January’s Web Exclusive, “Flood,” describes a significant moment of change in a troubled family’s life. It’s notoriously hard to master a run-on sentence, but author Keenan Walsh does it here. In editing, we realized there was no way to break it up without losing its very necessary urgency, that the whole thing was an intricately woven tapestry that needed to stay intact. What’s more, the form forces the modern, harried reader to slow down and take in shimmering details that they might otherwise miss, effectively carrying you away in its flow.
Erin McReynolds: In “Flood” a boy tells the story of his family’s struggles with being forced to move apartments and school districts, his sister’s seizures, and his father’s drinking. He tells us this in one, breathless, nonstop sentence. What was behind that choice?
Keenan Walsh: The single sentence thing was a process choice before it was any sort of aesthetic one. When I first drafted this story, I was working on another piece that I’ve since completely abandoned, thank God. I don’t know what it was, I hated it and I spent way too much time on it. But anyway, it had a lot of short sentences and white space and all that. I was just so frustrated with it that I wanted to do something totally different.
At the same time, I was translating another writer, Hajar Bali, who writes in French and was visiting Iowa City from Algeria. One of her stories contained a lot of very long sentences, and because of that, I guess I was already also thinking in and about long sentences, what kinds of sacrifices they require, what they allow for, what kind of emotional pitch they suggest or demand, etc. Experimenting with it in my own writing, I found it surprisingly relieving. The material had a chance to get away from me. I had to let go, I think, in a way that for whatever reason I hadn’t been comfortable doing for a long time.
EM: It’s notoriously hard to make the run-on sentence work. What were your concerns in revisions? Were you tempted to reneg?
KW: Yeah, that’s where it became more of a complicated aesthetic decision—should I break it up, does it serve or burden the material, etc. I still don’t have a single rationale, to be honest. I think this piece, as the title suggests, is concerned with things overflowing, becoming too much—both in the moment and in retrospect—and I guess the single sentence is a formal expression of that. And of regression, too, definitely. But it’s also concerned with blurred boundaries—the boundaries of responsibility, but also where one person ends and another begins, and the difficulty of accepting rigid divisions, the dread of being separate from. So maybe in another way the single sentence is an expression of that wish to get back to a place where the boundaries between things, thoughts, or self and other aren’t quite so definite.
At least, the process brought a lot of these things to the surface for me. But to tell you the truth, all of this feels more like a retroactive defense of something that I just felt attached to for reasons I couldn’t and still can’t totally explain.
EM: But it makes sense; the theme of spilling over comes across in the work. Also it’s the way a child tells a story, all in one blast; though he could be an adult as he tells us this (we can assume from the last few words that it’s at least some distance in the future) he inhabits, as we all do when we relive childhood memories, his childhood senses and sensibilities, effectively making him both a child and adult narrator. What does that allow you to do? What were the challenges?
KW: In retrospective first-person stories I often think about the duality of the narrator: the narrator looking back might superimpose (as I think happens here) a kind of intelligence that wasn’t necessarily available, or at least articulable, in the moment being recalled; or, similarly, the recollection of past circumstances might alter the way something’s being remembered and told in the present, the vocabulary, the syntax, the emotion, etc. So the final narrative voice contains a kind of interference pattern between the two points in time.
Which I guess is how it happens—like, I remember at some point in therapy feeling my adult vocabulary just fall away from me. Which is both scary and incredibly relieving. In some ways, I think, speaking simply about things heightens or reignites their mystery. The world is more urgently strange with fewer words. Or maybe it’s just that even as an adult, I find myself most bothered by simple things, like a pair of glasses or whatever. Either way, it’s nice to have the space and permission to approach them with a simpler voice than I might use in other circumstances. And so I guess that’s one thing the more childlike narration can do, is offer quick access to strangeness and bewilderment.
EM: You’ve captured the way an older sibling can assume responsibility for a younger one in families where, for whatever reason, the parents refuse or mismanage it. Then he confesses that he feels like he failed his sister, whose seizures are worsening, and who no one realized was legally blind—a confession that could have easily been heavy-handed or melodramatic but instead is sincere and heartbreaking. How did you approach his sense guilt and responsibility without treading into martyrdom?
KW: I wonder. I’m happy and flattered that you think it doesn’t. If it feels sincere now I hope it’s because it felt sincere when I wrote it, but I don’t know. For me, it’s really important to try and feel the emotions I’m writing about in the moment I’m writing about them. If it feels difficult or false then I know something isn’t working on the page. Writing fiction is like slow acting. But I think it’s just as important to go back after the fact and add moments that resist the first desires of the narration so that it doesn’t subsume everything. I do think the piece would have slipped more into martyrdom, for example, if the narrator hadn’t been sort of cruel toward the end.
EM: I love that: “Writing fiction is like slow acting.” Vision is a prominent theme here: the little sister has been legally blind all this time and no one caught it; with glasses, she can now see things that call up questions for her, like why are there leaves on the trees, when she has only ever experienced them on the ground; and she fears the violence of a surgery that could give her even clearer vision. What’s important about vision, where this family is concerned?
KW: I think it’s difficult to watch someone you love become scared. For the sister in this story, at least as the narrator understands it, the world seems to become more threatening as it becomes more vivid. Less innocently, though, he also struggles with the fact that as her vision improves and her seizures decline, she becomes more independently capable, which is a threat. One aspect of that threat is that he’s used to watching, not being watched. As she becomes more autonomous, what does she see? And imagining what she sees, what does he see or lose sight of?
I’ve also been really interested for a long time in the way children pass into this space of realizing they’re separate from their parents—and for siblings close in age, separate from each other. So in retrospect, I guess the vision trope allowed me to think about that abstract process more concretely. It’s strange to see each other. It continues to be strange. Even more so if your image of someone shifts very abruptly. Ultimately I think that’s beautiful, but at first it’s just kind of terrifying.
EM: Toward the end, we are introduced to a new theme—the wet and ruined carpet, the moldy wooden floors beneath, and the narrator, sticking his knife between the walls and the ceiling, telling us he will forever wonder about the layers beneath him. It’s so bang on, and I was wondering if this was maybe the first part of the story that came to you, this notion of damage done beneath the visible layer, and that you took that image and built the story backward from there. Was I wrong? What did come to you first?
KW: No, this story came out basically in the order it’s in now. I will say, though, that just before I wrote that part, I thought I would have to keep going for a lot longer. As in, I had shut myself away for what I thought would be a long day. But then when I got there I pretty quickly realized it was the end, so I stopped.
Although now that I think about it, some version of that scene did sort of appear in another story a few years ago. It was just a few lines and was cast as backstory, and different in a number of other ways, but it was definitely there. Maybe I had to sit with it for a while longer before it meant anything other than itself.
EM: That’s a great way of putting it. I still think someday all the things I’ve put away will make up one megaperfect novel in a Voltronesque way I am not capable of seeing right now. What are you working on now?
KW: I really hope so! Meanwhile, I find that I have to work on like three or four things at once, so that if I get frustrated I can say, “Well, it’s okay, that one is the throwaway.” Right now I’m working on a novel and some throwaway stories, or some stories and a throwaway novel, depending on the day.
EM: Future Voltrons! I have a nest of Post-It notes on my wall by my desk, kind of rah-rah-rahing me. Do you have any pieces of writing advice or encouragement that you need to keep handy?
KW: Not exactly, though maybe I should. There are writers and books who help me feel better when I’m feeling down or discouraged. Right now, among other things, that’s Housekeeping, Proust, The Waves, Olio, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I feel like I can read them very sincerely. As in, there’s nothing I want from them other than to read them. There’s just no way for me to compete. I love them so much. Even if I were to quit writing I would love them. It’s nice to feel that foundation.
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Keenan Walsh is a writer and teacher living in Iowa City, where he studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.