“Sickness had reached our valley at last.” In August’s Web Exclusive flash fiction, “Father as Astronaut,” a young woman mourns the loss of her father in an increasingly hostile world where everyone is fighting for survival. It’s a story that’s wildly imaginative, unsettling, and full of heart. We talked to G.E. Stiteler about this story, about a world in trouble, and what gives her peace.
Erin McReynolds: What led you to decide to set the narrator’s loss in the midst of widespread catastrophe?
G.E. Stiteler: There’s a strong autobiographical undercurrent in this story: my father died of a degenerative disorder when I was in my early 20s. It wasn’t until after he was gone that I realized how I’d relied on him to make sense of the world. My father was aloof most of the time but he was always available to discuss morality with me. And he had a powerful sense of the divine in nature, which he passed on to his children. When he died, the realization that I’d lost that force which shaped my moral sensibility and relationship to the natural world was, for me, a sort of spiritual apocalypse. This story renders that loss a literal apocalypse.
EM: I read this story as happening mid-apocalypse—she can remember better times, but has been trained for and adapted to this increasingly desperate and violent world. I was just curious: where in the decline of her world are we?
GES: Good question! I’m not sure that I have a satisfactory answer. When I write a speculative story my intuitive sense of the world tends to be stronger than my intellectual understanding of it. One of my weaknesses as a writer is over-meticulousness, a tendency to get bogged down in detail. To combat that I avoid deliberate “world-building” and instead allow the world to reveal itself only insofar as it’s relevant to each moment in the story. What I can say with regard to “Father as Astronaut” is that the decline of this world was gradual enough that the narrator had time to prepare, as well as the perspicacity to recognize the need for preparation. There was no singular apocalyptic event: the world is in a later stage of a slow systemic degeneration.
EM: A report recently came out warning that we just whizzed by the last off-ramp for cutting carbon emissions enough to halt climate change—one result will likely be a refugee crisis that will lead to even worse human rights crimes than the ones we’re seeing (and committing) now, so what I guess I’m asking is: How is this state of affairs affecting you, as a storyteller and artist?
GES: Art is an antidote to desensitization. Aside from acute catastrophes like Hurricane Harvey and the wildfires in California, the vast majority of Americans have only yet directly experienced climate change as screwy weather and expensive produce; our understanding of its human impact is shaped by the media, by the images and accounts that are published of flooding in South Asia, of desertification and famine in Africa. And I find that the media’s depiction of these ongoing catastrophes leaves me increasingly numb. In fact, most of what’s news leaves me numb. Fiction, writing as well as reading it, offers me a technique to reawaken empathy.
EM: What are some of your favorite speculative fiction (or sci-fi) stories?
GES: I like works that feign a strict realism and then introduce some single disruptive element or condition—Clarice Lispector’s “The Smallest Woman in the World,” Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Year of Silence.”
EM: Can you talk about your work with animals a bit? What do you most want people to know about animal-related production?
GES: That the factory farm model doesn’t just violate animal rights, it violates human rights. I had the fortune to grow up with a menagerie of both domestic and (injured or orphaned) wild animals and so have always had a strong sense of the depth and individuality of nonhuman creatures. Not everyone has this experience, though, and it’s pointless to try to convince someone who’s never loved a dog of the emotional suffering that factory-farmed meat entails. But CAFOs are also terrible for the health of neighboring communities—they pollute the water and air—and especially terrible for the health of CAFO workers. More generally, the overuse of antibiotics to keep factory animals alive long enough to size up for slaughter is a major contributor to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is an enormous threat to public health.
EM: What comforts you?
GES: Zen practice. I spent the last six months living at a Zen center and every morning since I left I’ve read Zen texts and sat. There’s this passage from Moby Dick that beautifully describes the comfort I increasingly find in zazen: “But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself forever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.” Pretty often I see the world as a hopeless maelstrom of shit where there’s no comfort to be found; in those times I find comfort in whatever part of me remains untouched by it all.
Gretchen Stiteler grew up outside of Philadelphia and received her bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. She earned a master’s degree in literature from the University of Iowa, where her critical work examined the exploitation of animals and the environment in capitalist systems of production. She has attended summer sessions at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has previously published fiction in Animal. She currently lives and works at an organic farm and Zen center on the coast of northern California.