Interview from StoryQuarterly 33, 1997
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"Interview
with Melissa Pritchard"
-- by James Klise
Drifters, mutes, killers and the killed, scientists, suburbanites, hunters and holy people - these are some of the famous and invisible characters who inhabit Melissa Pritchard's fictional landscape. Most find themselves, in one way or another, with blood on their hands. In the story "Shed of Grace," the female narrator is drawn unwillingly to the husband of her sister, a beauty who once posed for greeting cards: "I knew that my revenge had conjoined with his and that we would very soon prove uncontrollably, weakly submissive to our instincts." Grappling with basic forces at work against them, Pritchard's most fortunate characters find compassion and forgiveness in one another. The adulterous narrator of "Shed of Grace," for example, digs a grave for herself and lowers her body into it; in the cold morning, her sister discovers her and pulls her out: "She continued to hold me until affection rose in us, fateful as our births, aching with grace."
Spirit Seizures (University of Georgia, 1987, Collier Fiction Series 1989), Pritchard's first story collection, received the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, the James Phelan Award and an honorary citation from the PEN/Nelson Algren Award. Pritchard's picaresque novel Phoenix (Cane Hill Press, 1991) chronicles the journey of a young wander-philosopher who has temporarily escaped her Eisenhower-era family to explore the counterculture of California in the 1960s. Pritchard's second collection of stories, The Instinct for Bliss (Zoland Books, 1995, paperback 1997), won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and the title story was reprinted in Pushcart Prize XX: Best of the Small Presses 1995. Stories from both collections have appeared in over forty journals, including Story, The Southern Review, The American Voice and The Paris Review. Pritchard, who is on the faculty of Arizona State University, lives in Tempe, Arizona, with her two daughters, Noelle and Caitlin.
Klise: I read that you didn't start writing fiction seriously until you were thirty, and prior to that you were employed in a variety of occupations: actress, drama teacher, plant nursery worker, gardener and so on. How did these experiences in your twenties contribute to your later writing?
Pritchard: My stories draw, for their details and observations, upon experience. We can read all we like, be admonished or inspired as much as we like, but experience is direct. It confirms thought, validates emotion, is capable of transforming the heart. What led me past these diverse pursuits was a chronic, low-grade, residual frustration that kept expressing itself as a question: What am I meant to do with my life? What is my purpose? Experience, though I did not realize it, was both the teacher and the resource, the path and the apprenticeship.
Klise: Who were you reading around the time you began to get serious about writing?
Pritchard: It was the winter of 1978 in Evanston, Illinois, and I remember exactly what I was reading: the Tolkien trilogies, Tales of Genji by Lady Murasaki, Melville's Moby Dick and Sigrid Undset's trilogy of medieval Scandinavia, Kristin Lavransdatter. These were tomes. Heavy, historical, weighty books that took me out of my immediate surroundings. My first child, Noelle, had been born Christmas Day, 1977, and that entire winter, my first in the Midwest, seemed like one interminable, isolating blizzard with a beautiful baby at its center; my very confinement, or restriction due to these two conditions, caused me to crave books into which I could drop for long, complex dream-times. It was really a very blissful time.
Klise: Many writers say that among their early attempts at fiction there was one story or project, published or not, that really confirmed the vocation for them - one that made the young writer say, "Wow, I can do this." Was there one for you?
Pritchard: "Julka and Rena: A Simple Tale of Pre-Christian Poland." This was a story I wrote in 1974 while living in New Mexico. It was accepted for publication by the University of New Mexico's literary magazine, New America: A Review. I wrote that story, among other things, to prove to myself that I could develop and finish a story. And as I recall, it was inspired by something I had read about Polish mythology. It really seemed to tell itself, I wrote the first draft so quickly and believed absolutely in the world and time it created. Seeing it published encouraged me enormously. So much so, I applied to the graduate writing program at Western Washington State University, in Bellingham, Washington - I had heard Annie Dillard was teaching there. At that time, I was a great fan of Annie Dillard's. But yes, "Julka and Rena" was the story that kicked it in for me."
Klise: Let's talk about influences. You began publishing in the later 1970s and early 80s - at the height of the so-called "minimalist" wave - yet your work was and is resolutely "maximalist," if there is such a term: dreamlike, lush description, meandering prose, athletic vocabulary. Did you view yourself at all as reacting to the popular writers of that time?
Pritchard: No. I wasn't even aware of those terms and only came to them much later. My earliest writings, from 1978 on, were largely forged in seclusion. I literally had no contact with the literary world. By that time, I was well camouflaged as a suburban housewife and mother - my own friends didn't know what I was doing, writing one to two hours a day. When they read my early stories, they were largely baffled at the schism between my personality as they knew it and the stories I wrote. In the beginning, I wrote to a particular audience, a pantheon of writers, largely dead, largely nineteenth and early twentieth century authors: Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Flannery O' Connor, and so on. I wanted, in the most modest sense - it's rather difficult to express - to be in their company.
I also began to read and study contemporary fiction. There were quite a few writers I admired, among them Edna O' Brien, Elizabeth Tallent, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Kay Boyle. I found I had an enormous hidden arrogance, a stubborn ambition, not, I emphasize, for myself. I liked my obscurity, felt it kept me honest. The ambition was for the work. Despite my own inadequacies and shortcomings as a writer, which I felt were rampant and nearly insurmountable, I desired each story to be perfectly true to its own nature. I'm talking about a combination of arrogance for the writing and humility for the self.
Klise: You touch on these ideas of arrogance and humility in your essay "The Ethics of Fiction" - the crucial anonymity of the writer, the "bliss of the impersonal." It's not often that you hear young writers talking about their work in these terms.
Pritchard: For me, the concept of anonymity is crucial because I view all creative expression as a gift, not intended to be grasped or made small by the vanity of its giver, but to be circulated, celebrated, shared. So if I can persuade my personality to become as quiet as possible, to be alertly receptive, the story, hopefully, can then be heard. An artist who practices humility during the process of creation, who feels gratitude in being used by Eros, has a chance of authentic expression. It is a commanding paradox, to trust life enough to erase yourself in this way.
Klise: Do you view yourself as being part of a particular tradition of writers?
Pritchard: No. If I am part of a tradition, and I doubt that I am, I honestly don't care to hear about it. A resistance to categories, to established forms and corridors of theory, is probably both my aesthetic strength and my blind spot. I view my work as a continual process of evolution and self healing. Oddly though, I have discovered that by ignoring current trends, and writing from my own deepest instincts, I look up to find myself hardly alone. There will be other writers, for instance, fictionalizing historical figures or taking up with science in a literary way. Other writers working in the same field. I personally think this phenomenon has to do with the collective unconscious.
Klise: Do you consider yourself in competition with other writers?
Pritchard: I would hate to think I am in a horse race with anyone. I will not say I have never experienced envy or discouragement. Publishing is an unfair-enough business that nearly every writer I know suffers an occasional bout of depression or ranting or pique. The trick is to get past it, to not dwell on the unfairness, to keep writing and keep celebrating the existence of good writing. One develops both perspective and detachment. The best way for me to do that is to write and to read those writers who inspire me. And frankly, there are more of those than I can possibly keep up with.
Klise: What generally starts a new project? Character or situation? Image?
Pritchard: There's a deep inner-knowing. An instinctive honing in. The story can emerge through a recurrent image, a scene, a piece of music, even a newspaper article or a story I hear someone else tell. Generally it is something to which my emotions can deeply attach.
Klise:: I understand that your new novel has a Victorian setting. You've written a number of wonderful stories set in the last century, such as "Spirit Seizures," a tale of supernatural grief in a small Illinois town in the 1880s, and "La Bete: A Figure Study," which chronicles the experience of a fabulous "abnormally fat" laundress who enjoys a brief stint as the muse for French Impressionist painters. What ignites these historical stories? Something you've read? Is much conscious research involved?
Pritchard:"Spirit Seizures" is based on a recorded historical incident, and I traveled to Watseka, Illinois to do my research there. For "La Bete," I read several art books on the Impressionist movement in Paris. After that story was published, I learned that my character, "La Bete" (the beast"), bore an uncanny resemblance to La Goulue ("the glutton"), Toulouse Lautrec's famous model. I thought I had invented my character, and upon hearing the details of La Goulue's life, wondered if perhaps I hadn't somehow tapped into the historical ethers and encountered her.
My new novel, called The Cabinet Spiritualist, is loosely based upon a documented relationship between the notorious English schoolgirl medium, Florence Cook, and the respectably famous chemist, Sir William Crookes. I did a great deal of research for this book and, because research serves the story, used only a fraction of what I learned. I have always loved history, enjoyed the discovery process of research. As a writer, I am drawn to reinventing those historical figures, once well known, even famous, who have become, through time and neglect, invisible.
Klise: What about tricks or rituals? What external factors help you to write?
Pritchard: New pens, clean notebooks, a new folder: objects which signal to my unconscious that a new story is beginning. I take notes, sketch pictures - what I do is prepare to enter a dream state, a state of consciousness where an alternate reality can be manifested. So I need those very personal totems or objects or activities which signal a shift in levels of consciousness. I also bribe myself with good coffee and a promise of chocolate after writing each day. I'm that simple.
Klise: In the actual drafting of the text, do you start at the beginning and go right to the end? Several of your stories consist of collages of scenes, told from different points of view, and I wonder if you write them all out and shuffle them, or keep including new scenes until the story is complete.
Pritchard: Generally I write from beginning to end and do not start writing until I am relatively certain of the story's shape. The preliminary stage involves not writing at all, but dwelling in the possibilities of the story, asking where is the most dangerous place to enter, where is the risk highest, where do I feel the story's energy, its voice? It's crucial to listen before I write, to listen to the story telling itself in its own voice, not mine. This determines the form and the tone.
Klise:: How do you know when a story is working? And when it's ready to send? Do you rely on editors or special readers to help guide your writing?
Pritchard: So much of this process happens only through faith. Hanging in there. I don't know if it's "working" until nearly the last draft. Then I might go through a stage of thinking it's more finished than it is and sending it off prematurely. Whereupon, like a bad check, it bounces back and I re-read with horror, realizing it's one or two drafts away from being finished. So I guess you could say I rely on two things: my gut instinct, which can sometimes be betrayed by my fatigue with the story, and editors whom I press for reaction. It also helps to read the story aloud, listening for sour notes, disharmonies, static.
Klise: You were born in California, lived much of your early adulthood in the Midwest, and now have settled in the American Southwest, the setting for numerous of your stories. In fact, over time, you may become identified as a "regionalist" of that part of the country. Do you ever wonder what course your writing might have taken if you had moved, say, to Boston or Seattle rather than to the Southwest? Or perhaps the chemistry between that region and your imagination is uniquely potent.
Pritchard: My interest lies more in cultural difference. The Southwestern stories, many of them, look at people who wander naively into another culture and proceed to be disabused of their false expectations and well-intentioned ignorance. What they imagined, and what actually is, turn out to be vastly different scenarios. Exposure to the Hispanic and Native American cultures of New Mexico, the clash I observed between the tourist industry's version of these cultures and the truth which is much more turbulent, vital and interesting, these were the impetus for many of these stories. I don't particularly see myself as a regionalist. I probably fall more into the tradition of a pilgrim, wanderer, hoverer at the boundaries of things.
Klise: I'd like for you to further address the relationship between place and theme in your work. In addition to the Southwest, your stories are set in numerous exotic location: Hawaii, Mexico, the West Indies, Rome and nineteenth century France, to name a few. In general, which serves as the inspiration: character and situation, or place? Do you take notes when you travel with the intention of putting them to future use?
Pritchard: Some of the stories are set in exotic locales because I had the opportunity to go to those places and then wanted to make use of them. Those set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries simply seized my imagination, either by way of historic personality, such as "The Erotic Life of Luther Burbank," or true account, as in "Spirit Seizures," or by the image of a voluptuous, obese woman adored for her size, as in "La Bete: A Figure Study." I love taking notes when I travel; to slow down, observe and study, to sketch with words is, for me, one of the primary pleasures of travel.
Klise: The characters in your stories are a suspicious lot, aren't they? From the mothers who fret obsessively about their adolescent daughters in stories like "A Private Landscape," "The Instinct for Bliss" and "The Good and Faithful Widow," to the humorous narrator of "A Man Around the House," a middle-aged spinster (as well as mute stroke victim) who says of a houseguest in the story's first line, "I suspected him the minute he parked his suitcase on our front porch . . ." Often, this suspicion proves to be right on target. Why do you think this peculiar "instinct for suspicion" is so prevalent in your work?
Pritchard: Suspicious, eh? I prefer to think of them as intuitive and overly anxious. Intuition is not necessarily about fortune-telling. It is often about deeply sensing what you'd rather not know, thus provoking anxiety. Some of these characters feel silenced by social codes and self-imposed restraints. They simply won't allow their honest feelings to interfere with external standards and circumstances. So a dialogue of sabotage is set up, based on powerlessness. Practically speaking, if the character is introspective and a bit broody, the writer has a greater range of articulation. My characters have a tendency to lead richly eloquent interior lives and relatively powerless outer lives. Their movements, hobbled and conservative, contradict their thoughts and feelings, which can border on the philosophically bizarre.
Klise: Yes, I was struck by your character' hyper-isolation, the way they live almost morbidly inside their heads. For example, in your story "Rocking on Water, Floating in Glass," the narrator makes a chilling statement that might have come from the mouths of any number of your characters: "My solitariness was so complete that if the telephone rang . . . I would feel violated, irritable, interrupted." Sounds like a writer to me! What attracts you to writing about these deeply inward, marginal characters?
Pritchard: I may be something of an inward, marginal character myself, and my characters are reflections of their author. Also, if a character lives outside convention, feels peripheral, feels exiled in some way, one has the opportunity for a more authentic and complex voice. Who are we when we are alone? I'm interested in that, in the voice that speaks only in solitude. If I can strip away the public veneer, study the private veneer and listen for the subterranean musings and noisings of the secret self, I am intrigued.
Klise: When reading a story, what satisfies you? Do you expect structural conventions of conflict, crisis and the resolution?
I am most deeply satisfied by a combination of original use of language, powerful emotion, compelling ethical pressure, and the subtle presence of an author whose nature clearly falls on the side of compassion and heart. I respond to stories - of any style - where I feel the author has risked a great deal of herself to tell it. When this happens, there is a palpable heat coming off the arrangement of black shapes on the page, what we call language.
Klise: You include "compelling ethical pressure" as one criterion here. In what sense?
Pritchard: What I mean by ethical pressure is related to suspense, to the skillful telling of a dramatic story. What happens when difficult circumstances in a character's life collide with some previously dormant interior debate, argument, now-awakened conflict? The design of a story's events, the arrangement of its combustive elements, produces a suspense the reader is drawn to and absorbed by. And I'm convinced our appetite for suspense, whether rendered crudely or with a subtle complexity, is biologically related to the human condition, to the injunction in our cell memory to survive. Ethical dilemmas - for example, breaking one of society's laws to obey a higher principle of justice, that kind of thing - the testing of ethical values is fiction's lifeblood. I'm not talking about simplistic codes of right and wrong; I'm suggesting the author bring to her story the kind of non-judgmental clarity that strengthens empathy, that forges connections between human beings, that points, through the actions of the story, to the illusion of separateness. What happens to the ideal perception of the self when trouble hits? Or when the well-behaved, civilized self is placed under tremendous pressure through events the author invents - how will this character veer off course when tested? Quite wonderfully, our own lives provide our best laboratories of study and can yield devastating, as well as inspirational, terrain.
Klise: What does writing do for you personally?
Pritchard: With each story I write, I undertake, in mythological terms, the hero's journey. One enters the desert, clutching a flimsy, mostly inaccurate map, and waits. Waits to hear the intuition's voice, then in the writing, encounters trials, tests, and if these are met, is given a revelation of some kind and emerges from the desert, from the experience of the story, in some way transformed. I deeply believe this, and it is a harrowing process for me every time. I simply cannot think of writing as anything other than a vocation that demands everything of me. For me, it is such labor, it must be worth it. Otherwise, believe me, I'd be working in an herb garden or dyeing wool or raising fancy chickens. Something. Writing demands two things beyond talent, and to my view more crucial than talent, which can always be developed: courage and the capacity to love with mercy. The arduousness of this, the gift of it, is what keeps me writing.
Klise: What are you working on now?
Pritchard: Stories, more stories.
Klise: Finally, what advice to you give to your students?
Pritchard: Respect your instincts. Cultivate a rich interior life. Read what you love. Write what you would love to read. Work on your story (at least) one hour a day. Allow yourself the courage to be truthful, to forgive and love the self, to uncover the secret you're wrestling with in your story, to embrace it wholeheartedly, and thus be free. Eat chocolate. Drink good coffee. Write every sentence as if it were your last.