(Interviewed by Cameron Finch)

Image Credit: Cloud Study: Stormy Sunset, 1821-1822, John Constable.

E: I can’t say I’ve ever felt like a medium when I work. Although whatever happens on the page is often mysterious, it’s also earned. My stories come from my characters, and these characters must become an intimate part of me, that is, woven into the fabric of my being. If they don’t, they won’t attain their own reality, or credence. They must be set firmly in location and space. A real town with real trees.

Language has always been commensurate with my work. It figures highly in every sentence I write. This has to do with my training as a poet. Language is an extremely valuable tool. It is also powerful, even dangerous. I build my stories, one word at a time. I never know what the story is about until it’s revealed to me. This may take years, but the writer’s role is to yield to the work, let it dictate what must be said. Otherwise, it’s a trivial exercise, one that’s better left to someone else. Yes, details matter, immeasurably so. They’re what allow us to enter the story.

E: Fruition is a problematic word when it comes to writing books. It’s something we, as humans, need to believe in, but in my experience, every book has a trajectory, which is akin to reading footprints in the sand, which one must follow until it simply ends. I stop or abandon any given piece of work when it ceases to speak to me. Which makes writing an acute, almost searingly painful kind of listening, an ear-to-ground listening.

Because the Sky is a Thousand Soft Hurts was subject to every scrap of rigor I could afford it. Stories were put in, taken out, put in again. Some are old, go back to stories I started when in my twenties. It’s circuitous, an endless looping, a matter of sheer endurance. Perhaps language is my metaphoric glue, but not just. It goes back to listening. The longer I work my stories, the more they speak to each other across time and distance. This is essential for that illusive thing called unity.

There’s also the very real consideration of the reader, what the reader may or may not be able to digest. It must be parsed out just so. If the reader is lost, so is the book. Sections accommodate both the needs of the readers and the needs of the book. They are breath spells, moments when what has been read can be assembled before the next story is taken on. The lovely thing about stories is just this. The reader can take breaks, do the creative, imaginative work of assembling meaning before moving on.

Books must, necessarily, end. But it is just that. And ending a book is excessively difficult if you—and what writer doesn’t wish this?—want it to last longer than the time it took to write, or read it.

C: How did your debut story collection Because the Sky is a Thousand Soft Hurts come to fruition? What was the metaphoric glue that held it all together? Why did you structure the book in five parts and how did you know when the book was ‘done’?

E: The breaking point in any character is where the energy occurs. It’s a turning point, which is essential to any story. I believe many of us are consumed by fear, have been subject to trauma or violence, or have been the one who committed the transgression. What happens when one has been driven to the breaking point is what fascinates me. Narratives are very driven machines and must reflect this moment. The character will either move forward, or backwards, take action or collapse into inaction. I’ve always been drawn to the afflicted, to those characters who are placed on what might be called the downward end of the spectrum, as I believe they’re most human, or that they express their humanity more readily.

This may express itself grotesquely. In one of my more recent stories, the mother makes her daughter mount a corpse. To ride it so to speak, in the funeral home her husband directs. It’s an interesting moment, loaded, as they say, as it will affect or afflict the daughter from that moment on. Of course, I want to study that moment. To extract from it what I can. That girl, for instance, does she smell bits of skin under her nails, skin that smells of vanilla, or offal? Won’t that smell be with her for the entirety of her days on earth?

Will she retaliate? Take action against her mother? Turn inward, as if possessed by that corpse’s own rancid psyche? This is obsession, which is a large part of the work, to be obsessed with what can happen as a result or consequence of a breach. Breach, break then as an opening, a void, a place that has been voided, and then needs to be filled, if only partially. The writer plants in the abyss.

C: The characters you center on often find themselves at breaking points, many consumed by fear, trauma or obsession. How has writing the narratives of your characters’ bodies/emotions/memories informed your own perspective about how one navigates the liminal, the abject, and the fragile moments of life?

C: In your author bio, you also identify as a Master Gardener. Take us to your garden. Place us there. What do we hear? What do we smell? Does the garden play a role in your creative process? 

E: Writing is such intense, I mean really intense, cerebral work, it’s positively brain-scraping. The concentration is excessively demanding, requires such a full and strict attention, that I’ve always needed a counter-balance, that is, physically demanding work, which brings me into the garden.

The garden is a place to ruminate, mediate, dig holes. It’s largely aesthetic work—the idea is to create beauty, balance, order, but, in reality, gardens are largely messy, topsy-turvy and wildly organic. Just like stories, they grow out of the circumstances in which they’ve been planted. I may place a rose bush alongside delphinium or monkshood, for color and texture, but everything gets re-arranged by variances in light, weather, the birds, even the groundhogs. In short, the garden, like a story, is subject to vagaries that are outside of my control. This year, the datura ran rampant. It was gorgeous, but not exactly what I’d planned on.

Gardening is heavy work. It takes things out of my mind, puts them in my back, my hands. I’m always ruminating over my stories in the garden, and during the summer, I actually write outside on the front patio.It’s rhythmic, and writing, too, is rhythmic. I once studied ballet, as I felt it necessary to literally embody music. Likewise, walking. The work of writing has to get into the body both before and after it can be adequately transferred into the page.

C: Many of your stories and flash pieces are narrated in the first person. What draws you to make that narrative choice? What role has point of view played in your efforts to build connection with your reader?

E: When I was formally studying poetry, use of first person was, I hate to say, in vogue. For all the obvious reasons—it affords intimacy, both for the writer and the reader. I cleaved to this. Whenever I attempt to write in third person, I feel absolutely distanced from my characters and second person is oddly anonymous, even accusatory. First person more readily facilitates that Keatsian thing called “Negative Capability,” which may sound cliché, but a certain inhabitation of each and every character is a kind of prerequisite for authenticity.

If I’m unable to slip inside my characters, how can I know what they would do if they could do? The writer both stands at remove and in a scintillating, flesh-burning intimacy with those he or she writes about. How else can it sear? If the voice is false in third person, then where else but first person? A character must be heard. The story must be told. Otherwise, it’s much better to go out and dig holes.

C: Your language is just so delicious, Elizabeth. I can open my copy of Because the Sky… to any page and start reading your words with infinite satisfaction. I’m wondering if there are stories or lines by writers you enjoy that have imprinted on your brain in the same way that your lines have done to me. Which writers have captured your interest recently? 

E: I remember my mother telling me that when a person dies, a whole library goes with them. When I was young and in thrall with writing, and I still am, I had to move, frequently.  I was very poor, lived on what Mary Oliver called “chicken scratch,” because I would write, absolutely would write, despite everything. If the rent was raised, I moved. I always packed and unpacked my books first, as these were my most beloved possessions. I couldn’t inhabit a new ratty apartment if books weren’t on the shelves, which says something, I believe, about my relationship to language. It was more important than my even rattier relationships to men.

It’s my breath, my pulse, my bread. I’m so deplorably in love with language, it’s nearly an affliction. There are times when I have to gird myself and strike whole sentences out of my stories because the language actually impedes the movement of the whole. This doesn’t lessen my intense relationship to language. It’s a palpable presence for me, mouthy, rich. Of course, this comes from having read and written lots of poetry, which I still feast upon daily. My writing day never ensues until I’ve read some poetry. I always read the poems posted on such sites as the American Academy of Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily.

I read and write at the same time, migrating from the page to a poem, or story, then back again. I tend to ingest poetry during the day, then reserve my evenings for the reading of fiction and nonfiction. I think all writers and readers of literature have certain words, or lines imprinted upon the brain. Isn’t that the idea? Haven’t we all, as the result of reading Bishop, become masters in the art of losing and don’t we all wish, like Dylan Thomas, to rage against the dying of the light? Writers, I think, want to make that kind of mark. If the ego is involved it will, necessarily, fail. There is, and I’m adamant about this, a whole lot of surrender involved. If I don’t give into the work, the work will never yield what it must.

C: Might you leave us with a glimpse into what you’re working on now -- what new projects or creative happenings do we find you steeped within? 

E: Since the completion of Because the Sky is a Thousand Soft Hurts, I’ve been steadily and fully occupied with working on a manuscript titled, Learning to Hit My Mother. This book more closely resembles a novel-in-stories than a true collection because the interlocking between each tale is extremely tight. It follows one character, Pit, through time. The manuscript is ear-marked by my preoccupation with violence and its consequences, as well as my obsession with language.

Coincidentally, I’ve returned to teaching at Boston College after a rather long hiatus of fifteen years. It’s exceptionally joyful to be back in the classroom, and very creative. The students are wonderful. This affords me the opportunity to instill in them a passion for reading with intelligence, creativity, and daring. They, in turn, are reflecting upon what they read in their own writing. What could be more audacious and exciting?