Maria Pinto’s story, “Love Song of a Femme Fatale on Scholarship” was published in Flapperhouse.
Maria Pinto‘s work has appeared in Word Riot, Pinball, The Butter, Cleaver, Menacing Hedge, and Flapperhouse, among others. She was an Ivan Gold Fellow at The Writers’ Room of Boston, in the city where she walks dogs, grows a veggie garden, and does Karaoke. Her debut novel is in search of a home. She’s working on the next.
To read Maria’s story “Love Song of a Femme Fatale on Scholarship” and an exercise on creating character desire, click here.
In this interview, Pinto discusses the light brush strokes of flash fiction, framing narratives, and how language connects novels and much shorter forms.
Michael Noll
The opening paragraph introduces the character’s desire—to sleep with her professor—but the description of the professor depicts him as, shall we say, having less than the classic male beauty. You admit this up front: “She did not interrogate why. She was a freshman; there was only the urgent press of do, do, do.” I can imagine this piece in workshop, someone saying, “Yes, but why would she be attracted to him?” Or “What does she look like?” Were you ever tempted to answer those questions?
Maria Pinto
I’m rarely tempted to answer questions like that in shorter form pieces. One reason I love flash fiction is that its brevity allows for light brush-strokes. If this story works it’s because it reflects what life is really like–people are mysterious and their motivations are mysterious, so often even to themselves. I don’t think the protagonist’s feelings are wrapped up in any deep affection, and I’m not sure it truly matters whether she’s attractive, but I do think her willingness to see “past” her professor’s looks speaks to something we do all the time without necessarily being conscious of it, and that’s surrender to invisible forces. In this student’s case, that invisible force is chemistry. Or is it physics? Sometimes the big cartoon magnet in each of us just starts working towards another person’s magnet; attraction doesn’t only happen between supermodels, right? I’m fascinated by the idiosyncratic ways lust works, and by how some people feel freer to engage with their lust even when it rears up in inconvenient or even ugly places. The fact that we have no idea whether this “chemistry” is one-sided is part of the fun.
Michael Noll
This story is almost entirely composed of the character’s thoughts. Her only interaction with the professor is incidental, entering a unisex bathroom as he steps out. Other interactions might be entirely in her head—imagining that he notices her. Did you ever try to write an actual interaction? Was this story always focused on her imagining thinking about him and what that interaction might look like?
Maria Pinto
I never did try to write an actual interaction, no. Things would have gotten a little too steamy! I think this student has been enjoying that space in between “what if” and “I’m actually doing this,” unlike Prufrock, who will go through a hundred indecisions and revisions before breakfast. For her, all that imagining amounts to a kind of foreplay, and for the reader, I hope, it reminds them of the last time they watched and wanted and it was good. At the end of this piece I hope people wonder whether the professor will be able to maintain his institutional standard of ethics in the face of his student’s brazenness, but I also hope they see her fantasy as a world in itself, complete and silly and hot and mildly funny.
Michael Noll
One of my professors in grad school talked often about a narrative clock, and this story has one. She sees her professor on the bus, and we know that eventually both of them will have to get off the bus. I find that rough drafts often suffer from one of two problems: they don’t have that natural timer ticking in the background, or they have the timer but nothing else going on. Which came first in this story? The bus or the lust?
Maria Pinto
They came at the same time! Public transportation is such an odd environment–if you haven’t pressed your nose against a device or a book for your ride’s duration, chances are good you’ll make eye contact with someone. And then your relationship with that person is cemented until one of you gets off. Either you’ll look at each other again or you won’t. When you look again (and lord help you, if you smile), no matter whether you’re attracted to that person, a frisson is born. I wanted to write something that took place in that interval of a bus ride with that frisson, and the not-quite-stranger dynamic of teacher and student was the frame that immediately presented itself to me.
Michael Noll
You’re working on a novel, which is about as far away from flash fiction as one can get. Is there anything that you’ve done in a piece like this that transfers to the novel form?
Maria Pinto
This is a really interesting question. I guess it depends on what you mean by “anything.” If you mean “is there a premise in one of your pieces that could have been a novel,” I’d say that I once wrote about a grieving widow living in the sort of future where she’s able to make a suit from her dead husband’s skin and experience the world through his literal eye sockets. That could maybe get the novel treatment. And if you’re asking another type of question, I’d say that even though novels and flash fiction are worlds apart, they’re both so much better when an author is surgical and economical and cares about the poetry of her word choice–if her love of all that can be done within a single sentence shines through on the page.
May 2017
Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.
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