{"id":36547,"date":"2024-11-03T13:30:15","date_gmt":"2024-11-03T21:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36547"},"modified":"2024-12-17T09:37:28","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T17:37:28","slug":"issue-94-carmen-maria-machado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-94-carmen-maria-machado\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 94: Carmen Maria Machado"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Found in\u00a0Willow Springs 94<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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APRIL 12, 2024<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

POLLY BUCKINGHAM, DYLAN COOPER, BLAIR JENNINGS, ANNABELLE MORRILL, & SHRAYA SINGH<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH CARMEN MARIA MACADHO<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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Found in\u00a0Willow Springs 94<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

THE WEIRD AND THE WONDERFUL<\/strong>\u00a0are more than welcome in the works of Carmen Maria Machado. Her prose explores the messy, and often grave, corners of the human experience all while playing with the typical conventions of literature. Machado reinvents our relationship with narrative by speaking to the reader directly: inserting imagined research to introduce a classic, instructing the reader how to read and act while traversing a story, and even implicating the reader within her own history through use of the second person and the Choose Your Own Adventures trope. Johanna Thomas-Corr wrote of\u00a0In the Dream House<\/em>, \u201cWhat makes Machado\u2019s memoir so distinctive is not just its inventiveness but its unflinching honesty\u2014about the indignities of abuse, about the vulnerability of growing up feeling fat . . . and also about bodily desires.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the short story collection\u00a0Her Body and Other Parties<\/em>\u00a0(2017), the graphic novel\u00a0The Low Low Woods<\/em>\u00a0(2020), and the memoir\u00a0In the Dream House\u00a0<\/em>(2019), which was awarded the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGTBQ Nonfiction. Machado has also been the recipient of a Shirley Jackson Award (2017), the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction (2018), the IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award (2018), a Judy Grahn Award (2020), and seven others. Her work has been published in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>,\u00a0Granta, Lightspeed Magazine<\/em>,\u00a0Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/em>,\u00a0Tin House<\/em>,\u00a0The American Reader<\/em>, and many more. Machado\u2019s\u00a0Her Body and Other Parties<\/em>\u00a0was also a finalist for The National Book Award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We had the pleasure of meeting with Carmen Maria Machado at Spokane\u2019s Montvale Hotel in an arguably haunted conference room on April 12th<\/sup>, 2024. We discussed everything from research and adaptation to expression and sexuality, all tied up in the exploration of horrors that are rooted as deeply in the real world as in our imaginations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHRAYA SINGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had my students read your memoir, and we discussed the shifting points of view, how the second person offers distance between the speaker and the author and how it might be connected to the distance you had from the dream house at the time of writing. Could you speak about your choice of point of view, how it worked with the story you were trying to tell, and how it may or may not have changed your way of approaching different sections of the memoir? Is this a point of view you feel comfortable with and plan on going back to?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The journey to that structure began by accident. It\u2019s funny, POV is so important, but it\u2019s something I slip into. I don\u2019t think about it in a conscious way. After my first book was published, an interviewer said to me, \u201cAll of these stories are in first person,\u201d and I said, \u201cReally?\u201d When I initially sold the memoir, it was about forty very rough pages. There was no research. They bought it because I\u2019d already written a book for them. I had put it on the backburner because I was in the middle of touring my first book. When my editor finally said to me, \u201cI want to talk about the fact that all of the pages you sent me are in second person,\u201d I was like, \u201cAre they? Good to know.\u201d Clearly, I was not paying attention. My editor said, \u201cYou can totally write a memoir in second person, the only thing I want to make sure of is that you\u2019re not writing it this way because you\u2019re so traumatized that you\u2019re keeping the material at arm\u2019s length.\u201d And I thought, okay that\u2019s a super good point, let me think about it. I decided I was just going to put it into first. I read out loud when I write. I was reading the sections I was changing into first, and it just didn\u2019t sound right, it kept hitting my ear wrong. Clearly, there\u2019s something in here that wants to be in second person. And I wanted to do all this researched historical material; that would be weird in second person. I was also thinking about putting in contemporary sections of me writing the book, but that also felt weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book that really clarified it for me was Justin Torres\u2019 We the Animals<\/em>, a novel I\u2019m obsessed with. It\u2019s in this plural first voice. It starts as we<\/em>, and then at the end when the bad thing happens, the POV breaks down. It\u2019s this rupture that exists in the marrow of the text. When I first read that book, I was sobbing hysterically. Something about that switch destroyed me. I began thinking about the memoir material, the past material, as this young self I\u2019m looking at from a distance. The you<\/em> is both a way of speaking to her and a way of implicating the reader. A good example is the \u201cChoose Your Own Adventure\u201d chapter where the you<\/em> becomes muddled. I put the rest in first person. The you<\/em> acts like a distancing, but not as in I don\u2019t want it anywhere near me<\/em>, more a way of intimately conversing with this past self who I can see super clearly. She can\u2019t see me, but I can see her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DYLAN COOPER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s interesting to think about point of view as something unconscious when that\u2019s often the first thing we talk about in the workshop setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s happened before where I\u2019ve been in a POV that isn\u2019t working, and then I\u2019ve switched and found it works better. But I just don\u2019t think about POV much. I do it almost automatically. People have a lot of feelings about first versus third, and obviously second person is like the redheaded stepchild. People get very weird about second person, bent out of shape. Everyone\u2019s like, don\u2019t. Second person is fun. It\u2019s an incredibly powerful and challenging mode. When it\u2019s being well executed, it fires in this way that\u2019s so interesting. But yeah, I don\u2019t think about it a lot unless someone makes me think about it, and then I\u2019m like, sigh<\/em>, okay, fine. I\u2019m trying to write this novel right now that\u2019s rotating POVs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SINGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned that an early draft of your memoir didn\u2019t have the history in it. One of our nonfiction professors talks about the process of turning a personal document into a public document in nonfiction. Your memoir started as personal and became public, and it is often used as a tool for queer theory for a lot of people who aren\u2019t familiar with it. What was your journey from the memoir to the final thing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s interesting describing it as queer theory. I\u2019m not an academic even slightly; I studied photography in college. I tried a bunch of majors and was like, I just want to take photos, I don\u2019t want to do anything else, I\u2019m not an academic. I would die if I got a PhD, I\u2019d never make it. I spent a lot of time writing that book teaching myself how to read, and I did a lot of asking friends who were academics how to interpret certain material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was teaching myself research as I was working on this book. Part of the project of the book was this thing that happened to me, and I\u2019m trying to figure out contextually where I fit in this history of narratives of domestic violence and how it exists in the queer space. The answer is in other books, in documents, in research people have done, in academic work. There were all these moments doing this research where I was beginning to understand why we don\u2019t talk about domestic violence in queer relationships the way we do in straight relationships, why we don\u2019t think of women being capable of committing violence in the same way we think of men able to commit violence, why female queerness dissociates\u2014like lesbians are this third gender, not men or women. I\u2019m reading these essays\u2014Saidiya Hartman\u2019s essay from Silence of the Archives<\/em>\u2014and I\u2019m like, this is exactly what I\u2019m trying to articulate and now I have this academic framework. Could I have written a memoir that was just my personal experience? I could have, but the project is elevated by the context. It felt bigger and more interesting to think about those tree rings. That thing would be thin and wobbly if it was just my story, but that other material creates this mighty oak because it\u2019s all working together. It got me over a lot of my fear about research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For my first book, I did one piece of research. I looked up when trick-or-treating began in the United States. I was trying to make sure it fit into the time period. Five minutes of googling and I was like, okay, I\u2019m fine. But now I\u2019m working on this book that has a lot of historical fiction. Research can actually give you new material. It can give you all these interesting spaces that you can explore. The value of research in the space of creative nonfiction and how that relates to speculation and imagination is really interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BLAIR JENNINGS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When editing Carmilla<\/em>, how did you decide which sections to expand on via footnotes, and were there any sections you wished you had elaborated on?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was by coincidence that I had agreed to do Carmilla<\/em> while I was at this residency working on the memoir. Carmilla<\/em> was a break from that pure, unmitigated depression and grief. Some days I was like, I am not working on the memoir today, I\u2019m going to work on this Carmilla<\/em> thing. I\u2019ve done a lot of introductions for texts, but I had never been asked to edit anything before in quite that way where I have control over the body of the text itself. Because it\u2019s in the public domain, I could do whatever I wanted. I first planned to just do a straight edit, but I was like, I\u2019m not an academic and they know that, I\u2019m not going to give you an academic kind of text. So I began thinking about the contradiction of the text in terms of it being this iconic lesbian vampire text that predates Dracula<\/em> and is written by, ostensibly, a cis straight white Irishman, but also being like, this is about orgasms and there\u2019s so much gay stuff in here! I was playing around with footnotes, adding a little bit of context. If I had to look something up, I\u2019d think, that would be a good footnote to indicate to the reader something logistical. And then there were funny bits where I thought, that\u2019s definitely an orgasm and it\u2019ll draw the reader\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the introduction, I was trying to reconcile questions about authorship. I\u2019m sure you all are familiar with this idea of writing what you know or staying in your lane. So I wondered, what does it mean that this man wrote this novel? Did he know it had lesbians? Like, did he know? I ended up writing to the editor with this crazy idea where I wanted to write a fictional-nonfiction introduction to Carmilla<\/em> where I invent a bunch of text and engage with it in this metatextual-fictional, artificial way. I asked, \u201cIs that okay? Because that\u2019s a different thing than you asked me to do.\u201d They said, \u201cWe love it, yes, do it.\u201d I was having a blast. If I hadn\u2019t been working on this other really hard thing, maybe I would have done more footnotes or created something completely different in them, but it just wasn\u2019t meant to be. But I do love it, and I\u2019m really proud of it. It\u2019s a great project. It\u2019s funny because they are constantly going to reprints. That book sells and sells and sells, which is great for them. I love that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JENNINGS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many red flags that should have alarmed Laura and her father about Carmilla\u2019s vampiric nature, yet they always find excuses for her. As someone who has experienced an abusive relationship, would you say that the magnetism of a person blinds us to their red flags? And if so, how does one avoid falling victim to a beautiful monster if they cannot see straight?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My god, if I could answer that question, there would be no problems in this world. It would fix everything. I mean yes, I think so. But what\u2019s maybe more relevant or interesting is that we are drawn to what we lack, or what we think we lack. It isn\u2019t so much that Carmilla is just attractive, as I suppose she\u2019s rendered in the text, but there\u2019s a magnetism to her. It\u2019s really common for first queer relationships to be abusive, which is to say that sometimes when you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re looking for and then you find it, it\u2019s very exciting. You\u2019re willing to overlook a lot of other stuff because you\u2019re like, I\u2019m where I want be or, I feel really good or, it feels really right. I think that\u2019s common. I also think that people who are abusive are often looking for people who have that kind of vulnerability. I mean I\u2019m not a psychologist, but I think Carmilla\u2014 door slowly creaks open<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is this a haunted hotel? It feels like it\u2019s full of ghosts. I got here and thought, for sure people have died in here, I have no doubt. Anyway, it\u2019s all young love, being young and dumb and horny and a little crazy. As a person who has been there very deeply, that makes sense; it feels like a first love story. And if you think of vampirism as a metaphor for predation or abuse, that all tracks together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COOPER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned implicating the reader. A lot of your stories involve the reader in a very direct way, for example, addressing the reader in \u201cThe Husband Stitch\u201d with instructions for how to read it. Any piece of writing can be viewed as a collaboration between reader and writer in some way, but your stories often seem to make that a lot more visible, especially stories like \u201cThe Husband Stitch\u201d where the reader is not necessarily expected to fulfill the role you\u2019ve given her. What role do you imagine for the reader while you\u2019re writing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a question authors answer really differently depending on where you are in your career and what kind of a writer you are. For example, people on the more commercial end of writing are often very active with their audiences because they\u2019re writing in this very specific, transactional way, and so who the audience is and what the audience wants are relevant, economic questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I give different answers. One is I don\u2019t think about the reader at all because you\u2019ll go crazy if you do that; you\u2019ll never be able to finish anything because you\u2019ll constantly be anxious. And you can\u2019t possibly know who your audience is. Even though I think I know who my audience is\u2014young queer people\u2014last year I was in Ireland, and I met an 85-year-old Irishman who had read everything I had ever published, every magazine, everything. He was like an OG Carmen Maria Machado fan. I was overjoyed. I\u2019m so arrogant thinking I know who my audience is\u2014I would have never picked this man out of a lineup to be the biggest fan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, when I was writing the memoir, I was thinking extremely actively about my audience. Who is this book for? The book is for everyone, literally\u2014it\u2019s dedicated, \u201cIf you need this book, it is for you\u201d\u2014but also, I was imagining an audience like me. But even before the book had come out, people were writing me. One woman wrote, \u201cI\u2019m not gay, I\u2019m straight. But I\u2019ve never seen anyone write about emotional abuse this way. Thank you so much for doing this.\u201d And a man wrote, \u201cI\u2019m a straight man but I was abused by an ex-girlfriend, and I\u2019ve never seen anyone write about a woman committing abuse in this way. Thank you.\u201d My own preconceptions about my audience were completely blown apart. You can\u2019t know because it\u2019ll make you crazy, and you can\u2019t write for everyone, so you have to just write for yourself. Ideally, you\u2019re writing for history and across time. I have readers reading my books in languages I don\u2019t speak. One day, I\u2019m going to die. I hope it\u2019s a long time from now, but I\u2019ll be dead and people can still read my books in the way you can read a book from somebody who died two hundred years ago, and you\u2019re still having your half of the conversation with that artist even though they\u2019re long gone, even if they couldn\u2019t possibly conceive of you as a person. The thing about reading is that you get to engage across these seemingly impossible barriers, including death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fun thing is getting to be kind of cheeky and directly reaching out of a text. It happens less now, but when my first book came out, people were like, I did the thing in \u201cThe Husband Stitch\u201d where I moved the curtain and it was raining. That\u2019s so funny. I mean, it\u2019s a joke, or a metatextual audience gesture, whatever you want to call it. The \u201cChoose Your Own Adventure\u201d chapter in the memoir is another example of implicating the reader. I was actually initially thinking I wanted to gaslight the reader. Really early on I had written, \u201cGaslight the reader?\u201d and circled it a bunch. I wanted to do something where I create for the reader the experience I went through. And the way I figured it out was the \u201cChoose Your Own Adventure\u201d where I got to yank the reader up by the nose, yell at them, make them go in circles, do all the things that felt appropriate to what I was trying to describe. It\u2019s making explicit what\u2019s implicit in the contract of writing, which I love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SINGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s clear you like working with fragmented narratives; I haven\u2019t come across that so effectively done in the mainstream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you initially worked on the stories in Her Body and Other Parties<\/em>, did you get pushback from mentors or peers? And if so, how did you overcome that and decide that this was the best form for your prose?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fragmented text\u2014narrative generated through smaller parts\u2014is very old. I\u2019m thinking about The Pillow Book<\/em> [by Sei Sh\u014dnagon] from the 990s Heian period in Japan. And the Bible is essentially a large text with lots of little fragmented texts. That\u2019s true of a lot of literature\u2014it\u2019s true of a lot of things, right? In terms of more contemporary stuff, in grad school I was really interested in the organizational principles of Singular Pleasures <\/em>by Harry Matthews. The whole book is tiny little fragments of people masturbating, and they\u2019re unconnected. They\u2019re very short; you can read the whole book in less than an hour. The audacity of that is so interesting. Harry Matthews was the president of Oulipo, a French literary movement of constraint still very active in France. They\u2019re into constraint-based writing and creating restrictions on the text itself, like a novel written with no letter e in both the French it was originally written in and the English [Gadsby<\/em> by Ernest Vincent Wright]. And there\u2019s a sequel called the Les Revenentes<\/em> [by Georges Perec] where e is the only vowel that appears, and there\u2019s no a, i, o, or u. Another book I read in grad school that I love was 253<\/em> by fantasy writer Geoff Ryman, initially written as a hyperlink novel. It took place on a train in the London underground, and you could click on different passengers and go wherever you wanted. He wrote and set the novel on the date his best friend told him he was dying of AIDS. The train is going to crash\u2014the driver of the train is going to fall asleep\u2014and it goes through two stops; people either stay on the train or they get off. There\u2019s 253 passengers, each passenger gets 253 words, a little profile of each repeating the same events over and over and over. You\u2019d think this would not work, but it works so well. It\u2019s so devastating when you get to the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I started submitting work in workshop, some people didn\u2019t know what I was doing. My teachers generally knew. I did have a classmate say, \u201cCan she do this?\u201d And the teacher was like, \u201cYes.\u201d And that was the end of the conversation. I submitted SVU [\u201cEspecially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU<\/em>\u201d] from my first book\u2014the longer, surreal fanfic that has the Law and Order<\/em> episodes. A classmate really hated it and walked out of the workshop. But most of the class loved it and my teacher was like, \u201cIncredible, I love this, how can we make this better?\u201d He began giving this incredible lecture about, he called it, \u201csymphonic structure,\u201d a plot graph, or an orchestra of individual parts that feed the others in different ways. It was a really useful way of framing it. Something about that structure makes it possible for something bigger to happen. When I wrote \u201cEspecially Heinous,\u201d it was the longest thing I had written\u2014 eighty double-spaced pages or something. Because I had this artificial form I had imposed on the text, I had to keep going until I had filled in all the episodes. It was this way of generating friction or energy that allowed me into a piece of writing. Some people liked it and some people didn\u2019t. People have been like, I loved your first book but I hated that story \u201cEspecially Heinous.\u201d That\u2019s weird to say, but okay. Either you like a more fragmented structure or you don\u2019t. I love it, but people complain about it in reviews of other books. What was that thing that Joyce Carol Oates said on Twitter? I love Joyce Carol Oates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That makes a lot of sense that you love her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, I love her, she\u2019s great. She\u2019s so chaotic and I\u2019m amazed\u2014I sort of love how chaotic she is in public. She was on Twitter, and she said something like \u201cwan little husks.\u201d That is the funniest thing. I think she was talking about auto fiction\u2014she was really mad\u2014it was so funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve read Janet Kauffman\u2019s book Characters on the Loose<\/em> where each chapter is erotica about a single letter, from A to Z. I was thinking of that and \u201cInventory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is ringing a bell\u2014I have definitely heard of it. I was in a workshop and this guy had written a story that had sex in it. It was very misogynistic, which I said in the class, and he made some comment afterwards about how I clearly didn\u2019t like sex in writing, and I took that really personally. I was like, I\u2019m going to, out of sheer spite, write this story that is literally all sex scenes. And after writing it I was like, oh, I have to have plot, it can\u2019t just be an endless sequence of sex scenes. And then came the thing of a pandemic and what it would mean if you were trying to come into yourself sexually, but you\u2019re also shut off from other people and you can\u2019t access that safely. Sex is the structure\u2014a person\u2019s sexual life or sexual landscape becomes the spine of the story, the backbone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first thing that struck me about your stories is how prominent their structures are. You\u2019ve talked about point of view being psychological\u2014perhaps structure is in part also? Where does structure fall in the process?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are lots of ways into stories. A thing writers say a lot is an image strikes them or finds a character speaking to me and I followed them into the story. What is that thing Faulkner said about what led him to The Sound and the Fury<\/em>\u2014the image of a  little girl climbing the tree and of her muddy underwear? I do get images really clearly, though they\u2019re not usually the thing that\u2019ll lead me to the story. And I\u2019m not a person who generally, a character is speaking to me. My ideas come from structure and genre. I\u2019ll really want to write a demonic possession story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or a haunted house story. Or I really want to use a kickstarter as a structure. That\u2019s the way that I get in. The Wayside School<\/em> stories by Louis Sachar opened me to fragmented texts\u2014tiny little chapters, all different characters, and tales of this building. It\u2019s a thing I enjoyed as a young person, so it makes sense that my brain latched onto this way of telling stories\u2014having these fun little conceits or premises. Structure or genre is a stepping stone to something bigger and more interesting. People get really fixated on categories\u2014if it\u2019s this way it has to look this way. No no no no no. You can do whatever you want, you\u2019re the god of your own universe when it comes to writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANNABELLE MORRILL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stories from history, urban legends, and campfire stories seem to be important. In \u201cEspecially Heinous,\u201d we have television, in \u201cThe Husband Stitch\u201d campfire or folk stories, and even in Carmilla<\/em> the insertion of letters or stories of other people. I was interested in the importance of pulling from or building on established stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adaptation just makes sense to me. Once I\u2019ve absorbed a text, I\u2019m already interpreting it, I\u2019m already adapting. The Little Mermaid<\/em> was the first movie I ever saw in a theatre. I was three. I was obsessed with it. I still have the whole thing memorized from beginning to end. Someone from some birthday, probably when I was eight or nine, gave me a faux leatherbound classics series, and it included Hans Christen Anderson\u2019s fairytale collection. But then reading The Little Mermaid<\/em> I\u2019m like, oh my God\u2014it\u2019s so violent and gruesome and awful and has a sad ending, and there are angels\u2014what the hell is this? I was just beginning to understand: you can tell the same story over and over and it changes, and why it changes depends on\u2014I don\u2019t think I had this language at that age\u2014but there\u2019s an agenda. The way we interpret and retell stories, even Bible stories, and what stories get told, and what lessons we pull from them, is so interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My father had a very traumatic childhood that he cannot talk about except when he would tell stories that were supposed to be inspiring but were horrifying. One time he told me how when he was a kid he was so good at listening\u2014\u201cOne time your grandmother, my mother, told me to stay and watch TV and not move because she had to go to the store. While she was at the store, a fire started and I stayed right there.\u201d Sorry, is the moral of the story that if a fire starts, I should just stay put and burn to death? What\u2019s the point? And he was like, no, you should listen. I don\u2019t think that story tells me the thing that you think it\u2019s telling me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even at eleven I thought, this is wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through time, stories change. I read Kate Chopin\u2019s The Awakening<\/em> when I was a teenager, and I barely understood it. I reread it in my twenties and I was like, huh. And in my thirties I was weeping hysterically. Your perspective on life and art changes as you have experiences and you become a different person. The text itself is fixed, but you are constantly changing. Stories are repeated, told across time, across cultures. Stories have lessons or morals that won\u2019t necessarily adapt. I think about \u201cThe Frog Prince,\u201d the story of the girl who has a golden ball and throws it down the well. She wants her ball and the frog is like, \u201cI\u2019ll get it for you if I can come sit by your plate at dinner and sleep in your bed at night.\u201d And she says, \u201cOkay,\u201d because she wants her ball. She goes back to the house and her dad says, \u201cWhat\u2019s the frog doing?\u201d and she says, \u201cI told him he could sit on my plate and also sleep in my bed because he got my golden ball.\u201d And then she\u2019s like, I\u2019ve changed my mind, I don\u2019t like this. And the dad says, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to honor your promise.\u201d This story ends up being told in many different ways across time, but reading it contemporarily, this is a super rapey story, this is a story about consent. But that was not necessarily the original framework. Law and Order: SVU<\/em> is another great example, which was kind of a contemporary fairy tale. We have lots of these stories, they\u2019re variations on a theme. The early Law and Order: SVU<\/em> is really good\u2014every episode in the first two seasons is a banger\u2014and also incredibly problematic, and now the episodes are bad but they\u2019re way less problematic. There\u2019s an interesting inversion\u2014they\u2019re riffing and correcting themselves from past seasons. This is all to say, I think there\u2019s something really exciting about those forms. One of the fun things of being a writer is that you get to absorb all these stories and then you also get to retell and recast them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JENNINGS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rewriting stories is part of your graphic novel The Low, Low Woods<\/em>. It reads like heightened commentary on rape culture. The men in the mining town rape the women at will and then use the magical water to wipe the women\u2019s memories, which in turn makes the women slowly lose their personhood. There is more nuance to the situation in our world, but I\u2019ve experienced moments in my life where I think, oh my God, this is like Shudder-to-Think. Is there a danger in portraying this issue in such an extreme light, especially in young adult literature? And what are the benefits of doing so?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think of this book as young adult literature. I know it has teenage protagonists, but that\u2019s definitely not what I was thinking about when I was writing it. But I think one of the purposes of art is making people see clearly what you see. If I\u2019m writing something, I\u2019m like, do you understand? Do you see it how I see it? I\u2019m making explicit what\u2019s implicit. The origin of this story was that I was having a lot of nightmares, and I had one that was exactly the opening of the book where I dreamt that I was in a movie theatre and I knew something was going to happen. If I opened my eyes, I would not remember, and I had to keep my eyes shut. Normally my dreams are not helpful, narratively speaking. I write them down, and when I wake up it\u2019s absolute gibberish. But this was useful; it was so vivid and creepy, I wrote it down. That was years before I wrote this book. Then, when I was asked to pitch the project, it felt like it had a rich, narratively interesting space to start, so I began to build out this world and these characters. But also, things in this book that are real might feel really absurd. It\u2019s based on a real place\u2014Centralia, Pennsylvania\u2014which has been on fire for decades and decades and decades. I call it Shudder-to-Think. It comes directly from accounts of Centralia\u2014like the snow falling and melting into the paths of the coal, that\u2019s real. How much of this is exaggerated? It\u2019s less than you would think. There\u2019re no deer women, no skinless men, those are invented. I wanted to tell a story that made sense in terms of how I was thinking about the world. One way you do that is to create these scenarios that are fictional but just barely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When COVID started, this funny thing happened where I was one of a couple of writers who kept getting interviewed because I had written a pandemic story. We were asked, \u201cHow did you know?\u201d I wrote \u201cInventory\u201d eight years before COVID was a reality, and I was really just writing this story about what it means when your world\u2019s coming apart and you shouldn\u2019t be around other people but you can\u2019t help being around other people, which is not me predicting anything. It was just understanding how people are. Obviously, pandemics are real, skinless men and deer women and magical water are not real, but it\u2019s not actually that much of a leap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COOPER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What you\u2019re saying about asking a reader to see what you see, I wondered if you could speak a little bit about that. Your characters both resist and buy into social norms. For instance, a lot of your characters are sexually liberated or unapologetic in their sexuality. But in \u201cThe Old Women Who Were Skinned,\u201d they were not free from ageism or conventional beauty standards. How much do you think about that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Old Women Who Were Skinned\u201d is a funny example because that one\u2019s a very straightforward adaptation of a really horrifying Italian fairytale called \u201cThe Old Woman Who Was Skinned.\u201d I just made two of them instead of one. The premise of it is exactly the same, about an old woman who wants to have sex. I wanted to try my hand at adapting it, but it\u2019s a fairly straightforward adaptation. I\u2019m more updating it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, generally speaking, I write, as you say, sexually liberated characters. I\u2019m not interested in homophobia as a plot point, or prudishness as a plot point\u2014that\u2019s just not interesting to me. Some writers who write about queer people, that is interesting to them, so it exists in the text. I\u2019d rather characters be going through other stuff. Once the book had come out, this really sweet person asked me a similar question and I was giving my answer and they said, \u201cYeah, sometimes you\u2019re gay and a ghost appears.\u201d Yeah! Sometimes you\u2019re gay and a ghost appears. They don\u2019t have to be related to each other. We don\u2019t interrogate a straight character and assume it\u2019s related to them seeing ghosts, so why would we assume this for a gay character? I want it to be coincidental. I want it to just be the reality, and I don\u2019t want judgement to come into it because it truly is not interesting to me. Writing the memoir, I had to think a lot about homophobia in the world and my own pain. But for fiction, it feels like a baseline question\u2014not that it\u2019s not real or important, but it\u2019s just not the thing I want to be exploring in my own art. I\u2019m more curious about power and desire than the politics of sex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SINGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graphic novels are very different from literary prose, so how did you adjust your normal writing style while working on The<\/em> Low, Low Woods<\/em>? And what did you enjoy about working in a different medium?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is<\/em> really different. When DC asked me to write it, I\u2019d never written a comic. The cool thing about writing and also having success is people will reach out to you and be like, do you want to try this? They said, \u201cWe\u2019ll walk you through it, we\u2019ll give you an artist, we\u2019ll teach you how these scripts are written.\u201d The script is a hybrid. It\u2019s kind of prose-y, kind of screenplay-y. You basically describe the panels to the artist\u2014panel one, one-third of the page, upper left, these characters. You\u2019re describing it like you would a screenplay, but in panels. But this form allows things that would be harder in a screenplay. For example, narrations. You can, of course, have voice-over in a film, but here it\u2019s hard to pull it off. I\u2019m actually working on proper screenplays right now, and having my narrative voice taken away from me is very specifically a weird thing because I\u2019m not able to get into that comfortable first person voice I know so well.  It was a learning curve. I had to learn really basic stuff that might seem obvious. For example, one time in the book where the two friends are on a bike and they\u2019re just chatting and chatting and chatting for multiple panels, the editor said, \u201cOkay, so, totally you can have this, but you have to say in the description how these panels differ because you can\u2019t just have nine panels where they\u2019re on a bike just with different backgrounds and they\u2019re talking. That\u2019s boring. Think of the lens of a camera. Are we close to their faces? Are we far away? Are we above them? Are we behind some trees, which implies someone is watching them? Where is the movement of the eye, of the camera, of the image?\u201d Another thing they had to tell me was if you want a surprise, like a monster jumping out or something, then you have to put it on the odd pages because your eye always shoots to the right. You want to turn the page and then there\u2019s a thing that\u2019s startling. I never in a million years would have guessed that, but it makes total sense\u2014it\u2019s a visual medium. Once I began thinking about it in that way, it became easier to think about how panels are laid out and what it means to have one big page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Describing characters and then getting pictures of them back is the craziest thing in the entire world. The artist, Dani, who is amazing, would send me character drawings of their outfits and their general vibe. And I was like, yeah, that\u2019s the character I wrote. Describing the town or location, the art was what I was imagining, which, as a person who could not draw to save her life, is truly magical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SINGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You said you don\u2019t write a lot of place-based things, but In the Dream House<\/em> and The Low, Low Woods<\/em> feel very place-based. You also establish the idea that place is inherently linked with abuse. Place and setting play a very active role in heightening the narrative tension. What are some authors or books that climatized you to the importance of place in a story, and how much can place be a character of its own?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Place can absolutely be a character. Technically \u201cInventory\u201d is set in a bunch of places because she\u2019s moving across the country. So it\u2019s an American story. \u201cThe Resident\u201d is set in Pennsylvania, though I deliberately anonymize it\u2014I said the P mountains because it\u2019s the Pocono Mountains, but I wanted it to be divorced. It\u2019s funny because the initial title for In the Dream House<\/em> was House in Indiana<\/em>. And people started mentioning it in my bio. Or when I would do events, everyone was like, oh, are you from Indiana? I\u2019m from Indiana. Do you have thoughts on Indiana? What\u2019re your thoughts about Indiana? I don\u2019t want to talk about Indiana, stop. Stop it. Just stop asking me. People can get very fixated on location in this way that can be distracting.  I love getting to write Pennsylvania gothic fiction because Centralia loomed large in my imagination as a young person from Pennsylvania. The cool kids would go and photograph Centralia. I didn\u2019t go because I was not a cool kid. I was too afraid to skip school. The phenomenon of Centralia is international. All over China, whole cities, environmental disaster zones, have been evacuated because of underground fires in coal mines. This exact thing has happened all over. Centralia, for some reason, is the well-known one, at least in the US. So even though it\u2019s set in Pennsylvania and uses some Pennsylvania details, it\u2019s also a story about what it means to be in an environmental disaster space where forces at work in the government and the corporations are completely out of your control, and your safety and your health is forfeit for all kinds of reasons like class and race and gender and sexuality. The very land you live on, the space you exist in, is forfeit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So for me it doesn\u2019t need to be specific. I\u2019ve lived in a lot of places\u2014Pennsylvania, DC, California, the Midwest, all over the place\u2014and maybe that\u2019s part of it. \u201cEight Bites\u201d is set in Provincetown in the winter, but I don\u2019t name it on purpose. A tourist location, a beach town, in the dead of winter emptied out for the season is such a creepy, weird thing. I was there for a few days and it was so eerie, which I basically described, but it wasn\u2019t important that people knew it was Provincetown. That\u2019s actually less interesting. I don\u2019t want people to be distracted or territorial about a space when it\u2019s not the point or it\u2019s not that interesting. Setting is important, but setting and place are not the same thing. Setting should be vivid. Setting is informed by psychology, by trauma. Setting is informed by point of view. It\u2019s more important to know what the space is and what it means as opposed to literally where it is. We could walk into the exact same place, but if I had a really awful event happen there and you have zero context for it, you would be like, this is just a random place, and I would be hysterically sobbing\u2014oh God, I can\u2019t be here. Settings have meaning because we give them meaning. That\u2019s what a ghost is. It\u2019s this intersection of past and present in a location, in a space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MORRILL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have you always gravitated toward horror, or is that something you came to later?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I write in a lot of different genres, but horror feels like the one that\u2019s most consistent, the most interesting, that I return to over and over. It\u2019s funny, I was a huge scaredy cat as a kid. Totally terrified. I read so many books I should not have read, and then I would be up all night, hysterical, beside myself, with nightmares. My mother would treat my books like pornography\u2014 Goosebumps<\/em>\u2014she would be like, \u201cWhat is that?\u201d \u201cMy friend let me borrow it!\u201d \u201cNo! I\u2019m taking this away!\u201d And I would get more of them. Why on Earth would a terribly frightened, deeply anxious child return to these anxiety-inducing texts over and over? I think it\u2019s the same reason we get on a rollercoaster, which is a way of having an emotional experience in a safe and controlled environment. When you read a novel, nothing\u2019s happening, you\u2019re just reading a book. You\u2019re not actually in danger of any kind. People really overstate danger\u2014it\u2019s just a book, you can close it if you have to. It\u2019s this way of having an experience or an encounter with yourself or something else that can feel devastating and happy and exciting and terrifying and all these different things, but you have control over it. I find horror very comforting. I watch so many horror movies. When I was writing the memoir, I was alone in the woods doing this residency, and I watched endless horror every night because it was so relaxing. It was all I wanted to do. It\u2019s a genre that can be really subversive and offers ways to think about yourself and your own mind. I\u2019ve also written sci-fi. I\u2019ve written all kinds of stuff. I don\u2019t feel hemmed in by genre. But horror feels closest to what I\u2019m doing. It makes the most sense to me, feels the most consistently true. It\u2019s the genre I read the most. People have lots of strong feelings about horror. It\u2019s controversial. But it\u2019s also a genre that offers really good insights into ourselves and other people because it\u2019s a fearless genre that has the capacity for such excess and energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did an event with Gretchen Felker-Martin recently, in the last couple years, and we talked about how we both get asked, \u201cThe world is so awful, why would you write more awful things?\u201d That\u2019s assuming the whole point of the book is to just make other people experience awful things, as if we were complete sadists, which is not true. All the horror writers I know are very nice, well-adjusted people, which is funny. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019re aware of this meme about how Hayao Miyazaki, who writes gorgeous, life-affirming films, is this grouchy, cynical misanthrope. And then Junji Ito\u2014gruesome, gruesome horror manga author who writes truly mind-bending, can\u2019t-get-it-out-of-your-head stuff\u2014is the most cheerful man alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COOPER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems like there\u2019s a sense of playfulness or joyfulness in the writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, I think so. It makes me feel like I\u2019m in my element. And it\u2019s funny because again, as a kid I was so afraid. My mom used to tell a story about how, when I was probably five, she left me with my father to go run some errands. When she came home, my father was asleep in his chair and I was watching Poltergeist<\/em>, the original. For years, I was plagued by nightmares and images, which I later learned were from Poltergeist<\/em>, but I was so young I didn\u2019t remember where the images came from. In my twenties, I was like, oh, this is actually very healing to know this is where this all came from\u2014they weren\u2019t organically from my brain. It\u2019s funny how that person grew up being so interested in these edges and these spaces, but it also makes sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SINGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read your short story collection after reading you memoir and found a lot of similarities between scenes and characters. I guess it\u2019s safe to say that your identity plays a significant role in your work and that your fiction is autofiction a lot of the time. Where do you find yourself on the autofiction scale, and how do you feel that informs your writing and revision process?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have asked friends to explain autofiction to me so many times. I do have a story, \u201cThe Tour.\u201d It\u2019s going to be published in my new book, but it was published in a magazine two falls ago. It\u2019s fiction. The premise is that an author publishes a memoir about a bad relationship; then, when she\u2019s touring the story, there\u2019s this celestial event that disrupts spacetime, and she becomes a different person who can slip into different timelines. It\u2019s her own life, but it\u2019s different realities that normally you would have no access to. When I read it to a friend of mine he was like, \u201cOh, you\u2019re into autofiction.\u201d And I was like, \u201cWhat does that mean?\u201d And he said, \u201cWell, the story is obviously designed to create parallels between you and the protagonist. She\u2019s not called Carmen, but she\u2019s on tour.\u201d It\u2019s meant to muddle how close this character is to me. It\u2019s meant to be ambiguous, which is funny because there\u2019s this part of the story where she goes off on this rant at a literary event: \u201cI hate doing tours, I hate reading to people, I hate all these things,\u201d and everyone\u2019s always like, do you really feel that way? No, I actually don\u2019t. That\u2019s a moment where the character, not me, is speaking for herself, even though I\u2019ve created this deliberately muddled thing. It\u2019s a story that\u2019s supposed to hold all my feelings about what it felt like to tour the memoir, which was really intense and hard. It\u2019s sort of a sequel to the memoir, but it\u2019s a story with mostly fictional gestures, while also implicating me, the writer, as the character of the story. In that way, the story is autofiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What autofiction is and what it means I could not tell you. I don\u2019t fully understand it myself. I write autobiographical material in my stories, but all writers do that and have forever. In the last few years there have been all of these high-profile\u2014I don\u2019t even want to call them scales because scales give them too much energy\u2014discourses? God forbid\u2014about what it means to write stories that either include material about you as the author or other people you know. These discourses have gone deeply off the rails in a way that disturbs and upsets me because we\u2019ve always written this way. We\u2019ve always, always, always integrated ourselves and other people into our fiction. And people talk about it like it\u2019s this crazy weird thing. How dare you include your mother or your friend or your ex in your short story. Literally, that\u2019s just how we do it. It\u2019s always been that way. If you\u2019re doing your job correctly, most people won\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I put out \u201cThe Resident,\u201d they\u2019re like, who are the people she\u2019s talking about? What residency is she talking about? The only thing that I pulled from real life is that I did go to girl scout camp, I did have a fellow troop member sleepwalk into the woods in the middle of the night, and we woke up because she was screaming and the leaders had to go find her. That is all that\u2019s in there from my life. \u201cThe Resident\u201d is invented. None of the characters are based on anybody I know. In fact, I wrote it before I had gone to a residency. There\u2019s way more from my life in the Law and Order<\/em> story and that\u2019s a way weirder story. It\u2019s way more divorced from reality. So unless you know me or I tell you, you just don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By design, these texts are a container that can hold our experiences or my experiences, they can hold stories I\u2019ve heard in my life, they can hold what-if scenarios. In my new book that I\u2019m working on, the character has this incredibly humiliating, embarrassing thing happen to her, and at the very end, she punches the face of the person who did this to her, which I did not do. It\u2019s literally me, word for word what happened, and I imagined a different outcome where, instead of being humiliated and running away, this person takes control in a very violent and direct way. It can be an experience that\u2019s important to you but happened to somebody else. It can be something that you heard once. That\u2019s the thing about fiction, it has this capacity. And if you\u2019re doing your job correctly, if you\u2019re writing with the same energy across the board, it\u2019s going to be hard for a reader to tell unless they know you. But using autobiographical material doesn\u2019t make it autofiction, that\u2019s just fiction. It\u2019s how fiction gets written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Years ago, there was controversy over \u201cCat Person\u201d\u2014not the story itself, but the essay written afterward, and that discourse made me completely insane. I was so frustrated by how people were like, how dare she write a story about a person she knows. We always have done this, this is what we do all the time, and to act like this is a crazy weird thing\u2014the weird thing is, that story went viral. Nothing else happening here is weird, it\u2019s all very normal. I remember saying at an event that I\u2019m actually worried about a generation of young writers who are hearing this story and thinking they\u2019re not allowed to write about stuff they\u2019ve heard about or people they\u2019ve met. That actually worries me way worse than anything else relating to that story.  I think that autofiction is a very specific thing; it\u2019s trying deliberately to blur the line between this question of the author and the subject\u2014because normally you cannot assume the \u201cI\u201d in a piece is the author. You can never make that assumption. The author can be whoever. \u201cWho Is the Bad Art Friend\u201d was another lit-world controversy that bubbled up over COVID about who was writing about whom. Do you guys know what I\u2019m talking about? Don\u2019t look it up, just don\u2019t bother, it\u2019s so stressful, it\u2019ll make your eyes bleed. No one\u2019s nice in this story. Everyone\u2019s mean. It\u2019s a weird social energy, but also, we are allowed to write about whatever it is. It might cause problems for us, it might create a personal conflict, it might be done incorrectly, but you do have space, and I want to always encourage, in my capacity as a teacher or a mentor, room\u2014there\u2019s infinite space for you as a writer. I don\u2019t like when people feel shut down in these ways. It feels unhelpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s sort of the opposite of \u201cyou can\u2019t write about people who aren\u2019t like you,\u201d which is another message that gets overstated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s related. You can write about whatever you want. You can do it badly. You can fuck it up, and then you\u2019ve written something that\u2019s racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever, and that\u2019s a problem you\u2019ve got to deal with, and there are ways to avoid that. But to suggest that we are only allowed to write about people who look like us, only using our own personal experiences, or stuff that is completely invented\u2014it\u2019s counterintuitive. That\u2019s just not how anyone has ever done this for all of time, and it\u2019s really weird that in the last five years we\u2019ve somehow reimagined this weird moral code around fiction. I worry that it creates this space for writers where they can\u2019t be audacious. I\u2019m a human vacuum. When I\u2019m in the world, I\u2019m plucking little details from everywhere. That\u2019s what I do, and it\u2019s the only way I know how to do it. I don\u2019t know how anyone else does anything different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SINGH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m so glad you said we always have autobiographical things in fiction because a poet friend said, \u201cI could never write fiction, that\u2019s all made up.\u201d I was like, what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, I hate that. Nobody invents every single thing that happens in their brain. That\u2019s just not how the brain works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COOPER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve received advice as students about sex functioning in a literary way\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, no. I dread to know what you\u2019ve been learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COOPER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know that it needs a literary meaning. What are your thoughts on that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MACHADO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m concerned, as a teacher, about how people talk about sex in fiction, in writing, in art in general. There\u2019s not enough sex in any art being made right now. Our media landscape is so prudish, especially in the US. It\u2019s actually maddening. American culture is so historically prudish the way we talk about sex in general, but also how it functions in art. It has become very dramatic in the last couple of years. The thing that concerns me is the question, \u201cIs it necessary? If it\u2019s not necessary for the plot then why would you put it in there?\u201d Because we\u2019re human beings, most people enjoy sex, sex can be an interesting experience, it can be a wonderful experience, it can be a terrifying and terrible experience, it\u2019s part of the fullness of the human condition. Why would you not? It\u2019d be like saying, do you need to put a meal scene in there? Why are they eating? Take it out if we don\u2019t need it. Sometimes you just want somebody to eat a plate of spaghetti, and it\u2019s okay for them to eat the plate of spaghetti. And to think that there\u2019s something distinct between these is so silly. They\u2019re just different pleasures of the body and of the experience of being alive and being a person. You can say, I don\u2019t want to write that, or I don\u2019t want to read that, or I don\u2019t want to do that, and that\u2019s fine. But to talk about it as if it\u2019s some plague that has to be eradicated or we can put these conditions on\u2014like, if it\u2019s necessary to the plot then fine, but if it\u2019s not then take it out\u2014is just the most\u2014 why are texts only allowed to have necessary<\/em> content? It\u2019s not a fucking tweet, it\u2019s a piece of art, it\u2019s a book, it\u2019s a story, it\u2019s a poem, it\u2019s meant to prick a human consciousness, it\u2019s meant to alter the way that we see things, it\u2019s meant to connect us to time and space, to a human being. The cold, hard utility, the necessity for plot, it doesn\u2019t mean anything. That\u2019s the most irrelevant question I\u2019ve ever heard in my life. I see it more and more now as a teacher in conversations and discourses. Why? I had to get off Twitter. It just stresses me out. I\u2019m sure part of it has to do with COVID and that people\u2019s relationships with their bodies and with other people and dating got really fucked up because of this weird, wild thing that happened to all of us that got to everybody\u2019s mental health and everyone\u2019s ability to be in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perverts make the best art. I think that, I genuinely do. People will always come for the most interesting stuff first, and that\u2019s what they\u2019re doing. People get really fixated on moralistic questions around sex. You\u2019re no different than the homophobes who want to ban books in Florida, you\u2019re just coming from a different political angle. But this articulation of a text being tainted in some irrevocable way because it has a sex scene that you don\u2019t like or a sex scene whose moral intentions are ambiguous\u2014I\u2019m watching this conversation unfold in a way that makes me feel removed. Some of my favorite books are books where sex is the central focus. I love Nicholson Baker. He writes with such a joy and interest in sex and bodies and people\u2019s experiences with pleasure, it\u2019s gorgeous\u2014Vox<\/em> and The Fermata <\/em>and House of Holes<\/em>. He\u2019s like, yes, this is a perfectly valid subject for a piece of art, the same way that any other thing would be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People seek to restrict either explicitly through exterior forces or implicitly in terms of moralistic scolding, what belongs in fiction or doesn\u2019t. Sex is a good way to make plot happen because it can be messy and interesting and revolutionary, and you can have epiphanies, you can destroy your life. I had a teacher once say to me, give your characters a roll in the hay, they worked hard, they deserve it. I love the idea of letting characters be human beings.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE WEIRD AND THE WONDERFUL\u00a0are more than welcome in the works of Carmen Maria Machado. Her prose explores the messy, and often grave, corners of the human experience all while playing with the typical conventions of literature. Machado reinvents our relationship with narrative by speaking to the reader directly: inserting imagined research to introduce a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41002,"featured_media":36553,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36547"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37972,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36547\/revisions\/37972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}