For days we may not speak more than a few words to anyone but each other. We leave the hotel in the cool morning and come back sweaty, drained of energy, to stand
before a huge cage of parakeets, watching them quickstep sideways along their long stick-perches. Courting? Fighting? When we wash our hands we turn the water brown as a flooded field.
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Jeff O told us that he and Brian H split after watching Chasing Amy and getting into a fight—by then I was pretty much over my crush on Jeff O and I was kind of off and on living with Steve K who I was sort of ready to break up with so I deliberately rented Chasing Amy for us to watch and then broke up with him (but it had nothing to do with the movie).
I remember I drove to the corner gas station and called Ricky (never Rick) my best friend to tell him and he said to meet him and Matt M (my other best friend) for a drink so we could recap (I had had a crush on Matt M I think before and after this).
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Karolina Waclawiak: In reading your stories, I get a sense that a lot of your characters are women who feel like they’re ghosts in their own lives. They haven’t quite found their way into their own lives, they haven’t taken traditional paths. It feels in conversation with my character Evelyn’s own journey to navigate alternative life paths and being unsuccessful. I’m curious why you find these kinds of characters interesting to write about? These sort of never-do-wells.
Laura van den Berg: A straight-forward answer would be to say I’m drawn to sources of tension. For a lot of these characters, the story is finding them at moments where they have misperceived something pretty significant about their own reality.
I think we all have moments where something we’ve perceived is revealed as false. And that can be a very destabilizing experience. I was interested in looking at that with these women—in some cases, the misapprehension is destabilizing in a way that is not destructive. In other ways, the misapprehension is more serious or more destructive. What happens when a foundational perspective is upended or disrupted?
KW: It feels like it’s almost an investigation into the ways that we cope. And the lies we construct for ourselves. And not necessarily lies, again, I feel like there are negative connotations to that, but looking at our coping mechanisms and what works for us until it doesn’t is a really interesting way to look at how people move through the world.
Evelyn’s reaching this critical age where she’s constructed ways of coping and moving through her life that felt like, “OK, I can do this. This is functional.” But so much of the way we function is dysfunctional at a certain point. Having an about-face in your life to find healthier coping mechanisms is really difficult. A lot of people don’t do it. This book is about Evelyn facing herself and facing her coping mechanisms and saying, “How do I want to move forward in the next phase of my life, if the ways I’ve moved through the world are really unsustainable in the long-term?”
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Poets have reported various triggers for poems—sounds, scents, etc. What triggers a poem for you?
For me, a poem almost always begins with an image, something that catches my eye—a weird tree, a hawk swooping low across the hood of my car, something out of the ordinary. I jot it in an image journal, or just bring the image straight to a notebook or to the computer, and begin describing. It’s by getting as deeply and accurately as possible into an image through description that other things begin to open up for me, discoveries are made, and things I had no idea I’d be writing about begin to show up. That doesn’t always happen, of course, but it’s like a thunderhead rolling in when it does. It’s what keeps me coming back.
For instance, with my poem “Fledgling,” I was weeding in the garden one day when I noticed a robin fledging on the ground by a tomato cage and I realized that that little bird was out of its nest, maybe for the first time, learning to fly. What an exciting time, the beginning of everything new for this little bird.
I left my weeding and came in the house to begin describing what I’d just seen. Suddenly I found myself writing about something that had happened to me way back when I was at what could be called the “fledgling stage” of my own life. I’d had no idea the poem would turn that way when I first started writing. I was just trying to document the cool experience of seeing that little speckled fledgling up close.
Personal discovery is part of it for you, then. Anything else?
Oh, yes! Let me quote Thomas Merton here since I believe he explained this part of the writing process for a person of faith in such a beautiful way:
“The earliest [church] fathers knew that all things, as such, are symbolic by their very being and nature, and all talk of something beyond themselves. Their meaning is not something we impose upon them, but a mystery which we can discover in them, if we have the eyes to look with.” (Selected Poems of Thomas Merton)
Isn’t that lovely? That’s my prayer now—Lord, give me the eyes to look with!
During undergrad at Purdue, I took dendrology (the study of trees), tree physiology, and several urban forestry classes. When people asked why, as a creative writer, I wanted to study trees, I told them that I studied trees not only in the hope of writing better poems, but also in hope of better understanding the mind of their Creator. As a person of faith, spiritual insight is something I’m hoping for every time I write.
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SW: Across your work there’s also a great deal of lying about what’s been hidden—characters nesting lies within lies as if testing their consequences. In this novel, one of the lies is a forced one: the police tell the Lang children not to tell anyone about finding the injured boy. What interests you about lies and the people who tell them?
ML: As a child growing up in Scotland, my Sunday school teacher, Mr. Chisolm, taught me that telling a lie was a terrible sin which would, inevitably, be punished. As an adult, I discovered to my amazement that people could lie with impunity and nothing terrible happened. This did—and does—bewilder me (although, given the current regime, I should have got used to it).
At the same time, I believe there are essential lies, heroic lies. And I’m very interested in the relationship between secrets and lies. Keeping a secret, however innocent, often seems to require lying.
SW: Finding the boy in the field sets off something for all three Lang siblings—not a bomb but a flower, a desire to solve other mysteries in their lives. Duncan wants to find his birth mother; Matthew wants to find the boy’s assailant; Zoe is searching for someone who truly sees her. Why does proximity to misfortune and death bring such searching to your characters?
ML: I wanted to explore a central trope of detective fiction—the discovery of the body—from a different angle. In my version the boy recovers but each of the siblings is jolted into a new awareness. A few years ago, I reencountered an old schoolfriend. He described coming home from school one sunny afternoon and finding the body of a woman at the bottom of the garden. Those few moments changed his life, and his account of them made a deep impression on me. Perhaps not everyone would respond this way but my three characters do.
Thoughts Leading Up to My Successful Au Pair Application
The son I carried for <famous actress> (I know who she is but can’t say: hint hint, she’s winkingly Sapphic enough to quicken our pulses) is five, quarantining with Mum and her husband (harrumph) on their English estate, the article said she humbly admits to success with homemade crumpets and wryly bemoans daily squabbles over home learning; a child often sulks and balks when his mother picks up schoolmarmish chalk…they’d never need to know he once swelled my belly and plucked my sciatic nerve like a fresco’s cherub plays a tiny lute, as I, back then, nineteen, disowned for my exposed desires and all alone, soothed myself to sleep with think of the money, the money, the money…
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Many things we enjoy and which enrich our lives have been taken away in the last months of stay-at-home orders. Like others, I lament not being able to dine out at new restaurants with best friends and colleagues, not seeing newly released films at the cinema, and viewing featured exhibits or perusing the permanent collection at the MFA and other museums. I am also missing dinners shared with family and friends around our table or theirs, the trip my husband and I were finally going to take to Sicily in June, the hugs from my son when he visits and we have to speak to each other from a distance of yard to porch. And recently, I’ve learned that there is a strong possibility that our August Maine vacation will also be cancelled, since my husband and I would be crossing State lines into the Pine Tree State, and therefore required to quarantine for 14 days in our rented house—definitely not why we head to down east Maine for two weeks every summer.
Because of necessary limitations on social gatherings, I missed the funeral and the comfort of my father’s family, when his sister, my Aunt Marguerite died in a nursing home, after contracting Covid-19, which complicated her already existing health issues.
I miss, too, the writing studio where I diligently work in downtown Boston—much more diligently than I work at home with distractions. I even miss taking the unreliable and crowded MBTA Red Line train over the Charles River from Cambridge to Boston and back several days a week, when I go to work at that silent communal space, where I can schmooze with other writers at lunchtime in the kitchen, or on a stone bench down the street at Long Wharf on sunny, warm days. I miss the social aspect and the inspiration of going to readings of poetry and prose and celebrating my friends when their new books are released—Zoom readings aren’t the same, although I’m glad some people offer them.
My freelance coaching of writing students has been limited during the days of confinement, but my husband is teaching his university students online two afternoons each week until the semester’s end. When he is not online, he has planning to do and tests and exams to correct, and I try to sit in my home office at my desk researching publishing possibilities for my finished novel, working (rather half-heartedly, to be honest) on editing my new poetry manuscript, or catching up on reading from the pile of books my friends have published in the last couple of years. I go for a run on most warm or warmish days.
But there is one thing I am not missing, something I used to do much more frequently in the past. I have—happily—been going for hikes on trails in the towns neighboring Cambridge—in Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Waltham, Belmont, and venturing to Cape Ann on the North Shore. I love to hike, and it seems that in recent years, my hikes have become fewer and rarely take place in winter or spring. I’ve blamed the New England weather, my husband’s recovery from a knee replacement, and my busy life, for keeping me from hiking, especially in spring. We generally get more social in spring after our dark winters, and so, there are parties, events, and fairs, and shopping for warm weather clothes, and planting gardens, rushing the beach season, or going to baseball games—so much else to take up our time. So hiking has been of late, put off until summer, hiking Maine’s Bold Coast and trails in New Brunswick, Canada, or foraging with my husband for mushrooms in the woods around Concord or in Gloucester.
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