Your prose is so gorgeous, so resoundingly meticulous, lyrical. How does your work as a poet inform your prose writing? You are so prolific in many genres: What do you think it is about your creative process that feels so comfortable in many different genres?

Terese Svoboda: Fearlessness. That’s the prime requirement for all poets, the strength of mind to know that not every inspiration is going to thrive in a quatrain, that you need a lot of tools for the myriad of materials that arrive. The requirement for genre-switching is that whatever the material, the words will need a lot of pushing around, something that the poet is used to. I’m always satisfied, I’m always failing.

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Terese Svoboda:  “Beauty, Helene thought as she tapped on Wolfgang’s window, was a measure of some sort of purpose.” Is this a belief the author shares?

Elizabeth Powell: I’m interested in what beauty’s purpose is, why we use beauty as a way to get what we want or make others do what we want. Of course, there are cultural ideas about beauty. The natural world of flowers, for instance, has much to tell us about beauty and its uses. I’m interested in that in general, but here I’m more interested in what does beauty with a capital B have to say, that old fashioned cousin of capital T truth. I was thinking about Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I think Truth is a kind of purpose. I was also thinking about Keats’ poem “Endymion,” about the quandary that human beauty does pass into nothingness and ashes and dust. I was thinking about the idea of beauty being as Keats’ says “Full of Sweet Dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”

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Elizabeth Powell: Why the American West? The desert over time? What was the creative spark that inspired the book’s breadth and intensity of subject?

Terese Svoboda: Written over 25 years, the book’s spark was slow in coming. I wrote only two stories after I found the title about ten years ago, one of which was “Major Long Talks to His Horse,” which explains how the region became known as the Great American Desert. My formative years were spent in that desert, near the mysterious Nebraska Sandhills where water was always a topic. The pivot sprinkler came into use in the 1960s and revolutionized the climate and what could be grown. I have land there now and I’ve seen the corn turn blue and disappear back into the earth during a drought. Farmers think a lot about the future.

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Terese Svoboda: You mentions Pessoa, and Pound — a send-up of Pound as the subject of an Apple Think Different ad. These are not references that bestsellers evoke. We poets applaud this, but so many won’t understand. Does that matter?

Elizabeth Powell: I think it is incumbent upon people of all stripes to look up things they don’t know. I think Pessoa and Pound should be part of a general knowledge, and if not, then should be obtained through looking up. Does looking up stuff you don’t know matter? It depends upon what kind of world you want to live in and create for the future generations. When I wrote that, I was thinking about the Apple Think Different campaign where they use revolutionary thinkers like Gandhi and Einstein as a way to peddle their wares. That happens all the time in America, this capitalistic thievery of ideas as a way to make money or deceive someone into a desire that comes from a place of insecurity and emotional deadness. If you recall, part of that Think Different campaign was “To the Crazy Ones”, meaning if you want to think outside the box and become a legendary and revolutionary thinker, you should buy Apple products, which are ways to produce work, not ways to think in original terms. The novel references Pound and Pessoa as a way to mimic what the campaign itself is doing: Look at how you might become a crazy, brilliant person if you buy some shit that is very expensive, but will supposedly make you a better human. That desire, to be part of an equation that is trying to pull you into a magical place that is really a void.

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Elizabeth Powell: Did the ideas of Westward Expansion and the so-called American dream figure in at all?

Terese Svoboda: Whatever group overcame the Clovis people surely had a dream of expansion. Manifest Destiny warranted Major Long’s expedition, even if he denigrated the area with his nomenclature. Homesteaders exchanged the dream of riches in owning free land for the reality of its almost unimaginable difficulties. By the time the Dust Bowl descended, the homesteaders had endured enough. The land blew away and with it, the dream. Now, despite market forces and pollution, the very poor farmers left hold on to the dream that they live as their parents did, close to the land.With regard to the Anthropocene future of America — we need a better dream. After all, that’s not a rising sun in the West, it’s one that’s setting.

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Terese Svoboda: “Wolfgang continued to mine for some image of Helene that would express all the lingering beauty of the past as it incubated into the present.” This being a Rilkean ambition, what are you writing now?

Elizabeth Powell: I love how Rilke, in Letters to the Young Poet presses us as writers and humans to live the questions fully. Living the questions is the life and is the art, both of which use the past as a kind of incubator for the present. The past is beautiful because it is part of the question that reveals the present, the future.

I have just completed my third collection of poems and hybrid essays called “Atomizer”, which will be coming out in 2020. That book addresses questions surrounding love in the age of technology, online dating, and movement toward oligarchy. The work is in discussion with a favorite book of mine by French philosopher Alain Badiou called In Praise of Love. And because it is about love it is about the senses, the sensual. Scent looms large in the book vis a vis perfumery and my long history with perfume.

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Elizabeth Powell: Place is often a character in a work of fiction. In what ways do you see place as emblematic of character in your book?

Terese Svoboda: Water, and its lack, is central to nearly all the stories. Having something immoveable at the heart of a collection, a protagonist or at least a minor character that is silent, like the old man and the sea until the shark shows, best chiaroscuros the petty human endeavors that play out against it. But place in the book, that is to say, environment, is actually not immoveable, it is just as permeable and malleable and poisonable as our varying relationship to it, especially with regard to how it is shared. I have the characters reacting to what becomes a dynamic environment, a character. People forget that and think the earth’s always the same, no matter what they do to it.

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Terese Svoboda: I’ve directed a little, and worked on commercials, and I was very impressed at your ability to capture the experience. You have the actors in a sort of repertory model, so they appear in a series of shoots, each with its own narrative, a kind of lyric poem really in which many elements are left open yet are linked. Have you been involved in commercial film shoots?

Elizabeth Powell: I have not. My daughter, however, is a commercial model and television host, and I have appeared on her show and observed all the camera operators. Her work in the fashion industry comes from a family interest in image in poetry, art, life.

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Elizabeth Powell: Both my novel and your last story, “Pink Pyramid,” broker in the idea of dreams and their effect on not only the individual, but also the collective consciousness of history and with the present moment of now. What role/effect do you think dreaming has on history and place?

Terese Svoboda: I believe Trump never dreamt of being President — but Putin did. Without someone standing in a field envisioning a plant, nothing gets grown or built. Dreaming your sweetheart pulling up her blouse engenders population. But dreams are meant to fade and be replaced by others, hence their mark on particular times and places — except for prophetic (inspirational?) dreams, e.g. Vladimir Klebnikov’s dream in “The Radio Wall” that imagines television in the 1920s. But that is falling into the tech trap that dreams are all about enlarging our material footprint on the planet. Other dreams – our collective unconsciousness — of talking to animals or of breathing like a tree help us rethink our present and our relationship with other life. In my own writing, I’ve heavily invested in dreams. Tin God began as a persistent dream that I used in a poem, then a short story, and eventually a novel, pitting the 16th century against the present, in alternating chapters.

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Terese Svoboda: Did you start with the literal image of a catalogue page and enlarge it, or you discover the imagery through the characters?

Elizabeth Powell: I started out by thinking about what it meant that I liked looking at catalogues so much. Was it the image of the person or the image and how it related to the surroundings in the photograph? One of my grandfathers was a freelance photographer for Life magazine, and I spent a lot of time during my childhood studying books of photography, especially The Family of Man a book from a 1955 photography exhibit curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art department of photography. It was a seminal book for me, very influential to me as a poet and a person. Since then I have always loved the interchange between image and narrative that occurs in the photographed. Catalogues are narratives used to sell something. I wanted to co-opt that device as a way to let the spiritual and material worlds collide. Creation is in some ways the action of the spiritual and the material colliding, which then goes on to create narrative. It’s a commentary on the idea of taking pictures of things that don’t really exist to make them exist. That idea is a cousin to the idea of photographing something that exists mostly to be photographed. I’m a huge fan of Don DeLillo’s work. Your question makes me think of a section of White Noise that discusses this idea, a section that heavily influenced my writing:

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.

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Elizabeth Powell: “Camp Clovis” seems to me a kind of cousin to “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. Have you been influenced by her at all?

Terese Svoboda: Not particularly, although as the eldest of nine children, I adored her stories about family life and the mundane horrors of motherhood. “Camp Clovis” came out of a belief that a child’s preoccupations in the summer must be universal and timeless, and from living in South Sudan for a year, relegated to the status of a child in a materially-challenged environment.

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Terese Svoboda: I was certain that Wolfgang would have a heart attack chasing after the model on the beach. Was it hard to determine an end point for the book?

Elizabeth Powell: The end point always had the beach in mind. The beach as an image is always representative of leave taking and arriving from a destination. There is a kind of violence that the beach represents, who is coming? Who is going? Are we safe in this terrible, wonderful beauty? And then sometimes one looks at the sunrise and the sunset from the beach as a meditative stance, as a way to understand the opening and closing of the day, beginning and end. Moreover, the beach is part of the photoshoot narrative, so the conclusion logically leads imagistically back to the beach.

All the Faces Made of Wax: A Review of Edward Carey's Little

Edward Carey’s extraordinary novel Little follows Marie, an abandoned oddity whose small and spare physical presence sparks remarks like “little minor monster in a child’s dress” and “little bold face.” With a haunting cast of peripheral characters and a scattering of unsettling illustrations, Carey brilliantly animates the goings on within the tiny and seemingly inconsequential corners of a very dangerous world, namely Paris during the burgeoning French Revolution.

The book proceeds in decade-long chunks and covers the span of nearly ninety years. The resulting work is both claustrophobic and immense, delving deep and personal into unseen moments in history while never shying away from the darkness of obsession or the sweet sadness of love.

The novel begins as Marie, or “Little,” finds herself learning to become an apprentice to a doctor whose specialty is crafting wax models of human organs for academic purposes. As the doctor begins to set up a business of casting wax heads, Marie learns how to create representations of people through molding likenesses and drawing. She’s the one behind the illustrations within the text, which punctuate her experiences with a startling approach towards reality.

From the very first chapter, every moment that passes is a step further away from security for Marie. She does not live a happy life, nor does she find true kindness from any corner of her mostly miserable existence. Instead, she finds her agency and her power through creating representations of people, representations that refuse to be influenced by anger or vanity or even the ever-growing pressures of political power. Her skill is a dangerous one in a world in which everyone seems to be telling themselves stories about how the world works, while constantly failing to truly understand it.

The peripheral characters of Little can often read as petty and somewhat grubby, but they come to life in their wretched specificity. Because they are presented through the lens of Marie, they are always understood as human and always understood as dangerous. Faithful to her gift, Marie’s perspective never falters. She is singular in the way that she sees people and the world they inhabit. She does not make monsters out of people, though the people around her may behave monstrously.

The crime of seeing only fragments of a person’s humanity is one that is perpetuated by everyone in the book but the protagonist. Whether on the streets of Berne, in a tailor’s house in Paris, the halls of Versailles, or the creaking monstrosity that had once been a monkey hotel, Little documents the slow fading of humanity, both as an interior movement and as a response to exterior forces, featuring wax figures who are treated as if they are something worth seeing and people who are treated as if they are not.

Little asks what it means to capture a person’s image and what a person’s image can represent. It wonders what it means to strip others down to their parts and illustrates the varied behavior that people will justify when they see others as objects or monsters or threats.

In the end, the book itself serves as a solution to the question that it poses. Though Marie maintains a point of view that is ignored by all around her within the story, the text itself delivers her story in a way that makes her humanity impossible to ignore. Because she remains so singular in her perspective, she is, in a strange way, protected from the world’s machinations. Though she is never understood by anyone in the story, she is understood by the reader. Through the clever machinations of Little, Marie’s story is one that has been told in full.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nightwolf: An Interview with Willie Davis

Sometimes things come to you unexpectedly, in a plain wrapper with an unfamiliar return address. And the best that can happen when you open these unexpected things is that you make a welcome new discovery, unwrap something that you didn’t even know existed before this very moment. Something exciting, something you are not eager to put down.

That’s the feeling I got when an email from someone I didn’t know showed up in my inbox. I opened it to discover an evocative new novel Nightwolf, by a very engaging writer, Willie Davis. Immediately the book excited me, its story, its prose, its damaged and compelling characters; I read it deep into that first night, and the next, and more after that. By the time I finished it, I wanted to talk with Willie about it. Lucky for me, we were able—through the miracle of email—to have that conversation.

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Patty McNair: There are quite a few things I’d like to ask you about Nightwolf, but let’s start with the role Lexington plays in the novel. The city serves more like a character than just a backdrop, as some settings might. I have traveled quite a lot, but I have never been to Lexington. It felt wholly unique to me, its seedier parts, its neighborhoods, its inhabitants. Would you talk a little about how you chose Lexington for this story and why? It seems like a choice made not just because you know the city, but because this story could not take place anywhere else.

Willie Davis: My mother lived in Lexington, and my father lived in East Kentucky (the hillbilly, coal-mining part of the state). I grew up bouncing between the two places. Lexington, the urbane college town, called East Kentucky a bunch of stupid rednecks. East Kentucky called Lexington a bunch of pussies. I’d switch accents and agree with whichever set of friends was talking. I left Kentucky when I was eighteen because I couldn’t figure out a way to leave there sooner. If you’d have told me then that they built a moat around the state line of Kentucky I doubt I’d have cared. I pretended I didn’t like country music because I didn’t want to be thought of as a stupid Kentuckian. But, of course, the minute I left, I began to find Kentucky fascinating. In short order, I went from being embarrassed by my accent to playing it up to make girls think I was interesting. I wrote about Kentucky, and through writing, I fell in love with Kentucky, but only at a distance. I wanted to tell the stories of Kentuckians, but I wanted to stay away.

I started writing this book shortly after moving back to Lexington. Suddenly, I love living here. A lot of that is how the city has changed but mostly it’s how I’ve changed. What irritated me about Lexington before now seemed gorgeous to me. I used to call it the middle management of cities, a suburb to nowhere. But, of course, the hillbillies of my youth have moved to Lexington. It’s a city that’s getting constantly reinvented. The rural and the urban mix down here, but not much.

Lexington is a city that has a great deal of joy and shame and anxiety for me. It’s a place I love and is very close to my emotional core. It’s worth noting that the Lexington of my novel is at best a second cousin to the real Lexington, Kentucky. Some of that is practical. I have—this is not an exaggeration—the worst sense of direction of anyone I know. My mind simply has no spatial memory. There’s no way I could keep a map of the real Lexington in my imagination. I fictionalized it so it can react to the characters’ needs. If they need a walkable neighborhood or a reservoir, then Lexington could react to them. In that way, my off-center Lexington could interact with the characters around it.

McNair: Perhaps that is why the city seems so unique to me as a reader; it is both real and not. Like your characters. Milo, for example, is a complex character. When your reader is first introduced to him, Milo is behaving rather badly. He is a tough seventeen year old, engaged in regular illegal and often brutal activities. But he is funny, witty, quick with the one-liners and sharp repartee. And there is a real vulnerability to him as well, despite his yearning that there not be. He longs for his runaway brother, for his mother to be well, to be normal. Later, he yearns for the people, friends and family, he has lost in one way or another. How did you discover Milo? I wonder if you have other characters you’ve read that might have influenced his forming?

Davis: Milo came to me in drips and drabs. When I first started thinking of him, I was in my early 30’s and so was he. He talked to me like a drinking buddy, full of good cheer and fun stories. In my mind, he seemed a little scarred but basically well-adjusted. I saw him as a conduit to his group of friends. But the story wasn’t working. I got about 200 pages into his story and realized it felt lifeless. Whenever he and his friends talked about their childhood, the story suddenly felt alive, like they had some secret they were keeping. I finally decided I had to deal with that time when they were kids head-on.

Suddenly, Milo wasn’t a conduit to a group of friends anymore—his hardships were the story. I still saw him as the same jokey, hardscrabble guy I’d known before, but suddenly his story was a tragedy. He was a kid dealing with these godawful hardships. Meanwhile, he’s joking through them. To me, it seemed natural, but some early readers saw this kid submerged in darkness. As far as I was concerned, he jokes about his tragedy because people joke about everything. Almost everyone surviving in adulthood has dealt with tragedy, and we all, at times, think it’s hysterical. I’ve had many generations of him in my mind, so he’s not scared to get into the meat and gravy of his misery.

One of my favorite stories is Mark Richard’s “Strays” about two kids abandoned by their parents, having to answer to their Uncle Trash. They wind up burning their house down, and in the summary of events, it sounds tragic. But the story is hysterical and hopeful and makes me want to scream with joy. I don’t know Mark Richard’s thought process, but he grew up in hospitals with one leg longer than the other. No doubt a child grabbing the reigns on his own circumstances would appeal to him. It’s grim, but it’s also wish fulfillment.

McNair: When Milo finds a baby in the backseat of a car he steals, he conceives of a way to try to return the child to safety. However, he is haunted by the baby, by the way he felt in his arms, held close to his chest. Much of this story has to do with parenting: Milo’s mother is very ill and dies midway through the novel, his buddy Meander’s father dies. There is another mother who has a failed relationship with her son, a boy who may or may not have been “played with” at a party held by one of Milo’s friends. Did you know as you started this story that so much of it would have to do with absent parents, with children and parents separated?

Davis: I don’t necessarily think of them as incompetent parents, although, as I say that, I’m unsure how to finish that sentence. They’re self-absorbed to a degree, lost in their own stories, and consumed with their own pain, and they bring that element to their parenting. So, yes, I guess, kind of bad parents. Until you asked this question, I don’t think I realized how much the notion of parenting—present and absent—hangs over this book. It makes sense. About twelve hours after I finished the first draft—which was over twice as long, and quite a different book—my wife went into labor. When I first envisioned a few of these characters, I was a bachelor, living in Baltimore. When the story started to form for real, I was married, living in Kentucky. Then once the characters approached their endgame, I knew fatherhood was imminent. It doesn’t exactly change the story, but, then again, how could it not?

Let me go ahead and say what you’re already thinking: there is a place in hell for all parents who talk about how people without kids can’t possibly understand the emotional depths of the world. I agree. I can’t believe how many otherwise sensible people say, “As someone with a ten year old, I find pedophilia disgusting.” Like people are saying, “As someone with no children, I find pedophilia hilarious.” We have imagination and empathy—the childless, like everyone else, can put themselves in strange situations.

Still, as I re-entered the book, the perspective had changed. The mother dying of dementia no longer felt like a tragedy for the son—it was a new level of pain for the mother as well. Milo rescuing a child from a car he stole started out as the most bizarre comet out of the blue that could hit him. Now I was thinking about what it would take for a mother to leave a child in an unattended car. It helped give me empathy for the parents, which I should have had more either way. I thought of these as comedic situations, but suddenly they felt more human.

Take the scene where Milo’s best friend’s father dies. It started as an exercise where I imagined a character taking a metric ton of acid, and, as he’s waiting for it to kick in, he gets the worst news he can: his father’s dying and he needs to deal with his extended family That’s a (kind of) funny situation, but when the confrontation happens, it’s not funny. The family understands he’s a kid in trouble and they treat him with kindness. Life feels comedic to me, but the harshness often blows it away. I wanted this book to show the spirit of forgiveness.

McNair: Speaking of what you knew when you started the novel, and how that shifted through the writing and re-entering (as you say), there are a few major mysteries in the story: what really happened to Otto, the boy at the friend’s party; where did Aaron, Milo’s brother disappear to; who is Nightwolf, a notorious tagger, really? These questions give rise to others in relation to them as well. I thought it was interesting how Milo changed his mind regularly about what he thought the answers to these questions might be. What’s that old writerly adage? No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader or something? I wonder if you knew the definitive answers to these mysteries at any time, or did it shift for you as well? Perhaps even now you may not know for sure what happened to Otto, to Aaron, and who is Nightwolf.

Davis: There’s no less satisfying answer to any of the questions than “I don’t know, so it’s up to you.” But I don’t know. Or rather, I don’t know exactly. This book is, in part, about the unknown—the way that there are major mysteries that drive us that we will never solve. The point is, we search, and by searching, we generate stories.

These characters first appeared in a story called “No More Chatter” that revolved around a mystery. Milo, now thirty, was dating a married woman and while she was away, he breaks into her house, not to take anything, just to sit there for a minute. He leaves undetected, but the next day, he finds out that someone else had broken in after him and trashed all of the furniture. I never had any desire or interest to solve that mystery and figure out who broke into the house. The story was published, and I was happy with it. Then one woman told me she figured out who broke in the house, and she laid out the reason why. I tried telling her it didn’t matter, but she kept going. It was pretty annoying because she was right. I genuinely didn’t know the answer, but an answer existed below my detection. So I’m absolutely genuine when I say my reading is not a definitive one.

Fair enough, but it’s also a cop-out. If you ask someone whether God exists, there are a million intelligent, complicated, valuable answers, but you want to hear “yes” or “no.” So while, I don’t know exactly, here are my best guesses: Otto was most likely not molested by Thomas the Prophet. At the time, Otto doesn’t seem to think anything happened. But as his situation becomes more desperate, he loses any sense of surety that he had. He might have seen something that disturbed him, maybe was touched, but I doubt it was by Thomas. There’s nothing in Thomas’s nature that would indicate that. The accusations are all vague, and no one ever specifically says what they think happened. I do think Thomas endangered Otto: he let him in the house and didn’t take care of him. Thomas was caught up in the excitement of those times and forgot there was a child there he had to monitor. But I sincerely doubt he actively harmed him.

Is Nightwolf Milo’s runaway brother? I find the evidence that has convinced Milo of the fact pretty unpersuasive. The odds are that Nightwolf is just some random punk, and Milo’s brother is unobtrusively decomposing somewhere. But just because that’s most likely, it doesn’t mean that’s true. The unlikely happens so often that we usually can’t even be bothered to act surprised. Is it less likely than the rest of what happens to these characters? Is it less believable than the scores of absurd, crazy things that happen to us in our lives? As Milo says toward the end of the book, all it takes for miracles is for you to believe in what you do not believe.

McNair: Let’s talk about humor. How do you know it’s funny? Because there were a number of times when I spit coffee out of my nose reading this, sometimes at inappropriate moments in the story. How, too, do you balance the humor with the horror? Because there are some rather horrible things that happen in these pages, and still I laughed out loud.

Thank you, that means a lot. Humor in literature is hard because humor relies on surprise, and by the time you write something, rewrite it, edit it, sit on it for a year, and reread it, then it’s certainly not surprising. Humor ages poorly because jokesters stand on each other’s shoulders. Whatever shocks you into laughing tomorrow is going to seem tame in a month and it’ll embarrass you by Christmas. Most everyone reading this has left a friend in hysterics, but writing means you have to put the joke on a shelf, strip it of all context, and hope it connects with someone reading it in a different world than you wrote it in. The jokes that age the best are absurd, and that’s helpful, because these characters have an absurd view on life.

How do I separate the humor from the horror? I don’t. Horror, like everything else, contains comedy. That’s not a plea for edgier jokes, just an acknowledgement that people joked on 9/11, they joke through broken limbs, they joke after the cancer diagnosis. Not everybody, of course, but those who do aren’t doing it to mask their pain or to “laugh to keep from crying.” They do it because that’s the honest way they experience life.

McNair: This is a real coming of age narrative. Seventeen-year-old Milo becomes twenty-three-year-old Milo, and he learns a lot about life–good stuff and bad stuff–along the way. Characters on the verge of adulthood are fascinating to me; they know so much and so little at the same time. Why were you drawn to this age for these characters?

Davis: This was never meant to be a book about teenagers. Teenagers are a conglomeration of hormones trying to shape themselves into a passing fashion. So I guess, that’s like older people without the hormones or the excuses. I wanted to write about a group of friends.

The buried story is about Milo trying to understand his friend Shea’s disappearance. Shea vanishes shortly before Milo starts telling this story. He recounts these searches as a young man because he’s not ready to go on his current search. The telling of the story is Milo’s way of gathering himself for the new challenge he has to face.

McNair: Despite the toughness of Milo and other characters, despite their seeming autonomy, the role of friends and friendship is essential to the story. I don’t know what my question is here, but I guess I’d like to hear you talk about this some. Maybe specifically about Meander, Thomas, and Shea.

Davis: At heart, this is a story about people who genuinely care for each other. I’ve heard people assume that Milo and Shea are in love with each other. I think they are, but I don’t know if they are romantically. It’s about a group of friends who like each other, and within that number, four (Milo, Meander, Thomas, and Shea) who, in at least some twisted way, love one another. Thomas and Shea understand it. Meander can’t express it, at least not baldly. Milo comes to understand it through the telling of this story. But at its heart, this is a tribute to the ways lost people love each other.

McNair: You mention in the acknowledgements pages that storytelling was part of your upbringing, part of your family’s way of communicating. Is it this deep connection to storytelling that drew you to writing? Whose stories were you most eager to hear when you were growing up?

Davis: My family is unusual in a lot of ways, but I don’t know that our love of storytelling was one. My mother is a novelist who wrote one of the hundred most banned books of the 90’s. That novel, which is called Sex Education and is dedicated to me, was assigned to my 7th grade class. My mother’s sex book, dedicated to me and disseminated to my classmates, made for a long 7th grade. My father was a producer for a lot of Appalachian documentaries. When I was a child, he’d tell me goodnight stories, but if he tried to read me one, I’d say, “Tell me one from your mouth!” My brother was a storytelling savant from an early age. Once, when I was five or six, I heard my mother talk to her sisters about cynicism, and how she was a cynic, and how the country needed more cynics. I asked my brother what a cynic was, and without hesitation, he said, “Someone who has sex with corpses,” and then just watched as I regarded my family in horror. So my family prized telling stories above most things. Even lies were acceptable if they formed a story.

I don’t think this is particularly unusual. Kids grow up telling stories. While most families don’t have my stories, they have stories that are as strange and valuable as mine.

McNair: What are you reading now? What books are on your nightstand?

Davis: The best book I’ve read in the last year (maybe the last couple years) is The Tsar Of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra. When I finished it, I literally shook my head at how something could be so goddamn good. I just finished Because by Joshua Mensch, which is a memoir done in poetic form where he details his sexual abuse. It’s engaging but an absolute scorcher. I listened to the audio of Anthony DeCurtis’s biography of Lou Reed, and I’m about halfway through Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach. Up next is The Third Hotel from one of my favorite contemporary writers, Laura Van Den Berg.

McNair: Would you like to tell us about what you are working on next?

Davis: I’ve been poking around a couple of characters and see how they form together in a story. I have an idea about the son of a famous country musician, a man married to two women at the same time, and a boy who realizes his birthday is exactly nine months after 9/11 and he therefore hates his parents. I don’t know if these characters will come together. I had an idea of writing a full-on love story for no other reason than I don’t think I can do it. Then again, Nightwolf started as a light comedy that kept getting darker, so what do I know?