Doug Rice is the author of the forthcoming books An Erotics of Seeing: The Force of Photography as Philosophy’s Broken Sentence (Black Scat Books) and When Love Was. He is also the author of Das Heilige Buch der Stille, Between Appear and Disappear, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist, Skin Prayer, A Good Cu/tboy is Hard to Find, and Blood of Mugwump. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, The Dirty Fabulous Anthology, Kiss the Sky, Alice Redux, Phantoms of Desire, Discourse, Gargoyle, Zyzzyvya, and others. His work has been translated into Polish, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German. He was a Literary Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, and teaches at Sacramento State University.
His story, "A Broken Fairy Tale of Lost Souls," appeared in Isssue Sixty-Four of The Collagist.
Here, Doug Rice talks with interviewer, William Hoffacker, about fairy tales, revision, and Debra.
Tell us about the origin of your story “A Broken Fairy Tale of Lost Souls.” What sparked the initial idea or caused you to start writing the first draft?
I work from image and voice. Every story begins with an image and then eventually I hear a distinct voice in my head for telling the story. I come to know the narrator and the narrator’s desires and confusions through this voice. For this story, I was walking on the Southside of Pittsburgh two years or so ago and I saw a young girl turning in circles near an abandoned building. Her mother stood off in the distance on the sidewalk talking to someone and occasionally looking over at the girl. The girl walked over to a window of the building, looked in, shrugged, and walked back to her mother. This image and moment haunted me. I wanted to discover why a girl would shrug her shoulders after looking through a window of an abandoned building. I needed to know what changed about her after seeing whatever it was that she saw, so I wrote this story. Part of me was tempted to walk over and look through the window that the girl had peered into, but I feared if I did I would lose the story.
If we may take this story’s title somewhat literally, what essential qualities make this piece a fairy tale? What themes (or tropes, or other literary devices) do you think your work has in common with traditional fairy tales?
One of the primary tropes I worked with has to do with the dual plotted story. The boy has a direct experience that will mark him and the girl follows him and sees him go through whatever it is that he experiences, and this then marks her as well. The marking remains unspoken, unclear, but, hopefully, readers are left with something to think about for both characters. There are two journeys rather than only one, even though on first reading it may appear to be only one quest and the quest itself is not so clear.
I wanted to also give the sense of the not-too-long-ago that is part of many fairytale structures, but I also needed to simultaneously create a sense of the far-off and long-ago. I hoped the fairy tale reference in the title would help to achieve that.
I also wanted to confuse the easy binary of pretty and fair is good and ugly is bad. Clearly, the janitor has a darkness to him but the boy plays along with his darkness and trembles on the edge of being good to the girl while also introducing her to a seedier world. None of the characters fit neatly into either category of being pure and good or impure and evil.
The need that parents have for bedtime stories that appear at the end of my story is important as part of fairytale device. The parents are desperate for a story about the children in the neighborhood, because they are all losing their children and because their own imaginations have disappeared as they have aged. The parents are most likely the vilest characters in the story. Look at what they do to their children in their own bedtime stories. The children are simply young, and the janitor is not completely in control of his own acts, but the parents transform all of this into their own wish fulfillment.
And the final moment of the story: the locking of the truth of what they have all experienced in a stone is another part of fairytale tropes.
And, finally, locating the story in Pittsburgh, a city I love, but also a very prosaic city that lacks fairy tales—aside from those achieved by Franco Harris’ immaculate reception and Bill Mazeroski’s homerun off Ralph Terry—undoes the fairy tale trope. I did not want the story to take place in a typical fairytale setting. I think that would have reduced the story to only being read as a fairy tale.
For the most part this story does not deal in names; the main characters are referred to as the “boy-who-played-with-matches” and the “girl who followed him.” However, in one peculiar moment, the narrator does use someone’s name: “The boy and the janitor did everything that they had agreed on, but none of it was seen by anyone. Not by the police passing by. Not by the boys smoking cigarettes. Not by the girl standing in the snow. Not by Debra. Not even by the boy,” leaving readers to wonder who this Debra is. Can you speak about the decision to refrain from naming the characters, as well as the choice to include this one mysterious name?
In part, my decision had to do with the previous questions. Most fairytale characters are unnamed. Leaving them unnamed or named in the way that they are identified provides a narrative rhythm that becomes part of the narrative drive itself. The characters are searching for their identities as they try to make sense of this one small experience.
And the sudden appearance of Debra is meant to shock the narrative sensibility. Now, readers must rethink what they have been seeing and how they have been seeing what they have been seeing and through whose eyes the story has been being seen. I went back and forth between deciding whether I should give this female character a name or refer to her as a mother. I do not fully know what she means for the story or for the way that a reader understands the story. It does feel important to me, though, that there is this other woman present, and watching. She simply wanders into the story but remains trapped inside a liminal space. My hope is that Debra awakens something inside the reader’s emotional understanding of what is at stake for the boy and the girl and how they will never be able leave this behind. Debra is the woman who came after the girl who follows. That is a deliberate tense confusion. I struggled with how much to develop that moment or to more fully integrate Debra into the story. I cut paragraphs of her watching over the shoulder of the girl who follows, but in the end decided to rupture the narrative for one breath.
What was your revision process like for this story? How much did it change from the first draft to the final?
I revised like a maniac, with wild joy and wonder. As I do with all my writing, once I had written this story, I re-read it many times to see what it was trying to be about and what it might have to say. There is a sweet ecstasy that comes with discovering what my characters have to say and what the world they live in might reveal about my own world. While this story came to me in a rush, more like a poem than a story. I had one solid image and I worked on refining that image. Most of what I did during the revision process was cutting out details that overtold the story. The first few drafts simply had too many details. They crowded the story in a way that made the world too literal. So I cut as many details as I could. But the final draft of the story is not much different from the first draft in terms of narrative design and plot. I played with sentence breath and poetics. I worked on the style more than any other element of craft during the revision of this particular story. I kept moving commas, dropping them, adding them.
What writing projects are you working on now?
I have just completed AN EROTICS OF SEEING: The Force of Photography as Philosophy’s Broken Sentence, which is being published by Black Scat Books. Demian Bern has just completed the design for my book, When Love Was, that I wrote this summer while in residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. I am currently working on a new novel, Daughters of the Rivers, a story about women and girls and ghosts living along the rivers of Pittsburgh. This novel in some ways is related to the novel I just completed, Here Lies Memory. They both explore the myriad of ways that gentrification affects the souls of the people who live and have lived in neighborhoods that have been redesigned for the ease of those with more money than the people who actually built and lived in the neighborhoods for years. I am nearly finished with compiling a new book of street photographs (still untitled).
What did you read in 2014 that you would like to recommend?
A nearly impossible question to answer. I have read many astonishing books this past year, some published recently, some not so recent. But for a few…Moyra Davey’s Burn the Diaries, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, all of Hilda Hilst’s works, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, Hilton Als’ White Girls, James Salter’s All That Is, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ Harlem is Nowhere, Laszlo Krasznahorkai Seiobo’s There Below, and so many more.