Tag Archives: writing exercises

An Interview with Katherine Fawcett

25 Jun
Katherine Fawcett's debut story collection, The Little Washer of Sorrows, has been compared to the work of Kelly Link and Donald Barthelme.

Katherine Fawcett’s debut story collection, The Little Washer of Sorrows, has been compared to the work of Kelly Link and Donald Barthelme.

Katherine Fawcett is a Canadian writer living in Pemberton, British Columbia. Her short fiction has been published in Wordworks, Event, Freefall, subTerrain, and Other Voices, and her plays have been performed by several community theatre groups. She teaches music at the Whistler Waldorf School, plays violin with the Sea to Sky Orchestra, and fiddle whenever possible. Her debut story collection, The Little Washer of Sorrows, includes stories about banshees, mermaids, and half-feral boys coming of age.

To read “Dire Consequences” by Katherine Fawcett and an exercise on increasing tension by shifting gears, click here. In this interview, Fawcett discusses writing fables, humor mixed with horror, and Stephen King’s Night Shift.

Michael Noll

When I read the story’s final line, I laughed and gasped at the same time. In a way, the story is structured like a well-told joke. The end is almost like a punchline. How did you find this structure? Did it simply occur to you as you wrote, or did you have the ending in mind when you began the story?

Katherine Fawcett

I’m delighted that the ending made you laugh and gasp. I do enjoy going for goosebumps. I think the horror of inevitability is really powerful. To be funny and devastating at the same time reflects the inescapable reality of being human.

The structure of this particular story did fall into place as I wrote it. I knew it was a fable, and that in telling it the loss of the girl would have to somehow come around again. But no, I didn’t plan the ending in advance. When I neared the ending, I had no choice in how to finish.

Michael Noll

I also love the quick pacing. This is something I’m seeing a lot of lately, in stories by Sheila Heiti, Amelia Gray, and Dina Guidubaldi, to name a few writers. The stories don’t really descend into scene and stay there. Instead, they zoom along over a series of events, as this story does, with the result being a story that feels a bit like a fable. Does this seem like a fair description of the story? What attracts you to this form?

Katherine Fawcett

Daydreams for Angels is the first story collection from Heather O'Neill, the bestselling author of Lullabies for Little Criminals.

Daydreams for Angels is the first story collection from Heather O’Neill, the bestselling author of Lullabies for Little Criminals.

I recently read Heather O’Neill’s collection Daydreams of Angels, another Canadian author whose short stories often trip quickly along with gorgeous images and snapshots of events. I like how this style can feel intense–almost dream-like. I think the short story lends itself to this form very well. I love a story that is organized in such a way that readers feel they are swinging Tarzan-style from vine to vine with every turn of the page.

Michael Noll

This story was originally published as part of a series titled “Thrilling Tales of Torment.” As such, I guess it’s a kind of horror story, which makes sense—after all, two children die. But it’s a peculiar kind of horror story in that it’s funny. (At least, I laughed at the end.) But it’s also a weird kind of humor since the thing that is funny is also horrible, and so as I was laughing, I was also feeling a lot of empathy for the characters, especially the boy. Was this story intended as horror? Is that a genre you’re drawn to?

Katherine Fawcett

To be honest, I didn’t write this as a “Thrilling Tales of Torment” story, but when I was asked to submit a Halloween story, it was the most suitable one I had at the time. It certainly isn’t horror in the traditional sense, but you’re right–a couple of dead kids is a pretty nasty and no one wants to laugh at that, so it’s kind of a blend of bad, distasteful humour and weird, funny horror.

I do like reading horror–although I sometimes find it too disturbing to read at night. The first short story collection I ever read was Stephen King’s Night Shift. I must have been 11 or so–I remember being terrified and thrilled, and sharing the stories around campfires to scare my friends.

Michael Noll

One review of the book uses the term “fabulist” and compares you to Kelly Link, the incomparable giant of the weird stories that seem to now officially fall under that label. What do you think of that term: fabulist? It’s relatively new, and so it seems that the definition of what belongs is a bit fuzzy. Does it seem like an appropriate category for your work?

Katherine Fawcett

I am honored to be spoken of in the same breath as Kelly Link. I’d never defined myself as such before, but if the Link is a fabulist and NPR says I’m following in her tradition, then yup, you can call me a happy fabulist too. The word is appealing because it is like “fantastic” and “beautiful” and “marvelous” going out for drinks together.
But to properly answer your question, I looked it up and found out that fabulist has two meanings:

  1. Someone who recounts fables.
  2. A liar.

I suppose all fiction is lying by definition, but a fable is something that brings to light a truth. So yes, lying to find truth would be a great category for my work.

I read somewhere that fiction is simply a craft that arranges letters and spaces and punctuation in a way that makes us empathize with the fake struggles of pretend people. It seems to me the whole process of categorization (fabulist, magical realist, satirist, sci-fi writer etc) has more to do with marketing than actually sitting down and telling stories–lying to find truth. But if lumping me into a category will pique readers’ interest, lump away.

June 2015

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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An Interview with Dina Guidubaldi

18 Jun
Dina Guidubaldi's debut story collection, How Gone We Got, features robots and sea creatures and characters that seem intimately familiar.

Dina Guidubaldi’s debut story collection, How Gone We Got, features robots and sea creatures and characters that seem intimately familiar.

Dina Guidubaldi’s first book, the story collection How Gone We Got, has drawn comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, the Santa Monica Review, Cup of Fiction, SPIN, the Austin American-Statesman, and Other Voices; she has been an editor for Callaloo and American Short Fiction. A graduate of Texas State’s MFA program, she currently lives in Austin.

To read an exercise on making high-concept stories unpredictable and Guidubaldi’s story “What I Wouldn’t Do,” click here. In this interview, Guidubaldi discusses how to create realistic characters and following your instinct as a writer.

Michael Noll

How did “What I Wouldn’t Do” begin its life? Did you sit down and think, I’m going to write about a guy who builds an actual city for the woman he loves and see how far I can take the idea? Or, were you writing about a relationship when the idea of building a city occurred to you?

Dina Guidubaldi

This was one of those actually “fun” stories to write. I think it started with the idea of the narrator as this kind of obsessive, impractical nut. It also started with me thinking about the concept of “true” love, how there’s something selfish about it. My dad bought me a book when I was little, called The Reward Worth Having, about these brothers (?) who travel a long distance to vie for the hand of this ailing princess. The one who woos her in the end is of course the underdog, who just brings her a bird and a song and no money or promises. The idea was supposed to be “Aw, be yourself and people will see your value,” but I guess what I took out of it was “He doesn’t even know that princess! She could be awful! Why bother? He just wants to be the One who gets her, the One who gets written about.” And so that fuzzy memory sitting somewhere in my head got the ball rolling.

Michael Noll

I love how the story takes phrases that would normally seem sweet (“you were my hours and my half-pasts”) and makes them oppressive and creepy. This is part of what made the story seem strangely realistic to me. It’s a kind of fable or allegory (or something), and the risk with such stories is that they’re too clever for their own good. But this story seems like a real portrait of a relationship that many people have had; in fact, the fantastic-ish elements seem to create the opportunity for the moments that seem most authentic. How did you achieve this balance? In other words, how did you keep the metaphor trained on real emotion?

Dina Guidubaldi

Hm. Right, I think if it does achieve that realness, it’s because this is an honest problem people have—obsession is just selfishness. This guy’s trying his best to make things work, but for what? I also think the female character helps balance things out. She figures things out way before he does, that it’s not about her at all. And again, that fable bit—because it is loosely based on the premise of the knight aiming for the princess, you can get all crazy with the details. Also, he’s rich, and rich people come up with fantastic ways to spend their money, in real life. Or so I like to think.

Michael Noll

I laughed out loud at this line: 

It’s not like you’re a prisoner here, I said. You’re free to walk out of your turret room and down the spiral staircase and through the antechamber and into the foyer and out the front door and past the rosemary and lavender bushes and into the hedge maze and down the cobblestoned circular streets and out into the world. 

It makes me curious about the story’s tone. It’s told in first person, but a line like that seems to reveal a certain amount of self-awareness in the narrator. Was that tone/awareness easy to find, or did you have to write your way into it?

Dina Guidubaldi

Not to sound like a writer jerk, but that’s just the way the character talks, to me. He’s so blustering and headstrong that he almost grasps it—in fact, he does grasp it, I’d say—but he’s heedless, he doesn’t care. He has this little war brewing inside him—Should I keep doing this? Heck, I’ll keep doing it!—and I love that he just quashes any self-doubt before it can get big enough to rise up before him, before his many, many failures catch up to him.

Michael Noll

How did you approach the story’s ending? I can imagine other tempting ways to end it: when the woman leaves or with the narrator’s realization that “I’d been building us your city for me.” But you keep going and end with the great, creepy moment with the microscope. How did you know you’d found the right image or line to end on?

Dina Guidubaldi

I think I kinda like this guy, and I didn’t want him to be sad. I didn’t want him to realize anything much, or to change for very long. I wanted him to keep living blindly and blithely in his world, and the idea of a child—or, for him, a brand new generation of something to love and obsess over—seemed a good way of extending his quest. I also like that he doesn’t care if it’s his child—any one will do. Which kinda circles around the true love idea: is he truly loving or is he truly selfish? And I guess I (inadvertently) revisit this whole idea in a later story in the collection—the “Press Repeat” clone one.

June 2015

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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An Interview with David James Poissant

28 May
David James Poissant's debut collection, The Heaven of Animals, has a

David James Poissant’s debut collection, The Heaven of Animals, has a “rogue touch,” according to Rebecca Lee in a New York Times a review.

David James Poissant’s debut story collection The Heaven of Animals received a rave review in The New York Times. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The New York Times, One Story, Playboy, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and in the New Stories from the South and Best New American Voices anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters.

To read an exercise on developing a rapport with readers and Poissant’s story “Stealing Orlando,” click here.

In this interview, Poissant discusses why there is no such thing as a timeless story and why directly addressing there reader is a natural convention in stories.

Michael Noll

The story does a couple of things that might get called “risky” in workshop. The first is that it directly references pop culture. Plus, it’s a very specific reference—Orlando Bloom in the film Elizabethtown. I’m curious what your thinking was about this reference. I guess you could have written, “My wife wanted to have sex with a famous movie star, so I stole a promotional cutout with his picture on it.” What impact does the specificity of the Orlando Bloom reference have on the story?

David James Poissant

In workshop, we often hear about concrete details, about specificity, about “no ideas but in things.” Then, when it comes to pop culture, we often hear the dictum about avoiding concrete or specific brand names and pop culture references. I think the theory here is that you can better give your fiction a “timeless” quality if you don’t pinpoint an era too specifically with the name of a TV show or song or actor, or whatever. Or else, some people feel that, acknowledging the American entertainment industry, you pollute your literary story with low culture stuff. I think that both of these are bogus reasons to avoid cultural references and time-specific touchstones. Even if you leave those things out, a story will never feel timeless. Let me repeat that: No matter how vague you are, you have no shot at creating a sense of timelessness.

Already, stories are marked by pre- and post-cell phone usage. Having cellular phones easily available to most residents of the Western world has dramatically changed how living writers shape plot and plausibility in contemporary narratives. If you have a character hurt in a car accident and have another character run for help instead of pulling out a phone, your reader won’t think, Oh, this is timeless! She’ll think, Oh, this must be set before 2000 but after 1920. Then, the reader will waste time and energy focusing on minor details and trying to ferret out clues that reveal the story’s time period more specifically. Point is, your story is always marked by time. And, besides, what makes historical fiction more “literary” than contemporary fiction set in the current time period? Also, look at the classics. The Great Gatsby is full of its time period’s pop culture. Great fiction doesn’t have to look away from reality. Instead, great fiction can grapple with reality, even if that reality is Hollywood (Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust) or pop music (Teddy Wayne’s The Love Song of Jonny Valentine).

Michael Noll

The other potentially risky move is that the story directly addresses the reader: 

“I could tell you, Did the marriage make it, yes or no?
But I’m not going to tell you, not yet, because where’s the fun in that?
And also because read, you lazy motherfucker, read.”

I love that it sets out the stakes (will the marriage make it?), and I’m not sure if that could have been done so quickly without this passage. Was this passage always in the story? Or was it added in the course of revision? 

David James Poissant

One Story editor Hannah Tinti called The Heaven of Animals

One Story editor Hannah Tinti called The Heaven of Animals “Wild as two men wrestling an alligator, tender as a father stretching out on the floor next to his sleeping son.”

I love to address the reader directly. Think of Jane Eyre‘s “Reader, I married him.” I don’t know why this convention has been discouraged by some in contemporary fiction. Maybe because it sounds old-fashioned? I don’t know. But, in a sense, all stories are told, so all stories have an implied listener or listeners. Denis Johnson makes great use of this convention, addressing that “you” in both Jesus’ Son and The Name of the World, two of my favorite books.

As for foregrounding what’s at stake in a narrative, I think that some stories do better to set up the bowling pins on the first page, while some stories make great use of what screenwriters call a “slow reveal.” For this story, because it’s so weird and meandering at times, I wanted to put some heat on it and let the reader know pretty quickly what she’s reading for. I believe that those lines, or something close to them, emerged in the early drafts of “Stealing Orlando.”

Michael Noll

I’ve previously asked David Gordon and Melissa Falcon Field about writing sex scenes. Gordon uses a lot of specific details. Falcon Field focuses on what the scene means to the characters. You do something a little different. There are a lot of details, but they’re told in summary (“edible panties, sex toys, food, porn, food-porn, once the lubed length of a Harry Potter wand”). There’s a lot of lead up to the sex, but the sex isn’t actually shown. Was that always the case? Or did you write the actual sex and then think, in revision, “Hmm, maybe not?”

David James Poissant

I think that a lot can be implied when writing sex. I wanted to get the point across that there was an imbalance in these characters’ sexual appetites. I wanted to convey an energy and carnality that makes the narrator uncomfortable. But, I rarely want to make my reader unnecessarily uncomfortable. So, here, I decided that I could name some objects and ideas, then leave the sexual acts themselves to the readers’ imagination, rather than having to describe the sex acts themselves along with the implementation of those objects, etc. Additionally, trying to stay in character (when writing in first person) means saying what this guy would say and skipping over the parts he’d skip over. He probably wouldn’t go into too much detail if he was already kind of shy about what they’d been doing in the bedroom.

Michael Noll

I love the story’s ending, the way it jumps forward in time and then flashes back again. What made you save that final piece of dialogue between the characters for the end? Why not end it with “Some things, they end just this way”? To my ears, it’s not as nice an ending, but it could work. How did you know where to end it?

David James Poissant

First, thanks for the kind words. That ending, it was the hardest part of this particular story to get right. I played around with the end a lot and moved things around in the story’s chronology many times. The airport scene is the last scene that I actually wrote. I realized very late in the process that these two ought to have one more scene together. But, in the end, there was something more fulfilling about ending with the two committing to one another, even though we know that the commitment is doomed to fail. So, jumping around in time provides that tonal shift, or whatever you want to call it. The trick, then, was to avoid playing the moment for irony’s sake. I wanted to end on a note closer to melancholy sweetness than irony or cynicism. If I’ve hit that note with this ending, then I feel like I’ve done my job.

May 2015

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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An Interview with Nicelle Davis

21 May
Nicelle Davis is the author of three books of poetry, most recently the novel-in-poems In the Circus of You.

Nicelle Davis is the author of three books of poetry, most recently the novel-in-poems In the Circus of You.

Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist whose most recent book is the novel-in-poems, In the Circus of You. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Beloit Poetry Journal, The New York Quarterly, PANK, and SLAB Magazine. She is editor-at-large of The Los Angeles Review and currently teaches at Paraclete and with the Red Hen Press WITS program.

To read an exercise on writing description and Davis’ poem “In a Note Not Given to the Addressee,” click here.

In this wide-ranging interview, Davis discusses Borges’ “The Aleph,” Mikhail Bakhtin’s view of poetry as monolithic, and why poetry is not going extinct.

Michael Noll

I love the poem “In a Note Not Given to the Addressee,” especially the way it uses a hole punched through a door as a means of viewing something quite larger about a relationship. It’s not unlike Jorge Luis Borges’ story, “The Aleph,” in which the characters can put their eye to a point located in the cellar of a house and see everything that exists in the universe. What was the genesis of your poem? Did you start with the hole in the door? Or with some other detail that then led you to the hole? In other words, do you start with the aleph or with the entire universe and work backward?

Nicelle Davis

Thank you for taking the time to love any work of writing. And wow, what a question.

I can’t say that the poem “In a Note Not Given to the Addressee” was directly in conversation with Borges’s story, but I can’t deny that they might share a similar desire. I want a love that moves along the mirrors of the infinite, which expands and inverts simultaneously—a love that is so intensely real that it is no longer possible. The impossible—this is what I want. And my only chance of even glimpsing such a love is in metaphor. So I write poems.

“The Aleph.” That is such a perfect, perfect madness.

It’s difficult to talk about that story without becoming its characters. Discussing “The Aleph,”  I will easily gush like Carlos Argentino, the madman poet, who sees what he wants in every line—I just as easily become the sour Borges who robs others of magic out of the raw envy of everything mystical. That is to say, for me, there is an aleph, which means the hole is aleph and aleph is a hole. Whole is the word game here, isn’t it? It’s the blessing and the curse of being a writer—more like being a dreamer.

I love how “The Aleph” is something more than story; it is a poem that hates poetry; it is an essay that risks bending events past the conceits we use to construct truths. It is everything and nothing—that story IS its subject: “The Aleph”—the everything/nothing of us. It is hysterical both in humor and despair. I love how the protagonist is hyper focused on one point, the unrequited beloved, and is forced into revolving that one burning point into all and every angle of existence. In other words the obsession becomes the aleph or the aleph is in the obsession. Borges writes of the aleph, “And here begins my despair as a writer.”

This sort of despair is the only thing worth living for—yes? I’d gladly trade of lifetime of certainty for a glimpse of ever expanding uncertainty hidden in some weirdo-poet’s cellar.

Now the real challenge is seeking such a love without going insane or becoming a complete asshole; that is the warning in Borges’s “The Aleph.”He warns that those who seek the universe—that is, those who dwell in metaphors—are mad poets and assholes Not exactly exciting options, but the reward of such pursuits is that we find an entire universe hidden in the beloved’s skin.

In the Circus of You is mindful of such complications.

Michael Noll

The poems comes from In the Circus of You, a novel-in-poems, which is a strange hybrid animal. I’m curious about how this form affects the individual poems. Because a novel, theoretically, coheres in a different way than a collection, does it put pressure on the poems to repeat images or, perhaps, make certain images clearer or more spelled out in order to gain that overall coherence?

Nicelle Davis

Nicelle Davis latest book is the illustrated novel-in-poems, In the Circus of You.

In the Circus of You pairs the poems of Nicelle Davis with the illustrations of Cheryl Gross.

Sometimes it’s fun to look at the etymology of things. The root of “fiction” is new work, or new story. The root of “poetry” is to make. Yes, I would like to make new work—to enter and break open words. I’m not sure if this is possible, but I want to try.

The concept of a novel in verse is old; every epic poem has novel like characteristics. The Iliad and the Odyssey are novel(s) in a way, yes? Every novel has poetic elements, yes? It just so happens that the world (I would say, has always) chosen to privilege linear narratives over the stories manifested in poetry. I sometimes wonder if this privileging the linear over the nonlinear is similar to the world favoring war over peace; ecofeminism would say this correlation holds some merit. Instead of writing a lyrical novel, I wanted to make a novel comply with the dream rules of poetry.

Michael Noll

I’m a fiction writer, not a poet, and so when I pick up a novel-in-poems, I’m approaching it from the novel end of the label, not the poetry end. How do you think the form fits into the form of “the novel,” generally speaking? Or, what draws you, as a poet, to the novel form?

Nicelle Davis

Much of what I do is out of rebellion—In the Circus of You was in part written in response to Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin views poetry as largely monologic: that is, the text speaks with one voice, using one language—that of the author—admitting no possibility for outside voices (heteroglossia), and thus diversity of meaning within the text. Bakhtin concludes that “the language of poetic genres […] often become authoritarian, dogmatic and conservative, sealing itself off from the influence of extraliterary social dialects.” He seems to be saying that poetry is,at best, the worst form of navel gazing. I wanted to fuck with that; how much can one find in a navel; maybe an entire sideshow lives there?

Even more rabble-rousing is Christopher Ingraham’s recent article in the Washington Post, claiming that “Poetry is going extinct, government data show.” He writes on how the latest numbers from the SPPA show “poetry is less popular than jazz.” Well fuck, the only thing I might love more than poetry is jazz.

Okay, okay, I hear it all; all the voices telling us “if poetry isn’t dead, it should die.” Maybe part of writing a novel in poems was to tell those voices to fuck-off. I mean, the world still continues to process information and dreams in metaphor. The end of poetry is the end of dreamers; I’m not interested in such a world—I can’t imagine the world being interested in a dreamless existence.

Poetry traditionally has been the voice of the subversive, disfranchised—the voice of other. I find it convenient that during times of intense “speech oppression” that poetry is declared dead. A novel in poems, in a way, is the voice from the grave—the voice says, “Poetry is synonymous with human.”

Michael Noll

The illustrations in the book are beautiful and amazing. I found that they affected how I read the book. They slowed me down, preventing me from jumping immediately from one poem to another, which seemed to benefit my readings of each poem. When you decided to include illustrations in the book, did you do so simply because they’re so wonderful? Or did you have a particular effect in mind?

Nicelle Davis

Anne Sexton's Transformations was praised by Kurt Vonnegut and called "blood-curdling" by Stanley Kunitz.

Anne Sexton’s Transformations was praised by Kurt Vonnegut and called “blood-curdling” by Stanley Kunitz.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Anne Sexton’s Transformations didn’t inform my wanting illustrations to couple with poetry. Also, I’m a huge fan of graphic novels and comic books; Spiderman is a rather perfect creation.

Even more influential than Sexton and Spiderman is just dumb luck. My path crossed with the incredible Cheryl Gross. I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to work with her. I fell in love with her illustrations at first sight, and I asked if she would be willing to work with me. That was six years ago, and we continue to work together. This is a miracle, and I don’t take miracles lightly. Any form of art is a miracle.

As you pointed out in your lovely question, the pairing does slow down the read. I didn’t mindfully consider reader’s speed with the pairing of visuals and text, but I did intend for the words and pictures to feel like a conversation—for the reader to know they are part of that conversation. All art is ultimately meant to be a gift to some unknown love—the imagined voice at the larger table we dream of.

May 2015

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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An Interview with Joni Tevis

14 May
Kirkus Reviews called Joni Tevis' essay collection, The World Is On Fire, "fiercely, startlingly bright."

Kirkus Reviews called Joni Tevis’ essay collection, The World Is On Fire, “fiercely, startlingly bright.”

Joni Tevis is the author of two books of essays, The Wet Collection, and, most recently, The World Is On Fire. She has worked as a park ranger, factory worker, and seller of cemetery plots, and her nonfiction has been published in Oxford American, Bellingham Review, Shenandoah, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and Orion. She teaches literature and creative writing at Furman University, and lives in Greenville, South Carolina.

To read an exercise on writing with Keats’ negative capability Tevis’ essay, “Fairy Tales of the Atomic Age (Rock City),” click here.

For this interview, Tevis wrote about the inspiration behind her essay in what is perhaps the most detailed recollection of a writer’s zigzagging mental process that you’ll ever read.

Michael Noll

This is such a wide-ranging essay: Fairyland Caverns, the nuclear test in New Mexico, Rip Van Winkle, the preacher from your childhood, and a Civil War battle. The connections made complete sense as I read the essay, but I was also aware that these were connections that you made. They weren’t simply lying around, ready to be reported on. So, I’m curious about the origin of the essay. How did you begin making associations between these very different stories and events and places? How did you keep so many balls in the air without letting them drop? Was it difficult to keep the connections straight in your head as you worked?

Joni Tevis

I like to start research for an essay by going somewhere that intrigues me and just seeing what I can see. This essay began that way; I remembered Rock City from my childhood and went back for a visit as an adult, with the idea of writing about it. For me, this impulse isn’t primarily rational. I might not know why a place or idea or image appeals to me, but I try not to question that, at least initially. I’ll just go and see what’s there.

So I tried to approach the visit with a very porous mind and took notes on everything I noticed there, from the stuff in the gift shop, to the painted barns and handmade signs along the road up the mountain, to the recorded music and running water within Fairyland Caverns. And I’ll add that even though I like to start essays via this travel experience process, sometimes that impulse doesn’t lead anywhere—I have plenty of dead-end trip notes languishing in my notebooks. But you just never know what you might find.

The big surprise on that trip was the black light in the Caverns. I hadn’t remembered that at all, and I found it unsettling—the juxtaposition of childhood scenes with this very trippy light, light that we associate with drug culture. How to make sense of it? When I discovered that the sculptor who created those scenes did much of her work in the late 1940s, I made the connection to early atomic history, a period that had long fascinated me.

The Day The Sun Rose Twice has been called "definitive account of the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear explosion in history and the legacy it left."

The Day the Sun Rose Twice has been called “definitive account of the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear explosion in history and the legacy it left.”

And this is where the traditional research component came in. I was teaching at UNC-Chapel Hill at the time and had access to the terrific libraries there. One day I was browsing the stacks when I saw The Day The Sun Rose Twice, a great book about the Manhattan Project and the Trinity explosion. The book pulled me—in a not-fully-rational way, the same way that the impulse to revisit Rock City had been. I couldn’t put the book down. It hit me that when I had been a child, worrying about the end-times sermons on Sundays, I was also worrying about the reports I heard on the evening news, about nuclear tensions with the Soviets. So that led me to more research about the Trinity test—which led, in turn, to a visit to the Atomic History Museum, out in Albuquerque—and then to archival research about the woman who created the scenes at Fairyland Caverns.

I traced some of the other stories from the Caverns back—that’s where the Rip Van Winkle research came in, and by moving back in historical time, I read more about the Civil War battle that had taken place on Lookout Mountain sixty years before Rock City was created. Research about the material culture of the place led me to the See Rock City barns that had helped to advertise it. And what had many of those those barns held? Tobacco leaves, which were fascinating to research as well.

Someone painted the barns. Someone planned the scenes in the caverns, poured the plaster. Someone even now changes the black lightbulbs. Just like someone built the bomb. I’m satisfied with the essay now in part because it draws attention to the things we make, and the meaning we make with those things. And I think it evokes this sense of “living in a haunted world” with which the rest of the book also grapples—the reality that we’re not the first to step onto this patch of ground or handle this clay or stone, and that by examining the relics and words that our forebears left us, we can live in a more deep, enriched way.

May 2015

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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An Interview with Melissa Falcon Field

7 May
Melissa Falcon Field's debut novel, What Burns Away, explores the narrator's sudden isolation after having a child and finding her marriage in trouble.

Melissa Falcon Field’s debut novel, What Burns Away, explores the narrator’s choices after finding herself suddenly isolated after having a child and finding her marriage in trouble.

Melissa Falcon Field is the author of the novel, What Burns Away. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and earned her MFA in Fiction Writing from Texas State University. She has been the writer-in-residence at the Katherine Anne Porter and a Bread Loaf fellow, worked as an inner-city teacher with Teach for America and AmeriCorps, and helped develop and pioneer the YEAR UP writing curriculum used nationally. Her writing has appeared in various literary magazines and journals, including Hip Momma: The Parenting Zine, Kaliope Literary Journal, The Portland Phoenix, Across Curriculums, The Austin American Statesmen, The Ballantine Books Reader’s Circle, The Hartford Courant, and The Maine Scholar. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her young son, her husband, and four chickens.

To read an exercise on creating tension in a story and an excerpt from Falcon Field’s novel, What Burns Away, click here.

In this interview, Falcon Field discusses her approach to space breaks, love triangles, and sex scenes.

Michael Noll

I’m interested in your use of space breaks, something that a lot of beginning writers struggle with. For instance, early in the novel, you begin a passage with the sound of the narrator’s son waking her and then move into a flashback about the narrator’s childhood. When the flashback ends and the scene returns to the present scene with the son, the move is punctuated with a space break. The next section uses a similar structure: son as window to something else—in this case, the narrator’s husband. What is your approach to space breaks? Is it about thematic structure? Is it to help the reader avoid confusion?  

Melissa Falcon Field

In the novel, I use space breaks for a variety of reasons, first and foremost, as a way of showing readers a normal break in the narrative, but here, in the sections you reference, because so much of this early part of the novel toggles between back story and the present timeline, space breaks work to clarify those shifts, and they also serve to re-direct the reader in and out of Claire’s reflections, helping to avoid reader confusion with those time shifts. At other times, later in the novel, space breaks serve as a breather from the continual present time narrative, and allow Claire’s reflection and internal world to stand alone, giving them weight, and a wink a their importance, when punctuated by the space break.

Michael Noll

One of the so-called rules promoted by writing workshop is to eschew adjectives. However, your use of the adjective “steadfast” in describing the narrator’s husband (“the steadfast Dr. Miles Bancroft”) is pretty sharp, in part because it comes from a first-person narrator. The description of the husband is pretty spare. Besides this line, there is only one other descriptive phrase early on: “a new breadbasket of weight pooled at his waist.” How did you approach this all-important description? Were you aiming for a particular attitude toward the husband?

Melissa Falcon Field

Great question, Michael. I would say that, in general, the eschewing of adjectives in a novel is to foster finer writing and to encourage streamlining of sentences, avoiding language that reads as clunky, or feels heavy. But when a confessional is being written, as it is here in What Burns Away, Claire is zooming in on her husband, observing him, and so those adjectives work to establish her voice and are the adjectives that she, as the narrator has chosen, thus giving the reader access to her perception of her husband, Miles, guiding the reader to view him within the portrait of their marriage. So, although I prefer to keep the use of adjectives relatively limited in my fiction, I do find them necessary in some places to invoke decisive descriptions in sections where the pacing needs to be slowed down, with intention, as it is in the sections you have pointed to here.

Michael Noll

The novel pretty quickly sets up the triangle between the narrator and her husband and her former boyfriend. Was it difficult to get both of those men into the novel quickly—to basically juxtapose them on the page? I’m curious how much revision was required to make that juxtaposition happen.

Melissa Falcon Field

That triangle was there in my earlier conception of the novel when I knew I wanted to write from the vantage point of a new mother, who feels like everything desirable about her has moved past. So it was my hope that by incorporating Dean, a former lover, juxtaposed with Miles, Claire’s absentee husband, I could better capture that moment in a woman’s life when she feels desperate to reclaim her girlhood-self, just as she realizes her youth is more behind her than it is in front of her, which in this case, forces Claire to decide what and who she must let go of, and what and whom she must hold close. Because the story is ultimately about the ways characters redefine themselves, I sketched out that triangle for the first draft very loosely. That said, it was Dean who I focused on first, as I worked to establish the backstory of the novel.  Later, in second, third and fourth drafts, I worked more specifically to redefine Claire inside her family dynamic and within her marriage, in relation to her husband Miles. And because the two male characters work in polar opposition, I was able to play-out Claire’s surrender, which is both brutal and transformative, and why I felt compelled to capture that tension of a love triangle in What Burns Away.

Michael Noll

I’m always curious how writers handle sex scenes, and so I was interested in the flashback about the narrator’s first time with Dean, her high-school boyfriend. Other than a reference to rough palms, there’s almost no physical description. Instead, the passage focuses on what the sex and intimacy meant to the narrator. Did you play around with other ways of writing this scene? Did you always keep the physical description spare? 

Melissa Falcon Field

What Burns Away, the debut novel by Melissa Falcon Field, has been called "thrilling" and "perceptive" by Tin House executive editor Michelle Wildgren.

What Burns Away, the debut novel by Melissa Falcon Field, has been called “thrilling” and “perceptive” by Tin House executive editor Michelle Wildgren.

Sex that is any good is characteristically over the top, so I have always been more interested in redirecting readers beyond the obvious, toward the more unique secrets of the act, focusing on the minutia of rough palms, a freckle at the curve of a lover’s hip, or the tiniest bead of sweat on the tip of a nose. I did experiment with how to write those scenes, and at first it all read a bit more like pornography, which don’t get me wrong, has its place, but it wasn’t in that moment. So, I stepped back and thought more about the importance of that scene, which for Claire is a memory about desire and intimacy, and what being wanted felt like, so I focused on that, which is, after all what she has been missing and yearning for and what, in the end, gets her into big trouble, leading to later sex scenes with a more physical quality to them—cast into another kind of heat.

Michael Noll

You’ve spent years working as a teacher and writing coach. How does this work inform your writing? Writers often complain that the time demands that teaching places on them takes away from their writing, but given how much teaching you’ve done, I’m curious if you feel differently.

Melissa Falcon Field

Teaching, if you do it well, requires a huge amount of creative energy. But I love it. And, I do believe that for the most part, excluding midterms and final papers, it feeds my writing life. Over the years, teaching the craft and working along with my students, writing and revising and remembering how it is to first read, or conceive of a character, plot, or setting has been a source of great joy, and has always driven me to better hone my work and my ability to talk about narrative. Selfishly, I gain as much from the fresh perspectives of my students, as I give them back. It’s a wonderful kind of relationship, and one of the most important roles I play. And, I should also say that I would never have written a word without those who taught me, and the idea of being that person for someone else motivates me to read and write harder for my students, and to continue to learn more to be the best version of reader, writer and teacher for my students, as we all do the hard work together.

May 2015

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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An Interview with Ru Freeman

4 May
Ru Freeman's novel On Sal Mal Lane was called, by Cheryl Strayed,

Ru Freeman’s novel On Sal Mal Lane was called, by Cheryl Strayed, “Piercingly intelligent and shatter-your-heart profound.”

Ru Freeman was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and is the author of the novels Disobedient Girl and On Sal Mal Lane. She is also the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Extraordinary Rendition, a collection of the voices of American poets and writers speaking about America’s dis/engagement with Palestine. She has worked in the field of American and international humanitarian assistance and workers’ rights, and her political writing has appeared in English and in translation. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, Guernica, World Literature Today and elsewhere. She is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review and a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Freeman won the 2014 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. She calls both Sri Lanka and America home.

To read an exercise on using an omniscient narrator and an excerpt from Freeman’s novel, On Sal Mal Lane, click here.

In this interview, Freeman discusses the challenges of explaining historical context in a novel and creating an omniscient narrator and the politics of Sri Lanka and On Sal Mal Lane.

Michael Noll

On Sal Mal Lane begins with a prologue that functions very much like the infamous prologue to Star Wars. It sets up the politics, geography, and history of the place—and also indicates that, in the story’s beginning at least, the major conflict is some miles away from the main characters. What was your approach to this prologue? Do you think it would have been written the same if you could assume that your readers knew a lot about Sri Lanka and its civil war?

Ru Freeman

I like the way you use that to discuss the book. The prologue in this form was added after I had written the first draft. The original prologue, several pages longer, focused mainly on the characters, and all of it eventually got whittled down to that last paragraph. When I finished writing the book, I felt that there was a sense of longer-term history that couldn’t be contained within the main text of the book without burdening it with those kinds of explanatory treatises on history that can kill momentum. It was necessary that people understood that there was this regional and international context, this history of colonization and brutality, but also that, in the end, none of those things were relevant to the daily lives of ordinary people like those who lived on Sal Mal Lane. As a way of tracing immediate history to a pivotal moment, I included the murder of Alfred Duraiappah and the call to war by Prabhakaran. Whether people knew this history or not, setting it down with those few brushstrokes helped to establish the voice of the narrator who is, to continue with your image, a Yoda like character who knew all that came before and all that was to come to pass and could maintain both warmth and distance from every composite part of the story—the human and the inanimate.

Michael Noll

The prologue also has this remarkable pair of sentences:

“And who, you might ask, am I? I am nothing more than the air that passes through these homes, lingering in the verandas where husbands and wives revisited their days and examined their prospects in comparison to those of their neighbors.”

In essence, you have created an omniscient narrator and then embodied it in something of the novel’s world. Was this a conscious decision—in response, perhaps, to readers or yourself wondering who was speaking? Or did these sentences arise spontaneously in an early draft?

Ru Freeman

Ru Freeman's novel On Sal Mal Lane

Ru Freeman’s novel On Sal Mal Lane “soars [with] its sensory beauty, language and humor,” according to a New York Times review.

It was an asking of myself as I tried to wrap my head around this voice that had come into being while writing the earlier version of the prologue, and the novel itself. It occurred to me that the narrator here was someone (or in this case perhaps something, the road), who was intimately familiar with the this place, with compassion for everyone, but a particularly keen fondness for two of the characters, Mr. Niles, and Nihil. In the scheme of things there is no one main character here, but the ties that bind these two are elevated above all the other bonds that form—and are broken— between the people of Sal Mal Lane. Why this voice lingered over those two characters got me thinking about the entity to whom the voice belonged. So, it was spontaneous, in one sense, but also deliberate.

Michael Noll

Each chapter gets a title. Obviously this is something that some books do and some don’t. What made you choose to title them?

Ru Freeman

In my first novel, I alternated the story between Biso (an older woman leaving an abusive husband, taking her three children with her on a journey that lasts just about 36 hours, all related in the first person), and Latha (a little girl who comes to live in a house as a companion to a girl her own age who lives there, and whose story covers about three decades and is told in the third person). When I began this book, I imagined that I’d write it by alternating the voices of the children, staying close to each in turn, sort of like what Barbara Kingsolver did with Poisonwood Bible. I must have written about a third of the book when I began to feel oppressed by this framework. I abandoned it as a strict guideline and began to simply write the story, though, as you can perhaps tell, I do concentrate on one or the other of the children as I go along, at least in certain parts. I decided to break the book up by year into sections, and then title the chapters. I enjoyed coming up with those titles. It’s not something people do too often, as you point out, but it is a lot of fun and if I’m having fun then the writing tends to be better than when I’m straining.

Michael Noll

At the risk of veering into politics, I was reading this novel when Sri Lanka held its presidential election in January, and so I couldn’t help holding the two events (the events of the novel and the election) side by side. In the novel, animosity is rising between Tamils and Sinhalese. Now, the war is over, and the minority groups (including the Tamils) who suffered during it have managed to vote out the president who claimed credit for ending the war. Do you imagine Sal Mal Lane today? Do the current events cause you to think about the years of the novel in a different light or way?

Ru Freeman

Freeman's website contains what is, perhaps, the most comprehensive list in existence of Sri Lankan writers.

Freeman’s website contains what is, perhaps, the most comprehensive list in existence of Sri Lankan writers.

There is never a veering into, I think. We are always situated quite firmly and centrally in the middle of politics. As far as the election goes, while it is true that many ordinary citizens came together to vote out the former president, there were machinations that went beyond Sri Lanka, including the United States, to bring the current one into power. When I hear the rhetoric from the new leadership, I don’t feel optimistic; the alignment of the new president is with the United National Party, which in its time of power reigned over the massacre of more than 60,000 youth. The language used is old, it panders to American interests, and it is, frankly, disorderly. That combination can be deadly in a country like Sri Lanka, with a highly educated, enfranchised, and engaged civil populace.

Be that as it may, the Sal Mal Lanes of my country never disappeared. They went on through another quarter century of war, they mended fences, came apart, celebrated and mourned. There was a weight felt by everybody as they did these things, that was only lifted in May 2009, when the war officially ended, when the walls and barricades and checkpoints were dismantled, and the soldiers went to work on reconstruction and other support work. Devi, therefore, was a symbol to me of a fragile beauty that underlined all life in Sri Lanka, as well as a stand-on for the country itself. How people dealt with her presence and absence was and is similar to how they dealt with what happened during those decades of war.

May 2015

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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An Interview with Stefanie Freele

30 Apr
Stefanie Freele

Stefanie Freele “recasts suburban ennui as existential terror,” according to J. Robert Lenon. Her latest story appeared in Tahoma Literary Review.

Stefanie Freele is the author of two short story collections: Surrounded by Water and Feeding Strays. Her story “While Surrounded by Water” won the Glimmer Train Fiction Award and “Us Hungarians received second place in the Glimmer Train Family Matters Contest. Stefanie’s short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Witness, Western Humanities Review, Sou’wester, Quarterly West, The Florida Review, Night Train, American Literary Review and Edge. Her work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

To read an exercise on writing descriptive passages and Freele’s story, “Davenports and Ottomans,” click here.

Michael Noll

I’m interested in the story’s approach to close description. The first paragraph focuses on Maribel’s shoes and purse and then zooms in on her tights, particularly on the crotch. The language seems meant to make the reader feel claustrophobic (and from your blog post for Tahoma Literary Review, I know that feeling is intentional). I’m curious in the last sentence of that paragraph:

She hates these ill-fitting tights, the crinkly dress, the stiff polished shoes, and her mother for making her wear all of this nonsense. 

It’s a line that seems to sum up the details that we just read. This is a strategy that I actually teach in writing classes: present details and them sum them up by telling the reader what they mean. Did you wrote this sentence with any purpose in mind or were you were simply following the rhythm of the prose?

Stefanie Freele

Typically I don’t intentionally tell the reader what I’ve meant, because I assume they’ve caught what I mean, but in this case I think you are partially right: I was following the rhythm of the prose. Also, I think having this list emphasizes that for Mirabel, she is counting and focusing on her discomforts. While another child might be proud of this attire and show it off to the aunties, Mirabel is physically sensitive – pride and appearances aren’t her vices.

Michael Noll

In this story, the dialogue is italicized and not broken out into separate paragraphs. There are no quotation marks. This is a technical question that comes up a lot in drafts and in writing classes. Did you format it this way to avoid slowing down the prose? Were you trying to embed the dialogue within the voice, rather than getting caught up in prolonged scenes?

Stefanie Freele

Both. I very much enjoy prose that doesn’t break dialogue into paragraphs by quotes. I find it a distracting break from the story and I often jut out of the dream to inquire, who is talking now? I realize that some people abhor italic dialogue, but I may unapologetically continue writing this way.

Michael Noll

The narrator is listening to the grown-ups in the room and noticing them “using adult words like Naugahyde and paisley,” This is a recurring idea in the story, the distinctions marked by particular words and phrases: “something special” and “smile and shape up” and “smirk.” This seems like a really useful way to clue readers in to the narrator’s age and relationships with the other people in the house. Is it something you fell into—one of those happy accidents in writing—or was it an effect you were intentionally trying to achieve?

Stefanie Freele

Let us go with the happy accident theory. I think I am watcher, like all writers I suppose, and a collector of the phrases people say. There can be a ton of dialogue between people, but there are those certain words that will stand out and directly indicate something about the character. I try not to waste any words that don’t have to do with the revealing the character, the story or some sort of underlying message.

Michael Noll

I guess this story would be classified as “flash fiction,” both because of its length but also because it takes place in an instant. Was it always confined to this particular moment in time? Or, was it carved out of a longer piece of writing?

Stefanie Freele

Ray Vukcevich's story

Ray Vukcevich’s story “The Sweater” is included in his collection Meet Me in the Moon Room from Small Beer Press.

It isn’t yet carved out of a longer piece of writing. I was exploring the idea of anxiety in children and what adults might miss or can’t see. I was also recalling certain memories (will never forget the awful tights) and that sensation that one feels like they might burst or rip apart due to discomfort from all angles.  To the other characters in the story, they have no idea what is going on with Mirabel, with that explosive distress. She has made some connections and decisions including that stealing what is forbidden is acceptable. So much is happening to her in a few minutes, in one room, in one scene, and nobody one knows. I love the idea of exploring what is happening to someone in an iota of time. Ray Vukcevich did this in his story “The Sweater” where the entire story is told while a character is trying on a sweater. A must read.

April 2015

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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An Interview with Sora Kim-Russell

24 Apr
Sora Kim-Russell lives in Seoul, where she writes and works as a teacher and translator.

Sora Kim-Russell lives in Seoul, and her translations of the Korean writer Bae Suah are among the first of that form-breaking writer’s work to appear in English.

Sora Kim-Russell is a literary translator based in Seoul. Her translations include Shin Kyung-sook’s I’ll Be Right There and Gong Ji-young’s Our Happy Time, as well as Bae Suah’s Highway with Green Apples and Nowhere to Be Found. Her translation of Hwang Sok-yong’s Princess Bari will be available on April 27, 2015 through Periscope (UK).

To read an exercise on characterizing an entire society and Bae Suah’s novella, Nowhere to Be Found, and also an interview with Bae, click here.

Michael Noll

The style of the language in Nowhere to Be Found is plain and direct. There are moments of metaphor and some lovely writing, of course, but from the first page, the narrator’s voice is very matter-of-fact. I’m not a translator myself, but I can imagine the difficulties of trying to find a match in English for the tone of the original prose. Did you have a strategy for this? Did you play around with different approaches until you found one that was right?

Sora Kim-Russell

I did play around with the narrator’s voice, especially in the opening pages. It was important to me to capture the narrator’s tone and attitude right from the get-go. Korean-to-English translation has an innate tendency to veer abstract and indirect, so I really tried to push against that and keep the language clear and direct. That way, when the story later takes its flights of fancy, those parts would have room to shine. As for capturing tone and voice, I think my approach is a combination of text analysis and method acting. In terms of text analysis, I look for rhetorical patterns—words or images or emotions that reappear, particular sentence styles and shifts in sentence structure, anything at all that gets repeated—in order to pin down how the narrator is telling her story. As for the “method acting” part, I thought about my own experiences in my twenties and tapped into those memories of dead-end jobs, dead-end relationships, fear of the future, and so on, in order to channel those emotions into my translation. By that, I don’t mean that I wrote myself into the character—it was more like orienting myself emotionally onto the narrator and mapping where our choice of words and phrasings aligned and diverged.

Michael Noll

I’m curious about challenges you had as a translator in finding English equivalents for basic aspects of the Korean setting. There aren’t very many well-known Korean writers in America and certainly not many who are being translated. As a result, I found myself realizing as I read how little I know about Korea, especially as it was during the 80s. In some ways, the narrator seems like any young, single person. In other ways, though, the effect that poverty and the cultural expectations for single women feels quite different from what an American might experience. Does the prose in Korean take for granted certain things that had to be illustrated or explained a bit for an American audience?

Sora Kim-Russell

There were a few “taken for granted” parts, though to be fair, at least one of those references would be just as tricky for young Korean readers today—namely, the “officer-in-training” system that Cheolsu was in. I got really stuck on how to translate Cheolsu’s rank (silseupsodaejang). I guess it’s very roughly analogous to the ROTC system in the US, with the critical difference being that most Korean men don’t choose to go to the military. In South Korea, all able-bodied men have to undergo two years of military service, usually right in the middle of their college years. Cheolsu’s situation is different because he goes into the service after college, his stint is very short, and he starts at a higher rank than other men. He has it easy, in other words. The writer explained to me that, back in the ‘80s when the novella takes place, the officer-in-training system offered a loophole intended to benefit men from elite families, but as the man on the phone (towards the ends of the book) explains, some lower-class men were able to take advantage of it if they could pass the exam. So that was a very specific historical detail that is not explained in the original but which sheds light on who this Cheolsu guy is. I opted to add in a brief explanation, because there was no way to pack all that context into a single word translation.

Also, more broadly, the whole system of military conscription and the idea of women providing support and encouragement (from food, visits, and letters to perhaps more than that) to men undergoing military service is a ubiquitous part of modern Korean culture. If you know that, then it might be easier to understand why the female protagonist resists it. It also helps with understanding South Korea in general, though I would argue that this notion of women feeling pressured to provide “comfort” to men in the military is close to universal and no doubt found in every patriarchal, militarized culture around the world.

Another “taken for granted” part worth pointing out is the title itself. The original title was “Cheolsu,” but it didn’t work in translation because Cheolsu is an extremely common male name in Korea, comparable to “John.” In English, the name comes across as exotic and foreign, which is exactly the opposite of its intended effect in the original, so we opted to change the title in order to convey that sense of ordinariness and anonymity in a different way.

Michael Noll

How much freedom did you take in structuring sentences? For instance, a street in Uijeongbu is described this way: “A perfectly gray street. An old and dirty street.” Were the original lines fragments as well, or is that a construction you used in order to achieve a particular effect?

Sora Kim-Russell

I actually stuck very close to the author’s original sentence structures. There’s something jarring about her sentences in Korean, especially the shifts from long, antithetical sentences where she takes a phrase and turns it back and forth before moving on, to abrupt fragments where the speaker seems to have run out of breath. If I changed anything, it was because it didn’t work grammatically in English, but wherever possible I followed the author’s lead. There were a few places where I had copy editors suggest changes, either deleting a fragment or changing a word choice that seemed out of place, but I stuck to my guns and insisted on keeping them, or looked for ways to smooth them out just enough to allow them to fold into the text but still assert their presence. Whenever there was any doubt, I checked with the writer, and she gave me her opinion on what she thought could be changed or deleted without hurting the text, and which things needed to stay in place. She likes to jar her readers, but the challenge was to find the right words in English that jar without completely unseating the reader.

April 2015

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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An Interview with Bae Suah

23 Apr
Bae Suah is a Korean writer living in Germany whose books set in South Korea are finally being translated for English-language audiences.

Bae Suah is a Korean writer living in Germany whose books set in South Korea are finally being translated for English-language audiences.

Bae Suah was born in Seoul and has published seven books in Korean, three of which have been translated into English: the novellas Highway with Green Apples, Time in Gray, and, most recently, Nowhere to Be Found. She currently lives in Berlin and translates German literature into Korean, including Martin Walser’s Angstblute and two works by W. G. Sebald. She is currently translating the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet.

To read an exercise on characterizing an entire society and Bae’s novella, Nowhere to Be Found, click here. The following interview was translated by Sora Kim-Russell.

Michael Noll

The narrator in this novella—as well the narrator in your story “Highway with Green Apples”—seems to be struggling with what it means to be a young, single woman in a place where the expectation of marriage is quite strong. Given that expectation, I was sometimes surprised at how “liberated” she sometimes sounded. For instance, in a passage about what makes a relationship special, she casually mentions watching porn. Even in the present American culture of TV shows with strong, sexually independent female characters like Girls and Broad City, this reference to porn still took me by surprise. Is it something that would have surprised Korean readers in 1998 when it was first published?

Bae Suah

Well, in that particular passage, the viewer of porn isn’t specified as either male or female, but I do think women watch porn. Of course, men probably watch it for different reasons… In this case, some readers may wonder why the act of watching porn in particular would remind a person (male or female) of someone. It’s not about porn, per se, but about the way a certain someone can suddenly come to mind when you’re busy doing something. I think most of the Korean readers of this novella have been young women, and they didn’t seem put off by this passage. Or at least, I don’t think they were. I don’t think they were surprised by it either.

Michael Noll

Near the end of the novella, there’s a jump in time. You write:

“That year was my beginning and my end. It was one year of my life that was neither particularly unhappy nor particularly happy. It wasn’t so different from 1978, and it wasn’t any more or less memorable in comparison to 1998. The things that happened in 1988 had also happened in 1978 and would happen again in 1998.”

The passage continues on that way. It’s a bleak sense of an absence of logic and progress that you end up calling “third person random.” It’s something that appears in “Highway with Green Apples” as well, a sense of disorientation and disconnectedness, not just between the narrator and her life but among almost all aspects of life. There’s a kind of cruel senselessness at work. It makes me wonder at the reception of these stories in Korea when they were first written. Did readers say, “Oh yeah! This is how it is.” Or did they bristle at the portrayal of their world and the people in it?

Bae Suah

As with the first question, I think that young female readers responded positively to this novella. I guess you could say that what I portrayed in this novella is a kind of volcano inside women’s hearts—volcanoes that threaten to, but never actually, erupt. However, older readers and male readers reacted differently. Male readers bristled at this book, and specifically said that they felt put off by the narrator. The female protagonist is not very nice to the male protagonist; she throws his food in a latrine just to dramatically demonstrate how she is feeling (one younger male reader told me that chicken was highly prized in the army back in the ‘80s); and she has a brusque way of speaking (in fact, she tends to be curt, unfriendly, and rude with others). In other words, she’s the opposite of what’s expected of a woman in Korean society, and that made older readers and male readers uncomfortable. Plus, the novella doesn’t take a delicate approach to emotion and makes no attempt to appeal to universal sentiments. It tosses out unfamiliar and idiosyncratic words and expressions without pampering the reader, and it offers no cause-and-effect explanation in a way that could be understood by anyone and everyone, and I think that is why Korean (male) critics weren’t too happy with this book.

Michael Noll

The novella contains a Kafka-esque moment when the narrator visits Kim Cheolsu at the army base. She ends up running around, being misinformed about his whereabouts, being told that there is more than one person by that name. Was it difficult to find scenes or actions that would convey that sense of “third person random” that is subtly present in so much of the novella?

Bae Suah

The events in the story are all based in reality: the fear a young woman feels as she’s on her way to visit a boyfriend in the army, the anxiety of an uncertain future, the terror of love, and so on. That fear and anxiety is not something that can be overcome simply by escaping poverty. As soon as one insecurity dissipates, another drops before us like a curtain. The young woman on her way to meet her boyfriend doesn’t know this yet, but the older woman narrating the story does. She’s no longer troubled by the pain and uneasiness that follows love (i.e. relationships with men), and she doesn’t regard it as the source of her misfortune. She accepts this anxiety as part and parcel of life and love. While writing this novella, I recalled how I felt back in my twenties, so it really wasn’t that difficult to follow the narrator’s emotional trajectory.

April 2015

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

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