“Care is incredibly tenuous and imperfect:” words with Caren Beilin

With our new website comes new web content.  We’re happy to present the first in a series of interviews with Big Lucks contributors: this time with Caren Beilin, whose prose is forthcoming in BL #3 and BL #4.

I am very short sighted.

I tell you this because I cannot remember the word combination I Googled that led me to this blog post at Corduroy Books (“Blake Butler+Pants”? “Gary Lutz+cephalopod”? “Joshua Mohr+topless”?) a few months ago. I do recall, however, being struck with misogynist guilt when we got back from AWP, since I had brought back only four by women, but 15 books by men. Butler and Lutz are the two most distinct and significant authors I’ve ever read, so my curiosity was immediately piqued by the two female writers Weston mentioned alongside them.

One of those women was Deb Olin Unferth; the other was Caren Beilin. I immediately started to search engine the hell out of these two women. I loved Unferth’s novel, so much that I’ve recommended it to everyone I’ve ever wanted to kiss; the first of Beilin’s work I read was a story called The Curative Possibility of a Tongue, which I first read in silence with my mouth gaped open and then read a second time out loud to Laura.

If you get me drunk enough, I will not hesitate to tell you that Caren Beilin is my favorite living writer. I say this because certain writers–good writers–find ways to be emotionally resonating in a manner that makes you ignore the prose’s formal innovations and wonder would I ever let things get this bad? I think we can all see a bit of ourselves when we read stories like When We Were French: Beilin’s characters are flawed, and they are self-aware yet ignorant of these flaws in a way that feels more human than any prose I have ever read.

This should make for an interesting conversation: Caren has never been interviewed, and I’ve never asked an intelligent question in my life. Let’s see how this goes.

Mark C: You’ve been mentioned in some pretty fantastic places, like this Bookslut article about women being better short story writers than men. Yet, you are not as “out there” as some other authors are: no personal blog, no Facebook page, no LinkedIn profile.  Is there a complicated reason behind this? I only ask because you have such a vast amount of online publications at some really fantastic places (like The Lifted Brow and failbetter) and it only seems natural that you’d be a big self-promoter.

Caren Beilin: My friend Brandon Shimoda sets a beautiful example. Whenever we do meet or write to each other, his focus is on me and my writing and writers and writing, and the world, and not on himself. I then find out later from his girlfriend (herself a wonderful poet, Dot Devota) that he’s got two books coming out. I tease him about his reticence, his complete absence of self-promotion, and he says, “If I talk about myself I lose a chance to hear about you.” I find a lot of grace in his position and aspire towards it. I recently quit facebook– my skin is too thin, or I feel too many fluctuations of self-worth in this medium. I feel like this medium funnels me in either of two directions: a sycophantic one or an imperialistic one. I want to be neither. I posted some links to my stories several times but felt like I was collecting my friends, wanting validation and congratulations from them rather than sharing enchantment in moments. I feel so excited by the ways my work does somehow make it to someone. That blog post you read is by Weston Cutter who was a reader for Swink, read my story (“When We Were French”) and couldn’t convince any of the other editors to go for it. He started writing to me, we became pen pals for something like two years without ever meeting. I painted a portrait of Bob Dylan for his birthday, he sends me these bags he sews. We finally met in Minneapolis, where neither of us live, over Christmas. I’d never even seen a picture of him. He writes about me on his blog– you see it– this. I love this. Thank you so much.

MC: This “enchantment in moments” you speak of– is that something you aim to recreate in your prose? I feel like almost all of your stories have an enchanted quality to them. Or maybe I mean that there’s an emotional resonance in all of them that seems to be heightened by something other-worldly, or (at the very least) absurd.

CB: This is tough to answer! I’m working on a book of fairy tales for children and one of my princes, Prince Peter of the Leaves and Tulips, is looking for his father, who has disappeared into a wood inside the wood. I think this is a good way to answer this: I think there is a wood inside the wood. I think when I’m writing, I want to find it, and finding it requires strange ways, an eschewing of literalism. And you have to be a prince.

MC: You seem to have a bunch of different projects you’re working on (at least when we’re talking). What have you devoted the most time to lately?

CB: A recent project for me has been the completion of a group of short pieces titled Americans, Guests, or Us. I started writing them a couple years ago and had kept coming back to them, writing more. They’ve been like the bass behind all this other melodic trying that wouldn’t work. I finally accepted they were the thing and tried to really make it and complete it. I’m really glad that several of them are going into Big Lucks, too! The premise is that I don’t know who we are, Americans, guests, or us, but that I fear we’ve become guests, in our own homes, with our own lovers and families, in our own country. A guest is someone who forsakes home for experience and agrees to become unsure. There are many short pieces but they’re all coming from the same chorus of voices. There are these people having an affair, and a man who is becoming schizophrenic, and lots of leaving lovers, and a woman with a disease, and then, this very fucked up bed & breakfast.

MC: That’s interesting to me, because from the pieces I’ve seen from Americans, Guests, or Us online (at Diagram, Everyday Genius, and Slope), I had assumed that there was only one first-person narrator, not multiple perspectives. Are all these characters reaching the same conclusion–that we’re barely at home in our own homes anyone–or are they all coming to different, less definitive conclusions about their place in the world?

CB: I can totally see how you’d see it that way, and maybe it is that way, in part. I kind of see them as all speaking from a trance of similar voice, the way pain takes us and combines us. I don’t think these characters have concluded what their problem is as much as they’re suffering from it. They’ve become deranged. They’re torturers, of each other, themselves, and animals. Care is incredibly tenuous and imperfect. Some of them are more evil or callous than others. Some aren’t evil or callous at all. But everyone’s suffering. And for me, there’s a thing at the root of their suffering, and it’s a thing about who we are.

MC: Many of the characters in Americans, Guests, or Us have very intimate relationships with rather inanimate objects, like balloon animals or maps or argyle eagles. Not only do these objects (or animals) make your characters seem reflective, but they also give them the opportunity to admit some pretty ugly, (in some cases) nefarious desires. How much is this a book about ownership– ownership of memories, ownership of space and ownership of self-identity?

CB: I think it is a bit about ownership, like you could own something or take possession over something and then do what you wanted with it, even torture it. Like an animal isn’t an animal but is an animal on your property. It’s infuriating when something is free, or that’s what A, G, or U thinks. My characters, or this pain-chorus, or whatever this is, enjoy mocking slaves and Palestinians, so I must be thinking quite a lot about ownership. Personally, I think ownership is a real problem and it’s sick how we’re encouraged to own so much, to gather so much under what we’ve marked, to demote all of nature, and other people, into this owned guest of ours. I found this line from one of the pieces: “But earth, I think, happens in increments, as we rove over it, around our Houses.” Houses with a capital H. Houses over birds. Houses over palestine.

MC: Most of the sections I’ve seen of A, G or U seem to be relatively short passages. Would it be safe to assume that the entire book is written that way? Do you find these short, fragmented narratives to be more successful than longer works?

CB: Yes, that would be quite safe! I think “Zoo Balloons” in DIAGRAM is one of the longest pieces. Very few of them are longer than a page and some of them are much shorter than a page. I do favor fragments! I taught an intro fiction class based on writing fragments once, and this is because I think beginning writers (and me for all time) find it difficult to write interesting or meaningful transitions. Better to go right in and then out. Better not to belabor how it happens or how people got there or left. I have always struggled with writing long. I start to feel like I’m taking up people’s time. I start to feel the weight of overpopulation– there are so many people now, so many names, so many stories, so we can’t spend too much time here in this one name without it feeling hoggish, almost as if of a resource. I understand this to be an insane position. I love long stories and novels, too, though oftentimes not new long stories, and again, because of the overpopulation thing– I start to think, there’s too many of us right now for me to read this all the way through, transitions and all. War and Peace is a huge favorite for me, and many other long narrative novels. But I really love short novels. I love these more as a writer and long novels more as a reader. I love it when something is so tightly and even awkwardly about one thing. One of my favorite short novels is called Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq. It’s about a woman gradually turning into a pig. It’s very brief and violent and has a very smart but willfully dumb narrator– and is full of the passion and purpose of its author. One book that I think has a perfect structure is Wayside School is Falling Down by Louis Sachar. It’s a book for kids about this incredibly tall school with one classroom on each floor and the chapters are about the different classrooms and the particularities of how they work, what’s being learned, the teachers and students. If I had to build a book, it would look like Wayside School.

MC: Back to what you said earlier, about caring for someone being a “tenuous and imperfect” act. It’s interesting of you to say that, particularly when you consider “I Will Cure You,” your story that will appear in BL#3. Do you feel as if those themes come up quite frequently in your work– both suffering and caring? Are you someone (or a writer, at least) that struggles to understand those emotions, or do those things slip into your work subconsciously?

CB: This is a wonderful question! This isn’t an idea that I’d solidified with myself but now that you bring it out, yes, I think I’m very interested, as a writer and person, in suffering and caring. In “I Will Cure You” my narrator is in love with an alcoholic and her care really takes on a lot of sacrifice and even self-slaughter. “I Will Love You” or “I Will Accept You” would probably make much healthier titles! I certainly grew up in an environment where care was skewed, where you’d get a lot of “I’m doing this because I care,” but the care is all wrong. I think a lot of my characters would like to care but do not know how, or other things about them are in the way. There’s often a persisting selfishness. As for suffering, I think it exists in everyone. It’s one of the things that’s in the wood inside the wood, and it’s a good thing to know about in yourself and in others. That seems like a good writing assignment– start writing about somebody and don’t stop writing about them until you’ve figured out how they suffer.

MC: That’s the goal of all writing, though, isn’t it? Maybe I’m bringing too much of myself to the table here, but I’ve always thought that prose is the writer’s opportunity to understand the ugliest and most beautiful parts of humanity, until there’s a resolution of some sort.

CB: That’s an awesome way to describe writing! Maybe it’s pretty evident and obvious. For me, I need to remind myself to be that way, and to stay really close to it– keep each sentence close to it. I think that’s such a beautiful way to think about writing, and also, I love that you’re an editor looking for writing that fits this guideline. When you first contacted me about giving you something for Big Lucks, I knew you had the sparkle. You really have this enthusiasm, and you’re drawing all of these connections, thinking about what writing is doing and who is doing what, and you have optimism, and this ultimate curiosity. I’m excited about Big Lucks. It seems like you’ve really started something.

MC: Now you’re just being sweet. Oh you! Anyway, we should probably wrap this up, so last question: tell me the most encouraging story you’ve heard this month. Or, tell me about the last bit of life experience where you walked away feeling courageous.

CB: I get the most encouragement from what my friends are doing and what their lives are becoming. I just heard from my friend Max today. He and his girlfriend Nora have become the caretakers of this rustic lodge in the mountains. To think about my gentle and strange philosopher friend landing so magically and precisely. And then, my writer friends, so many of them (you included!) just working under the spells of these gorgeous projects. My boyfriend, Peter (of the leaves and tulips), working in the next room, this astounding inspiration, this example. I keep hearing how everyone’s life is changing. I feel like we’re all out in the same wood.

Be sure to check out Caren’s story in BL #3, now available for pre-order.