Though our Web Exclusive “Belly of the Beast” was published on Halloween, it’s a timeless story, drawing on folk tale traditions of employing monsters to contend with painful human realities. In this case, a spouse grows distant, frightening, and dangerous, lost (literally) inside of a beast. It’s a tender and desperate story that accommodates any number of ways in which our partners can abandon us. We talked with author Joy Baglio recently about the flash form, the Master Switch of Life, and why writing by hand changes everything.
Erin McReynolds: “Belly of the Beast” is such an imaginative, powerful story. Do you remember how it came to you?
Joy Baglio: The opening line came first, which isn’t often the case for me. Usually I write my way into a voice, character, or situation. I often get a glimpse of the ending midway through and jot that down.
But this came out fairly straightforward, from a very deep emotional place. Stylistically and thematically, I’m interested in “distortion . . . to get at truth,” as Flannery O’Connor has said, and from the first line on I was thinking about that emotional truth I wanted to explore.
EM: I’ve watched your Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop video about flash fiction, which everyone should watch right now—it’s an entire course in about five minutes! So instead of asking you to reiterate what you’ve already said there (seriously: get a notebook and watch it), I want to ask about the place flash fiction has in this faster, tech-driven, distracted world.
JB: There’s something old and time-tested about the form that goes beyond this moment: When people tell each other stories, they’re often telling them in something closer to the flash form—small anecdotes that cut out the unnecessary stuff and get right at the heart of the matter.
Flash is concerned with the core, the distilled essence, and it taps deeply into our instincts as natural storytellers.
I’d also add that the allure of flash comes from the echo, the “linger effect” (see Tara Laskowski’s essay “The Three L’s You Need to Make Lovely Little Fictions” in The Masters Review). I’ve found readers are often surprised by how much a single-page story, or even a paragraph-long piece, can stick with them over days, weeks, years. I’ve literally been thinking about George Saunders’ “Sticks” almost every day since June, and every time I look at it I see another layer I missed previously.
I sometimes tell students if the novel is a visit to someone’s house—walking through the rooms, opening drawers, seeing what’s in the fridge, what it smells like, sounds like, coming back day after day to witness those lives—then a flash story is like driving by that same house at night and getting a quick glimpse into the lighted living room window. Hopefully it’s just as powerful and emotional as the longer visit, but it may be subtle too. Whatever it is, it stays with you.
It continues to amaze me how much [writing by hand] has changed how I think and the actual ideas that come.
I also love the form because I think it gives special permission to weird, unconventional ideas and voices—ideas and/or voices that we might not want to follow all the way through a novel, for whatever reason.
Like second person point of view—which I love and think has tremendous power but I’m not as excited to read a whole novel of it. The brevity of flash allows for experimentation, for it to push back in a lot of ways, and I think that excites both writers and readers.
EM: Do you have a regular (vs. irregular) writing practice? What is it like when you get the spark of an idea, and do you save it for later or start working on it right away?
JB: I write every morning for as long as I can. If I don’t write daily, I pretty much turn into the worst version of myself, and since I run my own business and work mostly from home, I have this flexibility.
I tend to have a LOT of ideas, many of them bad (though these are sometimes the most exciting ones). Most of my ideas are these very high-concept “what ifs,” and I almost always jot down an initial paragraph or two, just to get a sense of the voice and tone as it’s initially occurring to me.
I almost never write the whole thing in one sitting, but I come back to it throughout the day. So much of the process is about trusting that the right words will show up. Of course they’ll need to be revised and reworked and sometimes cut, but it’s not our job to worry about any of that in the generative stage. I’ve gotten a lot better at letting things spill out in whatever form they come and trusting that something will be there, and it very often is.
EM: How do you keep track of your ideas/lines as they come to you—or stories that you’ve abandoned but might come back to?
JB: I use Word, Scrivener, many notebooks, my phone, Post-It notes, my own hand. I’ll voice-record on my phone as I run. Lately I’ve started writing more in notebooks, and I’m amazed at how much more I can get into a flow this way, both because of the constant movement of my hand (because it’s so much slower than typing, I have to keep writing to keep up with my thoughts) and because there’s no room to move paragraphs around or edit as I go—I have to just keep going forward.
It continues to amaze me how much changing my process like this has changed how I think and the actual ideas that come.
EM: What are you reading/obsessed with right now?
JB: I recently discovered Madeline Miller’s books, both Circe and Song of Achilles, and was blown away by her deft handling of such sprawling stories, how expertly she humanizes these archetypal characters, her emotional and image-rich prose, and the incredible gut-punch of the books (especially Song of Achilles). Such muscled, sinewy, fire-powered writing and such an emotional reading experience.
I keep a notebook full of sentences that I can’t stop thinking about, and it’s mostly full of hers right now. I’m also obsessed with her boldness as a storyteller, her complete defiance of genre.
I’m also reading some nonfiction for novel research and am particularly immersed in science journalist James Nestor’s Deep, about the shocking sport of free diving, wherein actual humans dive up to 700 feet into the ocean without any assistance or gear. Nestor describes the science behind this, including the fascinating Master Switch of Life, or mammalian dive reflex, which scientists have been studying: it’s the latent amphibious impulses that are activated when we’re underwater, what freedivers train to tap into. It’s fascinating and makes you realize how much we don’t know about our own abilities.
EM: This project sounds really exciting! You’re also working on a short story collection, so what’s it like working on two different projects simultaneously?
JB: Working on both at the same time is so much fun and also the hardest thing I can imagine a writer doing. I’ll get into the flow with one of them and ride that wave until I either feel stuck or guilty about the other, then I’ll switch. It’s a chaotic way to work, but it also creates space and urgency in both projects, and I think my brain functions best this way.
Recently, I’ve been in the flow with several short stories and I feel like I’m having a kind of Idea Renaissance where a number of stories are really sprouting up and fitting with each other, and that’s always exciting.
The novel feels pretty weedy still, even though I finished the first (completely handwritten) draft in September when I was in residence at Yaddo. It’s set along the Maine coast and centers around a marine research center. It’s kind of turning out to be more of a mystery than I intended, and I’m really liking that direction. I’ve been studying cold water coral reefs, research methodologies and equipment, how submersibles work, the different zones of the ocean, Greek mythology, mermaid lore, and renegade science, and am even in the process of SCUBA certification. I’ve received two grants to help fund research and travel, and I’m going to be embarking on some oceanic research trips as soon as I can pin down the story more.
EM: We’ll definitely be on the lookout for both books. In case anyone out there missed it the first time around, read “Belly of the Beast” here.
Joy Baglio‘s fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and PANK, among others, and is forthcoming in Gulf Coast. She has received fellowships, scholarships, and grants from the Corporation of Yaddo, The Vermont Studio Center, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Speculative Literature Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and her writing has been recognized by numerous contests and awards, including The Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest (Honorable Mention) and the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions. She holds an MFA from The New School and teaches at Grub Street and at Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, which she founded in 2016. Follow her on Twitter @JoyBaglio.