Jessica Alexander studies and teaches at the University of Utah. Her fiction has been published in Blip Magazine.
Her story "The Problem" appears in Issue Forty-Two of The Collagist.
Here, fiction writer Jessica Alexander speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about love, linearity, and the fetus niece.
1. How did you begin this piece, and how did you develop it to where it is now?
I thought of love as something that bursts. That’s where I started. I’d been reading a lot of Caren Beilin’s and Aimee Bender’s work, two writers who so beautifully render the figural literal, who turn emotional responses into palpable conditions. (Beilin writes of grief as corpse balloons carried by the bereaved. Bender’s grieving father wakes with a gaping hole in his stomach). Love is urgent and impractical. It operates in and against time. It is impossible. I don’t think my love makes anyone more discrete. It bursts them, spatially and temporally. I look for those I love and find them everywhere. And so, I think, what began as a spatial dispersal developed into a temporal dispersal.
2. What guided the narrative time leaps, the ping-ponging between the 10-year-old self at the bus and the adult reunion with the ‘you’? The two time-locales also seem steeped in their own particular, continuing, amended conversations (needing mothers v. fathers, wanting not evidence or anger but sobbing) – which seem to nullify or cancel out the time between this grade school morning and dining among all the “pretty person[s]. Everyone is feeding a lover, or being fed by one.” Are these conversations, in your mind, a kind of feeding/forcing feeding? How do these conversations align with your schema of time?
I’ve never been able to write a linear narrative. I’ve tried. It feels like filling my mouth with rocks, and trying to talk. I’ve seen people do this (both rocks and linear plots) admirably. But when I try it isn’t beautiful. It’s clumsy. I think it’s because that just isn’t how I experience time. I still wince with shame when I remember events that occurred on the school bus, in gym class, or locker rooms. Mine is not a narrative of progress. I cannot detail the moral and ethical formation of an identity, or posit my characters safely on the other side of pain, loss, and social shame. While I do think there is a moral dimension to pain and humiliation, I don’t think it consists of overcoming such experiences. I like that you say “force-feeding.” I had not made that connection, but I do think most of the narratives I’ve been force-fed insist on progress as a model.
3. I was in love with this story from its first line because it was destructive and haphazard and sad and there-was-nothing-you-could-do-about-it : What about that extraoridinary recurring image of “mothers burst into a flock of pigeons” is so attractive as a refrain, why this image as a nucleus-motif? Is it the bursting/dispersement part, is it something about the ordinary-ness/dirtiness of a pigeon, is it the fact that “We’re supposed to get over our mothers,” but can’t?
Wow, that’s really generous. I like your term “nucleus-motif.” It so aptly describes an alternative to linear narrative. A lot of wonderful non-fiction deploys a similar organizational strategy. Judy Ruiz’s “Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy,” Shena McAuliffe’s “Endnotes to a Seizure,” and Tasha Matsumoto’s “Mathematics for Nymphomaniacs,” are organized by constellations, or associations. In McAuliffe’s, and Ruiz’s work an inexplicable, and recurring event sits at the center of a web. The event, it seems, has shattered the narrator’s understanding of the universe. The story is the re-writing, re-weaving, re-organizing of a world around an unfathomable. Each of these pieces suggest, in content and organization, that what breaks us is not discrete, not bound neatly between before and after, but bursts and disperses. It becomes the nucleus motif of the worlds we think. And so, I think, you’re right, a nucleus-motif is about what we’re supposed to get over, but can’t.
4. What else are you working on? Does it also have (or have not) a home near Freud?
I recently met a woman who teaches yoga to toddlers. We were on an airplane. I told her about a sonogram of my niece. She was in down-dog (the fetus-niece, that is). I asked when our bodies stop bending like this. Why and when we must re-teach them. She said school. Of course, I thought, it has to do with molding our bodies, for hours, to desks. But she said potty training too! And I thought: Ah! The stress of socialization is so great we stiffen! That’s one thing, amidst all Freud’s myth making, that I really appreciate: his idea that being socialized is unbearable, the original trauma that breaks us into people. I think that aspect of Freud’s thought is something that I very earnestly, if unconsciously write through in my stories. But like the socialization process itself, there is so much in Freud’s work that I find tragic. For example, the way social prescription becomes description, delimits how things, and what things can be described.
5. What good stories/materials have you read about mothers (and or bursting and or pigeons) lately?
While there are no mothers or pigeons in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in Highschool, I appreciate the way she writes about child/parent relationships. In the first part of the novel Janey Smith’s boyfriend starts seeing other women, and stops coming home. Eventually, they break up. Pretty straightforward, only her boyfriend is also her father. Acker so succinctly demonstrates the perversity of patriarchy. The relation to the Father is not a precursor to future relationships. The relationship to the Father is the only relationship. Whether we agree with Acker’s stance or not, there is much to admire in her economy.
Families are perverse and fascinating! The ideal family instills social values. But how perverse is that? It’s a battleground, where through a series of transgressions, children learn what is and is not permitted—and shame is one, among the many weapons, that breaks us into social beings. I love writers like Mary Caponegro, and Jaclyn Watterson for their ability to de-familiarize the family’s fantastic perversity. So, I guess I haven’t read too much on pigeons, but I’ve read some excellent stuff on families, and by extension mothers.