Online Fiction Interview: C.M. Barnes

 

This month, I want to preface our online exclusive interview with an anecdote. In my first semester of graduate school, I taught an introductory creative writing class in which I received four—four!—stories that were about a dying or recently deceased grandmother. My first thought: why no dead grandfathers? My second thought: along with stories about car crashes and college keg parties, I must ban stories about dead or dying grandmothers in future classes, and that’s just what I did. It’s eight years later, and this month, ASF published C.M. Barnes’s “In Our Defense,” a story of the spreading of a dead matriarch’s ashes that’s recounted so beautifully and so interestingly that rather than banning my future students from writing “Dead Grandma” stories, I’m simply going to point them to this piece and say, “If you can’t write about a dead matriarch or patriarch this well, don’t try it yet.” We recently emailed with Barnes to ask about the story, the swirl of characters who are addressed in the piece, and about the professionalization of writing/proliferation of writing programs that the Nobel Prize folks really seem to hate.

Nate Brown:  “In Our Defense” is a tricky story in terms of the perspective. It’s third-person plural, or collective narration, but the voice also jogs off into these tributary descriptions of individual relationships between members of this family and the mother figure, whose ashes are being illegally dispersed into the lake via a minnow bucket. How’d you come to tell the story in this particular way?

C.M. Barnes:  Usually I fool around with the POV quite a bit, but in this story the us came very naturally and stuck all the way through. As for why, I think the collective perspective lends itself to interesting considerations of guilt (that ominous, sort of Biblical “what have we done!” vibe). I also liked the idea of no character being able to pin everything on another, but all of them still trying to do so at the same time—a real cacophonous chorus of blame. When that chorus ended in what felt like a mutual resignation, especially a self-accusatory one, I was surprised, but it seemed right.

NB:  I love that phrasing—a cacophony of blame—because it gets at precisely why this story, in spite of its using an unconventional perspective and structure, seems so true to experience. In loss, one of the things we feel most clearly is regret, the I could have done and I should have done sentiments that are left dangling in the wake of that loss. Is loss—or, for that matter, are families—integral to your work? 

CMB:  I tend not to write about loss—at least big L loss like this—very often, as the results usually get melodramatic in a hurry. (I think the unconventional narration helped with this as well.) I do write quite a bit about disconnection, whether it be between family members, relationship partners, strangers on a train, etc. I think that same could have/should have sentiment applies here as well. A feeling of disconnection (or maybe alienation) can often also feel like a failing, and that failing in turn comes to feel like a loss accompanied by regret—even if it’s the loss of something that was never really there in the first place. That’s a little abstract, but I think it certainly applies to families—especially families struggling to reconcile themselves against some impossible ideal of loving support. Probably none of us treat each other well all of the time, and being left alone with the nagging memories of those failings, those 2 A.M. woulda, coulda, shouldas…—uck, it’s brutal.

NB:  Weirdly, via the collective narration, the loss seems magnified. This is sort of an unfair question, but why is that? It seems to me that an unconventionally narrated story might be distancing when, in fact, in this case, it sort of enhanced my understanding of this family’s loss.

CMB:  I wonder if the answer has to do with perspective. The unconventional narration does create a distance between the reader and the family in the story, but the family’s loss also seems paradoxically magnified (at least to me) from a distance. Up close—say, from the sole perspective of any one of the characters—it might look too subjectively contained to be jarring. From a narrative distance, we can see the whole beyond the individual parts, and the whole is pretty overwhelming. I’m thinking of something like grief addition: X’s grief + Y’s grief + Z’s grief and so on. When we’re exposed to them all at once, they start to have an echoing effect on each other… I should have called this story “Echoes of Grief,” but that’s such an awful title!

NB:  I’m curious to know where you draw the line between grammatical standards and appropriately inhabiting a voice. It seems you have to strike a balance between going all out with the voice and with restraining that voice enough to make the story comprehensible. I think that’s why we don’t see a lot of great work that’s written entirely in some non-standard dialect, but on the extreme other end of things, that’s probably why we don’t see any great work that squares fully to grammatical rules. Where do you draw the line? This story does some of that bending, and I wonder how you decide to inhabit a voice while also keeping the story in bounds in a way that a reader can trust?

CMB:  Wow. That’s a great observation about the balance between commitment to and restraint of voice. I’d never thought of it that way, but it makes wonderful sense. As far as this story goes, I was conscious of wanting to keep the voice unstable in the way it varies between brittle self-righteousness and honest reflection. An unstable voice also felt true to an expression of guilt masquerading as a defense. I never thought of this interplay in terms of grammar exactly, but my sense is that the defensive voice comes out in the more performative prose and the confessing voice in the clearer passages (the ones that hold the story in bounds and gain the reader’s trust). This seemed right too: an ornate defensive argument undercut by a simpler story of confession.

NB: Okay, last, while I realize this is sort of ancillary to a discussion of your own work, I’m curious to know what you make of Horace Engdahl, a Member of the Swedish Academy, who has once again made headlines by decrying what he sees as “the perverse effects of the professionalization of the writer’s vocation.” As someone who went to undergrad at Iowa, the MFA program at Montana, and is now in law school (back at the University of Iowa), I’m curious to know your thoughts on the professionalization of writing. Would the state of literature be better off if, as Engdahl suggests, more of us were taxi drivers and waiters than, say, those who have or are seeking an MFA?

CMB:  Hmm. “Perverse” seems like a strong word, considering most the future and former MFAers I know are working as taxi drivers and waiters and whatnot. (Ok, maybe not taxi drivers, but a whole lot of waiters!) They might have taken a year or two off by virtue of being in a program—and I realize this is not nothing—but in general they were either teaching or paying big time for the privilege. More broadly, my feeling on this subject is that all writers are different, and all writers are in the ongoing process of figuring out the best way to write. For some, this might mean an MFA. For others, this might mean hitchhiking across Alaska. (For a lot of them, this might mean both, and not necessarily in that order.) For me, it currently means law school. Whether Mr. Engdahl would count this as a dangerous “professionalization,” I can’t say. I have held a lot of strange menial jobs already, and it worked for Wallace Stevens…

That said, I get that a certain amount of privilege factors into these choices, and that this privilege inherently curtails one’s view of the world. It’s also wonderful to have a broad spectrum of experiences shining through the literary sphere. However, I also think the world, with all its joy, loss, and mystery, catches up with every writer eventually and then has a chance to come out in the work—all fears and hopes of professional sheltering notwithstanding. Sorry to go on at length. I suspect Mr. Engdahl is out to get some goats, and he now has mine.