Water and Life and Death: Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda

“He gave us life,” the people of a western settlement earnestly say about the man—Dutch Joe—who digs wells or maybe divines water in the Great American Desert they have chosen to try to settle. He gave them water, and so who is a kind of spiritual leader or variety of folk hero in a story—neatly called “Dutch Joe”—in Terse Svoboda’s new collection Great American Desert which holds inside of it all of the work and boredom and ambition and helplessness and the fear and the monotony of settler life. “I have it on good authority that you can tell the future by looking up from those holes,” Dutch Joe tells them and us. “It has to do with those stars you see that way. But you don’t want to look up too often. If the sky comes down, we’ll all be wearing a blue cap.”

The whole collection occupies a wild but familiar American West then and now and maybe someday. It is connected by the space—the Clovis in what we know now as New Mexico (“Camp Clovis”), explorers chart the “great American desert” (“Major Long Talks to His Horse”), the settlers break ground on the land with their water guru Dutch Joe, desperate dut bowl farmers try to eke out a kind of existence and live a kind of life on the disappearing land (“Dirty Thirties”), citizens in a cold war atomic town live and lose their lives in the shadow of The Bomb (“Bomb Jockey”), and so on, and so on.

Water and life and death soak the pages. I come from a place full of ice and rivers and many lakes; I have spent very little time in deserts. It is only after I am several stories in to the collection that it occurs to me how large a space water must occupy—metaphorically, spiritually, mortally—in a place as dry as a desert. Having it, polluting it, searching for it, its lack, the desire: these energies pulse under every parched story.

The collection is eerie, touching, speculative, reflective, funny, tragic, and bittersweet. “Ah civilization” one of her characters reflects, and this may be the second thread in the braid: living and dying and doing it all with other people in human society. The stories unearth what is good and what is ugly and what is futile in us. For me there are several other stories which particularly stand out, but each is individually strong and worth the reading.

The very first story—“Camp Clovis”—is a dreamy, shadowed, bittersweet story told in “we”s which starts as if a familiar summer camp story and flows silently into an extinction tale about the Clovis people. Even without obvious magic, it has a hard-to-place flavor of something mystical.

Her story “Hot Rain” has worked its way in to my brain and my heart and seems likely to stay there. It has a fractured, disorienting story about an elderly man, his suspicious caregivers, his adult children, and the lack and decay of parental love. Everyone is a little awful and a lot human and certainly hurt and vulnerable. Tenderness and anger and generosity and selfishness and grief permeate each paragraph. It is such a clear sketch of a family, of desperate and damaged people, of being angry with someone who is dying. At one point the group goes to a restaurant for a meal together and it goes achingly awry: ” “We are ungrateful and unworthy, Dad is telling us, beaming as if he’s just discovered the true meaning of being a parent. At our age he figures we don’t need to be coddled, protected from the truth the way we were in our upbringing, not acknowledging all his years of upbringing-neglect, the true truth.” And yet it still pulls a few laughs from me.

“The Mountain” is a strange and disturbing fairy tale. It unfolds in a city-village that exists then-now-always in which all the children have been lured into the mountain by a pied piper—or perhaps sacrificed to the mountain—except for but one girl. She has a limp and fell behind and so was saved; subsequently the parents beat for being free. She suggests that the town may pay to get their children back, but this suggestion instead of calming the distraught parents enrages them as they descend into absurd, banal infighting about who should pay more and why. They decide to sacrifice the kind and queen to the mountain, who do not like hits idea at all and suggest that the people simply have more children, and who thwart the plan by murdering the girl at the doorstep of the mountain and either chaining, deporting, or promoting the parents into acquiescence.

Finally, the collection closes with what is for me the strangest and most evocative story: “Pink Pyramid.” In a dark, bizarre, and isolated dystopian past/present/future a man and a woman live in a travel home in the glow of a huge pink pyramid. What has happened, and what is happening, and what will happen outside of the immediate events of their interactions is shadowed; what matters is the emotional energy between the two, and it is heartbreaking and beautiful. With no explanation of the pyramid, the gas, the work, the shadowy threatening “they” who had sensors supposedly everywhere, the cataclysmic war, or anything else, the reader is forced to read only the immediate reactions of the two. But is he a ghost? A figment of her imagination? Is she? We are suspended in curiosity.

This is a wonderful, and fiercely original collection for anyone who enjoys fiction in any genre—literary, speculative, horror, romance. It ticks all of the emotional boxes. Even still disoriented by and under the spell of what I read, I can confidently recommend it.

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!

A World in Every Sentence

A rabbit who is really a penguin lives in a nest of quarks under the sink, reading Bridget Jones’s Diary and whispering the secrets of the universe through the walls at night. That is the first, and one of the more straightforward stories in David Atkinson’s Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change from My Pockets While I Sleep. The book forces readers to adopt whole new worlds with every sentence. Drills spit spheres filled with human brains; Hot-Wheels set saves lives; patio tables are fabricated from old waffles. Roses are Red is composed of more than a hundred pieces of fiction, few longer than a page and a half, and each of them is a radical reading experience.

Each story has its own logic, but they share the ability to subvert expectations. Every sentence in Roses are Red is a discovery, often humorous in its departure from what should follow from the sentence before. In “Frog Legs are Good Though It’s Hard to Get a Grip to Bite if They Aren’t Dead First,” for example, we find this:

Personally, I think throwing me in a Turkish malachite polisher prison was downright unjustified. You can tell me that’s all specified in subsection seventy-three, eighty-two six bis of the Napoleonic bro code, but we both know that “bis” is an imaginary number anyway. I won’t be fooled by Algebra again, not after that run-in with those bat-plastic-pants salesmen. I never should have trusted anyone smoking a cigar, let alone three of them.

This process of subversion continues relentlessly throughout the book. The reader experiences the constant joy of discovery and the exhaustion that comes with it.

But the stories in Atkinson’s collection are not mere word salads. Each story is indeed a story. A first pass at reading might not yield much insight into the world of the piece, but there is a world in there. An example of this might be “Himmler’s Hidden Alien Civil War Gold Caused that Detroit Pawnshop Storage Locker to Lose its International Real Estate Flipping License.” In the piece, History Channel documentaries about the Nazi’s bleed into polluted algae beds via corroded internet cables, giving rise to zombie clones of Eva Braun, Hitler’s companion and, briefly, wife. Fortunately, the zombie apocalypse is averted due to the Eva zombies’ aversion to spray cheese and the fortuitous “Easy Cheese World Subsidy Initiative of 2013.” The piece is as strange and unpredictable as any in the book. Still, it both participates in and critiques the zombie genre. It is on one hand an indulgent romp, and on the other a spotlight on absurdity.

The key to Atkinson’s success in these pieces is specificity. Each new concept, each reference, each break in continuity is not a whimsical departure but an exact movement that makes the piece feel intentional and crafted. In one story, a character has taken out a want ad for an RV trailer which needs to transport “a couple thousand pounds of pornographic Space Ghost collectible silver half dollar coins.” To finance the ad, the narrator had to sell “one complete collection of ballpark hot dogs partially eaten by significant Yankees infielders of the eighties.” Colorado, as a setting, has a distinct presence across the collection as well. Denver and its suburb Lakewood appear on numerous occasions, as do small towns like Glenwood Springs. These locations make Roses are Red feel real, rooted in a specific place. They also have the flavor of inside jokes, which made references that I didn’t understand feel more stable. If I didn’t get where a story went, then perhaps the story was for someone else. Specificity makes the leaps in logic in this book feel purposeful. The reader can feel safe in the writer’s hands, knowing that they’re on a journey, even if the destination is one of bemused wonder.

The tangled path of Atkinson’s work can still yield results. Few books have made me laugh as much as this one — not in amusement, but in surprise. Atkinson so relentlessly subverts expectation that every sentence bears the potential for genuine discovery. The stories in this collection are often hard to parse, but there is emotional depth for those who care to seek it. My favorite story in the collection was also one of the longest. “Ideas: Where to Get Them and What to Do When They Won’t Leave” is a literalized metaphor in which a writer’s ideas manifest as unwelcome visitors. The writer attempts to drive them away by embarking on ambitious artistic undertaking with them. Often, the ideas are turned off by the writer’s eagerness for commitment and are driven away. But sometimes, they stick around. The story captures the melancholy that comes from a new idea falling short, as well as the quite hope of the ones that stick around.

The ideas that inspire a work of art are often ideas that artists have a relationship with for years. No matter the form, an artist may toil for a long time before an idea matures into their vision. Roses are Red has the air of that kind of object. There are hundreds of distinct stories in the collection, many of them challenging. Still, they all bear the mark of obsessive experimentation, of fun had trying something strange and new, and the purity of making something for one’s self, though other’s might also find satisfaction in it.

Dead Aquarium: An Interview with Caleb Michael Sarvis

Caleb Michael Sarvis’s forthcoming Dead Aquarium is a collection of twelve short stories and a novella that Tom McAllister described as being “full of people living in the in-between spaces, downtrodden people at their lowest points who are still trying to do their best. . . . Though the stories are melancholy, they are also funny and hopeful, and you can’t help but root for these damaged characters to put it all together, or at least put something together. In Dead Aquarium, Caleb Michael Sarvis has written a collection that is thoughtful, inventive, smart, and a little bit weird, in the best possible way.”

Sarvis’s writing has appeared in Barrelhouse, Flock, Hobart, Split Lip Magazine, and various other journals. In addition to writing, he’s the managing editor for Bridge Eight Press and the co-host of the Drunken Book Review podcast.

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Michelle Ross: At the beginning of the story “Goose Island,” the protagonist tells us that his sister, an aspiring doctor, “ loved how [chemo] made you suffer before you recovered.”  That line really struck me. One, because it’s an interesting, and rather alarming, characteristic in a would-be doctor, but also, two, because it kind of resonates with the book as a whole. That is, your characters do a lot of suffering in this book. So I wonder: is there a way in which you like to write about suffering? Grief? Is there joy in that somehow? Or are you compelled to write about suffering for other reasons, e.g., as a necessary step toward recovery?

Caleb Michael Sarvis: I do tend to gravitate towards suffering in a way. I’m very mean to my characters, and it may just be a matter of feeling in the general sense. When I think about happiness, and this idea of joy, it seems really static. Writing for me is that pursuit of happiness, and to pursue something means you don’t have it yet. So I guess I’m mean to my characters because I want them to move. I want them to pursue something.

MR: Another line that particularly resonated with me and with your book as a whole comes from “Unfaded Black:” “Growing up was learning what was worth saying.” Many of these characters are young adults grappling with growing up, coming into themselves, as we all do. What draws you to writing about this age group, this time of life?  

CMS: I’m all about people figuring themselves out, because I’m not sure what the fuck I’m doing, and I’m still a sucker for a good existential quest in a way. Writing for me is discovery. It’s almost scientific, in that I’m just curious to see what happens. I think young adults, and those on the cusp of growing up, are more susceptible to chaos, which is an important element for me as a writer.

MR: There are a lot of dead fathers and other dead loved ones, and dead animals, too, in Dead Aquarium. Hence the title? How do you see the book’s title as speaking to all of the stories in this collection?

CMS: The original title of this book was Looney Purgatory, because I was really into the idea of a cartoon-like immediacy mixing with a sense of suspended displacement. But after a while, Looney Purgatory just started to feel like a mouthful. I settled on Dead Aquarium because yeah, there’s a lot of death in here, but I also wanted to stick with the idea of suspension. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant to tread water in a large tank that may or not may be full of dead things.

MR: I read that you’re from Florida, Jacksonville specifically. Certainly Florida is very present in this book. Have you lived in Florida all your life? How would you describe your work’s relationship to Florida?   

CMS: I moved to Jacksonville when I was nine after my parent’s divorce. I’d just spent the last six years living in Spain, and the first thing I noticed about Florida was that it stayed hot after the sun went down. That was so bizarre to me, and growing up, I continued to have experiences like that, where I would kind of just ask myself, “What is this place?” You start to realize what’s normal for Floridians is absurd to outsiders, and it just became natural fodder for my work. Need a story idea? Just walk outside, something will try to kill you or eat you, and then you will write.

MR: This description sounds so much like Tucson, Arizona, where I’ve lived for the past 13 years. I find the environment endlessly fascinating and inspiring and have written quite a few stories set in the desert. At the same time, I’m drawn to writing about the swampy Gulf Coast of Texas, where I grew up. Do you ever write about Spain? Or are there ways in which Spain or other places inspire your work in less direct ways?

CMS: It’s funny, but I don’t write about Spain, but maybe because we lived on the base and it didn’t feel all that different than America. I have a lot of personal anecdotes (catching scorpions in shoe boxes, breaking into empty homes), that I use for other things. I was born in Maryland, just outside DC, and my dad lives there now. I think my fondness for that area shows up more than anything else.

MR: Another element that shows up several times in this book is comics. For instance, the protagonist in “Goose Island” write a comic strip. The protagonist in “Scoop Carry Dump Repeat,” bonds with his deceased father over Calvin and Hobbes. Are you a big comics fan? What relationship, if any, do you see between comics and writing fiction?

CMS: I wouldn’t call myself a comics fan. Just a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan. I’m working on essays / a book about this now, but I contribute a lot of my writing style and success to Calvin and Hobbes. I think the shape of a daily strip (four panels, minimal detail, punchy dialogue) is a perfect model for a short story. In his essay “On Writing,” Raymond Carver says, “Get in, get out, don’t linger,” which is exactly what Bill Watterson does in Calvin and Hobbes.

MR: It’s interesting that you say this because, on the other hand, within your short fiction you do linger in a way. You allow your characters to brood some. One certainly wouldn’t accuse you of being a writer who doesn’t go deep. This brings me back to that line, “Growing up was learning what was worth saying.” Maybe while short stories must have a certain economy, at the same time, they must linger when it’s worth lingering?

CMS: I definitely agree with this. It kind of goes back to this whole treading water thing, right? I don’t want my characters to swim from one side to the other. That’s not quite enough. I want them to feel the water a bit, struggle along the way, give them opportunities to run out of breath.

MR: There’s quite a bit of range here in terms of genre. Many stories are rather straight-up realism. Others are more fabulist. Do you think much about genre when you set out to write? Did you think about it much in collecting these stories?

CMS: I’m sort of a sponge when I read, and a lot of the time, the stuff I write has a direct relationship with whatever I’ve just read. So I don’t have it in my head that I’m going to pursue any sort of genre or style when I write, I just kind of follow the rhythm of whatever I’m feeling that day. In “Terra,” when a man crawls out of the tree hole, I remember exactly where I was when I made that decision. I kind of just let the story be the story.

MR: Do you often remember where you were or what you were doing when the ideas for particular stories come into being?

CMS: In a way, for sure. I always know where I was when I started a story. “The Matter of Dust” was written in a Mellow Mushroom. “Vertical Leapland” was started while I was proctoring the PSAT. “Gastropod” was written in my garage after Hurricane Irma had blown through.

MR: Another way your book demonstrates range is in story length. You’ve got a little bit of everything here—traditional short stories, flash fiction, and a novella. How did you decide to put these particular stories together? Were there particular challenges involved in collecting pieces of different lengths together into one collection?

CMS: Again, I think these are all just products of wanting to emulate and write things that were similar to the things I liked to read. This idea of combining stories and a novella came about because I’d just read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders and Maybe Mermaids and Robots are Lonely by Matt Fogarty. Both of those reinforced this idea that the novella shouldn’t begin or end the book, but rather, exist somewhere halfway. Once I figured that out, shaping the rest of the collection was easy.

MR: I’m always interested in hearing writers’ thoughts about ordering the stories in their collections. Your book is divided into four sections: Mundane, Supra-Terrestrial, (Loon)acy, and Sublime. Would you talk about how you came around to this structure and why you chose it?

CMS: Originally, I opened the collection with “Bad Zeitgeist” because it’s the kind of flash story I think punches the reader in the mouth and prepares them for what’s next. But an editor who rejected an early version of the book made a comment about “the stories not building off one another” and that really made me think. So I printed all the stories out and organized them in piles based on which stories “belonged” together. I realized I had my “realist” stories, my “absurd” stories, and those that were somewhere on the spectrum. Then I became really interested in this idea of a slow descent in absurdity. So my “realist” stories open the book, but as you continue on, the hope is that the reader feels like they are slowly sinking into the abyss of my own literary fuckery. The only story that might be out of place is the last one, because it’s actually kind of a peaceful read, but it felt necessary to close the collection that way.

MR: I love this description of your book as a slow descent into absurdity. This arc calls to mind Ben Marcus’s Leaving the Sea, a collection which also moves from more familiar, realistic stories to stranger, less familiar worlds as it progresses. Have you read it?

CMS: I have not, but I will definitely put it on the list. I think collections need an arc of some sort. I want to finish a book and have an immediate impression, and I think the right sequence of stories (like a mixtape) can do that really well.

MR: How long was this book in the making? 

CMS: About three years, I’d say. Most of these were written in grad school, which could be why there’s so much range. “Scoop Carry Dump Repeat” was the first of these stories to be written but was probably the last one to be “finished.”

MR: Several of the protagonists in these stories are female and Xavier in the novella is black. What are your thoughts on writing from the point of view of characters whose experiences may be rather different from yours?

CMS: I just had these characters I was desperate to exist, and it wasn’t like I could tap on another writer’s shoulder (whether they be a woman or black), and say, “Hey, will you write this for me?” Xavier had been hanging with me for a while, and I ended up pursuing his story because I thought he was really interesting and hell, no one else was going to write him, specifically. Same thing with Taylor in “Vertical Leapland.” I just loved her, but until I wrote her, she wouldn’t exist. And once I did, they felt like real people I’m happy to have in my life.

MR: Do you have a favorite story here? Or one that is dearer to you for whatever reason?

CMS: I go back and forth. I’m so proud of the novella, because I managed to actually write one after struggling with long-form narrative for so long, and there are aspects of it I am so happy to have written (Sebastian the T-Rex or the Salamander, a superhero who is not the least bit super or hero). But “Terra” is probably the go-to. It’s my favorite to read out loud. I think it’s the story that mostly encapsulates who I am as a writer.

MR: In closing, what particular writers and/or books do you feel inspired or helped shape these individual stories or this book as a whole?

CMS: This would be a long list if I really got into it, but I did read a lot of Florida work while working on this. The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant, Felt in the Jaw by Kristen Arnett, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, Ovenman by Jeff Parker. When I look back at some of my book, I can see the moment where I was reading the above work. Then there were the sort of research-style reads, where I was trying to figure out a George Saunders sentence, Jason Ockert’s voice, and Amy Hempel’s sense of emotional destruction. But yeah, the list could go on and on.

Shelf Life of Happiness: An Interview with Virginia Pye

It’s rare to open a book, read any given page, and find oneself utterly absorbed. But that’s precisely what happened to me as I read Virginia Pye’s marvelous new collection of stories, Shelf Life of Happiness. With supple prose and truly immersive worlds, I found myself neglecting the dishes, my ringing phone, and refusing to turn off the lamp and get to sleep. Pye’s book simply had more meaning and urgency than any of those things.

I met Pye as a fellow writer in Boston, where we met at numerous readings, events, and gatherings hosted by GrubStreet, an independent writing center. She immediately struck me as sharp-eyed and generous, and before long I got to share drafts with her in a local writing group. I’m grateful to read her fiction, and to pose some questions to the woman whose work swallowed me up.

*

Sonya Larson: To me, the great engine of Shelf Life of Happiness is how it juxtaposes life’s tranquil, peaceable, and lovely moments with the dark, sinister, betraying, exploitative, and even murderous. Characters may be attending a theme party, planting flowers in the garden, or vacationing in Italy, but the claws of danger, envy, and manipulation are always on their heels. Do you think about such themes in your work, and how do you manage to have contrasting forces coexist?

Virginia Pye: Thanks for that description! I think you’ve captured well the source of tension in these stories. I suppose I think that in the midst of happiness there’s always the possibility of its expiration. That’s what the title of the collection means to suggest. Even knowing that joy can be snatched away, we have to fully throw ourselves into life anyway. In fiction, I’m interested in those moments that teeter on the edge. They allow us to see into the hearts and minds of characters. We figure out who we are when tested by life. The same is true in these stories.

SL: Your book exhibits wonderful range; somehow you’re able to inhabit many different characters from all walks of life—aspiring young skateboarders, aged painters, slick art dealers, wily adulterers, a dying groom, and a town in the aftermath of a family massacre. Where do you get your ideas for these characters, and how did you stretch your imagination to render each one?

VP: I love writing about people I’m not. To me, that’s what fiction is for. Writing gives me an excuse to imagine the inner workings of strangers. A lot has been written recently about how fiction increases empathy in readers and writers, but to me that seems so obvious: art has always been about stretching and enriching our hearts and minds. My characters may be inspired by people I’ve rubbed elbows with, or by people whose situations I’m intrigued by, but then I enlist my imagination to move beyond the real and create new worlds with their own challenges. I think a good story needs a crux—an inner or external conflict—that brings out who characters really are. By putting them in dramatic situations, hopefully they come to a life of their own.

SL: Several of the stories also manage a remarkable feat of craft: they capture an entire person’s life in a tiny, heightened sliver of time. An artist, for example, reflects on a lifetime of longing and regret while struggling to swim. How did you go about writing a short story that’s so ambitious in its scope? Did you begin with that aim in mind? 

VP: Usually I know where a story is headed, though I don’t always know how I’ll get there. In the case of Redbone, the story you allude to, I sensed a tragedy, but had to write it to discover how it would unfold. Sometimes, in a story, you need to give the reader an encapsulation of a character’s past. The trick is figuring out how much or how little to share. I think reading and writing a lot of fiction over the years has helped me to make an educated guess. I also think about rhythm in my writing—not wanting to get stuck on one note for too long, or bore the reader, but instead keep a story humming along.

SL: Which story was most fun/most difficult? Which taught you the most as a writer? 

VP: My first thought was that there’s only one story, Her Mother’s Garden, that taught me something: it helped me to move on from the grief I felt over my parents’ deaths and the sale of the house where I grew up. But actually, each story in the collection helped me in some unique way. Best Man helped me absorb the loss of a friend who died years ago of AIDS. An Awesome Gap helped me accept my son’s devotion to skateboarding—and therefore who he is as a person—even though I didn’t fully understand it. Each time I succeed at imagining a story, I think I evolve a bit as a person. It’s hard to explain, because these stories aren’t about specific things I’ve gone through. And yet, they each do the job of helping me to move forward in life with greater understanding. Perhaps they do something similar for the reader. To me, at least, this explains the joy I feel when writing each and every one of them.

SL: Describe your process. How do you go from idea to first draft, and first draft to final draft?

VP: These stories come out of small gems of understanding and serendipitous moments when life suggest deeper meanings. One Easter morning, at a brunch in our backyard, my husband and I realized that our young son had dug up a dead bird he and his father had buried a few days before. We were suddenly dealing with a resurrection on Easter morning—almost too perfect a gift—and I had to use it as inspiration for a story.

After considering some specific conundrum or irony of life, I write a draft, then rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, sending out the story to literary magazines and getting it back, then revising more until it’s finally placed. It’s a long process. The stories in Shelf Life of Happiness were written over a dozen years and rewritten all along the way. I even continued to edit on the spot during a recent reading.

SL: You’ve also written two award-winning novels: Dreams of the Red Phoenix and River of Dust. How do story-writing and novel-writing differ for you?

VP: A story can come from a single idea or gem of understanding, but a novel has to have many themes and characters and an arc that can sustain it. A story is more of a snapshot, although I like my stories to have a beginning, middle, and end. By the end of a story, I want my reader to have a feeling of completion. Each one should be a small sculpture—coherent in theme and style and execution. In a novel, there’s more room for elaboration and excess. I like my stories to be tight.

SL: What are you working on now?

VP: I’m working on something very different. A Woman of Letters is a novel set in 1890s Boston, about a woman who writes romance and adventure tales and must fight to be taken seriously in the world of men of letters. She decides to change her writing style to be more literary, upending everything for herself and her publisher, and ultimately allowing romance to leave the page and enter her life. It’s a feminist tale, and a writer’s tale, and a lot of fun!

“Reality” Has No Place Here: The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

Not infrequently, the “reading public” will “discover” a writer or artist from the past who is so brilliant, and singular, and original, that a furor or interest and outrage results. It will surprise no one that most of these creatives are women whose stars never rose quite as high as their male contemporaries.

Leonora Carrington is one such creative luminary who is—hopefully—currently experiencing such a revival.

In brief: Leonora Carrington was an English-born, Mexican surrealist painter, artist, and writer; she was also a deliciously difficult woman.

All of the best women are difficult.

At more length: We know some things about Leonora’s life, but it is shrouded in some deliberate mystery, since Leonora herself gleefully and stubbornly refused appeals to speak about her life with any kind of clarity. She had a habit of embellishing the stories she did tell with fantastical elements, or of offering multiple contradictory accounts of the events of her own life; the effect is that reading about her life has the same unreal, uncanny quality as reading one of her stories. In fact, the clear ways her stories draw on her own life only serve to further blur the lines of reality and art in her life and her work.

A surrealist to her very marrow.

We know that she was born in England in 1917, that she was a rebel against the confining role of a ‘nice young women’ from a young age, that she was expelled from two Catholic boarding schools as a young girl (“I had an allergy to collaboration,” she once said on the subject), and that while being educated by governesses and tutors at home, she reportedly focused her energies on haunting her family’s “lavatory gothic” mansion trying to learn to levitate.

So she was a weird kid from the off.

In time, Leonora was sent to an art school in Florence, and then a finishing school for well-to-do young ladies in Paris—from which she was also expelled—before returning to England to be presented at court and to have her own coming out ball. Her opinion on this whole affair is perhaps most clearly, and cleverly, revealed in her first story in this collection—“The Debutante”—in which a young ‘deb’ sends her only friend—who just happens to be a hyena—to her ball in her place, disguised by a gown and the face of the maid they’ve killed. The story is narrated in such a matter-of-fact style, that the young protagonist complimenting her hyena friend on the neat way she nibbled around the skin of the maid’s face to make her mask, must simply be accepted while also being experienced as absurd and delightful.

So, Leonora clearly did not make much of the society life.

While studying art in London shortly thereafter, she met the lauded surrealist Max Ernst when she was nineteen—he was forty-six—and the two ran off to France together. There they lived two years in, by all accounts, passionate and artistically fruitful happiness. Of course, if we know our history, we know that Germany invaded France in 1940 bringing it all crashing down. Max Ernst was arrested and sent to a prison camp; Leonora had a break down and was sent off to an asylum in Spain. There she was subject to what any modern reader would recognize as truly terrible ‘treatment.’

Eventually she escaped—With the help of her old nanny and a submarine, or was it a warship? And the nanny may have been a cousin. And really, does the ‘truth’ of the events matter? Is ‘reality’ a concept which holds any water? Leonora didn’t particularly think so—and perhaps the only good thing to come from that time at the asylum was that it would inform her novel Down Below. As she began to take up the threads of her creative work again, she married, moved to New York City, moved to Mexico City, divorced, married again, had two sons, and settled into her life-long home in Mexico, which she loved deeply.

Leonora described Mexico City as “A familiar swimming pool with sharks in it,” which from her can only be a compliment. She called her own home there the “house of the Spinx” and expressed her passion for the fantastic and rejection of the “normal” and the “real” with zeal. Her cooking is one good example, being more alchemy or witchcraft than culinary task; she was known to mix squid ink with tapioca pearls and call it caviar with a straight face, or to cut hair from the head of a guest she particularly disliked and cook it into omelets she served.

Is it any wonder that reading her fiction is such a singular, uncanny experience? She manages to hold all the liquid, shifting (false) duality of Freud’s “heimliche” and “unheimliche” in her hands at once, in a way that can only be marveled at. The known becomes strange, and the unknown becomes familiar, and it all happens at once without you noticing.

Take “A Man in Love” as an example, which opens quite suddenly with a fruit seller catching the narrator stealing a mellon, and stating: “Miss, I’ve been waiting for a chance like this for forty years. For forty years I’ve hidden behind this pile of oranges in the hope that somebody might pinch some fruit. And the reason is this: I want to talk, I want to tell my story…” If you haven’t figured out yet that you need to simply surrender to Leonora Carrington’s genius, and let her take you where she will, then you are a slow learner, and likely keenly uncomfortable. You will become even more so when the story moves in to the vendor’s shop, “through a door at the back and reached a room where there was a bed in which lay a woman, motionless and probably dead. It seemed to me that she must have been there a long time, for the bed was overgrown with grass.” But her mortality is, in fact, unclear. She is, for example, still warm enough to hatch chicks from eggs by her heat, and the greengrocer—who has a special talent, which is dehydrating meat by looking at it—waters her every day with loving tenderness. And all of this is simply the prelude to the man’s story.

Another standout story is “White Rabbits,” in which the narrator relays living in New York over a hot summer in which she gets in the habit of hanging about, quite naked, in front of her open windows watching the house opposite the street for any signs of life. After many days of this, she finally spies a woman come out on to her balcony with a dish of bones for a raven that had landed on the railing: “The woman, who had very long black hair, used her hair to wipe out the dish. Then she looked straight at me and smiled in a friendly fashion. I smiled back and waved a towel.” Nothing about this is surprising. Nor is it surprising when the woman calls across to ask the narrator if she has any spoiled, decomposed meat; our narrator only replies, “Not at the moment.” So she buys some meat from the butcher, leaves it out to rot, and pays her neighbors a visit. The rotting meat is, but of course, food for the hundreds of ravenous white rabbits living in the neighbors’ rooms. The neighbors themselves’—Ethel and Lazarus—wear ancient clothes, have white sparkling skin, and regard their rabbits as both loved pets and food. But none of this is treated as terribly strange in the word which tumbles from Leonora’s Carrington’s brain, and the story simply goes on from there.

Each piece in this collection—The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington—is a glittering jewel, and, although the volume is relatively slim, it is best to take it slowly and savor each one. When you have finished with them, consider seeking out her other books—The Hearing Trumpet and Down Below—as well as digging in to her wonderful artwork; her paintings in particular are extraordinary, and worthy of every bit as much lionization as any of the more well-known surrealists. If only we could bottle whatever mad witchcraft she possessed, the creative arts would be richer—and weirder—for it.

Alex Behr's Planet Grim

In “Teenage Riot,” one of the first—and best—stories in Alex Behr’s debut collection, Planet Grim, a broken teenage girl admits, “I want something to love.” It seems like such a simple statement, but, like the stories with which it shares its space, there’s much more happening beneath the surface.

Planet Grim is difficult to describe because it’s such a complex (and often complicated) gathering of short stories. There’s pain and suffering, but humor is just as prevalent. Imagine a Flannery O’Connor world written by David Sedaris. In “Wet,” for example, we find an unnamed woman struggling to deal with her recent divorce. Her pain is real: “I cut off my left arm with nail clippers. It hangs on. I can’t snip the final pieces of dried-out skin.” But Behr gives the story an added dimension by juxtaposing the immense sorrow with comedic absurdity. The woman says, “I have stained teeth and an undeniable love of cheese.”

“A Reasonable Person,” another one of Planet Grim’s standouts, strikes a similar balance. Here, Mary, a juror on a murder case in which a boy saw his mother murdered, can’t focus on the trial because she’s so overwhelmed by the struggles of her own life. Some are seemingly minor: she worries about when to urinate and if her armpits stink. Others, though, are much more serious. After going home, she removes her own absent son’s clothing from a drawer and cradles them on a bed. She talks to him intimately. It’s unsettling, but Behr works her magic again. Mary says to her son’s scattered clothing, “You ran pretty damn far from me!” It becomes heartbreaking.

“Sentient Times” and “The Garden” are two other stories that show Behr at her best, shifting tones and engaging in affecting wordplay. She’s a master of language, and these stories show a meticulous command.

One of the most appealing elements of Planet Grim is how Behr focuses on characters who are so realistic. These are characters who are identifiable misfits—maybe our own family members or even ourselves. They are struggling, but they are still fighting. There are issues with drugs, parenthood, childhood, divorce, and death. Even in their most desperate situations, they are still relatable.

At twenty-eight stories, Planet Grim could lose a few of the stories and, perhaps, be a little stronger. Having so many stories with dynamic shifts and quirks creates an occasionally fragmented overall experience. The ones that do work, though, and just for the record, most of them do work, sing.

Planet Grim is an affecting debut that should remind us how we’re all fighting a tough battle.