Tasha Coryell is an MFA Candidate at the University of Alabama where she is working on a novel about murderous sorority girls. Her work has been featured in [PANK], The Collagist, Word Riot and other journals. She has work forthcoming from WhiskeyPaper, Vending Machine Press, and Rappahannock Review. You can find Tasha tweeting under @tashaaaaaaa and more work from her at tashacoryell.com.
Her story, "Things that come from inside us," appeared in Issue of Fifty-Three of The Collagist.
Here, she speaks with interviewer Keaton Maddox about abjection, consumption, and sororities death pledges.
You begin with an inciting condition: the protagonist has an unexpected pregnancy. However, she never appears emotionally impacted by its introduction into her life. Rather, she moves through the mediocrity of her day as if nothing has changed. She is still successful (if you can call it that) at everything she does, and then she seems to escape the circumstance without consequence. How did you go about creating this sense of disconnect without pushing the story into numbness?
When I wrote this story I was taking a gender theory course and writing a paper about Kristeva’s idea of abjection. Abjection refers to people and places that have been cast-off or othered, but also can refer to various bodily fluids. Judith Butler has a really great line where she says:
The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-diffrentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit.
In this story I wanted to create a character who embodied this notion of the abject. She’s a person who has been relegated to the outside of society, she constantly has various fluids moving in and out of her body and she is carrying around this baby that was just inside of her. I wanted the emotion from the story to come out of the things happening to her body rather than the protagonist’s emotional state. I don’t even know how I would begin to approach the protagonist’s emotional state in this story. I also think reading it aloud completely changes how the story is perceived. I read it at a reading once and the audience was laughing the entire time, which was a surprise and also not a surprise. Physical discomfort makes people laugh a lot.
I frequently get asked about the lack of emotion in my stories and honestly when I’m writing I never think about it like that. I think maybe I’ve watched too much television so my understanding of how emotions work is flawed or maybe I was told “show don’t tell” too many times as a developing writer. I’m a very emotional person and I think, especially as a woman, emotional people have a constant awareness of how much emotion they are showing and are constantly trying to quell whatever emotions they have. I think this comes out in writing as well.
Building off the idea of consequence, the ending is so powerful because the reader never gets to experience the closure of her finally feeling something. If you had included an additional scene of her mourning, it would have been too predictable. If she still felt nothing, than she would no longer be believable. Walk me through your process for creating this finish and what that decision making process was like for you.
Finishing stories is the hardest thing to do. I find that writing a story is a very pleasurable experience. I usually write a first draft of a story, depending on the length, in a several day period and because it’s so fast, the experience is really enjoyable and fun. The end is usually dictated by how the writing of the story is going rather than by a set ending I have in my head. I never really know how I am going to end things. Things in life don’t really end like that, so often it’s difficult to end a story that way. Writing novels is easier in that sense. A novel can go on and on forever. A story though needs to be contained in a much smaller space. I always feel resistant to including a death at the end of a story. Death always seems too easy and yet in this story I wasn’t prepared to cope with the life of a child who was born in a fast food restaurant and by the end of the day has had their first club experience. If the baby dies, there doesn’t need to be that explanation of life and the story can be encapsulated in a single day.
The setting seems to take on a life of its own, even though we never have time to settle into any of the locales. The protagonist drifts in and out of them quickly and fluidly, yet they are all so vibrant. How did you go about working location into your story? What role do you believe setting plays in the constructions of narrative?
As a kid my parents never took me to fast food restaurants except once every summer when we were driving to my cabin, so as a result I’ve always been fascinated by fast food restaurants. I love the artifice of receiving a bag full of food wrapped in individual packages, there’s something that feels so satisfying about that act. Fast food restaurants are also culturally considered locations of abjection. They have drive thrus, which are sold as a convenience, but also means that people are able to eat fast food without actually ever going inside of a restaurant and facing all the smells and plastic that the experience involves. There are also a lot of strange events that take place at fast food restaurants. I’ve seen a couple of episodes of I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant and I think Burger King restrooms were the number one location that surprise babies were born, which was where I got the idea for the opening of the story. In general I always have a lot of food in everything I write because most of my life surrounds eating. I don’t understand stories where people don’t eat or don’t use the bathroom.
I write about jobs that people I know have had a lot. My little brother worked in a gas station in high school and as a result I place a lot of stories in gas stations. I also knew someone who worked in a call center one summer and that’s how I got the idea for this story. I try to write about spaces that are foreign or uncomfortable to me. I am a very routine person. I go to the same places all the time. If I were going to write about just the places I go, everything would be really boring.
Clubs are the scariest places in the world to me, so I write about clubs a lot too. I have never really been to clubs. I think am writing about the conceptual club in my head rather than the actual club. I have always been scared of parties in a similar way. Parties and clubs are the coalescence of humanity. Everyone is intoxicated and trying to look their best, but at the end of the night no one really looks good and just wants to eat something greasy. There are all these expectations set at the beginning of the night that are never really met. People want to find love in the club and mostly they just find themselves at the 24 diner with smudged eyeliner afterwards.
What are you writing?
The biggest thing I’m working on is a novel about sorority girls who kill people as part of their pledge process. The tagline would be something like “killing is the secret that holds them together for all eternity.” In undergrad I helped found a chapter of a sorority, which started as sort of a joke and now is embedded in the history of the sorority forever. I’m worried they will retroactively kick me out after I finish this novel. I’m always interested in exploring gender construction through writing and sororities are just the strangest places regarding gender and power dynamics.
I’m also working on a series of prose poems surrounding a single character, “Marianne” who eats a lot of things and breaks a lot of babies. Eating and babies have always inexplicably been my favorite things to write about. I don’t know if it’s going to be book length or chapbook length. Initially I wanted to make a chapbook, but then it was suggested I make it a book. Probably it will just sit on my computer until I figure it out.
What are you reading?
I’ve been doing a lot of research for my book about sorority girls. I recently read Dirty Rush, which is a true-to-life novel about a sorority scandal and I am working my way through the Total Frat Move book. Sororities and fraternities are strange places because they are the convergence of so many social pressures and norms and yet they still have this guise of serving the community. Dirty Rush was a big surprise because the protagonist was a gender and women’s studies major and very invested in gay rights, but continually throughout the book she called her sorority sisters and biological sister “bitch,” and it’s these incongruities that I’m interested in looking at. Pledged was also a great read. It was written when people still used AOL instant messenger so there is a lot of Missy Elliot in AOL messenger away messages. It really made me nostalgic for away messages as a form of writing.
I also recently read Brandi Wells This Boring Apocalypse, which I highly recommend. Brandi and I frequently talk about our food desires and I think this manifests itself in various ways in our writing. She has a really good line where she says, "It is hard to distinguish between a person who you love and a person you intend to consume" and I think this is so perfect.