HK: You're a novelist but also a writer of stories, some very short. "Cataclysm Baby"—an abecedarian set of very short stories included in your 2016 collection, A Tree or a Person or a Wall—is set in an apocalyptic world and features animal-like children and the horror experienced by the parents who knew the old world. Here is a passage:

"At dawn, we extinguish the flames so the candles will be there to relight tomorrow, and then again we pray: Oh lord, just once. Just once, deliver us a child not wrecked from the beginning. Grant us a son not lousy with fur, not ruined with scales or feathers. Give us a daughter made for the old world instead of this new one, this waste of weather and wild."

What informs this material, or can you say? And—considering a tendency in some of your work towards the disturbing, the horrifying and macabre (whole families murdered, a boy watching as his father descends into nothing after his mother's death, a twin eating his other twin in the womb)—can you speak about what it's like to 'go there' as a writer? What are the challenges? Are there lines you'd hesitate to cross?


MB: For better or worse, most of the time I don't have to think of what I'm doing as "going there": it's not a line that has to be crossed or a particularly dark mindset I have to get myself in. Maybe it's more disturbing to know how easy it can be, how everyday the process is? You would probably not know I'm dreaming up such things if you watched me doing it.

I think the challenges are more about the why than the how? Why depict violence in this way, and to what ends? I think that in Cataclysm Baby (and in the project my new stories in Wigleaf are from) I'm using violence in part to defamiliarize or intensify certain kinds of interactions and exchanges between children and parents, in part by transforming or translating emotional confrontations into physical ones, where they can be "seen" on the page in a different way.



2.

HK: In some of the stories originally included in How They Were Found, you use inventive devices (maps, blueprint catalogs, an index) to further the characters and the plot in interesting ways. Can you speak about this? Is the process one of taking an ordinary text or reference material and turning it into something more? How does it work for you as a writer?


MB: For a long time, form was the most generative starting place for me: I would start with a structure or a device or an object and then try to fill it with story. I'd rarely have an idea of what the story would be when I started, but by trying to be true to the form or the device or the object, story would eventually emerge. "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed," which you referenced in your question, was written in exactly this way: I wrote alphabetized bursts of prose until patterns began to emerge, and then I wrote toward those patterns until they became a kind of plot.



2 ½.    

HK: Are you scared to write about...?


MB: I don't know if there are any subjects I wouldn't write about, but I'm scared to write badly about many things, perhaps especially those most personal to me: my own direct experiences, my childhood, my marriage. The biggest problem, perhaps, is that it's hardest to be honest about anything in which I might appear: in fiction, protagonists are rarely as good or as in the right as we would like to believe ourselves to be, among many other problems. And so for the most part I use bits of experience and emotion, rather than big chunks or whole events, because the smaller the chunk of me that appears on the page, the easier it becomes to render it honestly.



- - -

Read MB's stories.

W i g l e a f                03-23-18                                [home]