Amber Sparks's debut collection May We Shed These Human Bodies is out now from Curbside Splendor. Her fiction has been featured in various publications, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Gargoyle, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and elimae. Her chapbook, "A Long Dark Sleep: Stories for the Next World," is included in the anthology Shut Up/Look Pretty, published by Tiny Hardcore Press. She is also a contributor at lit blogs Big Other and Vouched, and lives in Washington, D.C. with a husband and two beasts. Get more Sparks at her blog.
Her story "Birds with Teeth" appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.
Here, Amber Sparks talks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about getting the whole thing right.
1. Where did “Birds with Teeth” begin for you, and how did it get to here?
The story actually began a long time ago for me – I saw a documentary, years ago, about the Bone Wars (which you mention below) and I was completely intrigued. I did a bunch of research and came up with pages and pages of notes, and then I just couldn’t think of how to actually tell the story, what I wanted to do with it. So I put it aside, and then maybe a year ago I saw another special about these two guys, and I was really taken with the fact that they had been friends before they became bitter enemies, and how different their backgrounds and upbringing were. They were just polar opposites but both drawn to one another because of the same passion. I also hadn’t known before I saw the special that Cope had this girlfriend that his father sent him over to Europe to get rid of. So there were all of my characters, right there, a sort of love triangle, and the whole story was suddenly opened up. It wasn’t about bones, it was about a passion, a love, that all-consuming desire to feel something before we leave this world.
2. I love the way that this piece engages with history, specifically “The Great Bone Rush” or “The Great Bone Wars,” a time when paleontologists rushed to collect fossils and discover new species. The main characters are actual historical figures: Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. It seems to me that this passage describes what you’re doing so beautifully with the material:
Cope, though, gave the monster life. He was one of the first to do so, to bring these New World fossils a stunning, vivid sense of existence.
Can you talk a little about the challenges and pleasures of tussling with history-in-fiction? I’d love to hear what you do to make sure that historical fact enlarges the story. (And/or what you do to avoid possible reductiveness.)
Challenges and pleasures is exactly right. It’s so hard and so rewarding to write historical fiction. It’s my favorite thing to get right – I feel like kids’ history textbooks should be written by fiction writers, honestly. Sure, you might not get the facts right, but who cares about the facts? Fiction writers get the whole thing right, what’s really important. They get the story right, and that’s what is so interesting about history. The big story. Not the little facts. Some of the facts are fascinating, and give the story truth and life – I love to sprinkle those throughout – they’re like flaxseeds on your food, they’re good for you, they anchor it. But the meat of the story, the real food there, is the big story. The overarching themes. And sometimes to get at those, I make up shit. Marsh didn’t steal Cope’s girl, at least as far as I know. And Cope’s girl wasn’t a prostitute. But it serves my story, to talk about passion, to talk about different kinds of love, different classes and backgrounds, to make these things up. I think there are certainly different schools of thought on how you do historical fiction - I just read HHhH, which is a wonderful, amazing book, and Laurent’s doing historical fiction in this extremely factual way, which is terrific, because he makes it work by bringing in his own process, and his faith and doubts in the process, and in the facts themselves, and in the relevance of the facts – and whose facts, and how “facts” can be relative in the face of long-done history. And I think to me, that’s what gives me the license to do historical fiction the other way – to just make things up. Because no writer of history ever has one solid set of facts at his or her fingertips. You’re always guessing, you’re always interpreting and making it your own – so why not make it really your own, make it serve the meanings you’re trying to create? But I think you do have responsibility to be careful with history, of course. I mean, I’m writing about Bone Wars. Long-dead dinosaur hunters. I don’t think I would ever write about Nazis like this. I’m paraphrasing, but in HHhH, Laurent says something like, These are Nazis. You don’t have to make anything up when it comes to the Nazis. Why would you?
3. This piece’s structure—the flipping between third person sections and italicized first person sections—creates natural tension and energy. It also allows for delightful surprises, such as Charles Darwin’s letter. What went into your thinking about the structure of this piece? (Does it in some way reflect your research process?)
As soon as I knew I wanted the story to come through playing Cope and Marsh off of each other, I knew I had to switch narrators. But at first I was doing third person for both, and then I realized the story could really have power if I took a side. And the side I took was Marsh’s, because he was the quiet one, the cranky one, the one with no friends, the odd duck. I thought, all the revelations would come from humanizing him, making him sympathetic, as opposed to the naturally sympathetic, gregarious Cope. And then suddenly the she emerged as a stronger character, sort of took over the story like a weed, and so I needed first person for her, too. I needed her to have a voice, not to just be a marginalized plot convenience. If I was going to have a woman in this story, she was going to get her say, too.
4. What other writing projects are you working on right now?
Right now I’m working on some more stories, and putting together a short story collection, and also on a novel. I don’t want to say too much about the novel, but it’s my second attempt at such a form and it’s certainly turning out a lot better than the first attempt.
5. What knock-out writing have you been enjoying recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?
Oh, man, I’m also enjoying great reading. I just recently had the pleasure of reading Matt Bell’s book, which comes out in June, and I’m very excited for that. It’s fantastic, truly fantastic. And Matt Salesses and Ethel Rohan and Laura van den Berg, some of my favorite writers, all have books coming out next year. I’m excited for the new Karen Russell short story collection, and for Anne Carson’s newest. James Salter’s new novel. Lindsay Hunter has a book coming out that’s going to kick ass. And of course, I can’t wait for the novella that I wrote with Robert Kloss, The Desert Places, that’s coming out in October from Curbside Splendor. It’s illustrated by Matt Kish, the absolutely amazing artist responsible for Tin House’s Moby Dick in Pictures. I’ve seen a few of the early illustrations and I need to tell you that it’s going to be an unbelievable thing, this book.