The Virtues
of Leather Pants and the Big Sloppy Mess:
Ryan Sloan and Sera Gamble Talk with Author Aimee Bender
Aimee
Bender is late for her trip to Barbados. All that stands in her way
are two writers seven years her junior, cornering her with questions
in a West Hollywood café. Sure, we've scheduled the interview,
and in truth, it's really just a passport renewal she's late for.
But the conversation just keeps flowing, and it's so rangy and playful
I don't have the heart to mention that she's well past her self-imposed
time limit.
Sera first
read Ms. Bender's debut collection of stories The
Girl with the Flammable Skirt
two years ago and felt she had been given permission to write
modern fairy tales. I picked up her new novel, An
Invisible Sign of My Own, shortly thereafter and I admit here
to equal parts admiration and envy: Aimee Bender is ridiculously gifted.
She writes in clean, deep lines, with a gift for the perfect, just-so
phrase. In her Washington Post review, author and professor
Carolyn See goes so far as to say "what Aimee Bender has done
[in Sign] is to reinvent the language and tweak 'reality,'
so that everything old in that elementary, mathematical, philosophical
equation looks new and radiant again."
Below is a
sample passage of Bender's much-praised prose. In Invisible Sign,
Mona Gray is a math teacher sorting out life in Everytown USA. Mona's
saddled with the compulsive need to knock on wood, not just occasionally
for luck but perpetually, to mitigate panic and rage. Sensing the
significance of numbers all around her, she takes a marathon runner's
'50' placard as a premonition of her father's impending death:
| "
... panic bloomed in my stomach again, an ecstatic flower. I got
a warning. No one gets a warning. I wanted to marry wood. I wanted
to chew down some two-by-fours, crawl inside a tree, slide elm
into my aorta so that every beat of every second was a grand waltz
with luck." |
Sera:
So you write more than one short story at once?
Aimee Bender: Yes.
S: How many do you have going at any one time?
A: Five? And some I'll leave for two months. For the novel
I had a similar thing, maybe five scenes, and in general four of those
five scenes ended up getting cut. It was lucky if one was interesting,
but that one would generate another scene. So much got cut. [Writing
the novel] was about making an enormous mess, and then trying to see
a pattern there. And the great joy [laughing] is that there
was a pattern in the mess. It was a relief ...
S: So you never really had a linear process in writing the
novel.
A: I tried that. It was really dull - like, Mona has to go
here next. I had great revelations that
you can just have people buy a cup of coffee
and there can be enough in that tiny moment to be important. Because
I was thinking much larger, that the scene has to be an epiphany.
The pressure was ridiculous.
Ryan: Coffee-meeting mode is the short story writer coming
out, isn't it? At each end you have to have a meaningful close, and
I got that feeling in some of your chapters, the grotesque grand twist.
A: That makes sense. I feel like the short story push is my
more comfortable space, and pulling it out [into a novel] was just
newer. But it's also really addictive! Fun to write a novel, even
though it's awful ...
S: How long did it take to finish Invisible Sign?
A: Three years. By the time Flammable Skirt was published,
I was a year and a half into the novel. So I was committed to it,
but I was very unclear as to how it would all pull together.
S: This is probably the question everyone asks you, but were
you shocked by how much attention your short story book got?
A: That's not the question everyone asks. I was so excited,
but I was overwhelmed. There were just a lot of things I didn't know
about the book business. So I would get all this attention on a certain
thing and I wouldn't know it was that rare, and I would think, 'Oh,
that's so cool that it's getting reviewed in all these places, that's
excellent!' And then I'd learn slowly that
the press I got is hard to come by.
R: You were surprised because you'd published each of those
short stories individually?
A: A bunch of them yeah, in tiny chunks.
R: And critics don't review a story on its own.
A: Well, the journals are so small, generally circulation 500
or 1,000, if you're lucky. You'll get a little response, but I really
wasn't sure that it would be acknowledged as serious fiction. Usually
it's 'realism, realism, realism. You can't write fairy tales.' And
my response to that was, I think people are hungry for this kind of
storytelling.
S: I don't know how that is for people who aren't writers,
but I know that for me, when I read Skirt, I felt like I had
so much ... permission.
A: Oh, that's so good! It makes me happy to hear that. In part,
grad school took me in [a non-realist] direction. I first thought
that once I went I'd have to buckle down and get really serious. So
I would turn in one story to the group that was really more traditional
fiction, and then I would occasionally try out a second story that
was more in the line of fairy tales, and I really expected them to
ditch the fairy tales and embrace the traditional. It was a weird
grouping of people and a magical grouping of people - blessed glory
be, they did the opposite. They'd say, this one's boring, this one's
really good, and it was like a train hit me.
R: And were you disciplined before you entered UC Irvine's
MFA Writing Program?
A: No! Not at all ... And the thing about writing programs,
you can't recommend them all. Some of them seem to suck, it depends,
because some of them are squishing and allow only mainstream writers.
The fact that Irvine was more about finding the individual spark of
each writer ... it was very helpful.
R: How do MFA programs craft a person's individual voice? Actually,
how do you teach that?
A: My approach is to set an atmosphere where people feel like
they have permission and then when you see them going toward themselves
- you can feel when someone is present on the page, and when they're
detached, it's often that they're thinking, 'I am writing a story.'
They get formal and weird; when they're present, they're getting more
like themselves. Which in some cases means going far off from any
genre you or I would ordinarily read.
R: People have commented widely on your use of language - how
do you teach language, and how do you feel about the praise? Do you
feel that it's unique?
A:
I have no idea! Hard for me to judge my own work that way. But it
makes me happy, because I think language builds the novel up, I'm
very interested in it, but 'language' ... . People
will say 'writers love language' and I think they sometimes mean we
all love words like 'ubiquitous.'
I have this real split, where words can be playful, versus a more
academic bent. You want to feel like every sentence is doing its job.
But here's something weird: you asked how to encourage language in
classes? The sentences that I feel best about usually happen when
I'm not even paying attention to what I'm writing and they just flow
out. And I think, if you get really crafty, you do all your crafting
(not crafty sly but as a craft) I think before the sentence is even
out then I think they become kind of stilted. The more I can get a
class to spew and vent with the stuff and then shape and polish the
better - I try to get them to be a little less thinky with their language
and then we play with the words.
R: How did you come up with the idea of numbers having significance
in all areas of Mona's life?
A: That's part of my messy philosophy - when I tried to plan
the book it wasn't working. Then I wrote one scene with numbers in
it, where Mona sees the 50 on her parents' lawn and thinks her dad's
going to die. It didn't fit with anything before, but I really liked
that scene - it felt like the best scene I'd written, but I was like
'Shit, I don't know what to do with it.' And at that point she was
just a teacher, she was every kind of teacher, and then I thought,
hey, she could be a math teacher. And then things began to group around
her. I realized this theme was central to the book - this was the
book - and that helped so much. After that it started to roll, but
you can imagine because it's such a part of the book that before the
number on the lawn there was this amorphous feeling that was intolerable.
R: Okay, this part of the interview could go in two directions.
One's about the dying and disappearing fathers in both books, and
the other's about knocking on wood.
A: Okay.
S: As in, how's your dad's health and how's the OCD?
A: Dad's fine, yeah - the great luxury of the imagination.
And being obsessive, I did have a little knocking on wood thing there
for a while but it's actually gone. I can relate to Mona, there are
little kernels of reality, a real claustrophobic feeling of mine that
I've mapped over a whole character. It's
a horrible feeling, but it makes for a great character.
R: So you went to UCSD for your undergrad as a theatre major
...
A: And when I got out I applied to theatre MFA writing programs
- got turned down by everyone, which was a blessing in disguise, really.
R: And then you went to Irvine's MFA in Fiction after a few
years.
A: Yeah. Liberal,
weird place in the middle of conservative Orange County.
R: Now that you're not in a program with people demanding work
from you on a weekly basis, what motivates you (besides your publisher)
to get up every morning and write?
A: The truth is, it's extremely grounding to get up and write
every morning. Even though I hate it a lot of the time, and I look
at a blank screen and I have many, many useless days - I like having
this moment in my day that's all about giving a little space to my
imagination. Every day except Sunday. It's really nice and totally
worth it.
S: I feel like there's a resurgence in the short story ...
A: Oh there is. Five years ago when I was hoping to publish,
the word on the scene was 'You can not, ever, publish a book of short
stories,' and that's totally changed - no one knows what the public
wants.
S: How old were you when Flammable Skirt was published?
A: I'm 31 now, so ... 29?
S: So you're my motivation, in a way. I'm 24, my writing partner
is 25, and it's this ridiculous feeling that time's running out. Lahiri
won the Pulitzer at age 27 with her first book of stories.
A: No, this is the great thing about
writers versus, say, rock stars. There's no age thing.
So many people start to write at age 50. There's the general pressure
of life but nothing else.
R: Well there's leather pants. Writers and rock stars should
always compose in leather pants.
A: Thank god for leather. Gets us all through.
S: What's it like to be a working writer, just teaching and
writing fiction?
A: It's good! It's as though a ball starts rolling about writing,
and suddenly you're talking to people all the time about what you
love. I mean, things like this - I love participating in this larger
sphere of people who like to write and like to read. I enjoy finding
writers where there's kinship of thinking.
R: It helps that for the most part people like what you're
writing.
A: It helps when people do, exactly. People definitely don't.
It's a particular taste - if you like my work you really do and if
you don't you're thinking 'What is this?' [Laughs]. 'What the
hell IS this?'
