Morris Collins's first novel Horse Latitudes is out this August. Other fiction and poetry has recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from Pleiades, Gulf Coast, The Chattahoochee Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Nimrod among others. He received his MFA in fiction from Penn State in 2008 and he lives and teaches in Boston.
An excerpt from his novel, Horse Latitudes, appeared in Issue Forty-Nine of The Collagist.
Here, he answers questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from Horse Latitudes. Enjoy!
What is writing like?
[I try to get in over my head…]
On his stunned walk back into town, he had seen a lake pooling out on the plateau behind the shanties. Under the slivered moonlight it hung flat and motionless and Ethan thought about what he would have to do in the coming days. Once when he went snorkeling off the north coast of Honduras he had watched pearl divers in boats out beyond the reef line grab weights and jump overboard. It was like that. Getting down there would be easy. You let yourself sink. Anyone could do it. But getting back without consequences, where the stakes raised with every moment, would be difficult.
[and stay determined…]
She set out for one of the many raft launches. The sun had fallen and the lights appeared on the far shore, blinking between the trees like the moving lanterns of phantom guides. In the stories she had been told as a child, to follow the lights through the jungles was to follow the Duende—the spirit that lured children into the forest. But she was not her little sister, she was not afraid of spirits and did not believe in stories, and she knew as she watched the lights flashing out of the crooked coves of shadowed trees that she was drawn to them, that she would cross the river and move toward the lights the way the fishermen on her island followed stars, or the way the fish themselves rose toward the lure of the reed lanterns rocking below waiting spears. So be it.
What isn’t writing like?
Ethan stood and watched Doyle dance and felt the sudden freedom one feels when a menacing dream turns to nightmare. At least now he knew what he was dealing with, and whatever it was, it was another world altogether, a new wrinkle forever removed from any choice made in any morning at any table in New York. The whole thing reeked of ruin, and Ethan felt the urge to reach for a camera that was not there. He raised his hand to Doyle but Doyle did not see him. Doyle had made his way to the stage, where he frolicked with the club dancers, the women paid to stay and dance as long as there were customers. He moved between them, he bumped and bounced, he laughed over the hundred decibels of reggaeton—he produced, in the blackened half-second between strobes, a dead chicken.
When you do it, why?
[Usually,]
He had woken alone in a stranger’s bed wearing only his argyle socks. Fine, that was the state of things, the way the evening played out, but it was a hard state to ignore.
[But also,]
Ethan kept the picture. He didn’t take many and he kept even fewer. In it, she’s turning her head to the side to look not at him but at the sea, at the boats there, the darkening waves. She’s saying something, though—her mouth is open and her lips drawn up in an expression of wonder. The day’s last light tangles in her black hair. Condensation glints on the outside of her piña colada, but if you wanted you could say the blush in her skin is just sunlight, the glow in her eyes some kind of pleasure. Sometimes, when he looks at the picture, he knows it for what it is: a vanishing life tricked into permanence, the last perfect moment before the falling dark. Other times it’s simply evidence and he tries to see her as she saw herself—diminished somehow. But for him it’s just the opposite. If he could, he’d reduce the whole of their lives together to these photographs, moments outside of memory, stills that if you tried, could mean anything.
When you don’t, why?
At some point, to some degree, everyone abandoned their charmed life and lived as best they could in the world. What did it matter? There was purity in light but not in illumination. The light touched the world and the world appeared sullied. Get over it. We mold our own scars, we make our own mercy.
[And, also, unfortunately, sometimes:]
The margarita came and it was terrible.