Catherine, the devoted band mother in Erica Plouffe Lazure’s “Marchers,” is a wonderful example of just how affecting strong, straightforward, reliable narration can be. With an admitted pride in her son’s accomplishments and an implied annoyance at the petty goings-on of her small-town life in rural North Carolina, Catherine’s direct and clear narration makes the stranger elements of the story—Shriners in fezzes and miniature cars, young women bearing the agriculturally themed, honorific monickers of Shad Queen, Cotton Queen, Collard Queen, and Watermelon Queen—seem downright normal, if not entirely familiar. We emailed with Lazure to discuss the story’s origins, that strong, almost monologue-like narration, and the maternal love that sits squarely in the middle of the story.
Nate Brown: One thing that I absolutely love about “Marchers” is that it has this almost timeless quality while it also addresses contemporary concerns. When Mary Lanford mentions Homeland Security, for instance, it fully places this piece in the present even though the particular, small town concerns seem perennial. That she’s also “stealing” their vocabulary lends the moment a bit of absurdity, and it’s that absurd note that tracks throughout the piece. We’ve got a Shad Queen, a marching band, the danger of horse shit in the roadway, a sex scandal, and an ingenious pancake maker all in one very tight story. All of which is to ask: where in the heck did this come from?
Erica Plouffe Lazure: Long before I started writing fiction, I was a newspaper reporter. With a job like that, you get a real feel for the pulse of the beauty (and, of course, absurdity) of our middle-class middle American existence. You also get a feel for how people speak, how agendas slip into mindless chatter, how even the most seemingly banal and everyday person has a story to tell, and a good one, if you can figure out how to get her to tell it. My awareness of this was heightened when I moved from Massachusetts to Eastern North Carolina. The ring and twang—the melody!—of the spoken word there drew me in. I never wrote fiction until I moved South, and once I started to write fiction I realized many of the tools I’d learned as a reporter could find a home in my short stories. The toughest part of that transition was distinguishing the “emotional truth” of a story from the “factual truth” that I’d become accustomed to capturing. But I managed.
“Marchers ” probably got its start while sitting on the sidelines of the high school homecoming parade in Greenville, NC, while one of my colleagues made snide comments about “Miss Tight End” and such as all the queens rode by in evening gowns, in one of a dozen shiny convertibles. I can remember seeing the Collard Queen of Ayden in skinny jeans and heels puking on the tracks one night just behind the carnival rides, still wearing her crown and sash. Or hearing in the news about the Shad Queen who set fire to her roommate’s bed in their college dorm. I recalled hearing about an actual bicycle-powered pancake maker located somewhere east of Greenville, and I’ve been coerced more than once into covering news stories that involve talking to parents who have basically organized their lives around their kids’ extracurricular activities. I’ve also been one of those kids (a former high school show choir gal myself). But somehow the parades and band moms and the less than stellar beauty queens and the pancake griddle bike all started to gel as a story. It was when I got an email at work one day from someone looking for people willing to lend their convertibles for an upcoming parade that the dots in “Marchers” started to connect. People often take for granted the logistics of planning a parade—and yet there are people on the inside who think intently about these things (like seating arrangements for Ag Queens, or money for band uniforms). The world can get very small, very quickly.
NB: The emotional center of the story seems to come to the fore after mention of all of this world’s particularities (and there are many particularities here!). The paragraph that begins “Still, it’s amazing the things we do for our children: asking the town’s alleged pervert for his pancake maker” is so revealing. We learn that the narrator is a widow dedicated to her son, and suddenly the petty concerns of her friends and neighbors sort of fall away, both for her and for the reader. In that way, the story’s a bit of a magic trick: it leads you in with a very sharp voice and some incredibly entertaining details, but at the heart of the piece is a mother’s dedication to her son. Is that an accurate description of how the piece turns, emotionally? Or am I nuts?
EPL: Sounds about right to me—I can remember Jill McCorkle reading “Surrender” at Bennington, and on the heels of the story’s many humorous moments fell some hard-hitting revelations, one after the other after the other. It felt like playing in the ocean, all those waves ebbing, then knocking the wind out of you. Anyway, I wanted the humor and the poignancy in “Marchers” to have a similar cyclical feeling. I wanted both the absurdity and the sadness to shine through—and be revealing in the process. So, yes, the mother seems almost desperate in her dedication to her child because he’s all she has. She cares about poorly cooked pancakes because she cares about her kid. I would be remiss, too, if I didn’t mention the chance that the mother loses in her own bid for freedom (ie, life beyond her son) via Lars. She’s not exactly disappointed with Lars for his involvement with the Shad Queen, or the fate of the pancake dinners, but rather that these factors now rule him out as a potential love interest.
NB: That’s tricky ground to navigate as a writer. On the one hand, in a piece that’s both driven by the voice and that’s so short, there’s not a lot of room to elucidate all of the particulars of a character’s desire. Here, you do get the sense that there’s real disappointment in Lars. How do you manage to reveal what you need to reveal about a character while also not allowing this narrative to get sidetracked by, say, a love interest?
EPL: That’s one of the hardest part of writing short stories—not allowing yourself to delve into every rabbit hole of your characters’ lives. In an earlier draft of this story was yet another side plot about the narrator’s own somewhat unsupportive mother, and eventually I realized it was clouding the momentum of the rest of the story. So while I threaded in hints about the narrator’s potential love interest, her focus here is taking that photo of her kid, capturing this one last bit of his childhood before he goes off to college. A story about unrequited love could also achieve that level of poignancy, but not at the cost of what I envisioned to be the primary aim of the piece. Still, it’s there if you (as the reader) see it. Take the word “alleged” in the sentence you cited—not exactly a phrase someone would use on a person if she didn’t think he was just a little bit innocent, right?
NB: How does this piece compare to other work of yours? What are you working on now?
EPL: Lately I’ve been gravitating toward writing monologue-style stories, and certainly “Marchers” fits that bill. A lot of my stories focus on quirky people and situations that only get more peculiar the more you contemplate them. With the homogenization of our culture, it’s hard to find a fresh angle on a subject, and so I hope my work offers a bit of a curve ball to the telling. For some reason, the monologue—somewhat confessional, somewhat stream-of-consciousness—seems to be surfacing more in my literary voice. This past February, for example, I’d challenged a friend of mine to exchange daily prompts with me, and from it emerged 28 first-person flash stories that have been culled into a chapbook-length manuscript called Heard Around Town. I edited that this spring. For much of the summer I tinkered with my novel, Penny Hill. Tough stuff. It’s like designing and building an entire house from scratch. I also found a great guitar, so playing the guitar, and being patient enough with myself to learn how to fingerpick—that has been a fabulous distraction.
NB: Interesting that you’re working in such different modes at the same time. Can you say a bit about what it’s like to be working on these short monologue-like pieces while also keeping the novel in mind?
EPL: The short pieces are kind of like palette cleansers—they bring new energy into my writing (and convince my inner critic that, yes, I can still do this). At times with the novel I can feel bogged down by the same ole characters and the same ole story—for the past few years I’d been focusing on the novel and while I was breaking ground with it, I didn’t feel as productive as I did when I was focusing solely on short stories. So, the flash pieces are a bit like going through drills—and they help to keep me (and my writing) fresh and out in the world.
But what I have found with both forms is that I seem to be writing of and about a specific place in my imagination, some rural setting where lives intersect in peculiar and sometimes inappropriate ways. The unity of place isn’t something I ever set out to do—I didn’t realize that the monologues from Heard Around Town were coming from the same geographic location until about day 20. I always tell my students that your subconscious is working hard behind the scenes, and that you have to trust yourself and your creative instincts, and let it lead you where it leads you. I’ve been rewarded by that (hard-earned!) trust time and again, especially with what I’ve discovered about the novel and the story that is emerging from it.
NB: I know you had the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and that you’re currently teaching there. Can you say a bit about your year as a fellow and about teaching while also making time to write?
EPL: The Bennett Fellowship was an absolute game-changer. In 2009, I took a leave of absence from my job in NC to live in Bali with a friend and fellow writer. I wasn’t sure if I’d go back to NC or what my plan was, but that March, I got word about the Bennett Fellowship and all of a sudden my life seemed to have an arc. The following August I moved to Exeter, and spent the year working on my short story collection, Cadence and Other Stories, and laying down the bones for Penny Hill. I also met regularly with several students, many of whom I still consider good friends (hi, guys!).
As the fellow, you are given a monthly stipend, an office in the library, food in the dining hall, health insurance, and a place to live. It’s different from most other long-term residencies in that you have no obligation to anything but your work (no workshops, etc.). But with the gift of time, you can really discover your capacity for self-discipline and how you actually use (and waste) time. The truth of the matter is that Phillips Exeter is probably one of the most “scheduled” and time-conscious places on the planet and as the Bennett Fellow, you are undeniably the most “unscheduled” (but not un-busy) person on campus. You feel just a bit out of sync with everyone around you. So I made a formal daily schedule for myself, and in the end I got a lot of work done. It felt strange to reorient my sense of “work” toward my own creative pursuits, and not a regular job—I’ve had jobs since I was 14 years old (earlier, if you count the paper route) so I really felt like I had to account for my time. Even in Bali, my friend and I got jobs teaching shadow puppetry at an expat grade school. Good times! And by yet another twist of fate, at the end of my fellowship at PEA, I was able to nab a teaching position there for the following year. That was five years ago, and since then my life has been consumed mostly by teaching. I’ve been to a few summer workshops, but until recently I haven’t been able to generate much new material or be involved with writing as much as I would like. When I got the job, I told myself I had to “be the teacher,” and let my writing temporarily fall to the wayside. Last winter, however, I was able to write almost daily with very positive results, and this fall I plan to dedicate an hour a day to my writing as well. I do write alongside my students every day, trolling my subconscious for ideas, a quick poem here or there. The time I spend writing this fall will probably be more editing current story drafts—working on the novel really does require a full-court presence of mind. But you never know. The teaching/writing balance is really tough. But I’m working on it. And hey, there’s always summer!
Erica Plouffe Lazure is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives and teaches in Exeter, New Hampshire. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #29, Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine, Meridian, Litro, Microliterature, Greensboro Review, Monkeybicycle, Booth Literary Journal, and elsewhere. A short collection of her flash fiction is forthcoming in an anthology, Turn, Turn Turn, by ELJ Publications, and she is hard at work on a novel. She enjoys hula hooping and playing guitar and singing in the Dog House Band. She can be found online here.