I’m always thinking about place in fiction. I happen to write about a particular place, an Alaska laden with myth and personal and familial history. And I want to know, while reading, how other authors capture the nuances, the sounds, the smells, the senses of a place. What types of spaces do characters occupy, what spaces exist between characters, even spaces between the words on a page? At what moments does an outer landscape become an internal and psychological landscape? There have been numerous times, and it’s usually when I’m walking outside, that this line from Plath’s poem, “Poppies in July,” runs through my brain: “If my mouth could marry a hurt like that.” There’s something so beautiful—and/or terrifying, or startling, or saturated in color and light—it hurts. Something out there is so transfixingly alive or present or powerful or deadly at that moment and one wants to kiss, consume, devour it. Plath’s line reminds me of the arduous task of trying to pinpoint how place is captured in fiction—place, character, dialogue and jargon create a strange alchemy where everything bleeds together. The fiction is the union created by closing the distances between a character, what she sees and the place she is in—bodies and landscape and characters and dialogue reflect upon each other.
In “If You Lived Here,” a blog series of author interviews, some questions, not all, will focus on place, being displaced and the places in stories that “marry a hurt like that.” The hope is that these questions will lead to other places and other questions. The first interview is with Danielle Evans, author of the acclaimed short story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, a co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self is a book sounding with the voices of young black and mixed-race Americans who try to navigate the challenges of the modern world, while growing up and still facing deep-rooted prejudices.
MM: Ghosts and hauntings are central themes to many stories in your collection. They often focus on two characters who seem like opposites, who don’t understand each other or are in very different places. In the end, however, these characters become foils for each other—two lives and identities unforgettably intertwine. The story, “King of a Vast Empire,” immediately comes to mind because the narrator, Terrance, has his identity stolen by a man named Carlos Aguilar, which is possibly the same name of the one surviving child of a tragic car wreck Terrance and his family were involved in when he was nine-years-old. It’s such a great premise. Other stories focus on the following: the friendship of two adolescent girls, two cousins spending a summer with their grandmother, an ex-soldier and his would-be daughter, a father and daughter who can’t communicate, and two college roommates who seem like polar opposites. Why do you think you’re drawn to writing stories structured around pairings of characters?
DE: So much of character is relational. I’m interested in the way that people define themselves in concert with or against other people in their lives. Some of those pairings are intentional ways of playing with that idea—if I am this way, in relation to this person, who am I if that changes, or if it gets taken away, or can I change myself by getting away from that person? But as a question of structure, I think one of the ways you get a person from point A to point B in a story—mark a “before” and “after” in their lives in such a way that the action of the story reverberates—is to get a person to confront the reality that they are capable of something they did not imagine themselves to be capable of. Sometimes getting to that realization means getting the character close enough to a person who seemed to represent a path that they would never go down to realize that they’re already on the same path. Or getting the character close enough to a person who represents the ideal that they are forced to realize there’s no such thing. That shock of recognition in an unexpected place is often at the center of change, and it’s fun to play with as a writer because I think it’s also why we read.
MM: This mirroring unfolds in a fascinating way and leads to unexpected places, particularly with the relationship between Angel and Laura in “Harvest.” The story took me back to college when I would read those peculiar ads for egg donors in the university newspaper and think, “Who would do this?” and then, when I was broke, I would read the ads again and imagine what I could do with the money. The friendships and tensions between the college roommates in this story are fraught and tangled and I admired how one dorm room became the place where the complications of money, race, and worth played out. Then the line, “It wasn’t our eggs they wanted…” struck me, because “they” do not want Angel’s eggs because she’s black. They do, however, want (and ultimately pay) a hefty sum for Laura’s eggs, a blonde and blue-eyed overachiever who also happens to be a virgin. I also kept returning to the line “…they felt their own bodies had betrayed them,” as a thematic touchstone to your title Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, which is now one of my all-time favorite titles. How is the space the mind inhabits at odds with these characters’ physical space or physicality? How would you describe the complicated relationship between the mind and the body?
DE: I was most conscious of that as an intentional theme in “Harvest.” For me, so much of that story came back to the body—the way that both Angel and Laura felt that they were in a place where everyone could look at them and know that they didn’t belong, but Angel is further convinced that first through color, and then through pregnancy, her own body is somehow giving her away as an imposter. That sense of belonging or not belonging, and the idea that you can use your body as a way into some other state of being or way of being seen—be it through sex or injury or performance or physical transformation—probably is a recurring concern of the collection. I’m very interested in the ways that we perform selfhood, and so a lot of the stories center on some sort of disconnect between the interior life of the characters, the way that they present themselves in the world. Sometimes that presentation is very much about physicality.
MM: Laura, too, becomes an imposter of sorts when she helps others conceive even though she’s a virgin, and the money she earns is akin to payment for passing an exam not everyone is allowed to take. “Back to the body” is such a small phrase that represents so much heartache and frustration for many of the characters because no matter what transpires, the body is the vessel that carries one out into the world, and bodies have particular meanings out in the world.
Perhaps related to the body, the sense of feeling small and being overwhelmed by circumstance comes up again and again in the book. I wonder if there’s a correlation between that idea and the fact that many important conversations and important actions in the collection take place in small, confined spaces. One example is when the grandmother locks her two granddaughters in the bathroom in “Snakes.” Bathrooms, cars and dorm common rooms are often the sites of introspective conversations and comparisons. What is it about these places that makes time slow down for the characters and for the stories in the narrative sense?
DE: To some degree, this is sheer narrative pragmatism: how do you escalate the drama of a situation, and move something from tension to scene? Find a way to keep the character from running away, especially if a lot of your characters are escapist by nature. So, if I can trap people somewhere, especially if I can trap them somewhere together, sometimes whatever tension is simmering will come to a head. I also think that the way these characters react to the spaces can convey information, even, on occasion to me. The bathroom, for example, is intended to be a terrible punishment, but instead, the narrator feels safe and happy there—she’s with the only person she trusts. But in some of the other stories, the anxiety of being in a space where something is happening and you can’t get away from it eats at the characters, or drives them to dramatic action. So, sometimes it’s a way of answering a question about character: does this feel like a trap, or like a break from reality? Knowing whether the character wants a door open or shut can tell me a lot.
Cars, I think, are really good for compressed drama, but are also probably a particular anxiety of mine. The very earliest draft of what eventually my book was my creative thesis in college, and there were so many more cars in it. I never learned to drive, so every time I get into a car I have a brief moment of fascination and terror and the amount of trust I am about to hand over to a friend or stranger.
MM: In “Wherever you go, There You Are,” the narrator, Carla, is forced to take her teenage cousin Chrissie along on a road trip—it has that compressed drama and anxiety you mentioned. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story set in Delaware besides this one. But after reading this paragraph from the story, I feel as if I know it too well:
When you approach the city limits from the highway, there’s a painted wooden sign that says WELCOME TO WATERTON: WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE. It doesn’t tell you that where you are is a city that gets seventy percent of its annual revenue from ticketing speeding tourists who got lost on their way to the beach. It’s mostly a town that still exists because no one’s gotten around tell it that it can’t anymore. The highlight of most people’s weekends is losing money down at the Seahorse Casino, which is forty minutes away and not even a fun casino. It’s just a big room of slot machines and fluorescent lights, and the only drinks they serve are shitty beer and something called Delaware Punch, which tastes less like punch and more like the Seahorse Casino is determined to single-handedly use up the nation’s entire supply of banana schnapps.
Every setting —DC, NY, Tallahassee, college, high school, the parking lot of Waffle House—in this book is so vivid. I wonder if the setting for the story came first and then you decided to create a character who lived in and felt stuck in Waterton, Delaware, or if you formulated the character first. In general, how does setting factor into the creation of character and plot in your process of writing a story?
DE: Thank you so much for saying that because one of my ongoing anxieties as a writer is that I have lived a lot of places, but don’t entirely feel like I’m from any of them—there’s no place I know the way you do when you live there for a long, uninterrupted time and have a lot of history there. So setting can sometimes be vexing for me, and when I am wasting my time with writerly envy, I often envy those people who have a total command of some particular corner of the universe. I think because I had so much anxiety about place, I learned to pay a lot of attention to it—for years, whenever I traveled I would pick up a local paper and an apartment shoppers guide wherever I could find one, and try to really imagine what it would be like to pick up and go to that city and make a life there. I feel like that’s one of those habits that people find really worrisome until you grow up to be a fiction writer.
I do have a lot of family in a small town in Delaware, where we go every year for a family reunion. I used to look forward to that trip because as soon as you hit the city limits on the highway, there’s a welcome sign that says “If you lived here, you’d be home now,” which when I was a kid was hilarious, and as I got older would sometimes seem funny and sometimes seem sad, because it did strike me that this little town would always be home for so much of my family in a profound way that I wasn’t sure anyplace ever would be for me. So, even though I used another highway sign as the inspiration for and title of that story, some of that sentiment worked its way in, too. The really interesting thing about that story, for me, is that almost from the start, the character is on her way out of town, and she spends very little time in the place that she’s complaining about, but the trapped feeling never quite goes away. I tried to sell the idea to my best friend that when I finished that story, I’d finally written something with a happy ending because Carla can finally identify the sense of being trapped for what it is, and my friend was like, no, you can’t pass off people crying on the side of the road as a happy ending. Try again.
MM: I could use your friend’s advice. I think many writers could. Every time I set out to write a story with what I think is a happy ending, it becomes the most twisted and devastating thing I’ve ever written, as if the story is trying to spite me. The not-so-happy ending on the side of the road you mentioned is what I now refer to as the “Waffle House” ending, and it has stayed with me. In addition to specific towns and late-night eating stops on the road, the book also brings to life intricately drawn neighborhoods. In “Robert E. Lee Is Dead,” you describe the physical barriers created by neighborhoods in this passage: “Things changed quickly in those years: Eastdale pushed into the suburb of Lakewood from one side, while white flight created suburbs on the other. This was the new New South: same rules, new languages.” The story then further breaks down hierarchy through the dialogue of a high schooler named Eric who says, “’Negro, I go to Robert E. Lee high school, I know damn well ain’t no Souls of Black Folk required reading. Maybe Black Folk Ain’t Got No Souls, Who the Hell Told’em to Stop Picking Cotton, Anyway?’” and then adds, “’Don’t know why the fuck you laughing, Garcia. The next book they read is Mexicans Ain’t Got No Souls, Either, and Them Mothafuckas Don’t Even Speak English.’” The term new New South is a powerful way to illustrate that racism is not in the past, and there is no such thing as post-colonialism, or post-post-colonialism, there’s no post or beyond. In these stories, is the new New South an all-pervasive idea—more of a psychological state rather than a particular part of the United States? Are the seemingly ridiculous hierarchies rampant in high school a microcosm of the more serious and disturbing hierarchies that exist in society at large—as if America is an adolescent that needs to grow up?
DE: That’s a really fascinating way of putting it. One of the reasons I’m drawn to adolescence is that it’s a time when there’s a lot of deliberate, methodical performance or reinvention. There is often this belief in adolescence that we can will ourselves into being different kinds of people, or that there are still junctures to come when we can become entirely new if we want to. And on the other side of that, post-adolescence if you will, most of those conscious performances tend to drop away, either because they’ve become so second nature we no longer recognize them as performance, or because we care less about other people’s perception and are more aware of the limits of what kinds of reinvention we can actually pull off.
That same obsession with the idea of constantly becoming new, or better, or performing a role that we know isn’t real yet but suspect we can grow into, underpins a lot of what is interesting about American nationalism. But it’s a particular fascination with newness that depends on not only the belief that we can reinvent the country for the future, but that we can also reinvent the past to suit that vision, hence the tendency to be always declaring ourselves “post” things with which we’ve barely begun to reckon.
I tell my students sometimes that most stories about childhood are about the end of childhood, and the end of childhood is often a story about how we come to understand the concept that something is irreversible—that something that has been done cannot and never will be undone and we will somehow have to live with its implications or consequences forever. I think short stories about adolescence are often about that reckoning— if we can’t undo or bury or reject the past, how do we accept that we are always going to be the person who did this thing, or the person who survived this thing, and find a way to live through that admittance in order to move into the future. So in that sense, America as adolescent, or certainly American race relations as adolescent, is a really interesting concept, and also in a lot of ways central to the novel I’m working on now.
I intended to get the story “Robert E. Lee is Dead” far enough away from any particular neighborhood or sense of place that it could be a broader story of the present, and while I think I succeeded insofar as a lot of people have read it that way, everyone who’s ever purported to recognize the exact neighborhood it was loosely based upon has been a) right b) from that neighborhood.
MM: Speaking of the present day and modernity and this obsession with newness, a few of the stories mention the cutting-edge technologies of egg donation and cloning. Would your characters agree—in reference to the new New South—with the notion of stagnant rules, but new technologies?
DE: Hmm. I suspect some of them would and some of them wouldn’t. Angel, I think, finds the egg donation to be one more reminder of the ways in which she is and isn’t valued in the world, a reminder that she can be as good as she wants to be, but it’ll never quite be good enough. So, for her, it’s a new permutation of an old rule. But I think Eva reads the cloned kitten as something sinister in new way, a way she can’t even quite articulate, in part because as a character she’s more afraid of the future than the past. And there are smaller questions of technology, too— I can tell somebody’s age demographic by how they react to the fact that in “Virgins” the narrator pages her friend. I’ve been asked a few times why that story was set in the 90’s, and the main reason is that’s just how it came to me—the character showed up and started talking—but I’ve thought a lot about how changing the setting would have changed the technology. If the narrator had had a cell phone and had been texting Michael, or had stayed on the phone with him, would they have had more of a conversation before he showed up? Would Erica and Jasmine have communicated via text message after she left? Would Erica have been narrating her evening through passive aggressive Twitter messages? I mean, there are certainly ways that I could have told the exact same story with modern technology, but it was interesting to think about the ways in which these devices that make it possible to communicate in so many different ways, do or don’t actually facilitate communication or make us open up.
MM: The cloned kitten is an odd and wonderful moment in the story “Jellyfish.” Eva watches the news quip about the cloned kitten in the restaurant, and something about being in the comfort of this familiar place where she and her father meet makes that kitten all the more disturbing. Then Eva’s boyfriend is named Cheese, which is another layer of disturbing, and I laughed every time his name appeared. I mention all this because we’re wrapping things up and I want to make sure readers know how wickedly funny some of the stories are. Thank you, Danielle.
Danielle Evans is the author of the short-story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, a co-winner of the 2011 PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection. Her work has appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, and Callaloo, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories From the South. She teaches in the MFA program at American University in Washington, DC.
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Melinda Moustakis is the author of the short-story collection Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award in short fiction, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection. Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, New England Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She won a 2013 PEN/ O. Henry Award for her story “They Find the Drowned” and was recently a Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University.