Interview by Princess Gonzales
The period Sleep Tight Satellite covers is such a traumatic time in recent American history and world history. Your work encapsulated isolated life under quarantine. In certain pieces of Sleep Tight Satellite, nature becomes a refuge. Was it your intent to use nature in the same way as Shakespeare does with his “natural word”?
The first thing I noticed during quarantine was the way nonhuman animals took over. I remember walking through Seattle and seeing raccoons walking down the middle of a busy street, now deserted. I saw coyotes and heard birds I’d never heard before. Urban and rural life ripped their seams. Quiet was quieter and night was darker. It was a traumatic time for humans, absolutely. But for so many animals it looked like freedom.
I found the endings of multiple pieces (e.g. “Mock City”, “Sleep Tight Satellite”, etc.) as vehicles of an epiphany moment. These characters are confronted with the facades of life pre-pandemic and are struggling with the new normal, which awakens these pivotal moments within them. Did these epiphanies come naturally, or did they differ from what you had originally thought of?
This is a great question. None of the epiphanies were planned in advance. I try to write into my characters, to let them dictate the direction of the story. I don’t know where a story will lead when I start writing. There’s pleasure in the unexpected twists and turns, and truth in allowing characters to go in any direction that feels emotionally honest.
I love your use of second person point-of-view as it removes the barriers of story and reader or reader and character. Plus, it always has an experimental edge to it, and you’ve successfully incorporated it into your poetry and writings. For anyone interested in writing in second point-of-view, is there anything to be mindful of when using it?
I love writing in second person because it contributes to both interiority and urgency. It’s an invitation to the reader to identify with either the “you” or the narrative voice (which is not the “you,” but knows intimate things about the “you”). I don’t think I have any advice for using it. Any POV can go wildly right or wrong; it’s just about whether it suits the project.
Each section of the book pertains to pandemic life. The sequencing of each piece felt natural and progressed towards this narrative arc. How was the writing process like? Was this compilation of work during the pandemic where you had a clear theme or idea in mind?
I’m so glad you experienced the book as a narrative arc! That was my intention, but I created that feeling after all the stories were written. I did write most of the pieces during the pandemic, but a few stories predated it. “Mock City” was originally going to be the glue that held the collection together, but when Covid-19 hit, I reshaped the book around pandemic experiences.
The short stories “Vaccine Kid” and “The Lesbians Who Did Everything Right” highlight the struggles of marginalized communities during the pandemic, and the endings of those stories are bittersweet. Was the lack of satisfying endings meant to represent these issues as they are in the real world?
Yes. Both stories end with an unsettled feeling, with a major character gone missing and another character grieving their loss. But I wanted the grief of loss to emphasize that these are unreliable narrators, narrators who think they understand more than the characters who go missing. They don’t. They’ve missed clues, and misled others, including themselves. They’ve tried to save people they had no business saving.
In an interview from a while back, I saw you mention compression as a bad habit of yours back then. I could relate to being told that I should expand on plot elements, mainly dialogue, to add more to my narrative. If someone were to try to compress their manuscript or work, are there any key signs or elements someone could look for to winnow it?
This made me laugh, because I don’t agree with that anymore and can’t remember saying it. I think compression is one of my strengths as a writer, not a bad habit. It’s interesting that you were told to expand, to add to your narrative. I wonder if that advice was helpful to you then, or now? I usually think things should be pared down, winnowed. The more I expand something, the messier and more didactic it gets. So I appreciate this question. In terms of how to compress your work, there are lots of tactics to try. Sometimes I ask students to cut ten words from a piece, or fifty, or to condense a page-long piece into a paragraph. But I also think people write the way they write, and I respect that some writers unfurl stories or poems in long scrolls, that this is what works best for them, for their subject matter. Compression and excess are both beautiful. Compression is just what’s natural to me, what’s intimate, this relation to space and time in my work. I love believing that every word matters.
In the spirit of “Mock City”, are there any foreign crime shows you’re currently watching?
My mom has been watching “Annika,” and when I visited her recently, we watched several episodes together. It was sweet to realize she was drawn to the show because of the mother-daughter representation. I like learning new things about my mom, and I like all sorts of television. What felt important to me about that detail in “Mock City” was that the main character was so steeped in televised crime dramas that she couldn’t grasp the real violence her partner was participating in. She saw real violence as an extension of something staged, until she found herself inside it and couldn’t see a way out. I also wanted to stress that the main character was white, like the white women she’s watching on Scandinavian crime shows. Her whiteness is relevant to her inability to understand her partner’s participation in violence, and her own indirect upholding of brutal hierarchies of power and control.
About the interviewer: Princess Gonzales is an English undergraduate student from San Diego State University. Of course she loves reading, because if she didn’t why wouldn’t she be writing these reviews? An enjoyer of the weird and experimental—the ones where explaining the narrative to a friend makes them question your sanity—to the cozy and cliché, she hopes to one day to bring the same enjoyment to readers of her own work. For now she’s working to find her place in the small, yet varied world of the publishing industry.