Interview with Peter Rock, author of The Night Swimmers

It’s been lovely following Peter Rock’s work, from his atmospheric and suspenseful debut novel This Is The Place  (based in Utah, where he was born), to his more recent My Abandonment, a novel about survivalists and a unique father-daughter relationship that was made into the award-winning movie Leave No Trace (2018). Now his new novel, The Night Swimmers, is out and is about the relationship between a young college graduate and his swimming partner, Mrs. Abel. It traces their relationship through time, and explores the mystery of her disappearance as well as the more abiding mystery of how our older selves connect back to who we were decades before. 

Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Your earlier work was eerier and spoke to human disconnection as well as to a machine-like quality of human life. How did your work evolve into the richly nuanced, relationship-focused writing that we see in your most recent novel?

Peter Rock

I’m not sure I’m the best person to answer regarding how my writing has progressed, as it’s a pretty unconscious process. But there are at least two thoughts that come immediately to mind:

First, I realized after publishing a couple of books that my characters seemed unable to deal with interpersonal conflict or complication.  Tension and drama built up to a certain point, and then there were a lot of slamming doors, people leaping into pickup trucks and driving to other states; once they settled in a new situation, new drama would ensue, and a similar flight would result. It was pretty unsatisfying and, unsurprisingly, my personal life was eerily similar; I had a talent for beginning things, and a talent for bailing at the earliest sign of trouble.  I just didn’t know, in my fiction or in my life, what people said to each other, past a certain point.  I also had no handle on subtlety, no perspective whatsoever.  Probably the biggest thing that allowed this change in my writing was being married.

Second, I’ve never been a very autobiographical writer, or I’ve always failed when trying to write a character or narrator who is close to me in terms of identity and life experience. The work of building up a character and convincing myself of that person works to convince the reader, but that also comes with built-in limitations. I know more than what I’m showing about these people, but compared to the incredible amount of detritus I know about my own life, it’s relatively easy to manage.  When writing closer to my life, I have a harder time deciding what is important, and I also don’t have to do that work to convince myself, so the writing can fail to communicate. With The Night Swimmers I was happier with writing closer to my life, and I think this was because I’ve gotten so old that the person I’m describing and trying to inhabit is a mysterious other to me, and also, I’ve, through mistakes and practice, become a much more dexterous and intuitive editor. (Which sounds less than humble, but we need to take into account the shambles where I started!) Last thought: of course, all of my books come out of me, and in retrospect I can see what I was working through, personally, but the material of the narratives is further from my actual life. It’s probable, I suspect, that these unconscious revelations are more revelatory.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar

How do you construe writing about intimate relationships in relation to writing about darkness and uncanny themes? There is something very original about the juxtaposition.

Peter Rock

It is difficult for me to convey how I feel about living in this world by writing in a purely realistic way, and this is perhaps especially so with regard to intimate relationships. I do believe there are invisible forces around us, and the private languages and unspoken understandings we possess in intimacy bring this out, make a secret shared, make everything vibrate more specifically. 

Perhaps a larger backdrop for this question is simply the relationship between the visible and the invisible, or what we understand as realistic fiction and that storytelling that bends or questions this familiar, agreed-upon world.

My interest in storytelling, I believe, rose out of my father reading to me before I fell asleep. And that reading was The Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien, and most central was Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy. So that’s where and how I started, and what set my sensibility and momentum. I continue to love those books, and devour folktales, and fairy tales; one of my favorite writers is Angela Carter, whose prose itself ripples and bends our world. Writers like Aimee Bender and Karen Russell work a great vein that exists between these worlds and a more quotidian one, and that interests me. If there’s a kind of spectrum, perhaps I come in somewhere on this other side, where in my work I’m often trying to start with a more familiar, realistic world and then reveal it as otherwise, slowly, without departing entirely from that realistic world.  

Again, I may not be the best one to ask. Yet this digression does make me recall first encountering what we termed “magical realism” back in college, and being completely undone. I still really love Garcia-Marquez and especially [Julio] Cortázar ; for me, there are stretches of Garcia-Marquez, though, where I lose track of a concrete world, where the tension flags into “can he outdo that last fantastic occurrence?” rather than “what’s at stake for these people?”  Again, I may not be the best one to ask. Yet this digression does make me recall first encountering what we termed “magical realism” back in college, and being completely undone. I still really love Garcia-Marquez and especially Cortázar; for me, there are stretches of Garcia-Marquez, though, where I lose track of a concrete world, where the tension flags into “can he outdo that last fantastic occurrence?” rather than “what’s at stake for these people?”  

Cortázar, on the other hand, fits closer to my sensibility—here the maintenance of that original world was always a priority.  This is also part of [Haruki] Murakami’s appeal for me, in that however much underground voyaging is happening and how many tiny people are appearing, there’s still all that spaghetti cooking and beer drinking, ironing and lawn mowing.  One dimension doesn’t supplant the other.

I’m drifting away from your question, I fear. But I want to also say that I have rarely been drawn to work where the fantastic can be understood purely psychologically, or as the delusion of one character, or as some kind of metaphor or thematic amplification. Stubbornly, I don’t really get metaphors or themes, and find such thinking when writing would only take me out of the story; I just want these seemingly fantastic events to actually happen, to be as real as the real and get all mixed up. Again, this is not so much a literary question, or one of technique, it’s one of personal sensibility, an attempt to capture how I feel as myself living in this world.

Another attempt to answer: when I teach the undergraduates, I have many students who are primarily interested in genre—science-fiction or horror or different kinds of speculation—and are quite anxious that this won’t “count,” or that it is not sufficiently “literary” and that I’ll punish them.  What I tell them (simplifying and generalizing, as teachers do) is that literary fiction is celebrated for its characterization, the dimensions of the human it can conjure, but (to me) the plots and storytelling can be pretty boring and predictable; much genre fiction is noted for the ingenuity and unpredictability of its plots and storytelling, but the characters are often two-dimensional and clearly at the service of these plots or, ultimately, the author. So why, I ask them and myself, can’t we have richly complicated characters in narratives we haven’t yet seen, that startle and delight us?

Chaya Bhuvaneswar

How do you see your teaching fitting into your life as a novelist and story writer?

Peter Rock

Teaching is how I make a living, and how I share my mistakes. Now that I’ve been doing it for over twenty years, I spend a lot of time wondering whether I am helping anyone at all, or what exactly can be taught, and for what purpose. I also know it’s hard on my own writing practice in many ways, but the benefits of teaching really should be thought of in terms of the benefit to the student. And about that I can surmise, but it would be a little ridiculous to make declarations.  

You’re catching me at an interesting moment in terms of teaching, as I’m taking two years away from it and reconsidering what I’ve been doing, and why I do it. I’ve also been thinking of my former teachers; I never liked the idea of “mentors,” as that seemed a little Svengali-like, and I always considered myself as too much of a desperado to have a mentor. And I’ve never really wanted students who desired a mentor, either. A few years back the poet Carl Phillips came to give a reading at Reed, where I teach, and he said, “I never want to put my fingerprints on a student, I never want anyone to say, about someone who’s been in my class, ‘oh, of course, well, she studied with Carl Phillips.’” I feel that way.  I think the best I can do is give my undivided attention and respect to what someone is doing, to sit with it, to give them new things to read, and to challenge them to take responsibility for what their work will become.  

I find great pleasure in encouraging people.

But your question is more about how teaching fits into my life as someone who’s trying to write. It’s kind of crippling, I think. On the one hand, and it’s a gigantic thing, having a tenured teaching job allows me the latitude to write what I want to write, regardless of commercial outcome or outright failure. But it’s also made me self-conscious and pretty much taken away the pleasure in writing short stories from me; I talk about them too much, I even read them wondering what I’ll say about them, whether I’ll teach them. For me to write well, I have to have that critical, authoritative, reflective intelligence as absent as possible. I need to be confused. To believe that I know what I’m doing, that I’m in control, that I’m some kind of authority—that is poison. And yet to teach, one is continually in the position of providing answers and generalizations, of being that authority  It’s dangerous. When I started out teaching I think I was clearer and had more answers; now I’ve tried hard to be honest about how bewildering I find it.  That vulnerability is probably just confounding to the students, but it’s honest.

Back when I was a ranch hand or security guard or medical trials subject or temp, my relationship to writing was clearer, but I also hurt my body, often, had no health insurance, etc.  A part of teaching, I think, is also to be honest about how writing is not a wise professional choice; this is one reason I feel more comfortable teaching undergraduates, to be honest. I admire people like yourself who’ve been able to write while having a job that is far from the snake oil of talking about writing. Perhaps it’s simply the idea of being a “writer” that feels problematic to me. It’s not a destiny or identity or occupation. And the work we’re asked to do here on the web is often about presuming that.  

I’m a person who sometimes likes to write; I wish my writing could and would speak for itself!  Maybe “author” is better?  It feels more past tense, like, “this person once wrote something.” But this pretentious idea of being a writer, I wish I never possessed it, wish I could totally shake it.

To reflect on one’s practice probably only reifies this problem.  That said, a few thoughts: I write by hand, and I try to write all morning (but I have children, and a dog, and often a job), and then there’s often a lot of typing to do, later in the day.  I don’t let machines into my workspace. With The Night Swimmers I took it a little further and spent a few years gathering notes (this is typical) and typing them in and rearranging them, but once I started writing I decided not to type it until I got to the end. This made me kind of paranoid about house fires. I started photographing the pages, at the end of the day, just in case; and then once I did get to the end I did nothing but float in the isolation tank and type for several weeks, hoping this would cause the whole thing to settle and transmute in me somehow.  

Peter Rock is the author of the novels The Night Swimmers, SPELLS, Klickitat, The Shelter Cycle, My Abandonment, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place, as well as a story collection, The Unsettling. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Alex Award and others, he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College.

Mount of the Dead Men, by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Mount of the Dead Men

Sculptor left your stone eyes blank. But you were busy looking someplace else.

No dancing girl, Mohenjo Daro, terra cotta, Indian Jazz Baby, Twenties flapper contraband for bobbed hair alone.

You’re one of us, all the real girls.

Three steps you were supposed to stay behind but you two-stepped, grape-vined, twined closer with a lover’s hand. Moved him out of the way, so you could see words he was reading.

Half out of his mind with grief once you were gone, out of sight, out of mind, he listened to you then, instead of expecting you to look at him.

In fact, it was his eyes that went blank then, listening for words you had to say that were his words, not finding them,

not finding you. No Eurydice, no Beatrice, no Muse, no Magic Bus.

You only came up to here, on him, but had it up to here with him.

And had your way. And didn’t get your way.

As one of us, all the real girls. An Amrita, Arundhati, Mira, Deepa, Mahesweta Devi.

You were a gritty brown bottom exhibiting yourself, telling stories of what the sculptor did. Leaving your eyes that way, so you couldn’t see.

Interview with Danielle Trussoni, author of ANGELOLOGY and THE ANCESTOR

Note: this interview first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review.

Interview with Danielle Trussoni on The Ancestor: A Novel

By Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Danielle Trussoni is a New York Times bestselling author of the Angelology series, as well as of two acclaimed memoirs, Falling Through the Earth, about her relationship with her Vietnam War veteran father, and The Fortress, about her first marriage and time in Bulgaria. Her most recent book, The Ancestor, is both a delightful, gripping gothic horror read, as well as a thoughtful and provocative examination of women, families, evolution, power, genetics, inheritance. Danielle also writes screenplay adaptations and runs a Writer’s Podcast. She has taught at the Hudson Valley Writers Workshop and is a member of the Salve Regina MFA Program faculty in Newport. 

I spoke with her before the release of The Ancestor, which received a glowing review in the New York Times, which called it “chilling and inventive.”

Chaya Bhuvaneswar (CB): I’ve noticed that your new novel The Ancestor, which I thoroughly enjoyed and would take on any train or plane ride along with a blanket and a cup of hot chocolate, is receiving praise as a “gothic” and “horror” novel, including in Publishers Weekly and on many “horror novel” lists. In thinking about how other literary fiction writers have played with and refashioned “genre” (I’m thinking of Victor LaValle and Justin Cronin, for example), I wonder: what does ‘genre’ mean for you and has it been a useful way to categorize your work?

Danielle Trussoni (DT): I can say that I have never written a genre book in my life and that I would not categorize my work here as pop fiction/commercial fiction either. My first book, Falling Through the Earth, a memoir that has been called literary and was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of their Best Ten Books of the year, is an important story that is also a portrait of real people. Call it literary memoir if you like, but for me, it is the story I needed to tell in the form that could hold such a story. Angelology, my first novel, was written with the same attention to language as my first book but was put into a genre category— supernatural thriller. Because it was a bestseller, it was called commercial. Since then, I have written another literary memoir and another novel that involves elements of suspense and mystery.

So, to answer your question, my training at Iowa was in the training of writing great fiction, which applies to everything I do. I am always striving to push the limits of categories, and if people have a hard time classifying me, I see that as a very good thing! As far as I’m concerned: good writing is good writing, wherever you shelve it.

CB:  About the book itself— there are interesting feminist and woman as monster themes, My Favorite Monster, the graphic novel being another favorite example— and I wondered if you had intentionally set out to explore these as well as reference the history of gothic and horror novels by women.

DT: The Ancestor is firmly in the tradition of Mary Shelley and the Brontes (and contemporary writers like Sarah Perry or Jess Kidd), all of whom use the gothic elements of the supernatural or historical hauntings to create stories. I think of Frankenstein as the ultimate feminist novel, the horror of what happens when a man removes a woman from the creation of human life. I see this as a metaphor about the world we live in, in which women are kept from power, sidelined from authority, and marginalized in a thousand small ways. It creates a monstrous society.

CB: I’ve listened to and been thrilled by your writing advice for literary fiction and nonfiction writers on the podcast you run that readers and emerging writers can access here: writerlypodcast.com. Do you have advice you might condense here for writers who, reading The Ancestor, get inspired? 

DT: My advice to all writers is to spend the time you need learning to write a great story. Read widely and write every day. Don’t limit yourself to a certain kind of writing, and write what inspires you. Understand craft, and think deeply about what it means to be a storyteller. One of my favorite endeavors as a writer is exploring new ways to tell a story. Experimenting with different traditions of storytelling is deeply rewarding, and I find that readers respond to innovative and fresh takes on literary forms that have moved them in the past. 

The technology we have at our disposal now allows us to experiment even further with new forms. For example, in editing The Ancestor with my editor at Morrow, I lost about 100 pages of material, much of it pertaining to the scientific research. I loved that part of the story and felt that it would be a great story in its own right. And so I wrote a 10-part audio drama podcast, partnered with a great director, cast actors, and hired a sound designer. The result is an incredible audio experience of narrative, Crypto-Z, which you can sample here:

https://www.danielletrussoni.com/crypto-z/

CB: What’s next for you? 

DT: I have been working on a new series and on adapting my work as a television series. I’m also going to be publishing another piece of the Angelology series, as I have readers who are waiting for more. I have a weekly newsletter that gives writing advice and personal stories from my life to inspire writers and readers, so if you’d like to know more about what I’m doing, please join it by sending me a note at danielle@danielletrussoni.com

Interview with Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of STARLING DAYS

Ed. note: This interview appeared originally in BOMB magazine.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You (2017)—winner of The Authors’ Club First Novel Award, a Betty Trask Award, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and an NPR 2017 Great Read. Critics have praised “Buchanan’s versatility as a writer in her ability to both maintain distance from and be intimate with her characters” (LARB, Ilana Masad) along with the elegance and visceral power of her writing. In her new novel, Starling Days (Abrams), she takes on the story of a young couple, Mina and Oscar, as they cope with the aftermath of Mina’s suicide attempt. 

I was drawn to the book not only because, as a psychiatrist as well as a writer, I celebrate rich and questing depictions of depression and other conditions, but because this deft story engages queer desire and identity, family obligation, and idealization versus acceptance in a marriage. I also loved the moral ambiguity and compassion of this book, that deepens the characters and makes the story so engrossing and credible. Finally, the book presents such a fresh take on the “Americans abroad” and “expatriate” narrative, in terms of the sense of dislocation and vulnerability, familiar themes, but in the tech age. In an interview conducted in April 2020 via email, Buchanan talked generously and insightfully about craft, the role of classical myth and tragedy in her work, the influence of nonfiction, and what she has planned next.

--Chaya Bhuvaneswar  

Chaya BhuvaneswarHow did you balance honesty and immediacy with an awareness that whatever you wrote was going to "represent" suicidality in some way, especially against the backdrop of the stigma that exists?

Rowan Hisayo BuchananOne of the things that was important to me is that Mina is a specific person—with her own flaws and strengths. I'm not interested in everywoman. None of us are everywoman or can represent an entire group of people. In particular, I didn't want to write a poster-girl for mental illness for two reasons. 

A. It's not artistically that interesting to me.

B. I don't think mentally ill people can be reduced to a dichotomy between the hopeless and some Starbucks-perfect corporatized version who perform perfectly despite the sickness. I wanted to write a person who was sick but was also human and as such was sometimes brave and selfless and other times consumed by their own brain.

I tried to write her as a woman responding to her own particular circumstances. As a classicist, she tries to map her feelings onto nymphs, dead princesses, and the women of myth. As a modern woman, she falls down holes of Internet research and Googles her symptoms on WebMD. The journey she takes with her husband Oscar leads her to meet a woman for whom she develops feelings. I hoped that perhaps some readers might be able to relate to Mina's experience but I never tried to portray the Platonic version of depression.

However, I was aware that some people reading this might be in a vulnerable position. So I wrote an author's note addressing those readers who might be considering their own journeys through sickness. I didn't want someone in a fragile state of mind to take some of the cruelest judgments Mina makes about herself to be indictments of their own struggles. I believe fiction should be able to stand for itself without explanation—but I felt too responsible to take that risk here.

Photo of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan by Heike Steinweg.

CBI am struck by the way you found a clear, lovely, dynamic language to represent what can by its nature be a static experience—that of clinical depression. Can you talk about the writing on mental health that has been important or influential for you?

RHBIt is strange to me that depression is so often perceived as being static. In some ways, it might be easier if it were. If the depressed person could just put the whole world on pause while they healed. In some ways, this is the experience that Oscar tries to create for Mina by bringing her on his work trip to London. But unfortunately, this is never the case. Life bites the heels of the depressed person. Mina can feel Oscar becoming fed up. She senses that she is letting her career drift further and further out of her reach. And I hoped to capture that tension.

I think the works of fiction that were most influential to me were simply those that viewed the interior of the mind not as something ghoulish but instead something worth paying careful attention to. To name a few Kokoro by Natsume Soseki which is about love, friendship, and ultimately suicide. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is, I think, unavoidable when writing about intersecting lives, love, attraction to women, and depression. The work of Anita Brookner is not specifically about mental illness but it finds its great drama in the longings and dissatisfaction that occur in the private chambers of her protagonists' minds. 

Although for the novel, I read the articles about suicide that Mina does (and more), the nonfiction that most influenced me was about attitude. When I was young, I stumbled upon the work of the poet and psychiatrist RD Laing. I came on his poetry first and then began to pick my way through The Divided Self. The book focuses on schizophrenia. What struck me immediately, was the way in which he did not present himself as being above his patients. He emphasizes that many people "regarded as sane" are equally or more capable of being irrational or dangerous. And while he views his patients as sick he also sees their potential for insight and wisdom.

This is from the 1964 introduction to the Pelican edition of The Divided Self:

A man who prefers to be dead rather than Red is normal. A man who says he has lost his soul is mad. A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon. A man who says that Negroes are an inferior race may be widely respected. A man who says his whiteness is a form of cancer is certifiable.

Although there have been many advances in pharmacology since Laing's time, our willingness to ignore the sick or treat their thoughts as being without value seems to remain equally true. Perhaps my greatest desire in this book was to treat the story of the internal fight as worthy as a battle epic. 

CBOften as a psychiatrist, I not only treat patients who have suffered from the actions of others--I also treat what legal language calls "perpetrators," people who have raped others, harmed others, terrorized others. Do you feel that duality is relevant to your book?

RHBThank you so much for talking about seeing both sides, because that is especially important to me. As a writer, I’m not very interested in good and evil. They’ve never felt particularly representative of the world. If my characters do something cruel or frightening I want the reader to understand where it is coming from. Most people want to be kind, loyal, responsible and so on. And yet, lovers and family members hurt and abandon each other. For me, writing about trauma and pain is a way of making sense of that. 

People talk about emotional baggage, as if it’s something static that we just lug around. I think of our histories as closer to laboratory chemicals. They may be still and silent for years but the addition of a new chemical can neutralize them or make them explode. Mina is born in New York to a Chinese American family who do not have much money at the time. Her mother dies, possibly by accident, possibly on purpose. She is raised by her grandmother who then dies when she is a teenager. She’s put on medication and grows up to be a classicist fascinated by these ancient myths and legends that were supposed to explain the world.

Meanwhile, Oscar is the mixed-race child of an affair. He grows up trying to impress his British friends and his Japanese American father. He’s trying to be successful and normal. And then he falls in love with this woman who tells him she’s mentally ill but has it under control. All of this has already happened by the time Mina’s mental health medication stops working. And the weight of Mina’s loss smashes against Oscar’s need for everything to be okay. It is the collision of these histories that shapes Starling Days.

CBI will be honest and say that I had very mixed feelings about Phoebe, the hot blogger that Mina ends up falling for, and "escaping" with. I actually liked Oscar so much I felt it was disloyal to him to read those sections too closely! Can you talk about Phoebe?

RHBPhoebe was a particularly challenging character to write because she is seen only via Oscar and Mina. Oscar finds her not particularly interesting or noticeable—if anything he is grateful that she is keeping his wife occupied. Meanwhile, Mina is fascinated. She idealizes this beautiful English woman as somehow being perfectly elegant and put together. (Although I think the reader begins to see cracks in this vision. Phoebe is both less perfect than Mina envisions and more vulnerable.) But even Mina wonders if it’s sickness, obsession, a fascination with Englishness or perhaps love.

As the child of an interracial marriage and as a bisexual woman, I am interested in the way our identities shape the power relationships of even the most intimate interactions. There is a section of the book in which Mina follows Phoebe to her workplace. If Mina were a large man this might seem threatening. In Mina’s case it seems tragic or possibly embarrassing. However, there is another layer. As a person who has experienced queer desire but never been able to act on it, she associates a desire for women with unreciprocated pining. I doubt she would follow a man in the same way.

CBTell me about your writing process. 

RHBMy own process is a slow one. I write the first draft as a way of learning who the characters are and what their story is. I am not an outliner so this time is exciting. I feel as if I am uncovering something new. Then I edit and edit and edit. This can take two or three times as long as that first draft. In this time, everything is up for grabs. For example, the very first draft of this book included sections written from Phoebe’s perspective. I later cut these because I realized that this narrative worked best when seen from the two sides of the marriage. Then, when I have a second draft that I’m happy with, I print it all out and read it through, marking it up as I go. At times, I’ll read sections out loud to myself or to my partner. Then I send it to my first readers, get their thoughts and begin the editing process all over again. 

In terms of advice, I cannot tell anyone how they should write. There is no single correct way. I can say that you should read widely and with an active mind. The width allows you to see what is possible. When you find something you love, it is worth asking yourself why you love it. Is it the structure, the subject matter, the word choices? These become resource banks when you are stuck. Although the majority of what I read falls under that loose title of “literary fiction,” I read poems for language, murder mysteries for structure, and personal nonfiction for the mapping of mental landscapes.

CBHow are you spending quarantine? What are your days like and what are you reading?

RHBI’m mostly trying to keep going with work. I have a little online teaching to do and some longer-term projects that I’m thinking about. I’m reading in bits and pieces—at the moment Tiny Moons by Nina Mingya Powles. It’s about food and identity and language. It also contains some excellent writing about what it is to be mixed race.

I’m also reading Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything. I’ve only just begun though so I can’t say if this is a recommendation or not. But I am very intrigued by the choice she has made never to physically describe her main female character but to describe almost lasciviously her male protagonist’s appearance. 

CBWhat's next for you?

RHBI hope very much to write another novel. It is in those early tender stages so I’m not sure what it might become. I’ve also been working on some short stories (mostly about ghosts!) that should be coming out soon. 

Swallow, a short story by Lindz McLeod

by Lindz McLeod

The first time our son nearly choked to death, we were at a nice—not so nice that it made

me anxious I wasn’t dressed appropriately, but nice enough—restaurant on the Upper East Side. My

husband had ordered a pesto pasta dish and was tucking in with gusto, while Benji picked at his

chicken. Afterwards, I could never remember what I’d ordered, although I must have ordered

something. There was a bottle of house red on the table; our glasses were half-empty, and when

Benji lurched forward, his face shading from crimson into purple, eyes bulging out in a way they

hadn’t since he’d been born and the cord had been wrapped tightly around his little neck, my

husband and I had both leapt to our feet.

The table jolted and the glasses all tipped sideways. One broke—I heard the crack, sharp and

high—while the others fell harmlessly against cutlery. I put both arms around my son’s waist, made

a fist, and heaved upwards. He smelled of fear and shampoo and earwax. The label on the inside of

his shirt collar had come loose, the fabric hanging by a couple of threads. I wanted to bury my face

in his hair and never let go. Instead, I stared into the spreading red stain and heaved again and again

until the offending chunk was finally expelled.

We’d assumed it was a one-off—that everyone, from time to time, bites off a little more than

they can chew—but Benji developed a habit. We’d taken him to doctors, specialists, even a

therapist, but he was still struggling. They said it could be something to do with how he was eating,

or what he was eating, or stress, or hormones, or depression, or any number of fixable or unfixable

things. I’d enforced a soft foods policy for two of the three meals, and had banned him eating

outside with his friends, even in public places, even in his own bedroom. I couldn’t take the risk.

On a Friday night in late June, Benji sat at the kitchen table, head cupped in one hand, sheets of

paper spread everywhere, while my husband stood in front of the open fridge in my line of sight

and, unblinking, drank straight from the carton. Marriage makes monsters of us all.

“What’s the report about, bud?” My son pushed a dog-eared textbook towards me. He’d

circled several pictures. I read the footnotes, squinting, because my glasses were upstairs in the

bedroom. “Gargoyles?”

“Your mother’s a gargoyle.” Henry grinned, a thin milk moustache on his upper lip. Once

upon a time, he’d have been teasing; the sting would have been light. No more than a needle prick.

One and done. These days his words stung like paper cuts. Lingered, salty and ragged.

Benji’s eyes flicked sideways to catch mine. “We had to pick something interesting from our

last field trip. They’re usually monsters with funny faces. People used to think that scary statues

would frighten away any demons or ghosts or whatever.”

“Okay.” The fridge door was still open. My husband was just standing there, listening,

letting all the cold air out. The AC was turned up high but even so, I could feel sweat break out on

my lower back. Outside, on the trees which adorned the property line, the leaves trembled in a faint

breeze which, if I opened the door, would feel exactly like someone holding a hairdryer three feet

from my face. The sun was still an hour away from setting, the light dipping gentle golden fingers

against the windowpanes. Whispering a farewell, not shouting. “Did they?”

“Probably not. But look, this is cool. If they have a spout where the rain can come out,

they’re called gargoyles.” He flipped back through a page and pointed at a picture. “See this? The

rain goes through somewhere at the back and comes out of the mouth here.”

“Wow.”

“But guess what they’re called when they don’t pour rain—when they’re just solid stone.”

I thought for a moment. “Statues?”

“Nope. Grotesques.”

Henry lifted the carton to his lips again, badly hiding a grin. I pictured the milk spilling

down his chest, soaking his t-shirt, filling up his lungs. Coming out of his nose like a cartoon.

“Don’t finish that. We’ll need it for cereal tomorrow.”

“I’ll get more.”

I bit back a retort and turned to Benji. “Okay, bud, time for dinner. Can you take all this stuff

upstairs?”

He nodded and started to gather up his things. When he’d left the room and the creak of his

footsteps echoed across the ceiling, Henry finally closed the fridge door. “What are we having for

dinner?”

I didn’t point out that he’d been in there long enough to set up camp, never mind memorize

the contents of the fridge. “Takeout?”

He picked up his phone, selected an app, slid it across the table.

“We need to get him something soft,” I said, scrolling through the options.

“He just needs to chew. He’s not a baby.”

I paused at Greek, scrolled on past Chinese and Indian, then went back to Greek. “The

therapist doesn’t think the problem is entirely psychosomatic.”

He scoffed. “Yeah, okay. You think doing a project about swallowing is going to help keep

his mind off choking on every meal?”

I picked out a sweet chili pita wrap, aware that my blood pressure was rising again. “No,” I

kept my voice measured, “but maybe there’s a reason he chose gargoyles.”

“Whatever, Becca. He just needs to chew,” my husband repeated, and stomped into the

living room.

A second later, the TV blared loud enough to shake the glass in the kitchen cabinets.

On Saturday night, I slipped into a gorgeous emerald cocktail dress and raked through my

jewelry box to find matching earrings. Henry walked through the bedroom wearing only boxers and

socks, carrying a freshly ironed pink shirt in one hand and a beer in the other. He put the can down

on the bedside table and opened the closet.

“So I’m a gargoyle, huh?” I put an earring in.

“What?” He was staring at his tie rack. I didn’t know why he bothered, since he only wore

about four of them.

“Yesterday. You called me a gargoyle.” His words had been bothering me; I’d laid awake for

over an hour last night, listening to his heavy breathing, picturing myself haggard and hunched on

top of a building.

He picked up the beer again, took a long swig. “Oh my god, lighten up.”

I put the other earring in and wiped a mascara smudge from my eyelid.

“Jesus. You used to know how to take a joke.” He replaced the beer, bent, produced a

crumpled green t-shirt from under the bed. I was forever finding his clothes scattered around. There

were hampers in damn near every room but that didn’t seem to matter to him. “Where did this come

from?”

I wasn’t sure that was true. I’d rarely been the butt of his jokes and when I had they’d been

easier, more tender. A casket, lined with sweetness. “It wasn’t a joke, it was a barb.”

“A what?” He dabbed cologne onto his wrists and neck. The scent wafted over, dominating

my subtler sandalwood with brash pine notes.

“A barb.”

“Who died and made you Alex Trebek? What’s the fucking difference?” He balled up the

green t-shirt and threw it near the laundry basket where it lay, crumpled, on the floor. I pictured the

warmth of his body slowly receding from the material, leeching out in the air. Dissolving like salt in

water. I wondered how long it had been lying there, and when he’d last worn it.

“There’s a difference,” I insisted. “Besides, Alex Trebek is dead.”

“Okay, whatever.”

He disappeared into the bathroom. The sounds of vigorous toothbrushing drifted out,

followed by a loud gargle. He spat, ran the tap. Appeared in the doorway again. “Is he really dead?”

“Yeah.”

His dark eyebrows kissed. “I didn’t know that. I used to love watching him.”

After Benji had been born, we’d watched a lot of Jeopardy together. My son preferred to fall

asleep in his father’s arms; neither contestants answering questions or the familiar theme music

would rouse him, but the slightest indication that he was about to be put into a crib was enough to

prompt full-throated wails. Jeopardy got us through hundreds of quiet nights.

“Me too.”

He smiled, shrugging into his shirt. “You look beautiful. Did I tell you that already?”

He hadn’t but I wasn’t going to ruin the moment. “I wouldn’t mind hearing it again.”

He crossed the room, still buttoning the shirt, and dipped to press a peck against my cheek.

“Beautiful,” he repeated, and turned my head to kiss my lips.

On Monday morning, I drove Benji to another specialist appointment. We hadn’t told our

son we’d discussed divorce. He probably knew, or at least suspected, because he was a smart kid.

I’d asked the therapist in private whether she thought he might be anxious about things at home, and

she’d hedged the answer. Guilt gnawed at me as I stopped at red lights, navigated the city’s

honking, chaotic traffic. Benji sat quietly, legs splayed, fingers drumming on his thighs.

I pulled into a spot recently vacated by a blue Volvo and turned the engine off. Benji didn’t

unbuckle his seatbelt. He was at the age where he didn’t want me to come inside because it made

him feel like a little kid; at the same time, he was frightened—not childishly, but in a deep, visceral

way. Anyone at any age would be—should be—terrified by their body turning traitor, rejecting the

most basic method of survival.

“I’ll come in with you, if that’s okay,” I said, solving the issue.

His shoulders relaxed. “If you want.”

God, he was just like his father.

The specialist went over the details with us for what seemed like the thousandth time. He

suggested a variety of treatments, most of which we’d already tried.

“Your file is very thorough.” She put down her pen. “There’s always the chance that one of

the treatments could work, but we simply haven’t given it a proper chance to settle in yet.”

I looked at Benji, who was staring at his feet. Unlaced Jordans; an expensive birthday

present from my brother-in-law. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

The specialist bit her lip, skimming the file again. “We might consider an anti-anxiety

medication.”

“Anti-depressants? I’m not sure that—”

“Yeah, maybe,” Benji interrupted.

I stared at him. “Are you depressed?”

The specialist picked up her pen again. “That’s not all they’re used for, Mrs Parks.”

“It’s no big deal, Mom. Loads of people at school are on them.”

Other parents complained about their kid’s grades or extra-curricular activities—or lack

thereof—but I had no idea so many of his peers experienced mental health issues. Despite probing,

he refused to elaborate; unsatisfied, I dropped him off at school and drove on to work. My boss was

waiting for me as I walked in the door, hauling me into a client meeting I’d hoped someone else

would lead in my absence. The day passed in a blur of emails and catch-ups, and I was thankful

when I finally slid into my car and out of my heels. My driving moccasins soothed my aching

arches, and the traffic wasn’t terrible. I turned the radio on and up, windows down, letting the tepid

wind whip my hair against my cheeks.

After dinner that evening, my husband asked Benji what the doctor had said, which my son

relayed in almost correct terms before trudging upstairs, face already glued to his phone. When he

was out of earshot, I clarified further. My husband frowned. “Anxiety meds? So it is all in his head?

That’s what they’re saying?”

“Yes and no.” I picked an apple out of the bowl, rolled it between the palms of my hands.

Pictured pushing, hard enough to crush the flesh into pulp. Once, Benji had showed me a video of a

man demonstrating how to pull an apple apart into two halves. My son spent almost a month trying

to replicate the trick before giving up, leaving a bowl full of bruised fruit in his wake.

“Which is it?”

“Neither, really.” I put the apple back in the bowl.

Henry blew out an impatient huff. “I’m going to the gym. Back in a while.”

I pushed in the chair and turned towards the sink, where hours-old dishes were calling my

name in discordant voices.

“Hey, uh, did you book the room for tomorrow night?” His hands slid around my waist,

stopping just short of meeting on my stomach.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He mouthed the back of my neck, teeth scraping in a move that had stopped driving

me wild years ago, and which he’d never noticed or cared to amend. He pulled away with a pop,

leaving the wet flesh chilled. “Looking forward to it.”

On the bed in the hotel room, I googled proactive positions to receive your lover and how to spice

up your marriage. Everything was about spicing something, heating up. Mating in captivity. I

pictured us fucking in a zoo, cameras flashing, newspapers spinning like in the movies. LIBIDO

ON LIFE SUPPORT.

He knocked on the door. I told him to come in. He jiggled the handle.

“Didn’t you get a card? I left one at reception.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Why not?”

“What’s the point in pretending if I’m going to get a card and walk straight in?”

“That isn’t part of the pretending. Its just practical.”

“It’s not sexy if you don’t commit.” Knuckles rapping against wood. “Come on. I’m not

having this conversation through a door.”

I got up and let him in. He pushed past me, cheeks already flushed, and made a visible effort

to relax.

“You look great.”

“Thank you,” I said, although I wanted to scream.

“Do you want to—” he gestured towards the bed.

I unbuttoned the second button on my shirt. “Aren’t we pretending?”

He was already unbuckling his belt. “Aren’t we always?”

I assumed a docile expression while he flung his belt at the chair, missing it, and walked

back to the door. With his fingers loosely resting on the handle, he began to apologize for walking

into the wrong room. I assured him it was no trouble. His gaze travelled from my chin to my

sternum as he hesitated, explaining it wasn’t safe for a pretty girl like me to travel alone. I wanted to

ask what kind of world he was building here; which genre he was fantasizing in. I wanted to know

whether he truly enjoyed the idea of a world where a woman couldn’t safely travel alone, and

whether he realized that was the world we already lived in. A fun pretense for him; a jarring

reminder for me.

I wondered what would happen if my new persona told him to leave—if she turned out to be

a witch, a shape-shifter, a demon. If she informed him that she was more than capable of managing

her own adventures. I wondered what his expression would be at first, what it might evolve into

afterwards; the many-legged stages of homo rejectus. I wondered what my future would be like

with neither an occupied space nor a man-shaped void next to me. The words didn’t choke me,

because they never made it as far as my throat, far less my tongue.

As my husband kissed his way down my chest, I wondered why we bothered pretending to

be strangers to each other when we so evidently already were. When he slid into me after only a few

minutes of lip service, I pitched my response. Low, encouraging, but not condescending. He stared

straight ahead, thrusting steadily, while I was treated to a close-up of the underside of his jaw. He’d

shaved that morning but there were several ingrown hairs, the skin around them swollen in small,

pink mounds. Oysters formed pearls around pieces of dirt. Lucky me.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I pictured a clamshell, razor-edged rims slicing through the water.

The back of my husband’s head and shoulders flexing as the door closed behind him. The thought

spurred me on abruptly; my climax rose steeply, banked, thundered to a crescendo. I came,

shuddering, an empty doorway outlined against my closed eyelids.

He followed suit shortly, looking smug and satisfied, but the smile of contentment faded

within seconds. “Did you have a good time?” He rolled off, clutching the sheet to his chest.

“Yes.”

“Who were you thinking about?”

“No one.”

“Yeah, right.” He bent over over, the jutting sail of his back reminding me of a replica of a

Spinosaur skeleton Benji had once been so fond of, and clawed around on the floor for his shirt.

“If I’m a gargoyle—”

He blew out a sigh, hard enough to ripple the curtains. “Jesus fuck, not this again.”

“If I’m a gargoyle,” I persisted, propping myself up on my elbow, “does that mean you’re

the building I’m there to protect?”

Henry rose, bare-buttocked, and didn’t turn around. “Uh. I guess so. That sounds kind of

romantic. Where’s my belt?”

“Where you threw it.” I flopped back on the bed.

After he hopped into his pants and threw his jacket over his arm, he glanced over. I hadn’t

moved. “Aren’t you coming?”

“I thought I might stay here for a while. Get a little work done.”

The vein in his forehead swelled, but all he said was, “Okay, babe. See you at home.”

When the door clicked behind him, I waited until I heard the elevator ding open and whoosh

shut before I pulled my laptop out and googled gargoyles. I studied their faces; some horned,

snarling, some roaring with silent rage. Some looked tragic, mouths curved in theatrical frowns. The

urge to pick apart the word—to ascertain exactly which of us was the monstrous being and who was

a mere conduit for the onslaught of rain—seemed more important than ever. I didn’t dare tell Henry

I could only climax now while picturing his absence. It was nothing to do with other people filling

that gap, although he would undoubtedly jump to that conclusion. The idea of the gap being filled at

all, by anyone, was abhorrent. These days, emotions ran through me and poured out onto the

pavement far below. I figured I had my answer.

I drove Benji to his next appointment, late on Wednesday afternoon.

“I’m gonna go in alone, okay?” He slouched off without waiting for a response.

The waiting room was empty, the TV in the corner mouthing silent news between

advertisements for back pain medication. I picked up an issue of Teen Vogue and flipped through

the glossy pages. They’d been doing some steady journalism over the last few years; teenagers these

days had access to instant news and an incredible nose for even the slightest hint of bullshit. I

stopped at an interesting headline and smoothed the page out.

The article purported to expose yet another senator in the latest string of sexual harassment

claims. Opening with a description of the execution of a man called Giles Corey for the crime of

witchcraft was a strange choice, but it caught my interest. Apparently, the executioners had pressed

his body between heavy stones, and when they’d demanded that he confess to his crimes under such

a punishment, Corey had simply requested more weight. More weight, more weight, until his last

labored wheeze. The author of the article asserted that the truth could be crushed, but never quelled.

I wasn’t sure I agreed, but Benji emerged from the doctor’s office before I had a chance to find out

whether the rest of the article supported the idea.

“That was fast.”

He shrugged.

I waited until we were in the car, buckled in and reversing, before I pressed the issue. “So?”

He was already fiddling with the radio. “He thinks I’m doing better.”

I waited at the intersection while a red car barreled past, way over the speed limit. “Do you

feel like you’re doing better?”

The radio settled on screeching dubstep. “Yeah.” He crossed his arms and didn’t pull out his

phone. “My report was good, by the way. Mr Adamson said he liked it.”

“The gargoyle one? That’s great, bud. Do you want to celebrate?”

He pulled out an apple and took a careful bite. My fingers tightened on the steering wheel,

but I said nothing. He swallowed. Chewed again, swallowed. “Maybe we could get Chinese?”

“Sure. Whatever you want.” I held a smile in, all the way home.

When I passed on the good news, Henry didn’t seem as relieved as I felt. He opened the

fridge, stared inside. “Okay. Good.”

“Good? Just good?”

He picked up the milk, shook it, and drank. “Yeah. Good.” He caught my eye, sighed, and

closed the fridge door. The carton bent under the pressure of his fingers. “What?”

“Nothing.” I put my keys down on the counter. I’d been wrong; neither of us were

gargoyles. We were simply two halves of a building under permanent construction, waiting out the

latest storm. Maybe that’s all marriage ever was.

“What do you want, Becca? Do you even know? Is there someone else?” Bit out each word

like a bark, the sound of a dog half-strangled by an urge to stretch a chain as far as it would go.

“Yes. Myself. I’m the other person.”

He scoffed, disbelieving. “Don’t get cute.”

I splayed my keys out, one by one, making sure each had individual space. The words

bubbled in my throat, pricked my sinuses. I want to recreate myself in stone. I want to carve out my

own void and leave the space empty. I want to choose weight, not water.

More weight.

More.

Bio: Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer who dabbles in the surreal. Her prose has been published by Catapult, Flash Fiction Online, Pseudopod, and many more. She is a full member of the SFWA and is represented by Headwater Literary Management.

Novel Excerpt by Danielle Lazarin

Editorial note: We are thrilled to publish a novel excerpt on the timely and pressing topic of reproductive rights. For more of Danielle’s work, please visit her website at https://www.daniellelazarin.com/.

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JULIA, APPROACHED AT PLAYGROUND

It was a weekday morning when Julia was approached at the playground. She’d just put the baby in the swing, facing him away from the sun. Ben was eight months old. The woman who came up beside her on that day wore a baby on her chest who was younger than Ben by a good number of months, “a fresh one” they’d have called it at work. This time yesterday, Julia had been in the middle of a delivery, a healthy baby girl.

         The baby in the carrier fussed, and Julia instinctively turned towards its mewl. The woman bounced on her toes to calm it. Though Julia usually kept to herself at the playground, she smiled.

         “Julia,” the woman said.

         Julia squinted. She didn’t recognize this person. Had she delivered this baby? No, her memory was strong, especially for patients. The woman continued, in a voice low enough that Julia had to lean in just a bit. “I’m here to talk to you about a job, about changing your life.”

         Two thoughts shot through Julia’s mind: that, even though there hadn’t been more death threats since the two while she was pregnant, this was a trap, or that this was a rep from a private healthcare firm. These firms catered to women who could afford non-insured procedures—not abortions or any of the reproductive services that had drawn Julia into the field to begin with, but otherwise the best care money could buy. Julia felt these organizations had turned their backs on women just as strongly as the government had. She’d gotten calls before at the hospital, but never an in-person solicitation. The salary was five times what she made now.

         “Are you with Women First?” She could barely get the name of the private network out of her mouth without snorting. She and Lily called it Rich White Women First.

         “No, no. Nothing like that. We’re part of a coalition that serves all women, forgotten women, all over the country. We’re looking for someone with your training and discretion.”

         The woman handed Julia a piece of paper, a three-inch white square, one which she didn’t have to turn over to know was blank. She’d heard about this, activists signaling one another with a blank piece of paper, a reference to the laws they’d wanted: unrestricted. Some women carried empty signs to the protests. Of course she’d heard her share of rumors since undergraduate anatomy: that there were groups begun by med school dropouts disgusted by the lack of support for the true spectrum of care, groups secretly funded by the governments of certain states. Julia had thought it rather silly then; she didn’t know what to think now.

         The only other people at the playground were a small girl, about two years old, building in the sand pit three yards away, and the girl’s mother on a bench, eyes trained on her phone. Julia slipped the piece of paper into her jacket pocket quickly.

         “I’ve never done one.”

         “We know you’ve been trained.”

         The woman’s baby—and later, Julia would learn it was not hers after all, but a loan, so she could be in the playground with Julia without suspicion—was quiet now, but the woman was still swaying from side to side. Julia kept up her rhythm with pushing the swing, watched the way Ben’s single lock of hair, dark like Marcus’s, was lifted by the motion of it. His eyes fluttered closed. She needed to get him home before he fell asleep, or the afternoon nap would be impossible.

Interview with Danielle Lazarin, author of BACK TALK: STORIES

Interview with Danielle Lazarin, author of “Back Talk,” a short story collection on what it’s like to wait.

We all know it can take months to hear back from publications after we submit a short story, poem, or creative non-fiction piece, but a full manuscript on submission can take longer. I recently had the opportunity to discuss what goes through the mind of an author when their manuscript is on submission, and they haven’t heard back. Especially when the manuscript is so timely. Here is the candid interview with Danielle Lazarin, author of a short story collection titled “Back Talk” on what went through her mind as she waited to hear back.

PL: In your essay The Ambiguous Loss of (Probably) Not Selling My Novel, you write that “when your book is on submission, there’s a pressure of silence till you know the end.” Why did you feel compelled to write about the ambiguity of your novel selling or not, since I assume you are still in submission?

DL: I was on submission when I wrote the essay, but I’m not any longer. It was important to me to talk about it in the middle of it, knowing that any ending, whether it was a sale or not, would color the whole of the experience. We put too much weight on the end or results of things and most of the experience of something is going through it, not the processing of it, which tends to flatten it some. To put it in fiction terms, it’s the way that retrospective narration can sometimes add a false layer to a story, one that wants the story to mean a certain thing, so it’s told through a lens of (sometimes too absolute) knowing and leaves out the complicating parts because they don’t fit the story; I suppose that’s true of any sort of narration, isn’t it? It feels most honest to me to write about the spaces where we don’t yet know, and it adds an interesting craft challenge, too, to tell a story without knowing the ending. 

PL: In your essay you mention Pauline Boss’s work “…ambiguous loss, the fraught space of what no longer exist but isn’t concretely gone.” You wrote that essay nine months ago. Are you still in that space of not knowing how to “mark or mourn” your novel not selling yet?

DL: Overall, with time it has mostly become less powerful, but like any grief, it depends on the day. Being in the headspace of a new project I’m excited about helps tremendously. What’s been most difficult, given that my unsold novel is about the obliteration of abortion rights, is to be living through what is now undoubtedly the collapse of Roe and I’m certain a future onslaught of privacy rights. As a citizen, I feel constant waves of anger and grief both for the despicable way this country destroys its own people. As a writer, there’s still a lot of loss knowing that my book could have been part of a larger conversation, an access point, perhaps, for understanding or thinking about what we owe one another. It’s frustrating and weird to be sitting on something that is relevant to right now and will not be read right now or maybe ever. In some ways it can feel like I never wrote the book, and writing the essay was a way to remind myself I did; it’s the marker and the mourning itself.

PL: You’re a teacher as well as a coach for aspiring writers. How do you motivate your students to continue moving forward with their work and not be discouraged if they enter long periods when they don’t know if something they’ve written will ever be published?

DL: I ask them to consider what it is they want from publishing: money, admiration, validation, other opportunities? Asking what the end game is is itself enough for most of them to realize that the aforementioned is either not coming from a single publication or won’t be enough to sustain them through the long haul resilience of being a writer when it does. That even the most “successful” writers still want all for those things; the pursuit is perpetual. To keep writing you must learn how to sustain yourself outside of these short-term rewards. We talk about how linearity is a ruse, in both the arc of a writing life and within the process itself; it can be helpful to recognize that a writing career starts at some A and ends at some Z (Z being…a Nobel Prize? Posthumous fame?). Working on novels or other large-scale projects is particularly hard because there aren’t nibbles of validation or success along the way as there might be with shorter pieces. Practically, I tell them to take breaks and work on shorter things so they can feel the satisfaction of finishing or having a breakthrough on something---a short story or poem or essay or even a visual piece---to simply get out of a mode of voice or whatnot they’re in a long-term relationship with. That, too reminds you that your writing is not your current single piece of writing. If you have only one story to tell in one way then---I hesitate to say this as declaratively, but I think it’s true--- you’re not a writer. Writers have lots of stories and a multitude of ways of telling them, many of which they don’t yet have access to, but will come if they keep working, if they let themselves see what they want to try and can try it for the sake of—the thrill, the joy, the intellectual exercise of--trying. With time this becomes the thing you seek, that satisfaction of an idea or an experiment gone well or the learning when it doesn’t so you can carry that forward to what’s next.

PL: When you wrote this essay you said there are times when you try to work on your new novel, but “can’t get a grip on it.” We are now in June of 2022, nine months since you wrote your essay, over two years since your book “The Pathways” went into submission. Are you able to get into your new novel now?  How has your work been affected by this experience?

DL: Things are moving along with the new novel! I’m rolling towards a first draft. Crawling? I’ve started tracking my time and process over the past year and have come to terms with the reality of my pace. If anything, overall this experience has reinforced my drive to write what I write. Knowing how unpredictable and wholly uncontrollable the publishing end is, what else is there to do? It’s been said many times over that the only thing you can control is your work. In my class on claiming your own process and practice I quote a line from the book Art & Fear which takes it a bit further into process: “Your job is to learn to work on your work.” I try to do my job the best I can, to dig into the regular practice, which is all I can control.

PL: In your essay you also mention that in the past when self-doubts emerge “…I’ve always managed to find the smallest shred of faith and let it carry me through,” but now you are considering “giving up all together.” What makes this particular time of self-doubt want to make you give up writing? What changed from before when you could pull yourself through the self-doubt?

DL: Thankfully I don’t feel like giving up anymore, though it was very strong feeling during the earlier periods of the novel passes. So much was going on then: living in New York City at peak pandemic, adjusting to working with three other people in an apartment with barely any doors, general disconnection from a lot of people and things that kept me grounded and motivated. I’m in my mid-40s now, and like many writers at this age, there’s a sense of in betweenness I have about being neither a young writer nor an established one in a culture that fetishizes youth. This is compounded by being a parent, which makes getting work done as I’d like to very difficult, just much slower than is ideal or that I know I’m capable of. So there became a sense, especially with my kids suddenly literally in my working space again indefinitely, of the futility of the work I was doing. I think I wrote a good book, one that is relevant and compelling; as I said above, I did my job the best I could, just as I feel I did with my first book. But this time the job I did didn’t cut it, and there was no singular reason why, nothing I could point to to understand how I might have more success. It was painful to have spent a near decade struggling to accept that as a parenting writer I’d eek out the book the best and fastest I could given my circumstances and then still be in this in between space career-wise. Was I willing to spend another 5-10 years doing the same, knowing it would likely feel even worse to repeat that failure? Apparently, yes, I am. I can’t say this makes any sense; it is not a logical profession.

Danielle Lazarin is the author of the short story collection Back Talk. Her fiction can be found in The Southern Review, Buzzfeed, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Glimmer Train, Five Chapters, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Her non-fiction has been published by The New York Times, The Cut, and Lenny Letter. A graduate of Oberlin College’s creative writing program, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, the Glimmer Train Family Matters Award, Hopwood Awards, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and The Freya Project. She teaches fiction for Catapult and the 92Y. She lives in her native New York, where she is at work on a novel.

Paola Lastick is currently a student at the Mountainview MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. Her writing has appeared on blogs as well as the newspaper, The Real Chicago. She lives in a suburb of Dallas with her husband, daughter, and three small yappy dogs.

Ask Me How I Know, Youngblood: a short story by W.T. Paterson

The reason love is so hard, youngblood, is that we don’t fall in love with someone else. We fall for a person with the qualities we want to see in ourselves. Love is a mirror.

Imagine there’s this guy, and he’s lonely, and he wants to find love. It doesn’t have to be a guy, youngblood, it can be a girl, too, or however a person identifies. This is just how it goes. Imagine, for the sake story, that this guy is looking for a girl. It can be a girl looking for a girl, or any combination really, but for now, it’s a guy looking for a girl. Ask me how I know, youngblood, and I’ll tell you a different story.

The guy has been burned before. In past relationships, he learned what it meant to be cruel, what it meant to be heartbroken, what it meant to make mistakes, and what it meant to see the future reflected in a young lover’s eyes. All of that is in the past, and he works a job that leaves him wanting something deeper. At his job, he’s underappreciated. You understand?

Then one day, he meets a girl. She’s younger, but not by much, and possesses has the type of vibrancy that he’s desperately craving. On the train home from work, the girl dances a small dance in as music tickles through headphones. She smiles. She looks happy, but she, too, is wanting, is tired of drifting. She wants stability. She craves partnership after a series of failed romances. Ask me how I know, youngblood, and I’ll tell you a different story.

On the train, the two see each other. It doesn’t have to be a train, it can be anywhere. A park, a store, a gathering. But for this story, it’s on a train home from work. Trains move like life. They barrel forward making quick stops for people to enter and exit.

The guy and girl recognize in the other the things they want for themselves. It’s the magic of attraction. You understand? This person is everything we’re not.

The guy and girl speak. Since the other party reflects us, we’re telling ourselves what we’ve been waiting to hear. That, youngblood, is why the language of love feels like a song. We give ourselves permission to be free.

They kiss, and that first kiss, becomes a benchmark. So, they kiss more. They kiss so much that they forget to breathe. And it’s not that they are secretly kissing themselves, it’s that they’re kissing someone in the way that they’ve always needed to be kissed and that kiss is returned to them, and the pieces fit.

Kissing turns into more intimate affairs, and so the guy and the girl strip away their clothes to become closer, to understand who each other truly are, and in doing so, it gets complicated. By being more honest, they start to see the cracks in their own foundations.

You see, youngblood, we are not always who we think we are, and this is a scary moment of truth. Am I the person I want to be? Or have I been fooling myself, which means I’ve been fooling them, which means am I deceitful? The guy and girl have long conversations and some of the pieces they thought fit together so perfectly suddenly don’t fit together as well. They bottle it down because why tamper with something that, up until then, has been working so well?

But what’s really happening is that they’re seeing themselves reflected back as imperfect and it scares the, it makes them vulnerable. The guy and girl silently promise to get better, to grow and evolve, to change.

And therein lies the rub. Ask me how I know, youngblood, and I’ll tell you a different story.

Over time, an argument erupts, and things get said, and blame gets thrown, and feelings get hurt because this person, this reflection of us, now mirros all of the things about ourselves that we don’t like. They are us, and by arguing and yelling and fighting, we’re actually fighting ourselves. Every mean thing we say is actually aimed at us, every criticism and jab is pointed inward. It’s hard to accept that the person we want to love is imperfect, even though that person is us. Then the guy says I love you, and the girl says, I love you, too.

This guy and girl push through. Neither wants to go back to being alone and so they make adjustments to find common ground. The guy still goes to work, the girl still dances to the music in her headphones. But then the guy, knowing how much he loves the girl, decides to adopt her traits. On the way home, he dances to music in his headphones. The girl gets a job that pays well, but she doesn’t enjoy it. We take on the traits of our partners thinking that to be more like them, we must become them.

But that doesn’t work the way we believe it to. We swap roles and our partner becomes more like us than we are like us. The things we fell in love with no longer exist in them, because we are them, and they are us, and the whole thing is complicated, you understand? No longer is the guy reflected back in the girl, and the girl is no longer reflected back in the guy. They are trying to be the other. After some time, neither knows who they are anymore. The person reflected back is us, but the old us, the us full of flaws, and secretly we fear them.

Tension builds. One night there’s another argument and someone says you’ve changed, but it goes both ways because how can one person stay the same forever? The thing we wanted to see ourselves as no longer exists because we’ve become someone else without knowing we’ve become someone else, and in the process, we don’t like who we’ve become. The traits the other person possessed that we admired so much, are us, and we are no longer us. And how did it get this way?

We get mad at ourselves. It’s complicated, but we have adopted the traits of our partner, which means we have become the person we’ve always wanted to be, and even though it was how we always saw ourselves; it doesn’t feel right. Because there’s power in wanting and magic in not-being. Ask me how I know, youngblood, and I’ll tell you a different story.

The guy and the girl are so far away from the selves they were that day on the train, and now the train is running express. The guy, in his new skin, wonders if the girl is worth it, but because she has become him, he’s asking this of himself. It’s confusing, you see, but it’s always pointed inward. She is him and he is her and that’s always the way it will be. We are each other, always. And now seeing himself through her eyes, the guy finds boredom and stability when he craves music and dancing. The girl looks at the guy and sees someone more free, now that she is bound to her stable job. You understand?

But they stay together, you see, because they’ve been burned in the past, and they’ve changed together, and going back to the way things were feels foreign and terrifying and the game of a younger blood.

Eventually, they have a child, and that child is an even mix of the guy and the girl. Or they adopt, or they find a child to dote their values upon. The girl has become the guy and the guy has become the girl and the child has become both of them, but what happens is that the child becomes only their best and worst parts.

The child grows and exhibits loneliness while dancing to music, finds joy in the menial, treads the waters between cruelty and empathy. The child seeks magic and watching them seek magic becomes magic for the guy and the girl.

And then one day, the child asks them about love, and how it works, and where to find it, and there are no definitive answers. The girl tells one thing, the guy tells another, and though neither are wrong, they both believe they are right. They say it’s compromise, but without sacrifice. They say

it’s never settling, but also settling down. They say it’s being selfless, even though selflessness is selfishness because to love someone means to love yourself, you understand?

And that’s the way life goes, and how love only ever exists in the small pocket of time when a guy and a girl meet on a train. That’s it. Small pockets when the world feels full of possibilities because the person across from us is everything we want to see in ourselves, and the train barrels forward, and we lose ourselves to an idea until nothing else remains.

Ask me how I know, youngblood, and I’ll tell you a different story.

W. T. Paterson is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of New Hampshire, and is a graduate of Second City Chicago. His work has appeared in over 90 publications worldwide including The Saturday Evening Post, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and Fresh Ink. A semi-finalist in the Aura Estra short story contest, his work has also received notable accolades from Lycan Valley, North 2 South Press, and Lumberloft. He spends most nights yelling for his cat to "Get down from there!" Visit his website at www.wtpaterson.com.