Sarah Marshall grew up in rural Oregon and recently earned an MFA from Portland State University. She spent her summer vacation traveling through Manitoba (where she saw the snake dens in Narcisse and the Icelandic heritage museum in Gimli), North Dakota (where she was stranded outside a train station in Grand Forks, and saw the geographic center of North America in Rugby and the oil boom in Williston), and Montana (where she wrote). Her work has recently appeared in The Rumpus, Propeller, The Awl, and Hobart, and she is currently at work on a novel, from which "Rosebud" is excerpted.
Her story "Rosebud" appears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.
Here, Sarah Marshall talks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about imperatives, Texas Chainsaw Massacres, women as victims/victimizers, and fairy tales -- unbriefly and beautifully.
1. This piece opens almost as an incantation, buoyant and mysterious (it seems begged to be read aloud). How did you start this story? How did you know to start it here, this way, limp-yet-living (“Baby hangs taut as a plumb weight”), prophetic, in the kind-of-future?
Like everyone else I know, I wish I had all the time in the world to write, and like everyone else I often have just a few minutes here and a few minutes there to work with in a given day. In the last couple of years I’ve focused on making those minutes usable, and so when I begin a story the first thing I write often takes the form of a moment frozen in time. If I can’t write a sizable portion of a draft I can write a few sentences or a paragraph or so, and then come back to it later. If I used my minutes well, then I can often locate images, sounds, and ideas that I know will be important to the rest of the story. I began Rosebud by writing the first paragraph, setting it aside for a while—at least one week, probably several—and then coming back to it and allowing it to expand. When I read it again I heard the abrupt rhythms of Larina’s voice, her numbness to her life and her use of her child and her body as shields—really as so much meat. I knew those strands would be enough for me to follow to the finish. I’d also already decided on the plot by then, though I didn’t yet know how it would end.
2. What guided the logic for swivels in POV, from a close third to an imperative (“Wake up on the loning nights and walk barefooted […] Pull the sharpest knife from the kitchen drawer”) to the second person completely, at the end (“Unclasp your hands, Larina, my sister, and let your daughter go”)? Is the narrative pushing out in the same way Larina is, “push[ing] until she does not know what she is pushing out of her, whether it is just the baby or all the rest besides”?
The imperative and the loss of pronoun really begin, I think, as Larina starts to lose her identity as an individual, and become a Slaughter wife. That’s something I realize now, but wasn’t entirely aware of at the time—the imperative just felt right to me as I began a new section, and I went along with it and thought about what that change in voice meant later. Larina’s voice, which is a sizable presence in the opening sections—breathless, angry, and hopeful—fades away, and when a voice does peek through, it’s usually in Rosebud’s form—gentle, calm, and apparently forgiving whatever failing Larina thinks she is guilty of.
3. What draws you to the motif of names/naming : like Missoula, “by or near the place of fear or ambush” ? Who (or what) really is ambushed in this story, if that is Larina’s goal?
Names have always been important to me, especially town names. I spend a lot of time looking at maps and picking out places for my characters to wander through: Lima, Montana; Lovell and Greybull and Meeteetse, Wyoming; Thalia, Texas; Plum Coulee and Narcisse and Gimli, Manitoba. I like names that mean something, particularly something ominous—a lot of my California characters make some mention of Chowchilla, which is another corruption of an American Indian word, this time the name of the Chauchila tribe, which translates to “murderers.” It’s also home to two women’s prisons, and California’s death row for women. Diane Downs is there, Nancy Garrido is there, Susan Atkins was there before she died a few years ago. I write a lot of female characters who have descended or could easily descend into brutality, and who fear being trapped far more than they fear the darkness within them—who may fear nothing but being trapped. So Chowchilla seems like an especially ominous place for them.
I’m also interested in how the geography of a place gives birth to its names Rose is an imaginary town placed in a part of the world I know very well—the sleepy, rain-soaked part of Oregon between Portland and Astoria—and the real towns that surround it have names like Jewell and Mist and Rainier, roads with names like Neverstill and Ironhorse and Gnat Creek. You couldn’t have names like that in Texas or California, and you couldn’t have a Thalia or a Lima in that part of Oregon.
In the course of the story I think that Larina is ambushed more than anyone—by the impossibility of her desires, by the limits of her strength, by the complexity of the world she has invaded. I took a wonderful class on the southern gothic last year, from a professor who went on to be one of my thesis advisors, and became fascinated by the idea of all gothic narratives essentially being about opening a door into a world too choked with its own history to be comprehensible to an outsider—and then being dragged into that world. It’s a theme in so many different kinds of narratives, and a terrifying one. I’m a huge horror junkie, and I wrote a term paper for that class comparing Absalom, Absalom! to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. To me, Quentin Compson opening the door to Rosa Coldfield’s room is the same as walking into what looks like a normal Texas farmhouse and getting butchered by Leatherface. In both cases, you’re entering into a world you have no way of understanding, and the consequences are nearly always severe. After that class I consciously decided I wanted Rosebud and the other stories I set at Slaughter Auto to be a kind of Oregon gothic—though I’ve been told by my readers that I didn’t include enough rain.
4. Do you believe what your character believes about stories, their potencies, defenses, vulnerabilities? That somehow stories soften blows, “because the worst part of her death is that she is not here to make it seem less awful in her telling,” act as sedatives, that keep one “alive by telling a new story each night, until her husband fell asleep and could do no harm to her”? I love that moment when she threatens (yet protects) a narrative by crouching by it bedtimes and waiting with a knife, knowing “All she wants now is the telling, but she cannot get at it, and she knows that if he dies it will be gone for good.” Colt seems transformed by his role as (potential) narrator : so authors matter only as much as their stories? Or the inverse?
My goal right now is to spend the rest of my writing life answering that question. We all live our lives, to some extent, based on the narratives we assign ourselves, and the roles we see ourselves as inhabiting within those narratives—I am the good daughter, I am the mother, I am the baby, I am the protector, I am the provider, I am the one that can’t be trusted, I am the one that can’t be loved. Of course, these narratives are also assigned to us, based on our sex or our race or our economic status or our birth order or any of a thousand other things. Larina’s life seems to be not just about finding comfort in others’ stories—Rosebud’s old stories, and the promise of a story from Colt—but in the story she assigns herself: she is the avenger, the strong one, the fearless one, the one who will put things right. When the complexity of her situation undermines her ability to fulfill her role as a warrior—an ambusher, an “Injun”—she stops being able to cope with the realities of her life.
A lot of my writing lately has dealt with the narratives that allow women to become victims and victimizers, and about giving the reader a way to understand a character through the narrative she creates for herself. I’m working on a story about one of Colt’s other wives, who becomes the most powerful woman in the compound because of his high regard for her, and eventually helps him lure his victims. The question I want to answer is whether a woman who mitigates her victimhood by victimizing other woman—by appointing herself queen of a narrative which, though sadistic, may be the only narrative she can locate within her life—can be made understandable to a reader. I want to know whether we can look at this narrative from start to finish and understand her actions, the sources of her cruelties, and the diminishment of her humanity, and see her as not just human but perhaps even sympathetic. I don’t know if I can make do it, but I think it’s possible.
5. What have you been reading this winter? What has kept you warm?
Yesterday morning I picked up Lynn Crosbie’s Paul’s Case, which imagines the inner lives of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Canadian serial killers active in the early nineties, as well as their families, their victims, and other players in the investigation and trial. It’s part poetry, part prose, part criticism, and it was a hugely controversial book when it came out: people called for it to be censored, and for Crosbie to be assaulted or thrown in prison along with Bernardo. It was a hard book to to track down, but it was worth the effort. What I love about it so far is its fearlessness: Crosbie makes some very risky moves both as a writer and as a citizen (of course, those often go hand in hand).
The Bernardo and Homolka murders were immensely shocking for a number of reasons: because one of the perpetrators was female, because the couple who committed the murders were young, white, well-off, and beautiful, and because nothing like it had really happened in North America before, but especially not in Canada. At the time I’m sure it was comforting to move on from the case with a pat idea of what happened—they were unmitigated evil; they weren’t like the rest of us; they weren’t even human—and Crosbie uses Paul’s Case to interrogate those easy, pat conclusions about the nature of “evil.” She works at the subject like a pit bull gnawing on a bone—or, maybe more accurately, like a pit bull gnawing on another pit bull.
Sometimes the writing is bad. Sometimes the writing is amazing. It’s always breathtaking to watch. It’s also the kind of fearlessness I aspire to in my stories, most of which are at least as dark as Rosebud. I got a rejection from a literary magazine earlier this year that said something like “If you’d read our guidelines you’d have known we don’t accept stories about rape.” For better, or for worse that disqualifies nearly everything I’ve written.
6. What are you writing now?
I’m currently working on a series of stories about the other Slaughter wives—where they came from, how they ended up in Rose, and why they stayed. It’s taking the shape of a novel, though a title is still evading me. My boyfriend thinks I should call it Slaughterhouse 5, and a friend suggested Slaughter Daughters. I have a few ideas, but they’re only slightly less terrible.
Several of the stories are reworked fairy tales that two of the wives tell to each other—a hybrid of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Robber Bridegroom, a retelling of East of the Sun and West of the Moon in which the husband doesn’t regain his human form at the end, and Larina’s version of Isis and Osiris, based on her search for Rosebud. Like all quiet, bloody-minded children I loved fairy tales, and playing with those childhood narratives, in a work about women who have been in many ways reduced to a kind of childhood, has allowed me see them in a new light. It’s also been tremendous fun. I was hacking away at the collection this summer and at a certain point, when my relationship with my work had become somewhat grinding and cheerless, I thought, “You know what I really want to write? A fairy tale.” And so I did.