Beth Alvarado on Karen Brennan's Monsters: On Listening to Voices
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(Guest post by Beth Alvarado)
To write something about influence for the Marvelous Paragraph Project seems serendipitous, since Jillian in the Borderlands began as an exercise in imitation, to see if could I imitate all four writers whose work I was teaching in one story. Because this experiment gave me the constraints of the book—that each story in it had to be told from various characters’ perspectives—it also gave me something invisible and liberating: the permission to follow the voices and to let go of other intentions in order to do so. I think of this as a kind of “fast writing,” where you tap into a voice, listen, and then the story unspools. Of course, in the end, it’s harder than that but, when you’re writing, it feels a little metaphysical or magical, a little addicting.
It reminds me of a recent article about Francine Prose where she is quoted as saying, “I hate the word process, I just can’t bear it. People say, ‘What’s your process?’ My process is allowing my soul to leave my body and enter into the body of another human being. So try that!” In my case, though, it felt more like the other people’s souls were inhabiting me, as if I were the one who was porous and without volition.
Grace Paley was the first writer I ever heard talk about “finding” a voice. Once she found a voice for the character, she said, once she heard the first sentence of the story, then she could write the story. This seemed very different, to me, from the writer finding her voice. There was all this talk in the 80s, when I was in school, about “finding your voice”—which feels a little ridiculous, because it isn’t as if you have only one. But here, at least the way I understood Paley, the writer’s voice was not what was important. It was the character’s voice you had to find, and so no wonder, once Paley finds her characters, they come back in other stories, which is exactly what happened to me with Jillian in the Borderlands. At first it was difficult to switch from character to character within one story, but once their voices inhabited my brain, it was easier to call them back.
Karen Brennan was the first writer I ever heard talk about “fast writing.” Karen is a very good friend of mine, but when I think about influence, in addition to Paley, she has absolutely been one of the most important, especially in terms of my fiction. In the early 80s, we first met because a mutual friend had given her a copy of a story I was writing. After she read it, she said something like, “You should do more ‘fast writing.’” When I looked at the story later, I could see what she meant. There were the parts where I was dutiful and then there were the parts where the language and imagination took over and the story lifted off of the page.
It has always seemed to me that Brennan is—mysteriously, effortlessly—able to let the language take over, to tap into a voice and tell a story. Here, by way of example, is the beginning of “Headless” from her latest story collection, Monsters.
I was on my way to the bus stop when I saw the headless man. At first I thought it was a trick of the eye: I was wearing big dark glasses, possibly the head had been camouflaged by the dark trees behind the man. Surely, he couldn’t be headless. As I approached however, I saw that he was indeed headless. There was scar tissue on his stump of neck and a little tube sticking out–for eating or breathing or both, I figured. He was wearing an orange tee shirt and he was tending the university grounds with a weed whacker. Geez, I thought. A headless man.
The plunge into the reality of the story in the very matter-of-fact first sentence; the juxtaposition of details from the real with the “unreal;” the narrator’s acknowledgement of the fantastic: all of these are evident in this first paragraph and teach us how to read the story. The narrator’s obsession with the headless man—his name is Russ, it turns out—leads to? coincides with? her flagging interest in her partner Mitchell and the revelations of his flaws. It isn’t as simple as that, of course, but here are the final two paragraphs:
That night I ended it with Mitchell. I said what they tell you to say which is: This isn’t working for me. Mitchell looked stunned. He cracked open a beer and shook his head. Women are such fickle cunts, he said. He doesn’t usually talk like this, but he was mad, I understood that. The next day I left.
Funnily, I never encountered the headless man again. Once I thought I saw him in the grocery store, perusing the veggies, but this man’s head really was camouflaged against the red cabbages he was leaning over. I looked for him on the U grounds for a while, but then I thought, wait a minute, am I really thinking of having a relationship with a headless man? I don’t think so. So I stopped looking and that was that.
Both the magical elements of this story and its humor are in service to something deeper and larger than one couple’s relationship, and so the story has a kind of emotional grounding and “a texture” as Brennan would put it. Highs and lows. There isn’t just one note. There is human complexity in a story that is often, at once, despairing, absurd, and simply funny.
I have always thought of Brennan, like Paley, as a “voice” writer, someone who could channel voices, for whom the story just “came” to her—whether that is true or not. There is a feeling, in her stories, of there being no filter between the imagination, the fantastic fully formed world in the mind, and the language on the page that recreates that world. It’s as if she is very good at getting out of the way of her own doubts or censors.
By way of contrast with the voice in “Headless,” I’ve chosen these early paragraphs from Brennan’s “Souls in Transit, Souls at Rest,” a story I love because of its eerie, otherworldly atmosphere. While both stories have supernatural elements, the voices couldn’t be more different, something we can tell even from the titles. Here, the third-person narration is very close to the perspective of the protagonist, who is pregnant with her first child:
When she first encountered the ghost, she felt calmness fill her like a lake. At the banister, she watched a white face go by wearing a blue robe. Too typical, she thought. It went into a closet, she heard the latch click and considered following or letting it alone to pilfer the dresses and slacks. She'd been reading a book on breast feeding, how to squeeze the nipple and palpate the breast like a wine skin, and therefore a bullfight sprang to mind, the only one she'd had the misfortune to attend where the bull was stuck with banderillas, then staggered and died on the spot. She'd been fooled into thinking the bull would not be killed, that it was feigning death. How stupid and gullible she'd been. Thus she went from breasts like wineskins to the bull's slow dying--first it stumbled on one leg, then its head nodded, then it crumpled like a tent when the stakes are suddenly removed. So eloquent, this acting of the bull, she'd stupidly thought. This was in Mexico. Now the ghost.
Minutes later, she tried to recall the ghost. Had it been a white gown? And the hair, what had the hair been like? She thought at first blond with a few tendrils, pre-Raphaelite, or a darker French twist, but had to admit she'd lost the hair. The face had been startling, but on reflection she was unable to describe it in any meaningful detail because what startled were not the features. Or even the pallor, though there'd been unmistakable pallor, blue-green like a plastic skeleton. What struck her was a jagged quality unassociated with the usual fear or anger or sorrow or despair and so it seemed to her the ghost bore into the closet some alien emotion, but very powerful. It stunned her into calmness and caused a lake to rise within her, to slosh up behind her eyes so that she knocked against the cherry banister, holding on. Still, though, the ghost was typical, banal, its coloring like that of a plastic skeleton.
In the evening Guy returned with gifts, a new book on childhood diseases, candy, flowers from the experiment, not tulips but anemones with black eyes and flung in a bottle green vase she loved and set on the dining room table to pollinate her stacks of catalogues and white plates. She told him about the ghost and he loved her most this way, eyes shining, cheeks flushed, though about the ghost he was skeptical and patted her head which should have infuriated her but didn't. Maybe I did imagine it, she thought, because to imagine for her had never been an evil or shameful mistake, but something springing from a higher impulse to recreate and charge up the world. But she longed for the ghost to appear again because in another way she was curious.
In these paragraphs, the diction is more formal, the sentences are longer, and the movement from sentence to sentence is more associative than in “Headless.” All of these stylistic qualities of the voice, along with the questions the character asks herself, give the passage a tentative, musing quality and create the sense of being in a liminal space, where nothing is certain and anything could happen. Brennan’s unnamed protagonist is between worlds: pre-motherhood and motherhood. There is a not-knowing, a kind of danger, and the protagonist’s state of mind reflects that. She has an implicit conflict about everything: the thoughts about breast-feeding remind her of a bullfight; the ghost is startling and powerful and brings up emotions she cannot name and yet is “typical, banal”; the husband’s behavior is patronizing and yet she decides she doesn’t mind. These internal conflicts are what drive the narrative tension, but they also give the story its varying textures, its emotional depth and complexity.
“The Astonished Dead” is an early story from Jillian in the Borderlands where I was conscious of trying to silence my intentions—that crafting/editing self, the one who worried about plot, etc.—and instead listen to my characters. This segment of the story is in third person, very close to a young Jillian’s point of view as she sits on the monkey bars at school. She has just witnessed the astonished dead aid construction workers as they thwart a school shooting. One of the dead had put her finger in the barrel of the gun, which jammed it, and then the other dead slowed the shooter down so that the workers could tackle him and hold him face down in the dirt until the police arrived.
The astonished dead are standing before her although, because she has spun so rapidly and so much, they are a little blurry. What would they say to her, if they could speak? They are chatting among themselves. They are glad to see one another, which makes her think that death must be a lonely place, even though there are so many of them. Can they touch one another? If not, it must be a very lonely place, for the body craves touch, she knows. She loves it, for instance, when her mother brushes her hair or even runs her fingers through her hair as Jillian lies, head in her mother’s lap, while they watch TV. This, Jillian knows, is why people love to look at pictures of lovers and of mothers holding babies and it is why her Uncle Steve Sr. ran off with that girl even though it was a bad thing. The flesh wants what the flesh wants. It wants the touch of another person’s hand in tenderness, it wants the warm sun, it wants the feel of wind in the hair. And swimming! The feeling of your almost-naked skin moving through cool water, the bubbles trailing from your outstretched fingers and tickling your face. She wonders if the dead miss swimming.
She studies their faces, wishing they could speak. Even though she knows that communion with the dead is never clear—which is why the living have such a hard time with the interpretation of the dead’s words across the great divide of time. Just what did the dead mean, for instance, by liberty for all? Who was all? It wasn’t all, even Jillian knows that much, at the ripe old age of twelve. And so do we really want to go back there to the Good Old Days of the Founding Fathers where a black man was 3/5 of a white man and women could not vote and the only good Indian was a dead Indian? She thinks not. She thinks the dead are optimists: they would never advise going back in time even though that means they would still be alive.
Instead, she realizes, the dead are not astonished because they’re dead. No, they are simply astonished that the living take life for granted, that they do not value living—e.g. wind sun water good tomatoes and human kindness—over ideas. The dead are astounded at the man on the TV who plants the ideas and at the man with the gun who takes them into his body and is poisoned and twisted and they are astounded by the men who are forcing him to eat dirt and they are astounded by the people who will cheer the men who made him eat dirt, who will say, on the TV, “they gave him a little street justice,” as if pain equals justice, as if justice justifies pain.
Ironically, it’s easier for me, and I don’t know if this is true for others, to inhabit a character in the third person. In first person, I find myself consciously trying to create a voice that is distinct, and I tend to focus on what’s literally happening, the other characters, in order to make of the first-person narrator a camera lens, a way of seeing. In third person, I find it much easier to just give in. Here, like in Brennan’s story, because the movement of thought seems more associative than narrative, there is a kind of musing quality, as if Jillian is thinking through what she’s seeing, as if the language itself opens the possibility of straying from what is happening into speculating about its larger implications.
If there is emotional depth or thematic complexity in this scene, it doesn’t come from Jillian’s internal conflicts. Instead, I guess, it comes from the juxtaposition of children playing in a schoolyard with the fact of a shooter who would rupture their world—no matter that this happens far too often, it still feels surreal—and from the juxtaposition of Jillian’s own innocence with her partial knowledge of historical atrocities. Towards the end, though, Jillian does recognize conflicts in the adult behavior around her, as children are wont to do—one reason to write from their perspectives.
Finally, the most important thing Prose, Paley, and Brennan gave me: permission, to write about the realities of women and their children, to take their lives seriously, as being worthy of attention. It wasn’t something I saw very often. As Rivka Galchen notes in her book Little Labors, “Literature has more dogs than babies, and more abortions.”
Like the mirror, the mother’s body is shattered and the child does not see this at first, thinking she is whole and ideal. Thinking she is he and he is she. In the mirror which is broken, but appears unbroken.
Still there is this: A child whom the mother loves. A mother whom the child loves. Together they are disturbingly one.
I remember waking up with my son in my arms. He must have been about 10 minutes old. His head was horribly lopsided and he had purple marks on his temples where they used the forceps. Naturally I began to weep uncontrollably. On the other side of the plate glass window in my hospital room, I watched a flock of birds zoom by; they seemed to be cackling. One came quite close to the window, even peered in at us, my son and I in the high, white hospital bed, him swaddled in a blue and white striped flannel blanket and me in a pink bed jacket trimmed with lace over a black bra. It peered in at us and it was then that I noticed that it wasn’t a bird at all, but a tiny demon with horns made out of icicles.
From “The Snow Queen” by Karen Brennan
Jillian in the Borderlands is Beth Alvarado’s fourth book. These darkly funny tales, focusing on Mexican-American, Euro-American, and Mexican characters, feature visionary experiences and a young woman whose drawings begin to create realities instead of just reflecting them. Beth lived in the Arizona desert before migrating to the high desert of central Oregon. Her essay collection, Anxious Attachments, won a 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Visit her at www.bethalvarado.com.