"Her Tale Shaped by Telling": An Interview with Sarah Malone

Sarah Malone's writing has appeared in Parcel, Five Chapters, PANK, The Common, The Good Men Project, The Awl, and elsewhere. She blogs at sarahwrotethat.com.

Her story "Bridal Discount" appears in Issue Thirty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, Sarah Malone talks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about dialogue, Ancient Mariners, the conditional, and happy accidents.

1. What is the origin story for this story?

It began with setting: a wedding at a Finger Lakes hotel, October eight years ago, and the season’s first flurries as the last of us staying elsewhere stumbled to our cars. The leftover wine I brought from another wedding.

All the characters arose wholly in writing, as did what develops, except the talk about the bride. I was remembering a group at the Finger Lakes wedding who peppered conversation with tales of another they expected and who never showed, remaining legend.

Occasions set aside from routine by ritual or geography—weddings, funerals, holidays; writing conferences—do much of fiction writers’ setup work. They have three-part structure built-in; they can contain, compressed, acquaintanceships’ entire arcs. At the time, they seem to culminate more unmarked days, epitomizing, signifying more. Weddings especially evoke a sense of summiting a peak that will be visible from years to come—and yet, for most guests, soon recedes into the blue distance. “The crowded past,” is Jay McInerney’s phrase in Brightness Falls.

2. It seems all the characters in Bridal Discount are talking past each other, Juan and Trevor buried in each other’s necks, Rich asking questions to no answer, the narrator staring at snow.  Even in direct conversation, such as during the story of the police on the train in Peru, the characters talk past one another, as if only half-hearing.  What kind of effect do you hope to have with dialogue like this? 

Writing this story, I soon sensed its drama less between characters, even between Rich and the narrator, than between the narrator experiencing and relating it. Often past tense stands in unobtrusively for present; readers pass through the fourth wall to go onstage with characters. Here, the time between telling and events is real. The narrator doesn’t report live, on scene, but recounts, an Ancient Mariner, her tale shaped by telling. Indeed it transpires in telling (though that anticipates your next questions).

We’re never really in-scene in the usual sense. While some conversation seems in real time—characters answer, disagree with, even dislike each other—we cut rapidly between direct and reported dialogue, remaining in the narrator’s cadences; and we don’t know how much she excludes. The dialogue tends suspiciously toward her point. If scenes ran longer, we would get more crackling of interaction, but we would lodge in events rather than in her telling, and the end of the main action would register as rupture rather than culmination. The story would become “what happened at the wedding,” not “I can’t shake off the wedding.”

3. What is the narrator’s angle?  In lines like “We—I—had spent so long with people who turned out not to be serious,” she seems to be uncertain of who she’s connected to, and what’s worth being serious/unserious about. 

She’s wary from lousy hookups; she and Trevor, longtime co-workers, have drunk each other through many poor choices. She’s either from the city or went there for one reason and stayed for another, or lack of a better idea. I see her choice as ambivalent but wise—Rich ends up seeming a decent guy, but who wants to be with someone who’s talking about someone else? She’s alone, but intact; she chooses for herself, and not from insecurity or obligation, and she’s propelled to empathy that doesn’t seem habitual.

4. Several “woulds” consume this piece: “We would bundle together and when the wine was gone we would heat brandy and tea by the fire,” “I would have [paid the police],” “She wouldn’t sleep with me,” “That would have been when to ask Rich to start a new bottle…and not start to say goodnight until Rich and I were by one of our bedrooms and one thing seemed as easy as another.”  What is your relation, especially as a fiction writer (when anything may happen!), with the might-have-been? 

This may be the only story where I’ve used the conditional so centrally. It needs to make sense for the characters, narrative, and shape of a story, or else it’s simply a move. It lends time a spatial feel, but sharply; readers tend to assume they and the teller are moving through events in sync, and then suddenly the writer runs them off a cliff like Wyle E. Coyote and leaves them staring down at the bottom of a canyon.  Here, however, the might-have-been gives us the narrator’s vantage and attitude and complicates time, maintaining the linear progression of what did happen—we have details to fill in what she infers—while adding two temporal strands: the narrator ruminating at the time of the telling (which is as “real” as the events), and what she imagines—and likely didn’t imagine until later. Her vision culminates the “woulds” and shifts them from might-have-been to never-now-will-be. The conditional lets the story inhabit a great expanse of time, and I think there’s an elemental narrative pleasure—one we recall from fairy tales, hopefully—in feeling a story’s time signature veer away from and return to the time we take to read it.

5. Is there some punning going on with the title, “Bridal Discount,” the character “Rich,” and the “Nothing” the narrator comes away with at the end? 

“Rich” is a happy accident; he seemed a “Rich” as I wrote him. The title is definitely punning, its ambivalence—is the story only available to the narrator through the discount; is it to be discounted?—relating back to such occasions residing outside the normal flow of things.

6. What are you reading as winter winters on? 

Right now I'm reading Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Alice Munro's Dear Life, and also dipping back into Munro's older stories; I return to her probably more than to any other writer, and I'm particularly interested now to revisit stories I thought I knew well. I recently read Barbara Comyns' The Vet's Daughter, and greatly enjoyed the most latest issues ofParcel, Gulf Coast, and Missouri Review. First up in the new year will be Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. 

7. What are you writing now? 

I’m revising a novel of ’90s and ’00s New York City, and starting several new stories.

"Am I Crossing a Line? Am I Making an Impression?": An Interview with Sarah Ameigh

Sarah Ameigh is a recent graduate of Penn State University. After backpacking across Australia, she moved to the Washington DC-Baltimore area, where she currently works in publishing.    

Her story "Hip to Knee" appears in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Sarah Ameigh speaks to interviewer Melissa Goodrich about what sentences are doing, James Baldwin, cluelessness, and the kind of spills we take as we attempt to become adults.

1. Did this story originate with the image of the bruise?  How did you start conceiving it?

It did, I started thinking about the way kids hurt themselves growing up, the bangs and the scratches, and the recklessness .  There’s something taboo about wearing those kinds of bruises as you get older.  You don’t want to show them off to friends, you don’t want to see them in the shower, but they’re still there.  You’re not proud; you’re marked.  That spun into reconciling with the kind of spills we take as we attempt to become adults, little bumps that turn out to be large and ultimately ugly.  There’s a kind of shame in it, a bruise coloring the skin. 

2. I’m in-love with your halting half-sentences, like “Something about long hair and brown eyes and cruel beauty and ‘no chance’” and “The ‘I shouldn't’ and ‘too much’ and ‘always’ and ‘never’ and ‘I can't’ and ‘I won't’ and ‘I will.’”  Such lines feel very stop-frame, plunging off a cliff, or into clouds, or stepping forward into a wall you didn’t realize was there, that you pause to reckon with.  How cognizant are you of the ways in which you like your readers to twist inside your sentences?  Do you approach your work more on the sentence level, scene-by-scene, or more telescopically? 

Well thank you, I like to play with rhythm a lot when I write.  I think because I’ve played various instruments over the years, I find myself splitting my time between how a sentences sounds, what the sentence is doing, and how it sounds beside the other sentences.  Once I’m satisfied with those details, I try and move the story forward.  I’m able to focus on that kind of thing more with shorter stories, the longer the piece the more I work more scene-by-scene.   I tend to treat shorter pieces like songs, if that makes any sense. 

3. What is your relationship to intent and reception?  There’s something about rehearsing, apologizing, “lean[ing] in the doorway like a dare” that denotes this character as much as writing itself : “What had my hands done, I needed to know…” or “Like I have answers…I don’t.”  Are you ever plagued with a similar crisis, craft-wise? 

I know when I set out to write something, I always end up asking more questions than I answer, which can sometimes feel disappointing, and sometimes invigorating.  In think in the case of this story, there’s a sense of wanting to know how you’re impacting another person.  Am I crossing a line?  Am I making an impression?  Am I learning from all this, or better yet, should I be?  I think it’s difficult to fully understand our effect on others day to day, and I think in terms of writing, that’s especially true.  You throw something out in the world, and have no idea how it’s going to be digested.  

4. Best thing you’ve read the past month, week, hour?

I recently read “Screenwriter” by Charles D’Ambrosio and it completely knocked the wind out of me.  I also reread Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, just as stunning as when I saw it produced at Penn State.  I found some really great essays in Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin, who I think is as close to a perfect writer as any can come. 

5. What are you writing now? 

I’m currently working on a few projects, one about an Australian outback bar, and another about a woman who stumbles on a car accident.  In terms of comedy writing I’ve been working on a new non-fiction blog that essentially makes fun of my friends and I, living in different cities and figuring it out.  Let’s be honest, if we couldn’t laugh at the fact that we’re completely clueless twenty-somethings, we’d probably never laugh. 

"A Pit Bull Gnawing on Another Pit Bull": An Interview with Sarah Marshall

Sarah Marshall grew up in rural Oregon and recently earned an MFA from Portland State University. She spent her summer vacation traveling through Manitoba (where she saw the snake dens in Narcisse and the Icelandic heritage museum in Gimli), North Dakota (where she was stranded outside a train station in Grand Forks, and saw the geographic center of North America in Rugby and the oil boom in Williston), and Montana (where she wrote). Her work has recently appeared in The Rumpus, Propeller, The Awl, and Hobart, and she is currently at work on a novel, from which "Rosebud" is excerpted.

Her story "Rosebud" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.

Here, Sarah Marshall talks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about imperatives, Texas Chainsaw Massacres, women as victims/victimizers, and fairy tales -- unbriefly and beautifully.

1. This piece opens almost as an incantation, buoyant and mysterious (it seems begged to be read aloud).  How did you start this story?  How did you know to start it here, this way, limp-yet-living (“Baby hangs taut as a plumb weight”), prophetic, in the kind-of-future? 

Like everyone else I know, I wish I had all the time in the world to write, and like everyone else I often have just a few minutes here and a few minutes there to work with in a given day. In the last couple of years I’ve focused on making those minutes usable, and so when I begin a story the first thing I write often takes the form of a moment frozen in time. If I can’t write a sizable portion of a draft I can write a few sentences or a paragraph or so, and then come back to it later. If I used my minutes well, then I can often locate images, sounds, and ideas that I know will be important to the rest of the story. I began Rosebud by writing the first paragraph, setting it aside for a while—at least one week, probably several—and then coming back to it and allowing it to expand. When I read it again I heard the abrupt rhythms of Larina’s voice, her numbness to her life and her use of her child and her body as shields—really as so much meat. I knew those strands would be enough for me to follow to the finish. I’d also already decided on the plot by then, though I didn’t yet know how it would end. 

2. What guided the logic for swivels in POV, from a close third to an imperative (“Wake up on the loning nights and walk barefooted […] Pull the sharpest knife from the kitchen drawer”) to the second person completely, at the end (“Unclasp your hands, Larina, my sister, and let your daughter go”)?  Is the narrative pushing out in the same way Larina is, “push[ing] until she does not know what she is pushing out of her, whether it is just the baby or all the rest besides”?

The imperative and the loss of pronoun really begin, I think, as Larina starts to lose her identity as an individual, and become a Slaughter wife. That’s something I realize now, but wasn’t entirely aware of at the time—the imperative just felt right to me as I began a new section, and I went along with it and thought about what that change in voice meant later. Larina’s voice, which is a sizable presence in the opening sections—breathless, angry, and hopeful—fades away, and when a voice does peek through, it’s usually in Rosebud’s form—gentle, calm, and apparently forgiving whatever failing Larina thinks she is guilty of.

3. What draws you to the motif of names/naming : like Missoula, “by or near the place of fear or ambush” ?  Who (or what) really is ambushed in this story, if that is Larina’s goal?

Names have always been important to me, especially town names. I spend a lot of time looking at maps and picking out places for my characters to wander through: Lima, Montana; Lovell and Greybull and Meeteetse, Wyoming; Thalia, Texas; Plum Coulee and Narcisse and Gimli, Manitoba. I like names that mean something, particularly something ominous—a lot of my California characters make some mention of Chowchilla, which is another corruption of an American Indian word, this time the name of the Chauchila tribe, which translates to “murderers.” It’s also home to two women’s prisons, and California’s death row for women. Diane Downs is there, Nancy Garrido is there, Susan Atkins was there before she died a few years ago. I write a lot of female characters who have descended or could easily descend into brutality, and who fear being trapped far more than they fear the darkness within them—who may fear nothing but being trapped. So Chowchilla seems like an especially ominous place for them.

I’m also interested in how the geography of a place gives birth to its names Rose is an imaginary town placed in a part of the world I know very well—the sleepy, rain-soaked part of Oregon between Portland and Astoria—and the real towns that surround it have names like Jewell and Mist and Rainier, roads with names like Neverstill and Ironhorse and Gnat Creek. You couldn’t have names like that in Texas or California, and you couldn’t have a Thalia or a Lima in that part of Oregon.

In the course of the story I think that Larina is ambushed more than anyone—by the impossibility of her desires, by the limits of her strength, by the complexity of the world she has invaded. I took a wonderful class on the southern gothic last year, from a professor who went on to be one of my thesis advisors, and became fascinated by the idea of all gothic narratives essentially being about opening a door into a world too choked with its own history to be comprehensible to an outsider—and then being dragged into that world. It’s a theme in so many different kinds of narratives, and a terrifying one. I’m a huge horror junkie, and I wrote a term paper for that class comparing Absalom, Absalom! to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  To me, Quentin Compson opening the door to Rosa Coldfield’s room is the same as walking into what looks like a normal Texas farmhouse and getting butchered by Leatherface. In both cases, you’re entering into a world you have no way of understanding, and the consequences are nearly always severe. After that class I consciously decided I wanted Rosebud and the other stories I set at Slaughter Auto to be a kind of Oregon gothic—though I’ve been told by my readers that I didn’t include enough rain.

4. Do you believe what your character believes about stories, their potencies, defenses, vulnerabilities?  That somehow stories soften blows, “because the worst part of her death is that she is not here to make it seem less awful in her telling,” act as sedatives, that keep one “alive by telling a new story each night, until her husband fell asleep and could do no harm to her”?  I love that moment when she threatens (yet protects) a narrative by crouching by it bedtimes and waiting with a knife, knowing “All she wants now is the telling, but she cannot get at it, and she knows that if he dies it will be gone for good.”  Colt seems transformed by his role as (potential) narrator : so authors matter only as much as their stories?  Or the inverse?

My goal right now is to spend the rest of my writing life answering that question. We all live our lives, to some extent, based on the narratives we assign ourselves, and the roles we see ourselves as inhabiting within those narratives—I am the good daughter, I am the mother, I am the baby, I am the protector, I am the provider, I am the one that can’t be trusted, I am the one that can’t be loved. Of course, these narratives are also assigned to us, based on our sex or our race or our economic status or our birth order or any of a thousand other things. Larina’s life seems to be not just about finding comfort in others’ stories—Rosebud’s old stories, and the promise of a story from Colt—but in the story she assigns herself: she is the avenger, the strong one, the fearless one, the one who will put things right. When the complexity of her situation undermines her ability to fulfill her role as a warrior—an ambusher, an “Injun”—she stops being able to cope with the realities of her life.

A lot of my writing lately has dealt with the narratives that allow women to become victims and victimizers, and about giving the reader a way to understand a character through the narrative she creates for herself. I’m working on a story about one of Colt’s other wives, who becomes the most powerful woman in the compound because of his high regard for her, and eventually helps him lure his victims. The question I want to answer is whether a woman who mitigates her victimhood by victimizing other woman—by appointing herself queen of a narrative which, though sadistic, may be the only narrative she can locate within her life—can be made understandable to a reader. I want to know whether we can look at this narrative from start to finish and understand her actions, the sources of her cruelties, and the diminishment of her humanity, and see her as not just human but perhaps even sympathetic. I don’t know if I can make do it, but I think it’s possible.

5. What have you been reading this winter?  What has kept you warm?

Yesterday morning I picked up Lynn Crosbie’s Paul’s Case, which imagines the inner lives of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Canadian serial killers active in the early nineties, as well as their families, their victims, and other players in the investigation and trial. It’s part poetry, part prose, part criticism, and it was a hugely controversial book when it came out: people called for it to be censored, and for Crosbie to be assaulted or thrown in prison along with Bernardo. It was a hard book to to track down, but it was worth the effort. What I love about it so far is its fearlessness: Crosbie makes some very risky moves both as a writer and as a citizen (of course, those often go hand in hand).

The Bernardo and Homolka murders were immensely shocking for a number of reasons: because one of the perpetrators was female, because the couple who committed the murders were young, white, well-off, and beautiful, and because nothing like it had really happened in North America before, but especially not in Canada. At the time I’m sure it was comforting to move on from the case with a pat idea of what happened—they were unmitigated evil; they weren’t like the rest of us; they weren’t even human—and Crosbie uses Paul’s Case to interrogate those easy, pat conclusions about the nature of “evil.” She works at the subject like a pit bull gnawing on a bone—or, maybe more accurately, like a pit bull gnawing on another pit bull.

Sometimes the writing is bad. Sometimes the writing is amazing. It’s always breathtaking to watch. It’s also the kind of fearlessness I aspire to in my stories, most of which are at least as dark as Rosebud. I got a rejection from a literary magazine earlier this year that said something like “If you’d read our guidelines you’d have known we don’t accept stories about rape.” For better, or for worse that disqualifies nearly everything I’ve written.

6. What are you writing now?

I’m currently working on a series of stories about the other Slaughter wives—where they came from, how they ended up in Rose, and why they stayed. It’s taking the shape of a novel, though a title is still evading me. My boyfriend thinks I should call it Slaughterhouse 5, and a friend suggested Slaughter Daughters. I have a few ideas, but they’re only slightly less terrible.

Several of the stories are reworked fairy tales that two of the wives tell to each other—a hybrid of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Robber Bridegroom, a retelling of East of the Sun and West of the Moon in which the husband doesn’t regain his human form at the end, and Larina’s version of Isis and Osiris, based on her search for Rosebud. Like all quiet, bloody-minded children I loved fairy tales, and playing with those childhood narratives, in a work about women who have been in many ways reduced to a kind of childhood, has allowed me see them in a new light. It’s also been tremendous fun. I was hacking away at the collection this summer and at a certain point, when my relationship with my work had become somewhat grinding and cheerless, I thought, “You know what I really want to write? A fairy tale.” And so I did.

"The Rhythm of the Sea's Crashing": An Interview with Iris A. Law

Iris A. Law is a graduate of the M.F.A. program at the University of Notre Dame, a Kundiman Fellow, and the editor of the online literary magazine and blog, Lantern Review. Her first chapbook, Periodicity, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2013.  

Her poem "Watching The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I think of my father." appears in Issue Thirty Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Iris A. Law talks with interviewer Amber L. Cook about passing, process, patterns, and the “ebb and flow” of the sea. 

1. What made you write this poem, “Watching the Voyageof the Dawn Treader, I think of my father?” Is it a direct response to The Chronicles of Narnia, or did you take more liberty with the poem?

Yes, it’s a response to Lewis, but it’s a bit of a sideways one: the moment that provided the impetus for the poem came not from the books themselves (though they are very near to my heart), but from the experience of sitting in a darkened theater four months after my father had passed away, watching the movie version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In one of the final scenes of the film (spoiler alert!), the main characters (Edmund, Lucy, Eustace, Caspian, and Reepicheep) row to the edge of the world, where they encounter an enormous, glassy blue wall of water that rises up out of the sea, forming an impenetrable border between them and Aslan’s country on the other side. Aslan appears, and tells them that only the mouse Reepicheep may cross through to his country; the rest must wait until it is their time. So Reepicheep passes, alone in his little rowboat, to the other side. Sitting in that theater, I couldn’t help but think of my father also passing, alone, to a country on the other side of our world: how it must have felt for him to arrive in a place that was all at once new and yet familiar; what it must be like for the vestiges of one’s earthly existence to be stripped away from the soul as one crosses into God’s country. And as I watched Caspian and the children bid an emotional goodbye to their friend onscreen, I thought about my own experience of loss. About waiting while someone you love crosses into the next life. About the heartache of being left behind, of not being granted permission to cross with that person into the sun-warm beauty that you know lies on the other side of that wave—not yet.

So the poem is a response to that moment: of watching the blinding majesty of that wall of water rise up out of a twelve-foot screen (we were watching the movie in 3-D), of the sound of the sea filling the cavity of my skull, of gulls crying and of salt water streaming—both across the camera’s frame and down my face—of being transfixed there in the darkness; transported, dazzled, momentarily overwhelmed.

2.  You very nicely combine long line and short line free verse throughout the poem. How do you think this variety helps progress the reader through the poem?

I’m not sure that it was a conscious decision to use such a jagged pattern of syntax, but I do know that I was thinking about the rhythm of the sea’s crashing as I was writing—hearing its ebb and flow in my head—so it makes sense that the same sort of tidal motion seems to have found its way into the trajectory of the finished piece’s arc. It’s my hope that the reader would be able to experience the same sense of being wrapped up in the sea’s movement as the speaker; that they would be pushed along by the force of language, riding the current of the action and syntax as the figure of the father crosses through the wave and the poem reaches its moment of resolution.

3. I love the sonics of lines like: “shells and rough silica scrape out the catacombs of/ my ears,/ bathe them in blue oscillations.” Do you often turn to sonics in your poems? How do you respond to sound in your personal writing and in the writing of others?

Sonics are definitely very important to me, both in writing and in reading others’ writing. I grew up playing a lot of music, and my teachers spent a lot of time training me to listen for tone, or the quality of the sound one produces on an instrument—the roundness, resonance of a note, its fatness or transparency. Maybe that’s part of why the sonic quality of words within a poem—its music—is so important to me, as well. I am drawn to—am instinctively moved—by the way that words turn in the ear, on the tongue; the way that breath and phrasing (the silences between sounds) string together to create sense and meaning.

My mother used to read a lot of poems aloud to my brother and me when we were small, and she often had us practice reading them aloud, too. She was always very insistent that we pay attention to our inflection and enunciation, in much the same way that our music teachers trained us to listen to the shapes and tonalities of the phrases we played on our instruments. Once, when she was helping me to memorize Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain”  for school, she pointed out that consonants in the phrase “cold currents thrid” were imitative of the soft, percussive thudding made by waves beating the body of the wrecked ship in the poem. I remember being really impressed by Hardy’s cleverness at the time. I thought it was amazing that he’d been able to choose words whose pronunciations so perfectly heightened the vividness of his already-evocative imagery; it was the first time I realized that the pleasure of a poem can lie as much in the experience of its soundscape as it can in the visual landscape that it paints for the reader.

Listening is still an integral part of my writing process. I often work out things like pacing and texture aurally, silently “orating” what I’m writing inside my head. When I’m revising, I’ll often stop and read aloud what I’ve written, in order to get a better sense of how the poem’s sonics are working as a whole. I’ve found that I can sometimes “hear” the rough spots in a poem better than I can see them.

4. What’s something you’ve read lately that you’d like to share with the world?

Henry W. Leung’s chapbook, Paradise Hunger (Swan Scythe, 2012). It’s beautiful: bravely vulnerable and rich with layers of myth and memory.

5. Is this poem part of a larger project?

Yes; or at least, I hope it will be. I have been working on a full-length project about my father for a while now. It initially began one way—I was first interested in approaching it through the lens of his passion for science (he was a chemist) and how that inflected our relationship as I grew up—but after he passed away in 2010, it started to become much more about the experience of losing, and later, grieving for him.  The middle section of the original manuscript—a series of (mostly) persona poems about historical women in science and their relationships with influential male figures in their lives—has since become a separate chapbook that is being published by Finishing Line Press, and I am now focusing on reworking and reenvisioning the remainder of the project into a new manuscript. This time, I’m working with a lot of epistolary poems, many of them elegies. It’s been difficult and very slow-going, but I know that the process of working my way through the wreckage is necessary for me, both as a writer and as a daughter.