Roberta Allen is the author of eight books, including the novel, The Dreaming Girl, which was republished in 2011, two short short collections, a novella-in-shorts, a travel memoir and writing guides. She has recently finished a novel and two story collections. A conceptual/visual artist as well, she has work in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum. She leads private writing workshops.
Her story, "Forgotten," appeared in Issue Fifty-Two of The Collagist.
Here, interviewer Melissa Goodrich chats with Roberta Allen about darkly-humorous details, the collective unconscious, and a series of imaginary islands.
How do auxiliary details help inform your writing? Like the shared stylist who had once fallen twenty feet off a cliff while hiking and landed on her feet, or the all-white bedroom, or the old boyfriend who bar mitzvahed his dog—all of them vivid, curious, and full of metaphoric implications.
I am drawn to details—some darkly humorous—that exemplify to me, the strangeness of life, the strangeness of human experience and behavior, (the hair stylist who fell twenty feet and landed upright, the bar mitzvahed dog), and the absurdities that abound in the world. Curious and peculiar differences are remembered by the narrator rather than connections between one character and another. Details moved the story in directions I didn’t expect it to take and played a part in determining the form of “Forgotten.”
At the end of this story, the narrator has lost more than her memory—but the actual friendships with the people she’s struggling to recall. Do you consider her forgetfulness a defense mechanism? Or a kind of trauma she’s suffering (“is there a giant repository with all the words that were ever spoken?” “Can the desire to remember fool you into believe that you do?”)? Those black Australian caves stick out to me—kind of magnificent, kind of horrific—“the sort of nothing…which seems to suddenly drop to infinite depths.”
The narrator, who is older and afraid of memory loss, plays a game with herself. A serious game. She is testing her memory. I imagined the narrator as a character who doesn't have much feeling for Katherine, Valerie or Yolanda. The narrator’s anxiety about her memory (not the friendships) fueled this story for me. But she may be hiding her motives for remembering. Of course, the unconscious has its own motives. The “black Australian caves…which seem to drop to infinite depths”) are a metaphor for the unconscious, for all the memories that are lost, that may never be retrieved—not only in the narrator's memory but in the collective unconscious as well. The same holds true for “the giant repository of all the words that were ever spoken.” After the banal incident that triggers her memory of the characters, I imagined the narrator struggling to recall them because they are unimportant to her.
If I said that memories of important people in her life, important events, might have aroused too much anxiety in the narrator, I think I would be reading into my story more than is there.
You’ve written many short-shorts (a novella in shorts as well as two short short collections)—is your current writing still signified by the brief, or are you writing longer work these days? Do you ever combine your writing with your work as a visual artist?
I am reworking longer works, originally written years ago, that were unsuccessful or left unfinished. The ones I’m rewriting still resonate with me. In between, I am writing surreal flash fictions, each less than 200 words, as part of an ongoing series, Amulets From Imaginary Islands. The name of each island mixes up the letters of an existing one. The flash fictions were inspired by a series of my photos, which I call amulet photos. These are my only stories that combine images but the stories also stand on their own. My conceptual art is something quite different.
What excellent things have you been reading?
I was impressed by The Guardian, Sarah Manguso’s memoir, and by the novel, Acqua Viva by Clarice Lispector. I thought I had read just about everything by Lispector, translated into English, except for the two novels that came out last year, Acqua Viva being one. (Her other books I read in 1989.) The story collection, Family Ties, which isn’t recent, I somehow missed but I’m enjoying it now. I wish I had more time to read. There are a number of books on my list but my writing, my art—the solo exhibition I am preparing for—and my writing workshops keep me very busy.
