The Light Source: An Interview with Kim Magowan

I met Kim Magowan in late 2014. We both entered a Sixfold fiction contest. If you don’t know it, it’s a contest in which the winners are selected by the various writers who enter work into the contest. Stories are submitted anonymously, and voting takes place over three rounds, each writer randomly assigned six stories per round. Kim was assigned my story during one of those rounds. Kim was one of the few readers who left me detailed feedback, and her comments were insightful and generous. If you’ve never submitted to Sixfold, let me tell you, this is a rarity. Somehow, despite all the voters who said things like, I kid you not, that they wished the protagonist of my story would drive off a cliff and die, I ended up winning that contest, and I emailed Kim after to take her up on reading an edited version of the story. We hit it off, and we’ve been sending each other our drafts ever since. Since July of 2017, we’ve been collaboratively writing a short story collection together.

The story Kim submitted in that Sixfold contest was the opening chapter from her debut novel, The Light Source (7.13 Books). Kim is also the author of the short story collection, Undoing, which was winner of the 2017 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Indiana Review, New World Writing, SmokeLong Quarterly, and many other venues. Her story “Madlib” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press). Her story “Surfaces” was selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2019. She is fiction editor of Pithead Chapel. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. www.kimmagowan.com

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Michelle Ross: The Light Source began as a few individual, but linked, short stories and at some point you made a conscious decision to expand the grouping with the intention of shaping them into a novel. Which stories/chapters had you written already when you made that decision? What was the first chapter you wrote after you decided you were working on the novel? And how did knowing it was now a novel change the writing process or did it?

Kim Magowan: I feel like my process with the novel is textbook “what not to do”! I wrote the book all out of order. The first section I drafted was the Beth chapter, Chapter 3, when I was in graduate school, around when the chapter takes place (1994). I saw it as a stand-alone story. Soon after, I wrote the Heather chapter (Chapter 2). In 2011, when at long last I became serious about writing, I dusted off those two stories and substantially revised them. That same year I went to my 25th high school reunion, and afterwards wrote the Mamie chapter (Chapter 6). Once that was drafted, I wrote the Porter chapter (Chapter 4)—he was my villain, he needed to tell his side of the story. All this time I believed I was writing a bunch of linked short stories, along the lines of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, but I was becoming increasingly uneasy. For one, both the Mamie story and Porter story are really long, and for two, the Porter story was too profane to publish. It was my favorite thing I’d written to date, but I knew it didn’t really work as a stand-alone story. Around this time (2012), an agent contacted me to ask if I was working in a novel, and I realized (duh!) of course I was—kicking and screaming, denying it all the way. So in the next 5 weeks, when I was in New Orleans with my family, I slapped together a first draft of both the Julie chapter (Chapter 7) and the Ian chapter (Chapter 1). It was the most intensive writing experience of my life—I wrote about 70 pages in 5 weeks. In the next few years I added material, mostly to the Julie chapter. I cut a chapter that seemed too Sesame Street song “One of these things is not like the others,” though that’s the opening story to my Undoing collection (and if you read “When in Rome,” you’ll see I never bothered to change the character names, so Julie has a cameo appearance). The Pam chapter (Chapter 5) came last. Unfortunately I suspect the only way I can write a novel is in this Homer Simpson “Doh!” backdoor way. I am too intimidated to write a NOVEL (oh my) unless I fall into it accidentally.

MR: Probably my favorite chapter is the Heather chapter. A lot of that chapter is Heather strolling through memories—of Julie over the years, but also of Heather’s family and her own life—but at the same time, the chapter/story feels grounded in the present because Heather is physically strolling around Amsterdam as she broods and you do such an amazing job of bringing that place to life. Writing that particular chapter in the way you did seems now like such a natural, inevitable choice. How else do you pull off so much meandering into backstory unless the character is presently meandering through space, right? Is this something you were thinking about as you wrote the chapter?

KM: Thank you! I like that chapter too. Heather is my favorite character. She captured my imagination early on. I got loads of nice rejection letters for that story before The Gettysburg Review published it, and I think it kept getting rejected because nothing really happens—Heather writes a letter and ruminates. Amsterdam, for me, is the perfect setting for deep-dive introspection that isn’t necessarily productive. It’s a beautiful city and also a decadent city. My memories of Amsterdam are a weird combination of precise and smeary. I needed Heather to be in a place where she felt lost, far away from Julie, trying to get her bearings, sifting through a past made complicated because of Julie’s denial and Heather’s collusion. Heather feels alone, even when she isn’t physically alone (she makes a friend but a friend who doesn’t speak her languages). A lot of my novel is about watching—characters are always watching each other, particularly observing Julie. Amsterdam for me is the essence of a voyeuristic city.

MR: There is a lot of voyeurism in your novel, but it’s largely a kind of claustrophobic voyeurism in that this is a group of friends studying and commenting on each other over the years, much in the way that families often do. There are quite a few moments in the novel when one of them says something about Julie or Heather to others in the group along the lines of “You know Julie…” or “You know Heather…” There can be something comforting in people thinking they know you, but on the other hand, it can be stifling and annoying as hell. While this novel is on one level a love story between two people, on another level, it’s a story of the dynamics between a large group of friends, the kind of group that operates much like a family, yes?

KM: Yes, absolutely—when I (inarticulately) describe my book, I say it’s about love and friendship. I went to boarding school, and your point feels absolutely true to me—one’s friends are like family, in both positive and negative ways. There’s this kind of intimate knowledge boarding school friends have of each other, and like family members, they know exactly how to wound. Beth refers to this precision wounding in her chapter as “many small splinters that embed themselves under our skin.” I tried to capture their intimacy by shorthand—for instance, through the obnoxious ways they “tease” each other, and the nicknames they have. They love each other but annoy each other. They think they have each other entirely figured out; they get a lot wrong. In different ways Heather and Julie both experience that group knowledge as stifling. Heather is regarded as the cavalier slut (for years none of them realize she’s deeply in love), and Julie is the good girl/ homecoming queen (if boarding schools had homecoming queens; they’re too patrician). It’s very hard for outsiders to break in to this kind of closed loop. Porter legitimately sees Julie’s friends as exclusionary.

MR: The Pam chapter is another favorite of mine. It’s tiny compared to the other chapters/stories, but Pam is no less realized than other characters in the novel, and it’s a perfect little story that reveals much about Heather. In choosing peripheral characters for the novel, did you plan out in any way what you thought these chapters needed to accomplish within the novel? Or did these characters and their stories come about more accidentally?

KM: I wrote the Pam chapter after I cut the Emily chapter (and threw that one into my Undoing collection). I decided Emily was too peripheral, but I wanted to insert a character who was an outsider, not part of this incestuous, warm knot of boarding school friends. Also, I wanted a tempering perspective on Heather. Mostly the reader experiences Heather as lovelorn, so I wanted an example of her treating a partner cavalierly. Heather is honest with Pam, but nonetheless she hurts her badly (even if Heather points out later that heartbreak is an inevitable risk of falling in love). Pam is my way of showing that Heather also has some blood on her hands.

MR: Was any particular character easier or more difficult to inhabit than the others?

KM: Strangely enough, Porter was very easy for me to inhabit. He’s the bad guy of the novel, but I felt like I completely understood him—I was channeling his voice. That chapter was the most fun to write. I needed to lay out clues that Porter was ignoring or misinterpreting. He’s a smart guy, but he misconstrues what he sees.

MR: We don’t hear Julie’s voice until the end of the novel. All that time we’ve gotten all these different characters’ versions of Julie, so when she finally speaks, it’s a little bit startling, in a good way, to finally get into her head. What’s more is that you do something different in Julie’s chapter with time. The other chapters in the novel move chronologically through time, each chapter occupying a distinct moment in time somewhere from 1994 to 2013. Julie’s chapter is composed of slices of 1994, 1997, 2006, 2012, and 2013, so we’re not only getting a present-time Julie, we’re getting the various Julies of the past as well. Would you talk about this choice to break the pattern of time in this way and to save all of Julie’s sections for last?

KM: Along with Heather, Julie’s the main character, but Heather is so open, and Julie is the opposite: closed and guarded. I needed her story to come at the end. I knew that choice was risky. She is not someone the reader is inclined to sympathize with by that point in the novel. My goal was not to make Julie likeable (frankly, I get very impatient with that adjective! I could give a crap about “likeable”), but to make her comprehensible. There are, as you say, various Julies, so I didn’t feel like I could write the 2012-13 version of her and leave it at that. I needed to show what she was thinking and feeling at earlier stages in the novel: why she chooses Heather, why she bails. The Julie chapter begins right where the Beth chapter ends—Beth sees Heather and Julie talking on the beach. I wanted to dramatize that conversation. Again, that was a chapter I wrote all out of order. I feel like I should attach a warning label: do not follow my madwoman, counter-productive process! The first part I wrote was the kitchen scene where Julie talks to Heather and their twins. Then I wrote the section where Julie has coffee with Porter, then a first section I later cut, then the ending. But I had to keep going back to that chapter and filling in more material, trying to flesh out Julie’s character, to clarify why she made her often problematic choices. I made her suffer more: the scene with her husband Rob was a later addition. So was the trampoline scene, because my novel was a love story missing a scene of Heather and Julie actually being a couple, in love, but struggling and at odds. The chapter originally began in 1986, when Ian, Julie, Heather, and Beth are in high school. I cut that section (it was leaden) late in my revision process, after Leland Cheuk had accepted the novel and I was doing a final tighten/ compression.

MR: Your story collection, Undoing, also contains several linked stories and you’ve written a few more linked stories since then. Why do you think you find yourself returning to particular characters again and again? Are you thinking about them between writing those stories or do they come back to you out of the blue?

KM: Ha! This goes back to what I said regarding your first question—the only way I can write a novel is to back into it, unawares. Either of those linked sets of stories (the Laurel ones, the Ben and Miriam ones) could have easily turned into a novel. This year I wrote yet another Laurel story and yet another Ben and Miriam story. Those characters have a hold on me; I know a lot more about them then I put on the page. But who the hell has the time to write a novel? And yes, I think about them in between writing about them, and I write about them when those thoughts get so brim-full they overflow. I may well end up writing a novel about them, but it will be entirely against my will.

MR: How would you compare the process of putting together the novel versus the story collection? Is there some metaphor that suitably encapsulates the different experiences?

KM: Oh man, the processes for me are so entirely different! With the short story collection, the big challenge was getting the story sequence right (though of course, as you and I have laughed and wailed over, no one seems to read short story collections in sequence, so so much for all those hair-tearing hours!). But I could yank any story I had doubts about, so the short story collection process appeals to the perfectionist in me. With a novel, you can’t just toss a chapter, because it holds up scaffolding. Revising novels is more frustrating and laborious. I kept imagining Tim Gunn from Project Runway, when he’s shaking his head over some godawful jumpsuit or ball gown and dictates, “Make it work.” A metaphor? I’d say putting together a story collection is like curating a museum show, figuring out which paintings belong in which rooms and how to light them. Putting together a novel is like being a 15th century cartographer who constantly has to adjust the map of the globe: “Oh shit, there’s a continent there. Must move everything around to make room for that new continent.” There are lots of smudgy eraser marks all over the novel map; it’s much less pristine.

MR: I asked you this question before in another interview when your story collection, Undoing, was published. Will you list ten words that encapsulate The Light Source?

KM: Friendship

Voyeurism

Denial

Betrayal

Trojan Horse

“Addiction”

Charades

Forgiveness

Circles

Light

MR: Why did you put addiction in quotation marks?

KM: I was thinking about one of my characters who identifies as a sex addict, and another character scoffs— she has no patience for that characterization, she believes it’s a way of letting himself off the hook. And I suppose the scare quotes represent for me a broader theme in my novel, a complicated relationship between abjection and accountability. Addicts are under a compulsion, whereas “addicts” persuade themselves they are under a compulsion. Sidenote: when you asked me for ten words, I resisted the urge to look up our last interview, but I bet Addiction was on my list for ten words about Undoing, and I bet there were no scare quotes around it. In an interview George Saunders said he consistently writes about class struggle, and that he doesn’t feel like he chooses that subject: it’s hardwired. There are certainly themes and plots I find myself returning to again and again.

MR: Finally, what’s one of your favorite lines from your novel?

KM: The Heather chapter is the prettiest, I think—the most pull-quotable. This bit is the essence of that chapter, because it shows Heather’s longing for Julie but also her frustration: “Last summer I read my little cousin Lucie a myth about a Greek girl who, unable to settle for having her god-lover only at night, against his warnings burns his fur cape and consequently loses him. ‘Why are you crying?’ Lucie asked me, and I couldn’t say, because I know how Psyche feels; because I want to burn that fucking cloak of fur.” Sidenote: I’ve always been fascinated by the Psyche myth, because it shows what is sexist about quest stories. Male characters go on quests and receive a reward—the princess, the crown. Female characters quest to retrieve what has been lost or stolen from them. On that note, I also like this line from the Porter chapter: “To some degree, all lovers are time machine conjurers, seeking to recover and to repair the past.”

Feeling Haunted: A Review of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

When I was a girl I used to read with a kind of anxious-joyful intensity that bodily took me over. I would wedge myself into the space between my creaking bedframe and the wall of my bedroom, and the sunbeams would slant overhead, and the dust would get in my nose, and I would get lost for whole weekends—maybe even weeks if it was the summer. The physical sensations were specific: too-rapid heart beats, short and shallow breaths, a wildness rising in my throat, a wide and unconscious smile, a shivery feeling in my spine, eyes moving rapidly and without blinking until I’d realized periodically that they hurt like a sonofabitch. That specific mania-joy-wonder doesn’t happen for me as often now; I’ve read enough books, and lived long enough, and narrowed my palate. When it does, though, I feel twelve again, and I am once again in my childhood bedroom. I smell the particular smell of the dust and the warm sunbeams and the detergent-rich sheets on my bed.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House, she explores what it means for a space to be haunted—“It means that metaphors abound; that space exists in four dimensions; that if you return somewhere often enough it becomes infused with your energy; that the past never leaves us; that there’s always atmosphere to consider; that you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh.” This is undeniably true. But I think that haunting can work in the reverse too. A feeling can be infused with a specific space, a specific time, and a specific body.

The book haunted me in this way. It haunted me by being unspeakably beautiful and new and clench-my-jaw-hands-are-shaking brilliant. It made me twelve-and-thirty at once; it overlaid my no longer really there Midwestern childhood bedroom over my New York kitchen; it possessed me with all those old familiar drugged-up sensations. I sat rigidly still for hours in the same attitude without even noticing that this is not something which is particularly bearable for me anymore. I ignored fourteen phone calls; four were from my mother. I cancelled one set of plans and declined another. I skipped several meals. And all because I had to—absolutely had to—finish this book, which I did within twenty-four hours of getting my hands on the ARC. And then I flipped back to the front and started again.

It also haunted me with past versions of myself—the “You”s I contain as the book itself takes on a convention of a “You” and an “I” to differentiate the narrator’s self in the timeline of the story. (“You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved; a neat loop that took first person—that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer—away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog.” From that cleaving, I left and lived on the east coast, lived the most triumphant notes of her life that we think of associated with an artist like Carmen. You’s biographical points are the points which live in her time in Iowa and Indiana, and in the dark of that relationship. I thought you died, but writing this, I’m not sure you did.”) This haunting arises from a number of key biographical parallels which were joy-light-tear-bringing to read, since they are lived experiences I do not often (ever) get to see made vivid on the page. I am suddenly remembering the dedication of the book—”If you need this book, it is for you.”—and at the risk of sounding like an unconscionable egoist, it feels like it is for me, at least when I am alone, in my room, at my desk.

And it is.

And it is not.

This book is, yes, for you (me) if you are someone who can relate to any portion of the experiences or identities outlined and may want to feel a tin bit less alone and more seen.

It is also, explicitly, for The Archive. For a “you” that is collective and historical in context. Which is part of Carmen Maria Machado’s incredible mastery of craft; she can write something at once erudite, personal, and formally complex and experimental, and generous, and contrary, and natural, and meta, and snappy. It’s deft and as weightless as air. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a creative work which has so explicitly engaged with an awareness of the reader, the act of reader, the mind of the reader parsing the text, the idea of text, and the act of writing, while still remaining warm and engaging and funny.

But what can you expect when you pick up the book? (And you should, whoever you are.) Something that feels new. On one hand, Carmen weaves a personal narrative which progresses more or less chronologically through an abusive relationship with a woman she met and dated mostly during her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. These are presented in a series of what amount to medium-length personal essays, and the language and insight in them is beautiful and touching and clear-eyed. But if this is the more traditional base, the book as a whole is far from traditional, because that more traditional memoir fodder is only one strand which Carmen deftly braids with personal essays dealing with other periods of her life—as the information may become relevant—academic and cultural essays on topics ranging from Louise Bourgeois, the Gaslight films, Saidiya Hartman’s “violence of the archive,” queer history, Gothicism, Doctor Who, folktales, features of abusive relationships, A Star is Born, the concept of hauntings, and more and more. Each essay is playful and smart and different from those around it, starting with “Dream House as…” and taking on variously the form and genre conventions of a bildungsroman, a choose your own adventure, a libretto, a murder mystery, and so on, and so on.

In the Dream House is also, before you get too far into this review thinking that the book is going to be some kind of alternatively maudlin and hyper-intellectually dry tome, very much playful and funny. In the very first section, or essay, or whatever I am meant to call it, “Dream House as Overture,” she begins the whole book with “I never read prologues.” The very next section, when you turn the page, is “Dream House as Prologue.” This tongue-in-cheek, double-back-upon-itself dance permeates the whole work. So too does a sense of interrogating the purpose and use and limitations of the work itself (“the memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection”), but also the strength and power and necessity of it—of memoir and memory. While she explicitly acknowledges that hers are just one person’s—with just one person’s constellation of identities—lived experiences, Carmen addresses early on, and then again and again throughout the book the problem of the archive: of history, and queer history, and the lack of literature and documentation and study of abuse in relationships between people with the same gender identities. History is incomplete, and that has individual and communal implications. So, with her memoir, she “enters into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this.”

The truth is I’m a little bit in goofy-sappy love with this book, just like I was a little bit in goofy-sappy love Carmen’s debut collection of short stories Her Body and Other Parties, when my good friend Patrick (who reviewed it for this very site) pressed the book into my hands and said ‘no really, you need to read this, YOU especially need to read this.’ And so when I saw that the ARCs were coming in for her second book I leapt at the chance to “dibs” reviewing it (umm, sorry Patrick). So now I arrive at the third way I am feeling a little haunted while writing this review, which is with a tinge of embarrassment. Both the reflexive embarrassment I always when I have a crush (and, yes, I get crushes on books), and also with the lightly mortifying memory—persistently lingering in my consciousness as I write this—of the time that I met Carmen (briefly) at a reading she did with NYU at the KGB bar. When I fainted right there in front of her. (It was hot and overcrowded, I had low blood pressure, let’s just… leave it.) I can assure everyone that she could not have been kinder, or more concerned and gracious. She offered me a granola bar and I was a little out of it, but I remember getting really weird about how I couldn’t possibly, not her granola bars, oh my gosh. I did however take the opportunity to introduce myself and dizzily say “hi, I’m a big fan.” She talked to me for a while to put me at ease, and drew smelling salts in my copy of her book when I asked her to sign it, and very kindly did not make fun of me even a little despite how weird I was being.

So, if none of the praises I’ve heaped on In the Dream House have swayed you thus far, here’s one last salvo: it is a good thing in this world and in our community to support and lift up the lovely ones, by which I mean the writers and artists are brilliant and funny, and still warm and kind and human. And Carmen Maria Machado seems, really seems, like a good one.

The Jaguars that Prowl Our Dreams: An Interview with Poet and Novelist Mary Mackey

New York Times best-selling author Mary Mackey became a poet by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, dodging machine gun fire, being caught in volcanic eruptions, swarmed by army ants, stalked by vampire bats, threatened by poisonous snakes, making catastrophic decisions with regard to men, and reading.

Here is my interview with her, focused on her decades of writing, particularly her latest poetry collection The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams.

How were you able to write in such a dream state, with such a flow of superimposed dreamlike images, completely sober? How do you get into the state of mind that prepares you to write this sort of poetry? 

In the mid 1970’s, I decided that I needed some way to access my unconscious that did not involve drugs or alcohol (none of which I use) or exceptionally high fevers. Running a fever of near 107 degrees is too high a price to pay for anything, much less poetry. I knew there had to be a better way, and gradually I found it.

After exploring various possibilities, I put together a method which permits me to go deeply into my unconscious, access the nonverbal parts of my mind, and come up with images, metaphors, plots, ideas, and other materials. Put in simple terms, I stand on the threshold between dreaming and waking. This is very much like the state we are in in when we first wake up in the morning. Usually we forget our dreams almost immediately. I have figured out a way to remember unconscious material long enough to go to my computer or one of my notebooks and write it down.

To what extent are the places you visited still wild? How do the people in Costa Rica, Brazil and everywhere else you visited feel about economic development and ecological conservation? Is it possible to accomplish both goals? 

Although Costa Rica has one of the best national park systems in Latin America, much of the rainforest that I lived in when I was in my twenties has been cut down. I was told a few years ago that 90% of what I saw in the late 1960’s no longer exists. I don’t know if this is true and I haven’t gone back to look because it would be too heart-breaking.

As for Brazil, the Amazon is still vast. When you fly to Rio from the US, you fly over it for four hours. In 2004, my husband and I went up the Amazon starting at Manaus on a boat usually used to carry botanists and other scientists into the jungle. We traveled 2000 miles in all and saw only 3 small villages and two towns, neither of which had populations over 14,000. There was nothing else except jungle and water and sky. Unfortunately, all of that is now changing at a terrifyingly rapid pace. The new President of Brazil has opened formerly protected parts of the amazon to logging and mineral extraction. I have no idea how much of that vast, species-rich jungle will survive, but I think we should all be alarmed by its destruction.

As for how the people of Brazil feel about economic development and ecological conservation, I’m not equipped to say. Personally I feel that it is possible to feed the world’s population and protect biodiversity at the same time. A new book entitled Nature’s Matrix describes this positive scenario better than I ever could. I recommend checking it out.

How do you decide which poems should go in each book? Do you just write poems until you have enough for a book, or do you link them together by themes? 

Arranging the poems in a collection is an important process. My poems naturally fall into groups. I write until I have more than enough for a collection. Then I cull out all but the best poems and put them into their groups. When I started selecting the poems for The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, I came up with 248 poems. Clearly that was far too many, so I went back and selected the best of the best. Jaguars now contains 132 poems, each­ selected with a great deal of thought about how it fits the whole.

I believe that my attention to arrangement was one of the reasons Jaguars won a 2018 Women’s Spirituality Book Award and the 2019 Erich Hoffer Award for the Best Book Published by a Small Press.

How would you describe the main themes of your collection? 

If I could simply describe the themes of Jaguars, I wouldn’t have needed to write the poems. Good poetry exists in a realm beyond logical prose description. It’s evocative, touching the mind and the emotions and the human unconscious all at the same time. So let me answer this question by asking a question in return: The title of my recent collection is The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams. The jaguar is the jungle’s top predator. When the shamans of the upper Amazon do their vision quests with Ayahuasca, they believe that they become jaguars prowling through the dream world. But we aren’t shamans from the upper Amazon (at least most of us probably aren’t). So let me ask you: what jaguars prowl your dreams?

How do you reconcile celebrating all of nature, all its wild ferocity and predation and death, and then celebrating kindness? 

That’s the great question, the one religious leaders and philosophers have tried to answer for thousands of years. It’s the question William Blake asks in his poem “The Tyger.” I can’t answer it. I’m a poet, not a philosopher. As poet, my duty is to bear witness to what is, not what might be. Wild ferocity, predation, death, kindness, love, beauty, tenderness, anger, greed, generosity, timid grass-eating deer and stalking jaguars all exist; and I see myself as describing, celebrating, and in some sense preserving them, for future generations in all their contradictory complexity.

Language and Laughter: Two Writers in Conversation

Peg Alford Pursell and Nancy Au first met at the College of Marin (in Northern California) over nine years ago, when Nancy enrolled in her first writing class, a flash fiction class taught by Peg. Deeply inspired by Peg’s teaching, Nancy began attending North Bay Writers, a writing workshop Peg founded and facilitated in Sausalito. During this time, Peg also founded the award-winning literary reading series Why There Are Words (which since has become a celebrated national series and also inspired Peg’s founding and directing WTAW Press, a nonprofit independent publisher of books). Peg could see that not only was Nancy an original and talented writer, she was also interested in literary community building, and asked Nancy to become in involved with the series. Nancy began interning for WTAW in its second year. Nancy went on to earn her MFA from San Francisco State University, where she teaches creative writing. She is also an instructor at California State University Stanislaus and, in the summers, she teaches creative writing to biology majors! Nancy co-founded The Escapery, a collective of teachers who are dedicated to diversity, and to writing and art as a form of resistance. Of all the writing workshops Peg has attended in her lifetime, one of her favorites, one of the best was led by Nancy at The Escapery.

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes into the Forest, just released July 16, by Dzanc Books. She is also the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for Literary Fiction. 

Nancy Au is the author of the debut story collection Spider Love Song and Other Stories, forthcoming from Acre Books in September. Of the book, Peg wrote: “Foxes, turtles, ducks, oysters, fish, badgers, beetles, damselflies, bees: all manner of creatures scratch, swim, thrum, and shimmer through these tender and fantastic stories. Characters struggle with the entanglements of the living and the dead, like the ‘spiders’ webs [that] can wind around anything that doesn’t pay attention,’ while they long to be out in the world that both compels and terrifies. I was spellbound by Au’s unique vision and language that pay attention to the many wild, rich worlds that hold us.”

The following conversation between the two writers took place long distance while they were traveling, Peg promoting her new book, and Nancy taking her creative writing/biology major students on a week-long camping field trip on Mt. Hamilton.

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NANCY AU: I think about the generative Tzara’s Hat exercises that we did in North Bay Writers Workshop when you taught me to draw inspiration by pulling a word from a pile, and digging into stories utilizing that word or the image it evoked. This is still something that I do on a regular basis, both for my own writing and in my workshops!

Note: The Tzara’s Hat exercise derives from Tristan Tzara, who, during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s, offered to create a work on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat.

PEG ALFORD PURSELL: Not everyone enjoys exercises when it comes to writing, so it makes me especially happy that you do, too. Doing something like “Tzara’s Hat” can make generating new work feel playful, and that sort of approach is really helpful if one is experiencing anxiety about getting something down on the page. It’s interesting that creative anxiety is thought to be a crucial step of the creative process: the anxiety builds until the creator begins to make something, relieving that pressure. A kind of necessary evil, it seems. But some can find that anxiety intolerable. An exercise, a game can help a writer out of their own way.

I would love to know if any of the stories in Spider Love Song and Other Stories had their genesis in this Tzara’s Hat method. And if not, how did you begin your stories?

NA: For SLS, I loved using “Tzara’s Hat,” which helped me to begin writing both stories, “The Unfed” and “Mom’s Desert.” I also experimented with different poetic constraints, such as variations of abecedarian exercises and, my favorite, using word cut-ups (with science textbooks, bird field books, recipe books, books about mammals, etc.) The cut-ups helped me to generate material for dialogues between characters, to use words that are not part of my everyday vocabulary, to find unique word pairings, and to use words in strange and new ways. I also used ekphrasis exercises. At museums, while studying the art, I wrote in my notebook using words to describe what I saw. Ekphrasis helped me to envision colors, settings and composition, textures, lighting, clothing, facial expressions, physical movements, and gestures for my characters.

I love your description of the playfulness of writing exercises, and how this can alleviate a writer’s anxiety. I carry a lot of anxiety, both within my writing/professional life and within my everyday life, and I often struggle with feeling confident about finding my words, using words, even in the context of just speaking with others …. With exercises, like cut-ups, it helps me to feel like words don’t have to be so serious, that language can be malleable and forgiving and funny. I think this is the reason why the writing exercises that you taught me at North Bay Writing Workshop have been so invaluable and inspiring and generative for me.

I want to talk about A Girl Goes into the Forest. In the story “Iguana,” there is a moment that took my breath away, when the protagonist “lifted her face to the sky. She wanted rain to mist her face, wash down her neck, thrum on her throat. Water she would wipe away.” This moment, like so many impossibly beautiful and heartbreaking moments throughout AGGITF, feels like we are witnessing a person’s dreams, in the way that a person wakes with their heart still pounding, the scents and tastes so real they keep their eyes squeezed shut, afraid to lose the dream.

I was heartbroken by the intensity of the character’s desire to reach her daughter, to be seen, heard, to hear her daughter speak before disappearing into the van. I wanted the dreams, these stories, each one, to go on forever. I believe that this intensity, the hyper-realistic, fully immersed, fully felt dreams, are what makes flash so magical. In a related sense, I wonder if there a catalyst/impetus for your book? Was it a vision? A dream? An image?

PAP: I need to make up an exciting story about how this collection came into being! If I were to do that, I’d say I’d had a sort of vision, one that came to me in a dream in the middle of the afternoon while I was in a liminal state, perhaps lying on my back in a meadow surrounded by buzzing bees and nattering squirrels, excited songbirds, catfish jumping in a nearby stream, while the cumulus clouds scuttling overhead formed the catalytic images. But the reality is, I almost never have any idea what I’m setting out to write. I plunge in, going with some impetus or another, most often the sound of a phrase that came from who knows where. I write early in the morning and often wake with words in my head that I need to set down on the page. Sonics are important to me, and in revision I’m careful about preserving and building upon the sounds of language.

A related question for you, Nancy, about revision: Throughout your stories certain motifs appear and I’m curious about whether they appeared organically in the individual stories, or if it was a matter of revisiting the stories after they were collected and then injecting the motifs into them—or a combination? For example, all the creatures in your book! Have you compiled a list of all the animals that show up in your stories? “The Fox Spirit” contains, besides foxes, a woodpecker, beetles, an orange tiger, hoary goats, dying fish, just to name a few. Can you talk about the significance of the animal world in this book?

NA: I love that you ask this because I love how in AGGITF, you dove so beautifully into the natural world, the “arched sky… so blue,” the “closer to earth darkness churned like sea reeds,” the excitement of animals lurking … in the surrounding darkness.” Each piece in the collection reminds your reader that this entire world and our experiences through it is a wilderness. A wilderness surrounds the teenage daughter who travels alone across the country to live with her father, and another daughter when she secretly marries and proclaims that she is moving to Chile to raise horses with her new husband. There is a deep and beautiful wilderness within the protagonists themselves, within the complexities of parenthood, of daughterhood, of love, of marriage, of separation.

With my use of the natural world in SLS and for much of my writing, I am inspired by my husband who is an educator and a biologist who deeply loves the insects that he studies. I often think about the time when he and I were on a hike, and he suddenly shouted out, terrified, “Watch out!” to a mayfly just as it was eaten by a dragonfly in midair. I know that he loves dragonflies just as much as he loves mayflies, and I always imagine the turmoil he must have felt in this moment, rooting for one bug who has captured another bug as its meal, and simultaneously wanting to save the bug from being eaten. I think about the tenderness, the awe, and concern. And, the science! I’m a science lover (aka a science nerd without a science degree), and I love to read about birds and animals and insects. I use my fiction writing as an excuse to spend hours wiggling my way down the endless Wikipedia informational wormhole, to learn about anything ranging from the mating habits of lions, or the flight patterns of damselflies, or the origins of television static.

One of the guiding principles that I’ve lived by, with regard to publishing as a short story writer, was something that you taught me early on: write stories, publish stories, work on building a collection this way. Was this something that you did for AGGITF? Was AGGITF always envisioned as a story collection? Or were the individual stories written over time, and a theme began to show up?

PAP: Many of the stories were written over time. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t usually know what I’m creating, and that’s particularly true about a book, a collection. I wouldn’t have it any other way! The mystery is essential. It takes time and stories before I can discover what my obsessions are about, what they may be adding up to. Once I have an idea, more stories flow, though, in the end, I will cut quite a few that don’t enhance the overall collection. Also, once I have a sense of the overall project, I’ll realize that there are other stories, stories written earlier that already held the seeds, and with my eye and ear trained on them through the new focus, I’ll look into how I might tend to them in such a way that they can take their place in the collection. I really love that process of investigation and discovery and of culling and assembling.

Will you talk about your process in writing your book? Many of the stories have been published individually, too. Did you have a larger idea about writing this particular book before writing the stories? And then set out to publish each? Or did you assemble that book after you felt you had enough stories to form a collection? How did you develop such a wonderful cohesion between these stories?

NA: I love that your process involves this wonderful mystery, this incredible discovery! I think that the entire process—beginning with my very first writing class that I took with you at the College of Marin, and later with our NBW workshops—has been such a beautiful discovery and adventure! I didn’t know, when I first started writing, that I wanted to be a writer. I knew that I wanted to express myself creatively, and I knew that I wanted to connect with others, but I wasn’t sure how. I’ve been a visual artist for years, and writing creatively was something that felt new and exciting.

For SLS, a few of the early drafts of the stories were first written during my time in the workshop. I remember when I wrote my first story, that I wrote my story to you and my wonderful workshop peers. I think that this was because I loved all of my workshop peers so much. And, because before the workshop, I didn’t know how to write knowing/imagining that someone else would read my work, and at the same time, I didn’t know how to write to myself, for myself. I loved being a part of that wonderful group of writers, I loved each week when we met, (even though I was so nervous about sharing my work and receiving feedback), to know that my words and my imagination were being heard, seen by others. I felt connected and alive.

The stories in SLS include ones that I wrote and published individually over the past several years while at both the workshop and at my MFA program. It was when I wrote the title story (during an Oregon State University-funded writing co-residency with my friend, Carson Beker), that I began to see the possibility of putting together a collection. The cohesion might come from my constant interest in (aka obsession with) writing stories about Chinese heritage within multi-generational immigrant families, death, and daughterhood.

My dream is to write a story collection as taut and meaningful as AGGITF. I’m working on a linked flash fiction collection. What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about writing a linked flash fiction collection?

PAP: That’s so exciting that you’re working on a flash collection! You’re one of my favorite flash fiction writers, and I still remember discovering your flash with its unique vision when you came to my class. Your fresh way of seeing and originality of expression was so thrilling and invigorating. I hardly need to give you any advice about writing a linked flash collection. You are teaching me.

If pressed, however, to share my thoughts about collections of flash and other hybrid forms like those in AGGITF, I’d say that it’s important to consider how the reader will experience so many distilled stories one after the other. What is the nature of each flash? When you’ve got highly compressed and condensed stories—and here I mean stories, not anecdotes or vignettes—which, arguably, is what defines flash and/or sets apart those stories that best deliver—it’s worthwhile to think about the demands on the reader. How to adjust pacing? How to allow the reader to take a breath when needed? How to create the larger rhythm? These are the kinds of problems each flash fiction writer will need to solve for themselves, according to the kind of book they’re hoping to create, whether the flash stories are linked or stand alone.

Is this your next writing project? Or are you working on something different? Maybe more than one project at a time?

NA: You are one of my most favorite flash fiction writers, one who’s had such a tremendous influence in so much of what I write. In answer to your question, I think completing a linked collection of flash will challenge me as a writer and artist, to think about pacing, rhythm, and breath. I love how you described earlier the culling and assembling of AGGITF. That was something that I felt so strongly while reading your gorgeous book—the way you dove so deeply into the minds of your protagonists, into their desires and uncertainties, especially those uncertainties with family members, partners, and selves—while simultaneously opening up space for the reader. You did this with the brilliant use of titles, of spacing, of moving into and then later outside of the protagonists’ interiors, your shifts in point-of-view.

I am still in the discovery and mystery phase of writing the linked collection of flash. I agree with you that “mystery is essential.” As a writer, I love structure (deadlines and assignments), but I also thrive in the unknown, in the experimental nature of writing exercises that allow me to laugh at myself, at language.

I’d also love to know about what you’re working on next! Are there pieces of another collection that you’ve been working on? A novel?

PAP: I have two nearly complete manuscripts I’ve been working on over the years. The one that feels most ready is a novel told in flash, “Blow the House Down.” The second is also a novel—I think—though it may revert back to its original form of a linked story collection, stories of a traditional length. I’ve also started a long essay about laughter, with over 63 pages of single-spaced typed notes. Like you, I love to research, and it’s been the best part about the essay. Writing nonfiction is an extreme challenge for me, and I’ve published exactly one essay to date! Meanwhile, in my daily practice, I continue to write occasionally more of the hybrids that you find in AGGITF, and we’ll see what comes of them.

"What A Lonely Place It Is": A Review of Katie Rogin's Life During Wartime

“The war had taken so many things from her, from her body, from her mind and from the other part of her that hovered between action and thoughts. She didn’t want these things back… She just wanted some kind of something to reassemble her broken world”—for Lise, and the other characters of Katie Rogin’s Life During Wartime, this thought captures that desperate need for restoration after deep trauma, along with that raging uncertainty about how to begin getting there.

Set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, Rogin’s novel revolves around characters individually reeling from the events of 9/11 and the Iraq War. These individuals are forced together when twenty-one-year-old Nina Wicklow—recently returned from combat in Iraq—disappears in the foothills outside Los Angeles. Jim Wicklow—Nina’s uncle, who escaped the World Trade Center before it fell—flies from New York to search for Nina. He’s joined by Lise Sheridan, a nurse who served in Iraq’s green zone, and Nina’s friend from a recovery group for vets. The narrative shifts its point of view, among Jim, Lise, and a handful of others, as they go looking for Nina.

While this inciting event suggests Life During Wartime to be a book about a search for a missing person, the disappearance plot is hardly the novel’s engine. Instead, the conflict is the deep struggle of these searchers with their own internal demons—the brokenness of their bodies and minds.

Jim and Lise (and the vanished Nina, of course) suffer intensely from posttraumatic stress disorder. Jim loses control of his senses at times, has trouble seeing and hearing. He’s held in the perpetual, visceral grip of September 11, returning to it at any given moment: “They were always humming in his background—the falling towers were with him.” Lise experiences blacks out, finds herself having pissed her pants without remembering how or when. Words fall out of her head, or she scrambles them in “her word salad.” Commonplace anythings become triggers, jolting her back to Iraq. At the common sight of L.A.’s trees: “Palm Trees swayed to the left in Iraq and then arced back to the right in Los Angeles.” Throughout the book, Rogin expertly weaves readers in and out of Jim’s and Lise’s memories, deftly taking the narrative back and forth between present and past.

These moments become the heart of Life During Wartime, which speaks deeply to the sheer, lasting devastation that violence inflicts upon us.

Wrestling with this trauma, Jim and Lise are joined by a cast of others—Jen, Nina’s landlady, and Danny, Lise’s Hollywood-type sort-of-boyfriend—to find Nina. But as California wildfires rage around them and the bleaker Nina’s situation gets, each of the are pushed to their psychological limits. The question Rogin then asks is if healing can ever overtake brokenness, when the world continues to turn, inflicting fresh wounds before the old have a chance to heal.

In this way, Life During Wartime is hardly about the urgency of the present, despite the high stakes of a young woman’s disappearance. Instead, the novel presents that constant repetition of the past, a deafening soundtrack on a loop, that hangs over these characters. The story is about the painful physicality of memory and remembering. And the book itself acts this out for us: published in 2018, but bringing to excruciating life the crises of the falling towers, the Iraq war, and the country’s financial plummet. What Rogin does so well is to show how events of trauma unlatch themselves from their original places in time and hook their claws into individual and collective bodies and minds.

This collective suffering plays a key part to Life During Wartime’s power as well, gifting readers glimpses into multiple minds, struggling—often invisibly—right alongside each other. (Although I wonder if Rogin’s attempt at one too many voices and views becomes the book’s weakness, as some points of view seem more essential and compelling than others.)

In the end, despite the light Rogin shines on the horror of PTSD and those who suffer through it, perhaps what’s most haunting about the novel is what she keeps in the dark. Nina Wicklow disappears, and we don’t glimpse her internal life. Despite the round-robin perspectives we’re given, we aren’t granted Nina’s. During the search, even those who love her can’t fully grasp what’s driven her away. Here, Rogin puts great distance between what is known and what is unknown. Empathy can only take one so far. This grave space between portrays the frightening and isolating nature of trauma, and what a lonely place it is.

Considering all this, one realizes the power and intelligence of Life During Wartime’s title. That present tense betrays the lingering reality of those who have managed to walk away from the rubble. Of these deep wounds from the deepest kinds of violence, Rogin’s novel tell us: we cannot forget.

Energy, Entropy, and the Sunsphere: An Interview with Andrew Farkas

Andrew Farkas’ story collection Sunsphere is a funhouse of energy and potential energy revolving around the Sunsphere, a former World’s Fair tower that is now a derelict tourist attraction in Knoxville, Tennessee and to which Farkas brings iconic status. These nine stories engage and circle the mysteries of human relationship, the fine points of entropy, and the classic automotive joys of the Mercury Comet, among many other things. I was motivated to talk with Andrew because he and I share an affinity for story collections with broad scope and ambition.

Ron MacLean: What is the origin story or creation myth of this collection called Sunsphere?

Andy Farkas: In 2002, I was accepted to the University of Tennessee’s M.A. program in English. Beforehand, I’d never been to Knoxville and knew nothing about it. When I arrived, wandering through the city, I ended up seeing the Sunsphere for the first time. Since it’s kind of down in a little valley, this World’s Fair tower isn’t the imposing, awe-inspiring structure that you’d expect (like the Eiffel Tower or the Space Needle). Instead, it’s honestly kind of ugly and dwarfed by the buildings up on top of the hill. At the time, the park surrounding it was a wreck because it was at that stage of remodeling that makes me think it’s all been a lie, we’re not actually trying to fix anything, we’re just having fun breaking things. Looking at this kind of ugly, not particularly awe-inspiring structure, I immediately knew that I liked it more than any other World’s Fair tower because it seemed like a parody of all of them. And so I began doing research on the Sunsphere and the 1982 World’s Fair. Once I learned that the theme for that exposition was energy, I instantly connected that to the way the place looked now (having reached entropy), which led to me researching energy, entropy, and quantum physics (with a big thank you to my friend, Jim Westlake, for helping me out with that research). The stories mostly sprang from there.

MacLean: In Sunsphere, the narrative grounding is very different from story to story — with “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” or “Everything Under the Sunsphere” at one end of the spectrum, and “I Don’t Know Why” or “No Tomorrow” at another. Others fall in between. What for you is the core of a story? The fulcrum on which it balances, the nucleus that gives it energy? And how do you find/build/grow what surrounds it?

Farkas: Experimental work can be more idea-based, so I normally start with an idea instead of, say, a character or situation. “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” started with the idea of potential energy. There’s a ton of potential energy all throughout the story. The problem for Trevor is that he thinks there’s no way to access that energy because everything he tried in the past led to ruin. Now, whereas this story is a little more realist, I still started with an idea (potential energy) then expanded the idea (potential energy that can’t be accessed). So, I didn’t decide I wanted to write a more conventional story, I just followed where the idea took me. “I Don’t Know Why” is the same. Entropy is all throughout Sunsphere, but “I Don’t Know Why” is the entropy story. I knew I wanted to pack in as much entropy as possible. That led to the post-apocalyptic city of Knoxville being filled with white noise (for communication entropy) and chaos (the Sunsphere being deconstructed, the city impossible to navigate). Since it seems like everything is truly over, I thought, “Well, it’s the end of the world,” and so I started looking up potential ends to the universe (which is how each section of the story ended up with a subtitle that describes a different end to the universe). From the original idea, then, everything else springs. Since I’m not working in realism, I have no problem creating characters who represent ideas themselves. Though I would say normally these idea-characters of mine are critiques of the ways we turn others into paper cutouts of themselves, or turn ourselves into two dimensional robots.

MacLean: I’m smitten with Kat and Trevor from “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” What would Kat say about Los Angeles? What’s her take on “No Tomorrow?” What would Trevor say about Knoxville? Did he ever get confused by the many names for a single street?

Farkas: Kat needs to keep moving, so she’d probably kick the driver out of the Mercury Comet in “No Tomorrow” because he’s going too slow. And plus, he’s in Knoxville, and she’d definitely rather be in Los Angeles, weaving in and out of traffic, finding the next power source. When we see her in “Do Kids in California,” though, she’s burned out because she was trying to channel all of the energy of not just L.A., but all of California at once.

Trevor might be attracted to Knoxville because of the Sunsphere, which he could end up seeing as the center of energy he’s looking for. As for a guy like him, he wouldn’t get confused by the street names because he’d convince everyone else to call the streets by the names he uses. Gene, from “Everything Under the Sunsphere,” however, can’t even convince himself what they should be called.

MacLean: What is an example of an uplifting, aphoristic billboard that would describe your best life?

Farkas: When I wrote Sunsphere, I was sitting between two very large pieces of paper, each with a very small sentence printed in the center of them, that came from the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. One said, “Somewhere better than this place,” while the other said, “Nowhere better than this place.” I think that space in between fits me no matter where I am. On the other hand, I also thought of a movie poster for Being John Malkovich (1999) that I had on my wall for a long time. It said, “Ever want to be someone else? Now you can.” I feel like writing, whenever it’s going well, allows me to be someone else.

MacLean: What makes an Andrew Farkas story a story?

Farkas: Since my stories are rarely about plot, I instead look for when the material has reached critical mass (as Michael Martone puts it). This is particularly the case in a piece like, “The Physics of the Bottomless Pit.” There are lots of different sections, most of which don’t connect to each other, except that they take place in a bottomless pit, or are about the bottomless pit. Once I build up all of this material, I look for the moment when it feels like I’ve explored this idea enough. Call it the Goldilocks moment. But even though there’s no real beginning-middle-end, when the story’s over, you have that satisfied sensation you get at the end of a Freytagian piece. The difference is, instead of riding the rollercoaster, you’ve been let loose in the funhouse and experienced all there was to experience there. If I’ve done my job, you look forward to going through the funhouse again.

MacLean: What makes a story an Andrew Farkas story?

Farkas: Definitely the voice. People who know me and who’ve read my work always say that they can hear my voice when they’re reading something I’ve written. People who don’t know me, but have read my writing, when they meet me, they always seem to say I sound like my writing. I think that happens for two reasons: 1) I am not at all a fan of “invisible style,” writing that works hard to make you forget about it so you only focus on the plot or characters. Plot and characters are interesting, but I want people to think about the language and the voice too. 2) When I’m writing, I constantly read my work out-loud. It isn’t done to me until I like the way it sounds from beginning to end. If I trip up at all while reading, I know I need to rewrite a sentence or a section.

MacLean: I am deeply concerned about Mr. Yang from “The City of the Sunsphere.” At this writing, what is Mr. Yang’s condition, and/or his proximity to James Agee, expressed in terms of Knoxville City Hospital room numbers?

Farkas: 42

MacLean: Can we discuss Freytag’s triangle and the obsession with classic story structure? In particular, can we find a way to undermine its dominance?

Farkas: I think the way you undermine Freytag’s dominance is by introducing people to work that doesn’t follow the triangle and hope it clicks with them. That’s what happened to me. When I was an undergrad, I had to read Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957). At the time, I hated it. I also watched Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995). I hated that too. But I’d been exposed to them. And they stuck with me. I found myself thinking about them, telling other people about them (usually how much I couldn’t stand them, though they perhaps were thinking that I, you know, doth protest too much), until finally I just had this compulsion to go back to them. Now, I love both works. And I’m really into work like Dead Man and Endgame (and pieces that fit into this outsider category). I expose my students to this kind of art all the time. One of the best compliments I ever received about my teaching was when one of my students asked if all the movies in the class were going to be weird, and before I could answer another student, who’d had me before, said, “Everything you read or watch in an Andy class is weird. But then you discuss it afterwards and it doesn’t seem so weird anymore.”

MacLean: What is your perihelion?

Farkas: Closer than you think.

MacLean: Given that your stories are structured non-traditionally, on what basis do you revise, and how do you know when a “story” is “finished”?

Farkas: Revision is actually my favorite part of writing. The most difficult thing for me to do is look at a blank page. So, at the beginning, I hate whatever it is that I’m writing because it doesn’t conform to how I see or hear the piece in my head. The worst thing for me to do, then, is to revise along the way. Unfortunately, all too often I do just that. At some point, however, I finally have to pound on my keyboard (I write on a computer mostly, with some handwritten notes on the side) until I have as many of the ideas out on the page as possible. That draft is horrid. I then print that draft out and pound on the keyboard while looking at the horrid draft, rewriting and normally adding more (though sometimes subtracting, but I find it’s mostly adding for me). I keep doing this until I get to the point where all I have to do is think about how to craft the sentences. This is my favorite part because the piece mostly looks the way I want it to look, it just doesn’t sound the way I want it to sound yet. I guess it’s rather like sculpting, if sculptors first had to collect the atoms to make marble, then they made a block of marble, and then they made the statue. I’m only exaggerating a little there. I then know the story is finished when I read through and everything sounds exactly right. Ideas and style/language are more important to me, I suppose, than plot and suspense. It’s probably no surprise that, in a culture full of people saying, “No spoilers,” I say, “Give me all the spoilers now and don’t dally.”

MacLean: “There is a way to battle the torrid world, a way to understand it. But somehow, I’m on the outside.” This line, from “Everything Under the Sunsphere,” is one of the most moving things I’ve read in a while. Why? And what is the way, for us hungry readers?

Farkas: At one point in “Everything Under,” Gene is trying to get into a shindig and he can’t find the way in. Later, when he’s describing this experience, he says he isn’t sure if he wants to be on the inside or stay on the outside. So not only is he alienated throughout the story, he has no idea what he wants. He blames the torrid world for this because as you raise the heat in a system you create more disorder. Gene thinks if the world were completely organized, then he’d know what he wants. This, of course, will never happen. But since Gene is constantly trapped in between, he’s not only alienated from society, he’s alienated from himself. Strangely, this makes it so he can battle the torrid world because the way to battle the torrid world is to be outside of everything. He’s in the ideal position, but can’t see it because he’s bought into the idea that alienation is bad. I think that’s why you find that sentence to be so moving. It’s tragic that Gene can’t see what position he has and use it for something because, in a lot of ways, the outsider is often seen as a loser. With this discussion, I also wonder if Gene might represent the position of narrative art that isn’t quite conventional.

MacLean: What is the most dangerous condition a human can contract through (accidental) contact with the Sunsphere?

Farkas: You might get proselytized by the Cult of the Great Golden Microphone. If you allow yourself to be blessed by the adherents, you will end up covered in glitter.

MacLean: What are you working on next?

Farkas: Right now, I’m working on a collection of essays called The Great Indoorsman. In each piece, I explore some indoors space (since I’m not outdoorsy at all), but I also connect my experience to something in the world. For instance, my essay, “Filk,” that appeared in The Iowa Review, is about old video rental stores, but it’s also about filk music (folk music inspired by the science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror genres) and the cult film Dark Star (1974). Just recently, 3:AM Magazine published “Wait Here?” an essay that’s a metaphysical investigation of waiting rooms.

Forensic Psychology and How to Be “Literary”: Nisha Singh on Her Bhrigu Mahesh Series

Nisha Singh is the creator of the Bhrigu Mahesh literary mystery/detective series, set in northern India but with international appeal.

She was inspired by Sherlock Holmes’ logical examination of circumstantial evidence, but decided to also explore the concept of forensic psychology in detective fiction and also its implications for real-life crime solving. She believes that at some point psychology may well become an exact science and advances this view through her books.

Cristina Deptula: Several reviewers have compared your two male lead characters to Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Do you think this comparison is accurate? How are Bhrigu and Sutte like, or unlike, the famous British pair?

Nisha Singh: I knew that this comparison would arise because Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have become the quintessential detective pair and for more than a century, mystery fans have identified either directly or indirectly, every detective with them, that has been created after them. Many mystery writers over the millennium have been inspired by this British pair and I frankly confess that am among them too. While reading the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I was awed and impressed by his eccentricities and the genius of deduction that he possessed but as I matured and read those stories again, I found that where they were perfect as far as reading the physical clues was concerned, they were quite inadequate in using those clues which we now call circumstantial evidence. That was the biggest flaw in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

While investigating, it’s the standard procedure to lift circumstantial evidence like fingerprints and other residues and Sherlock Holmes helped revolutionize the field of forensic science but it fell short on how those clues should be used. Circumstantial evidence is just the first line of investigation and from there you have to dig much deeper or else it would end up in a botched-up investigation. Therein lies their biggest shortcoming. Sherlock Holmes’s methods rely almost completely on physical clues and not in the least on mental ones.

My detective, Bhrigu Mahesh, on the other hand, looks similar in temperament to Sherlock Holmes because he has a genius too but he is much more aware of himself than Sherlock Holmes and hence he is more mature. He understands that physical evidence just scratches the surface of a mystery and it should always corroborate the find and not dominate it. Bhrigu Mahesh goes behind the mind of his every suspect and lifts mental cues and that’s the reason why my every character is so well developed. Therefore, I should add that my books are a study in Psychology as if it were an exact science with no room for doubt.

In a nutshell, Sherlock Holmes was the genius of the physical realm of an investigation, whereas Bhrigu Mahesh is the genius of the mental realm and through him, I have tried to prove that the former should always follow the latter and not vice-versa.

As far as their scribes are concerned, Sutte is like Watson in the sense that he appreciates the great talent of his dear friend too, but he isn’t a sidekick. He understands his friend and offers help and assurance every time that his friend reaches a crisis. Hence, he is as indispensable to Bhrigu as Bhrigu is to him.

CD: You’re known for your well-rounded characters. What do you think makes the detective character interesting? How do you create original characters without falling into stereotypes? (i.e. brilliant but socially inept, etc?)

NS: My characters are well-rounded because, as I said before, it is imperative to my story. If the characters aren’t fully developed, lifting of mental cues would be impossible.

The character of the detective is made interesting by his strong personality and also by the methods that he employs to investigate. My detective, Bhrigu Mahesh, studies his suspects thoroughly and his scribe Sutte, studies him. For him, his friend carries a world in himself and he is on this exciting journey to unravel him. Hence, he devotes a lot of time writing about his every action and expression in a hope to understand his complex thought processes which he finds fascinating.

My characters are inspired from real life and hence they can never be stereotypical. Let’s discuss the nature of the word- “stereotype” A simple answer is when something gets repeated many a time, its gets stereotyped but I think this definition is untrue and can be used only for things that lack any depth. When the stories or characters are fuelled by your own observation and experience, it can never be stereotypical.

As some things, inevitably, could run parallel that could make it seem like it is the same but if someone feels that way for an original work, they haven’t read it thoroughly or have failed to look for the beautiful differences because they were too occupied looking for similarities. This bias is in the reader’s mind that gives rise to this feeling of an original work adhering to a stereotype. If my readers think this way about my books, I would request them to remove any biases from their minds which lets them concentrate on their preconceived notions. A broad-minded person with perspicacity and depth would never fail to see the real personality of my detective that runs throughout the narrative.

CD: Psychologically, are there any indicators that someone’s likely to be innocent, or have committed crimes? What indicates that someone’s lying or telling the truth? Do you agree with Bhrigu Mahesh that human psychology will eventually become an exact science?

NS: Yes, we can ascertain whether someone is lying or telling the truth by observing them and understanding their psychology. Every human brain has their own programming, as Bhrigu calls it, and if we are able to run that program, we will understand how he or she will behave in a particular situation. But this is a complicated program and every human evolves during their course of life which makes decoding it a very challenging task. It’s very important to understand how every brain is unique and similar too and is also given to be influenced by factors both internal and external. Hence, it’s important that we first try to understand the common factors and then specialize in that knowledge with our own personal observations. Statistical studies that are carried out by psychologists should be supplemented by individual studies that will help to get to the mother lode of this knowledge. Only then will we be able to make headway into understanding human beings, their behaviors and the patterns inherent in those behaviors. These patterns will then tell us all that we need to know.

When we get to that point, we’ll be able to conclusively say if someone is lying or not but for now, let’s hope that the lie-detector is still working!

Yes, I agree with Bhrigu that Psychology will become an exact science one day but we still have a long way to go and brilliant psychologists like Bhrigu Mahesh are rare to find. I have applied psychology in real life in order to understand the motivations of people and what influences their behavior. If we keep pushing the frontiers of this science which is still in its infancy, we’ll be able to make discoveries that will help us understand ourselves better. Evolution will then be just round the corner.

At this point, I would like to draw attention to the word- ‘Psychology’. It is made up of two words, Psyche and logic. Combining both of them together, it would translate to the logical study of the mind. What needs to be done is to understand that if we have to understand our psyches we will have to approach it as logically as possible because logic never leaves room for doubt. Aristotle’s book, ‘Prior Analytics’ first explained the importance of logic and scientific reasoning. It has also a chapter that deals with the study of the mind and how it should be accomplished scientifically. For me, he was the world’s greatest psychologist and his works have laid the foundation for approaching the study of the mind through reason and perception. Today, psychologists are more focused on statistical studies to diagnose human behaviors and hence they leave great margins for error. The field of psychology should be studied like an exact science and only then it would one day become one. This can only be achieved logically, as Aristotle believed.

CD: How do you successfully incorporate comic relief into a story with tragedy, where people get murdered? How do you place the humor in ways that don’t trivialize the tragic events?

NS: Humor can never trivialize any tragedy. In fact, it only helps augment it. From the beginning of time, humor and tragedy have been considered two things that are mutually exclusive. Even Shakespeare used to write chapters quite separate from the main narrative which he used to call “comic-relief”. I know that this practice has stemmed from the fact that everyone believes tragedy can never exist where there is humor and this is very untrue.

My books are a work of fiction but they have been plotted to stay as parallel to real life as possible because it is a scientific work; the study of mind. As everything inspired from reality, humor is something that we come across on a daily basis and it gives us relief from our own problems as we enjoy the mirth of the moment. I have seen witty people entertaining their friends in the midst of great tragedies and I am sure that during the two most devastating events in history, The World Wars, the soldiers and their families must have tried to hold on to humor much more than they did otherwise. What I mean to say is that humor doesn’t come at the expense of tragedy but it is a thing just like oxygen. It is present in the atmosphere, as people need it to survive. And when there is tragedy, the reliance on humor increases manifold.

My first-person narrator Sutte is a satirist and hence he is naturally witty. He sees the world through the lens of humor and even in the most mundane details he sees something or the other that tickles his funny bone. Bhrigu, unlike Sherlock Holmes, doesn’t stop him from expressing himself and thus he writes in the very way that he sees the world. Yes, he goes to places that are shrouded in mystery and hence tragedy lurks round the corner but still his mental makeup allows him to find relief there too. This is the reason that he is indispensable to his friend Bhrigu Mahesh. His ability to see humor in the most stressful of times, provides relief to the great detective and makes him focus more on the investigation at hand which can sometime get too much even for him.

It’s high time that humor shouldn’t be segregated from the main narrative to make it look “serious”. Life is full of light moments and hence despite the greatest of tragedies we see the light of hope to move on. If serious writing means the death of humor, it would be akin to saying that your light moments would be the death of your serious pursuits. If the colors of real life are so complex, its time that fiction should follow suit or else it would suffer genre segregation that would only make it more fiction and less real.

CD: What makes a detective novel, literary fiction, as opposed to those mystery and novels that are genre fiction?

NS: First of all, I would like to say that it is wrong and confusing to remove genre fiction from literary fiction. Literary fiction is a broader term which includes several genres and so separating them makes no sense at all. We just give genre fiction a name to make it more specific, that’s all. Literary fiction is an umbrella term only and should never be used to alienate genres that fall within it.

Literary fiction is the creation of complex characters that make us feel alive by bringing us closer to our own emotions that sometimes need words for expression. Also, we are a part of our surroundings and hence imagery plays a vital role in bringing out our own identities. So, characters and imagery are the two pillars on which rest the works of great literature, be it any genre.

CD: Was there a real-life event or place that inspired the story of The Witch of Senduwar?

NS: Yes. This story was inspired by a real-life event that happened in Senduwar, which is an actual village in the Rohtas district of Bihar. An excavation of a mound found buried treasure and during the monsoon, the odds and ends of that treasure got washed away and seemed to rain gold on the inhabitants. Many used inverted umbrellas to siphon this washed up gold and one or two of the natives got a good influx of money when they sold this gold in the market. I was so amused by this event that I decided to weave the net of my first mystery around this incident.

CD: If you were to set Bhrigu and Sutte’s adventures somewhere else in the world, where would you choose? How much does location matter to your story?

NS: Well, this is a very interesting question and something that I have pondered myself. Bhrigu and Sutte are universal and they can thrive in any location but I have used the villages and cities of India as the location for my stories as I was born and brought up here. Hence, I am acquainted with its cultural diversity which makes for a colorful and sensual writing. I only use the elements that I find captivating; right from the mean streets to lofty temples, and then graciously blend them in Bhrigu’s and Sutte’s world.

If I were to set Bhrigu’s and Sutte’s adventures somewhere else in the world then I would select a place which has a great culture. I have always been fascinated with South America which is replete with its mysterious, indigenous tribes and the great Amazon River which floods every year but still the natives depend on it for their livelihood. I would love to set one of my stories among the Amazonian tribes like the Waodani people who love their forest and enjoy a unique lifestyle.

South America has always been an exotic place to me, wrapped in mysteries and its every country has a unique culture that’s very interesting to read. From the legendary mountains of Peru where the Incas lived to the multicultural Brazil, everything about this continent is very appealing. I have also read that there are many indigenous tribes living in total isolation there than anywhere else in the world which only goes on to add mystery to this strange continent which is ruled by the awe-inspiring Amazon. I would love to explore Latin America’s many hidden secrets, art and culture by choosing locations that reflect its beautiful soul.

Morocco is also a charming place which is still steeped in old values and its Andalusian culture has always held a great fascination for me. I have read many travel articles about this place and how it has always been a sweet spot for writers like Tennessee Williams. It has also played a pivotal role in the creation of modern literary works of great value and Marrakesh is known for its glorious libraries and book shops. The old-world charm that is reflected in its villages is unparalled and if I ever get a chance in future, I would surely like to visit and explore Morocco whenever I am in need of fresh inspiration.

From my choice of locations, it must have become abundantly clear that for me, mystery is a very important factor. Fascinating cultures make for a unique reading experience and they blend seamlessly with elements of mystery fiction, adding charm and sensuality to the stories. Hence, any place which has an old-world charm and has still retained its roots will become ideal as a background for mystery novels. 

CD: Who are some other authors you admire, mystery writers or otherwise, and why?

NS: I am a great fan of Isaac Asimov. His accurate prediction of events based on the scientific knowledge of his time is unparalleled and hugely interesting too. I also admire the golden era of detective fiction as that era gave us some very interesting detectives. I like the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as he had created a bold template for the quintessential detective. I also like Edgar Allan Poe and his stories of Dupin, especially his short story, “The Purloined Letter”. We see the very first marvel of logic-based deduction in this story which has influenced countless mystery writers and has also gotten the gears of my brain to move as I admired and challenged it all at once.

Also, I like R. Austin Freeman and his character of Dr. Thorndyke with his perfect tools of deduction. His inverse detective stories are something that I have hugely enjoyed. I am also a fan of Jacques Futrelle and his detective, The Thinking Machine. His story, “The problem of Cell 13” is also a marvel in logical deduction which really thrilled me when I first read it as a teenager and also fuelled my desire to develop it even further.

I have read many mystery writers from the golden era of detective fiction, and I’ve seen authors like Anton Chekov, Mark Twain and P.G Wodehouse get inspired enough to try their hand at writing some. This only goes on to prove that mystery is something that no mortal can resist and if a detective is even more interesting that the mystery, well, it’s just icing on the cake.

CD: Why do you think so many authors have created mystery and detective books throughout time?

NS: The mystery genre has always been a compelling one because when executed well, they can captivate anyone. There is mystery everywhere and when one is solved, it leads to discovery and every new discovery introduces new knowledge. Hence, mystery has always been associated with the creation of new knowledge. Many great authors throughout time have dedicated their lives to writing in this genre because such stories are hugely entertaining and have an appeal not just for the readers but the creators too. There is a thrill in creating great characters/suspects who are a mystery to the readers and this room for doubt makes them rack their own brains in an effort to remove that doubt and reach their own conclusion. Hence, both the writers and readers are working together on a mystery but their intentions are different. One is creating the puzzle and scrambling the pieces while the other is busy collecting them and putting them in a neat order. This brain exercise is exhilarating; almost euphoric and hence like a potent drug, it is used again and again.

The genre of mystery is also appealing because it organizes the elements of fiction in a way that other genres can never achieve. For the creation of a brilliant mystery, it is very important that every ingredient is present in just the right amount or else the recipe for magic will never come alive on the pages. The work is technical and needs an expert to blend every element in order to create works of great fiction that captivates one and all.

For me, the charm lies in the creation of characters that are mysterious but real and to give a spin to real life experiences that charms readers and they are left wanting for more. I like many genres including science fiction but mystery is something that I love the most because it gives me the power to create an engaging plot where the reader has no option but to be glued till the last page, figuring out the mystery and connecting all the dots. Such a compelling reading experience can only be found with this genre and hence it has enjoyed such an overwhelming success form time immemorial. Also, it provides the framework to explore themes and issues of the modern world and also to explore complex ideas through the narratives of the characters.

Many authors have exploited this genre to use as a framework for telling their colorful and complex stories. No other genre provides such a support as this one and the fun of storytelling is magnified when the platform used is popular and enjoys mainstream success.

CD: In your opinion, what was the world’s first detective novel?

NS: Well, here the opinion may differ, but for me the world’s first detective novel was ‘The Moonstone’ by Wilkie Collins. Although, as far as creating a logical detective is concerned, Edgar Allan Poe was the pioneer but his were only three stories and he never attempted a novel. Collins was the first who introduced social commentary in his detective novels and thus laid the stone (pun intended) for the introduction of mystery genre into classic literature.

His plot is also attractive because it uses the Tippoo diamond of Seringapatnam. The plot is set in the east; Imperial India under Queen Victoria. India has always been the perfect location for mystery novels and Wilkie Collins also succumbed to this temptation by creating a work of detective fiction that is hailed as one of the finest that he ever produced in his lifetime.