FANZINE

AL: There are great frightening unknowns in this work. In certain stories, such as “It’s Coming,” that unknown is never named, not even for the reader; in others, such as “The Way the End of Days Should Be” as well as the title story, the unknown is something as specific as an endless body of water. Yet even in these stories, where the threat is identified, we keep looking over our shoulder. We sense that this danger in front of us is not the only one—or not the right one.  

What should the reader be wary of as she makes her way through these stories?

DC: I think my characters are instructing readers to be wary of thinking they know what they want, because my characters are people who think they know what they want but are often wrong. They are often uninterested in confronting the possible folly of their ways. They want their ways to be right. They want love and acceptance of the way they are.

This leads not so much to disappointment—if the story continued, that reckoning scene may come, maybe ten or twenty pages later—but rather they are bewildered. They are still holding onto this feeling of, “Wait, but….what? This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

I would hope the reader would also be wary of thinking these worlds in the stories aren’t real, aren’t our world. I recognize that these worlds will seem strange and impossible, but to me, the essence of our world is in there. It’s a slightly exaggerated reality. Men don’t steal babies from yards, but, well, sometimes they do. And there is plenty to be afraid of as a new mother even when a man isn’t stalking your child. All children are needed except when they’re not. They get told they are not-needed through apathy, neglect, dire need. Sometimes a threat to life is figurative. But sometimes it’s a cougar. Sometimes a flood. Sometimes it’s us.

AL: I’m most intrigued and moved by the stories here that demonstrate a “raw yearning.” This is true of the very first piece, the aforementioned “Moving On,” which is about a widow who is compelled by the State to forget her dead husband. It is also true of “A Wanted Man” and “The Mast Year,” which read like companion pieces. In “A Wanted Man,” people succumb to their animal natures; specifically, men are given to the prideful behavior of lions, winning—or losing—by decisive violence the right to mate with any woman.

In a collection like this—in a world like this—where we are stripped to our base fears and urges, this kind of “raw yearning” seems essential, and it also seems impossible. How does it continue to exist? Why cling to it?

DC: I like thinking about the ways that people are still animals—possess animal, natural and instinctual ways but also try to hide and deny that lineage with civilization, rules, structures, rational thinking. We are our base fears and urges. But we control ourselves so that we can live among others. I’m aware of the ways I mediate my own raw yearnings. And I’m always fascinated when I meet people who don’t, or don’t go to the same lengths.

We calm down, we take a breath, we sleep on it, talk it out, we hold our tongue, we say no when we really want to say yes. All in the service of harmony, order, ease, and kindness, too.

In the book, that people fuck in the streets or tear one another apart when they leave their apartment seems impossible, but not entirely. It’s just farther down the sliding scale of what being human is. But it’s the same scale.

AL: Despite primal urge and a driving need for self-preservation at all costs, nearly all of your characters seek one thing:  friendship. Why? [As in, why “friendship” and not “family,” etc.]

DC: One thing I realized in my adult life is that I never learned how to make friends. I moved every year when I was a kid. I’d come into a place, have to make friends, then leave and start over again. When I finally stopped moving, I had no idea how to have long-term friendships. So I would switch my friends every year, even within the same school. I didn’t know how else to do it.

People who grew up in the same place or have childhood friendships amaze me. I can’t even begin to imagine what that was like–to grow and become you in front of others at a time when you’re really changing in big ways and it all feels of great consequence.

This thing of knowing and being known by people was a weirdly foreign concept to me then. I’d say my formative years for sure. So even though I’ve managed to get past that and happily have many lovely people in my life who know me, I still look at the process with a lot of wonder and disbelief and fear. Of all the types of relationships one can have, I think friendship is the most mysterious one.  It’s not a thing we map out as much as romantic love or our family bonds and sometimes I think we don’t weigh it as much though I’d argue we should. It has many forms. It’s this strange shape-shifter we tangle with daily.

AL: Looking back, do you think the first-person plural was inevitable, ultimately, for a collection like this?

DC: I guess when I’m wrapping the stories with a big Man V. title it conjures big humanity. And I’m trying to think about People with a capital P even as I’m writing stories about individual characters. I like fairy tales, myths and fables in part because I like archetypes. I like allegories because I don’t mind when something is in your face about being universal. I like universal. Writers are always trying to get at something universal. Trying to touch the human condition, truth. They can do it by presenting a very specific character or they can set looser characters adrift in a specific story. I rarely describe what my characters look like because it rarely occurs to me to do so. And as a reader, I rarely care what description an author has given for a character (unless it is key to the plot, or it’s so good it takes over my imagination). I just picture whatever I picture from my own store of images, or maybe I just picture a shape without specifics. I don’t know now. Suddenly, it’s like I have no memory of ever reading.

AL: I’m the same kind of reader, actually. I imagine that your work at This American Life really helped shape the impulse towards People with a capital P. 

DC: Either that, or my impulse for it led me there. This American Life was like six years of narrative bootcamp. I was a producer, which meant I did everything. From finding good stories, to going out in the field with a writer to make sure we got the right tape, cutting it back at the office, working on structure with the writer so he or she could write through the tape, editing with the writer and other producers and Ira, then mixing it all once those (many) edits were final and we’d recorded the voice tracks. The show is very particular about what airs. You have to start with a story that moves and is surprising. And then you have to ask what a writer or storyteller has to say about the story. What’s interesting about this story? It can’t just stop at what happens. This ability to not only tell a compelling story but also interpret it and pull meaning from it is what made a story one we could air, rather than an anecdote, or a series of actions you might tell to a group of people who would be left thinking, “Why is she telling us this?” But more, that interpretive act would create little gifts of insight to offer the listener.  Perhaps about being a Person in general.

AL: “It’s Coming” is about an attack on an office building, which in setting, immediacy, and namelessness invokes 9/11. The story continues to redefine the threat as it moves, however, conjuring an almost prehistoric mass, until finally it takes the form of common man’s newest threat—the business executive. In “It’s Coming,” these execs, who are the last of the prey, identify with the predator, as they themselves are at the top of the food chain.  

DC: I didn’t set out with an idea for this story. I was reading The Bloody Chamber and found I wanted to write a story full of gore where I used the word “prick.” And that’s what I did. It took me a long time to figure out what the story was doing or saying. What came out just came out and I had to learn from it and go from there. Now, I feel that the characters are acting on what they’ve been taught, told, led to, or come to believe about life and themselves, and that they are wrong. And now they are screwed but they aren’t even totally aware that they’re screwed yet. At the end when they stand at the lip of the building figuring out how to survive they have nothing to show for their survival except…survival. Is that new life even going to be worth it? The execs aren’t a political statement. They’re more a statement of how expecting certain outcomes is a trick and a trap. Stan and Susan, through the process of revision, became two of my favorite characters in the book. I love them.

That said, I remember very clearly writing straight realism in college and wanting to shift things but not knowing how to. I think elements of the strange always came into my old stories in the form of a dream because I didn’t know how else to introduce them or play with the rules of the world. This made for stories that were so deeply dumb. I wasn’t widely read enough to realize I had other options. Science fiction and fantasy seemed far away from what I was trying to do, and I had never been a big reader of those genres. I was reading Hemingway and Carver and Ford short stories. I still love them but they were limiting for me at the time. I hadn’t yet visited Cheever’s weird suburbs. But I remember coming across Aimee Bender’s, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and going, “Oh shit, no way. Basically, I can do whatever I want and take risks narratively as long as I set the course and am confident and trustworthy enough to entice the reader to come with me.” I’d certainly read books that took place in a world different from mine. I mean, I’d read One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’d read dystopic novels and fairy tales. But there was something so simply ordinary about the life presented in the stories even as they were filled with impossible occurrences. It freed me up. Then, I looked for a place to get inspired and found that in the natural world. So, you know, I’m both a naturalist and a member of the SISWW (now an official acronym which can be found in the dictionary).