Interview with Anne Valente
Q: The first-person collective voice can, I believe, be divisive. I love it, and I think you use it to great effect in your collection By Light We Knew Our Names, specifically in the stories “Dear Amelia,” “By Light We Knew Our Names,” and “Until Our Shadows Claim Us.” What draws you to this narrative voice? How do you decide to use and develop it?
It surprises me that first-person plural can be divisive, but I don’t think you’re wrong. I think some readers find it unnatural, and also unbelievable as a speaking voice for an entire group. These are things I really value about the collective voice, though. I appreciate its instability, and I view it less as speaking for a group as speaking from a group: what it means to take away the singular authority of a narrator (and narrative) and place it in the hands of many. I’m also eternally interested in the delicate balance of the singular and the collective in terms of how we experience things as human beings: what belongs to us, what doesn’t, what each of us feels individually and uniquely, and what we collectively share, know and remember. Where that line is drawn, and whether and if it can be, is a fascinating space of liminality for me in fiction.
Q: It strikes me that so many of the stories in your collection have much to do with violence, specifically our reaction to it. The violence ranges from random (“Minivan”) to systemic (“By Light We Knew Our Names”) to the tiniest of acts, a father ripping a flower from his own backyard (“A Very Compassionate Baby”), and it discomfits the reader—even more than violence usually does—because it stands in such stark contrast to the stories’ beautiful lyricism. Is this an intentional juxtaposition? What role do you see violence playing in your stories?
The liminality in my work between violence and beauty perhaps aims to juxtapose in some way a safe haven from brutality: that even though horrible things happen in the world, so do magical and beautiful things.
I think I’m still working on a clear sense of the role violence plays in my work, but it appears again and again, and often in contrast to softer spaces and even lyricism. I’m tempted to turn to works like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for answers, where extreme violence meets some of the most beautiful language I’ve ever read on the page, and I think this hints at liminality as well. In McCarthy, to know the stark beauty of the earth and the stars is to also know the harshness of nature. These co-exist; they are not dichotomies. Of course, the violence of rape and of systemic injustice—the forms of violence, among others, that appear in the collection—aren’t necessarily the same as the violence of nature. Ideally, I’d love for the world to exist without them. The liminality in my work between violence and beauty perhaps aims to juxtapose in some way a safe haven from brutality: that even though horrible things happen in the world, so do magical and beautiful things.
Q: At the Heavy Feather Review, Erin Flanagan said your stories build to “crystallized moments when wonder is either abandoned or embraced,” which seems very accurate to me. Can you talk about your story endings—how you and your characters (many of them teenagers, though I surely wouldn’t classify these stories as YA!) arrive at the end, and what you try to do with an ending once you get there?
I rarely know the ending of a story when I begin, and I try to let the narrative lead me where it will. This often means really trying to place myself inside the world of the story, to intuit what the characters would or wouldn’t do, and to know the narrative’s world well enough to know what will happen within it. I think it’s relatively easy to write an ending that feels tacked-on, and for me, this often means that my stories end with more questions than answers. How often in our lives does anything ever feel all that definitive or conclusive? Maybe others feel more certain most of the time, but I find myself constantly questioning. In this sense, the notion of a definitive end rings false to me. In terms of wonder, and whether characters choose to abandon or embrace it, I think this is the culmination of a story-long process of questioning, and one that presumably continues beyond a story’s final word.
Q: Following up on that question, this collection and these characters seem so acutely aware of the strangeness and magic of the natural world—animals, sky, forest, water. What role does your own sense of wonder and curiosity play in your writing?
Wonder and curiosity aren’t only for children, or for those who have never experienced hardship. Wonder and pain can co-exist. Wonder can overcome pain. Wonder can allow for escape, or flight, or even freedom.
I imagine most writers write what sparks their curiosity and sense of discovery, and it’s most definitely the engine that drives my process: the desire to learn more, to ask questions, to wonder what’s out there in the world. There’s a lot of magic out there, and not just in terms of what often becomes magic realism in my writing: so much of science is fascinating, and nature, and the inner workings of the human body and the composition of the ocean. I feel like I discover some incredible fact about the world every time I start a new creative project. This sense of wonder may relate in some way to the question of violence, since I think it’s often so easy to assume that wonder is trite and for the uninitiated, and that it’s a kind of naïveté that quickly disappears when we learn what hardship and devastation really are. Wonder and curiosity aren’t only for children, or for those who have never experienced hardship. Wonder and pain can co-exist. Wonder can overcome pain. Wonder can allow for escape, or flight, or even freedom.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’ve recently finished a novel about a series of unexplained house fires that erupt in a community after a mass school shooting. I’ve also been working on a collection of short stories about the city of St. Louis, less historical fiction than a digging into oddities, curiosities and strange histories. St. Louis is my hometown and it’s a fascinating, complicated city. I’m interested in its history but also its landscape, its weather patterns and, of course, its baseball team.
ANNE VALENTE’s debut short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, is out now from Dzanc Books. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in One Story, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among others, and won Copper Nickel’s 2012 Fiction Prize. Her essays appear in The Believer and The Washington Post.