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Vision, Sympathy, Fever: Kirstin Valdez Quade and Mira Jacob in Conversation
This week for Discover Great New Writers, Kirstin Valdez Quade, the author of the new short story collection Night at the Fiestas, sat down to talk with Mira Jacob, whose critically-hailed debut novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is now in paperback. Their wide-ranging conversation took in superpowers, the nature of art, and what not to read when you’re trying to write a book of your own.
Kirstin Valdez Quade: It’s such a joy to get to talk to you about The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, Mira. It’s a beautiful, moving, and generous novel — and hilarious to boot!
One episode in your novel particularly haunted me: Amina captures that tragic moment when Bobby McCloud jumps from Seattle’s George Washington Memorial Bridge. Her photograph goes viral and triggers accusations that Amina exploited Bobby McCloud’s death. It also triggers Amina’s self-reproach.
It’s an incredible scene, and when I read it, my blood ran cold. Over and over, Amina finds herself making art out of the difficult moments in other peoples’ lives: the bridesmaid throwing up at the wedding, the grandmother passed out on the table, and, of course, Bobby McCloud’s suicide. She is deeply troubled about exploiting others’ lives for the right shot, but she is driven to take the shot anyway — at the risk of her sanity and her job.
This feels so morally complicated, and it’s a conundrum that, as a writer, I find really moving. It’s not as though Amina is seeking these things out: she isn’t a peeper or a creep; she just captures what she sees. Can capturing these moments for art ever not be exploitation? And where does exploitation start? When she displays the picture? When she clicks the shutter? When she notices those moments of vulnerability? Does the fact that it’s “art” excuse it? Do you tangle with these questions in making your own work? As a writer, do you feel the need to justify looking closely at vulnerability? How?
Mira Jacob: First — congratulations on getting Night at the Fiestas out into the world! The reception has been rightly spectacular — your stories are so perfectly formed and emotionally sharp that every time I finished one, I just had to sit and stare at nothing for a long time. And now I have all sorts of questions for you, but let me answer yours first.
When my book opens, Amina is a failed photographer — not because she is taking pictures of weddings but because she has found a way to doubt the force that drives her art. That fascinated me. All artists have that force, right? That strange mix of vision and curiosity and sympathy and fever that makes us make things the world has never asked for. But what happens when you lose faith in it? What happens when you are both repulsed and gratified by the thing that compels you to create?
Amina has had a kind of superpower from a young age — an ability to keep looking when others don’t, to capture those moments with her lens, but with it comes a corollary and necessary blindness, a distance from the emotional heat of the moment as it is happening. This is nothing new — photographers from James Nachtwey to Sebastião Salgado have talked about their ability to be in a situation and not of it, beholden to only their camera — but for Amina, who lost her brother while she was looking right at him, that choice is always a little fraught. It is something she tries not to think about too much until Bobby McCloud steps off a bridge in front of her and gives her her first real success — both in terms of exposure and money. It completely dismantles her.
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Does art justify exploitation? Oof. I have seventy-five answers to that and none of them are right, because the truth is that it depends on the art and the exploitation. War photography? Fashion shoots? MTV docudramas? But yes, to answer your question, this is something I think about constantly. Writing fiction comes with its special stipulations, of course, I am creating situations to let certain emotional truths play out, and most of the time I have no idea what they are until I write them. But it requires taking a very close look at vulnerabilities–my own, others — and there is always a part of that process that feels parasitic. I imagine I’ll be wrestling with that feeling for the rest of my life.
One of the things I keep thinking about in your stories is how many of your characters seem to be backstage in their own lives, waiting for to be seen (I’m thinking of Amadeo waiting to be redeemed in “The Five Wounds,” Frances waiting to be desired in “Night at the Fiestas,” Monica waiting a better life in “Mojave Rats”). Something big is just out of their reach, and every movement they make toward it becomes amplified in a way that is so gratifying to read. What is it about this moment, this peripheral state, that keeps you writing about it?
KVQ: “That strange mix of vision and curiosity and sympathy and fever that makes us make things the world has never asked for”: this has to be one of the best descriptions of the artistic drive I’ve heard!
I love what you say about Amina’s vision having a corollary blindness. It seems that art-making, whether it’s taking a picture or writing fiction, requires simultaneously real vulnerability — both to recognize these moments from which emotional truths can emerge and to experience them on the page — and a kind of coldness, a willingness to rake our subjects (and ourselves) over the coals.
Thank you for giving my stories such a careful read. You’re right that several of my characters occupy a liminal space of longing when the stories open. I think what interests me about this state is how emotionally risky it is to truly long for something — whether that thing is the love of another person or complete transformation or a different life story. But while it’s scary to want something deeply, it’s even scarier to reach for it, because failure is always a possibility. I’m interested in that moment in a character’s life when his longing becomes so unbearably intense that he has no choice but to reach for what he wants, even when what he wants is so enormous or ineffable that he’ll never truly grasp it.
What Amadeo wants in “The Five Wounds” is nothing short of total redemption. But he is still, emotionally, a teenager: he lives with his mother, he’s preoccupied with his own early promise, he has declined to take any responsibility for the care of his teenage daughter. What he doesn’t understand is that redemption, if it comes, won’t be total and bestowed on him from heaven, but rather will be incremental and hard-won and only the result of the messy, complicated work of showing up for the people who need him.
Monica, in “Mojave Rats,” finds herself alone with two small children in a trailer park in the Mojave Desert, longing for a life filled with art and books and money. She has the sense that her true life has been derailed by her first, disastrous marriage, so in marrying Elliott, she is trying to right things, despite her doubts. She decides that her doubts themselves are standing in her way, and to quell those doubts and reach for the life she longs for, she gives away the last vestiges of her life with her first husband — at the cost of her relationship with her daughter, who is a product of that unhappy marriage and therefore a constant reminder of it.
One thing that strikes me about your novel is how generous it is: not just with your characters — though there is real love and generosity in the characterizations, even when the prose is incisive and darkly funny — but the novel itself is capacious enough to contain India and Albuquerque and Seattle, many loves and losses, and whole decades. When you started writing, did you have a clear sense of what the arc and scope of the novel would be? As a short story writer at work on a novel, I am so curious!
MJ: I really appreciate “how emotionally risky it is to truly long for something” — you are so right. And yet it’s something we overlook so often. I love that your stories refuse to do that and instead sit right on that moment to let it play out. So glad to hear that you’re writing a novel! I felt like each of your stories had a whole novel packed inside it, so it will be fun to see what you do with more space.
I have to tell you, I had no idea what I was doing when I started working on mine. My agent tells me that I sat down with her one day and told her the whole story from beginning to end, but it took me ten years to actually get it written. In that time, I made a lot of wrong turns before finding the right ones. I didn’t know, for example, that I was going to be working with three different timelines — India in the late ’70s, New Mexico in the ’80s, and Seattle in the ’90s. I didn’t know how much was going to happen to each of the characters because in my mind, it was just going to be a story about a daughter watching her father lose his tether on reality. But then when I was writing, all of these things just started happening. Heartbreaks, calamities, family fights, but also moments when the characters really saw and loved each other. I was a little unprepared for that part — for how fiercely they felt, and how misshapen their love would be. I also didn’t realize how much I’d care about them, how beholden I would feel toward getting their story right. There were days and nights when I would barely see what was going on around me because I was in this shadow world, watching my characters’ lives rise and fall.
The other thing that happened was that I lost my dad to cancer in the course of writing this book. And the grief I felt, the rage — it was so unfathomable to the woman I had been before. I kept looking for a book that would answer this feeling, that would make some sense of it, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Most books about death are so serious and spare and I need something that jumped and rattled and made me laugh again, something that brought me back to the world of the living. When I couldn’t find it, I tried to write it. And I don’t know if it’s horribly unsophisticated to admit this, but I kept thinking as I wrote that maybe other people needed this kind of book, too.
Speaking of which — one of the things that is so grounding about your writing is how fearless you are about telling us how your characters feel. You don’t allude to things, you say them in a totally straightforward way. Claire “missed her mother with an intense, full-body longing that hit her so hard . . . that she couldn’t breathe.” “Hope glinted in Andrea’s chest.” “Margaret felt a sudden jealousy.” It might just be me (and tell me if you think it is) but I feel like this kind of clarity has recently dropped out of fashion in literary fiction. Characters are often moved from scene to scene with very few clues as to what they are feeling inside. And yet, it’s why I read in the first place — to connect, to see something that I can barely acknowledge all lit up with specificity. Can you tell me a little bit about your process? Were you ever self-conscious of being so straightforward? Is it something you had to learn to do, or something that came to you naturally? And does it have anything to do with being a New Mexican? *Raises New Mexican flag and waits with bated breath*
KVQ: The writing I most admire — and I’m happy to now count yours in this category! — is unafraid to contend with real emotion. I am so very sorry to hear about your father’s death, and yet because the treatment of grief in The Sleepwalker’s Guide feels textured and specific and surprising, I’m also unsurprised that some of it sprang from experience.
I agree with you that there is a kind of fiction in which pain is alluded to without being explored, as if the pain is so deep and unutterable that it can only be expressed by a stony gaze out at some spare, inhospitable landscape. Sometimes this kind of well-defended approach can work for me as a reader, but not usually. I’m always more drawn to work that risks real emotion on the page.
Certainly being from New Mexico has shaped my characters’ relationships to the past and to each other, though I’m not sure what role that landscape plays in my fascination with their interior landscapes.
I write — and read — because I am interested in characters’ interior lives, and I tend to be drawn to characters who are fairly self-aware. I’m interested in what they feel and how they feel and what they don’t want to admit they feel. I’m interested in the stories they tell themselves to explain their emotional reactions and how those stories fall short. I’m interested in how they try to hide their emotions, how they’re caught off-guard by them, and I’m interested in the emotions triggered by other emotions.
If inner lives are merely alluded to, then they can never been explored as deeply as I want to explore them, both as a reader and a writer. I tend to think that most of the time people — and characters — have a pretty clear sense of what they’re feeling and why, and if my character does know how he’s feeling in a particular moment, and I’m being faithful to his perspective, then I need to allow the reader access to that aspect of his experience.
There are as many shades of, say, yearning (or jealousy or rage or whatever), as there are situations in which yearning is felt. When you peel away one layer of emotion, there are deeper and more complicated layers, and I think the way to explore those layers on the page is to name them — as nearly as one can — and to keep looking closely and deeply. With any luck, you might eventually get deep enough that the emotion can’t be named. This process happens over many drafts.
I do occasionally feel squeamish about writing strong emotions and worry about risking sentimentality. But to me the risk is worth it if I’m getting closer to something true. Someone told me that Judith Mitchell said, “If you aren’t peering into the black hole of sentimentality, you aren’t getting close enough.” You don’t want to get sucked in, but you want to feel its gust.
You talk about how your novel took shape over a decade and how essential it was for you to immerse yourself in the shadowy fictional world to get the story right. I’m always so interested to know what writers read as they’re writing. A friend of mine reads only nonfiction when she’s in the thick of a project, while another reads poetry. Were there books that sustained and inspired you as you wrote? Books that served as touchstone for this particular project or for the process in general?
MJ: Love the Mitchell quote, but for now I’m going to keep this one close: “If inner lives are merely alluded to, then they can never been explored as deeply as I want to explore them, both as a reader and a writer.” It explains how I feel exactly.
I have such strange and varied and numerous touchstones for this book — the perils of writing for ten years.
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is family story with huge political implications, centered around Syrian Christians in Kerala (where my family is from). I love the magic and scope of the story, the tragedy that rings through it. One funny thing: when this book came out, I remember an aunt saying that she was upset because the book contained incest and now “they” — meaning white Westerners — would believe this was true of all of “us.” It made me feel immediately sick and burdened by my race. How can you build complex characters when there are aunties in corners wringing their hands about how you’ve ruined it for everybody?
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty was part of the antidote to that line of thinking. I’ve loved Smith since White Teeth, last quarter of the book be damned. I’m thrilled to death with her fearlessness around race, her candor and accuracy and willingness to just let characters do what they need to, never mind what “they” will think about it, because “they” are in there too, with everyone else. This is the kind of writing that makes me feel like I can breathe right.
Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven turned what I thought was a perversion — my ability to get very funny when things get very dark — into something I could work with. Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad make me more excited about language than almost anything else. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude reminded me that family stories can be epic.
One funny thing you didn’t ask but I feel like I should mention: I’ve learned that I have books I need to stay away from while writing. Anything by Junot Díaz or Toni Morrison — both of whom I love — will sway me too far from my own voice. I get their rhythms in my head and it takes too long to return to my own. Do you have anyone like that? A voice that is seductive that it can drown out your own?
KVQ: I love so many of the books you mention, Mira! Especially A Visit from the Goon Squad, which so thrilled me when I read it that I immediately had to start again.
Alice Munro’s Runaway is one of my favorite collections ever. Her stories remind me that one can always look more closely at a situation. In her stories she continues to peel back layers, revealing deeper and deeper layers of the story, deeper and deeper layers of mystery. And her curiosity about people seems to be limitless. She looks so closely at her characters and their situations, and that quality of attention is breathtaking.
Some of my stories are definitely in direct conversation with the work of other writers. In “The Five Wounds,” for example, I was interested in exploring a character who, at first blush, might be easily dismissed — by the reader and by me. In that context, I thought a lot about some of Raymond Carver’s characters. Flannery O’Connor was also on my mind as I wrote that story: probably no one has influenced my writing about faith and religion as much as O’Connor. I love her dark and occasionally mean sense of humor, and I love that in her fiction it’s never the pious or the do-gooders or the self-satisfied who find self-knowledge or grace or closeness to God.
Sometimes for fun I’ll give myself challenges based on what I’m reading. After reading Alice Munro’s “Chance,” I set myself the challenge of having a character meet a stranger on some form of public transportation. The result was “Night at the Fiestas,” my title story. In “Soldier’s Joy,” Antonya Nelson opens with a dream, which seemed like such a terrible and risky move, yet she pulls it off beautifully. So in “Ordinary Sins” I set myself the same task.
I know what you mean about those voices that can threaten one’s own voice! In college I was obsessed with Virginia Woolf. In the space of a few months I read everything she wrote except for maybe Jacob’s Room and a notebook or two. John L’Heureux, my writing professor at the time, suggested I might want to take a break, since my stories were starting to sound like terrible Mrs. Dalloway rip-offs. It was advice I needed to hear.
MJ: Kirstin, it has been really fun to talk to you, Hopefully next time it will be over green chili enchiladas.
KVQ: Absolutely! Except when it comes to enchiladas, I’m a red chili girl all the way. I so enjoyed talking, Mira.