Sarah Blackman is the director of creative writing at the Fine Arts Center, an arts dedicated public high school in Greenville, South Carolina. She is also the co-Fiction Editor at DIAGRAM and the founding editor of Crashtest, Some of her recent prose has appeared in Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review and the anthology Meta-Writings; Towards a Theory of Nonfiction among other journals. Her story collection Mother Box was published by FC2 in 2013.
Her story, "The Virgin," appeared in Issue Sixty-Seven of The Collagist.
Here, she speaks with interviewer Gary Garrison about aspirational topography, Gustav Klimt, and intuiting a story.
“The Virgin” has a striking, fractured feel to the characters and the places they inhabit. How did you first come to this world and what drew you to it?
The world of the story came from two sources: the place and the character. The place is one of those places you see through as you pass through. Like looking through the window on a long road trip when you can choose to either see your own eyes, nose, lips, chin or someone’s backyard clothesline, decaying plastic playset, cat-tin lids winking in the tomato patch (to scare the squirrels), daytime bar, tennis shoes strung from the telephone wire. When I pass through places like the town Estelle’s Uncle May lives in, places with an aspirational topography but no real aspirations, I always feel the pressing choice between seeing myself in the landscape, literally (the solipsism of the road-trip cheez doodle coma), or seeing down the long, private channels I can catch only in fragments as I speed through. Not to say, I am exposing anything here that is any more “real” than the splintered fragment. Rather, I wanted to lay fragments next to each other in this story. Not to make a picture exactly, but to make—what?—a chronology of passage? Something of that nature.
The other source of this world, the character of Estelle, is equally fractured or fragmented. Having once been one, I wanted to write a teenage girl. The teenage experience in any gender is inherently, perhaps naturally, fractured since it is that boundary land between the two tectonic plates of childhood and adulthood. The myth of childhood is powerful; the myth of adulthood is pushy—there’s a lot of friction in that space. For Estelle this is compounded by the fact that her family unit is also in the process of fracturing and by the fact that she is a girl and so her selfhood, her body, what should be her very private and idiosyncratic and elliptical understanding of her sexuality is being standardized, commodified, sold back to her. There are a lot of ways teenage girls deal with this invasion, with the limitations pressed upon their identities—as many different ways as there are teenage girls. The way I dealt with it was to make the most outlandish choices I possible could—about my own appearance, about the expression of my desires—in order to make sure I was, in fact, making a choice rather than having one foisted on me by someone else’s desires. Much, much later in my life, I realized that this was reaction rather than action and so not really a choice. The anger I felt at the time was the result of living within such sudden societal limitations, battering myself against them every day. At the time, though, I didn’t know this and neither does Estelle. She doesn’t know yet that the scorn she feels for herself is someone else’s scorn. I think she’ll figure it out, but I don’t know what happens to her after this. I hope she’s ok.
There are a lot of aspects of the narrative that are never fully addressed, such as the fate of Estelle’s father, and why exactly Estelle is sent to live with her Uncle May. How did you balance these subtle ambiguities with the more concrete details in the writing process to best inform Estelle’s mental state?
When I write a story I always think about why I am intersecting with this character at this particular point in their life rather than any other. I think about all the things that have happened to them that have brought them to this juncture; all the things that haven’t happened yet; all the things that are happening simultaneously with the story but aren’t actually a part of it so don’t make it onto the page.
That’s kind of a lie.
I don’t actually THINK about those things—when I do the stories end up sprawling and long and oh-my-god-is-this-a-novel? I-don’t-have-time-to-write-a-novel-right-now—but I do kind of intuit them. Like when you are walking in a forest. If you start thinking that all the other things that are inhabiting that square foot of forest with you (fungus, ants, hornets, butterflies, squirrels, toads, single fox, hiding rabbits, mink in the riverbank, fish in the river, mica, leaf mulch, pine beetle, hawk) are regarding you as a singular entity among their plurality you can no longer inhabit that space. You are outside of it. You are a stranger (also a narcissist). If, instead, you accept that the lives that surround you touch your own only briefly, and that in an exploratory fashion, before moving on to their own concerns, you can be a part of the place you are in and, even, touch the lives that are surrounding you without making them flinch or panic. There is a reciprocity to your regard, rather than the adoration of terror or suspicion or worship or whatever it is people think the denizens of the forest are doing in reaction to their presence. This presupposes of course that you are in the forest sitting quietly, maybe eating a sandwich, and not waving a gun around or hacking at the trees or otherwise making a fool of yourself.
Anyway, all that to say, in the moments we are with Estelle we are fully with her, down to the last detail of the vegetation, the weather, her unease, the ambient noises, Uncle May’s appealing armpits. In the moments that we are not with her—the exact nature of her father’s breakdown, why she doesn’t go back to school in the fall, what her mother thinks about all this, why Uncle May and not someone more suitable, and so on—are places where the story has not intersected with the character; where the life beside your own turns away to its own business. It’s not that Estelle doesn’t know these things. The story doesn’t know these things. Me neither, actually.
The title of this piece, “The Virgin,” seems to be doing a lot of work acting as a lens through which the story is seen. How do you see the title speaking to Estelle’s experience and how did you come to it?
It’s a Gustav Klimt painting! It looks like this!
I like Klimt a lot, actually most of Art Noveau/Symbolism/Weimar Republic/Vienna Secessionism/whatever other little splinter of a frantic subgroup is painting at this time period in Europe on the eve of World War I. In this piece in particular, though there are many ways to read it, I like the way all of these women could be the same woman layered on top of each other. I liked the impartial nature of their nudity, a little peek-a-boo but, minus the one in the bottom right who is clearly saucy, not salacious, just nude. I like the suggestion of dream. I like that the title both commodifies their lack of sexual experience (Virgin, capital V, is such a fraught identity and has so much more to do with the expectations of the future lover than it does the identity of the erstwhile virgin his or herself) and, somehow, interacts with their lack of sexual expectation—which is not quite the same thing as a lack of sexual authority or sexual identity…Also, I like that it is a singular title which represents a multiplicity of women some of whom are choosing to include us with their gaze, some of whom are not. I think it is actually a very empowering painting to be named such a traditionally un-empowering name.
All that mashed together seemed to me to be like the character of the girl I was trying to write—who is not a virgin, but might be a Virgin.
When I originally started writing the piece, I thought there would be a scene with Darcy and the Blue Hawaiians in the kind of comfy, snake tangle pictured above, maybe at the party?, but it never quite worked out, so I scrapped it.
The splintered and circular nature of this narrative, which seamlessly, and artfully blurs Estelle’s past and present, gives a sense of a deep trauma. How do you see the piece’s fractured linearity informing the character of Estelle?
Well, see above: teenagers, tectonic plates, suspicious forest creatures, road trips. Also, I think any experience of the world is fracturing and even the happiest, smoothest, most loving childhood is traumatic. I’m not saying this to be dire or caustic or to reassure my teenage self that her choice to wear black lipstick around her cozy suburban neighborhood was somehow existentially justified. I have two little girls. At night I lie awake in bed and try to project a protective and soothing mental energy field around them as they sleep down the hall, but I also know that the depths of their feelings about the world are, at this advanced stage in my adulthood, far beyond my ability to do anything but dimly remember. Their griefs are real and keen; their joys are transcendent. It is traumatic to be a human in the world, even if the world is not actively hurting you. Also joyful even when the world is not actively tickling you or blowing raspberries on your stomach.
I don’t know. I’m not the possessor of any advanced knowledge of the universe, but I’ve dipped my toes in Nietzsche I think eternal reoccurrence feels about right to me. I think Nietzsche is much less of a downer than people generally suppose, but his particular melancholy on this concept might have something to do with the fact that he was a 19th century man (no offense 19th century men!) and so kind of bound up with the idea of a march toward progress, even if in this case it is the progress of the eternally cyclical reoccurrence of the human experience as an incrementally perfecting one. For a woman, circular time doesn’t seem that unusual. Women kind of are circles, and I don’t mean in an essentialist reproductive way, but rather in our experience of pain as a cyclical reoccurrence, in our more primary roles as caretakers and nurturers of the very young and very old, even in the shapes our bodies tend to make. I have a lot of crackpot theories about entropy and linear time and phallic symbols and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse which I won’t expose to ridicule here, but I will say: I write female characters who experience their lives simultaneously. They are not trapped in their pasts, per say. Their traumas occur in continuity with their joys. I think that is the way the world is—I cannot say from the male experience because I haven’t ever been a male, but from the female experience, yes, I think so.
What are you reading at the moment?
I just finished Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox which has one of the best last lines I have ever read, anywhere. Now I’m in research mode for a new longer project so I am kind of simultaneously reading Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Andrea Wulf’s biography of Alexander Von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature and James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce. From that list, it’s anybody’s guess what this book will be about. I sure don’t know.
What new projects are you currently working on?
Aside from confusing myself with the above reading list and drawing multi-colored diagrams in my journal, I’m working on a collection of ekphrastic short fictions, of which “The Virgin” is a part. After both my children were born, but particularly my oldest, I had a very hard time with post-partum depression in which the fact that I wasn’t writing played a large part. It felt like the energy I was putting into keeping the babies fed and warm and not enraged and alive was the same energy I formerly had put into writing. Not like I was too tired or too frazzled or too leaky, though that was part of it, but like the creative energy of writing was the same as the mother energy of caring for the baby and I was not prepared to, and still am not willing to, sacrifice one for the other.
So, I started spending time looking at pieces of art I responded to, titling a blank word document the name of the piece of art, then writing whatever came to mind afterward. Some of the pieces reflect the art directly, or include the actual piece of art in the plot; some of them are more ambiguous or gestural. The key was I didn’t have to find a starting point. I jumped off someone else’s starting point—Klimt’s or Debuffet’s or Hesse’s or Frankenthaler’s—and that was a good place to re-enter and has been a productive place to linger for the past four or so years. Some day it will be a collection, but right now it’s a project and a happy one.
Thanks for talking to me here! I’m glad you liked “The Virgin”—the first of this new venture to be published by the way—and I’m delighted it found a home with The Collagist. I can’t imagine a better confluence of editors and readers for Estelle to have landed among.