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Episode 26: "Wild Milk: Stories" by Sabrina Orah Mark, w/ special guest Lara Ehrlich
68 Plays6 months ago
We’re joined today by Lara Ehrlich, a writer, editor, and longtime friend (she and Tom go back 20 years, which seems impossible). Her first story collection, Animal Wife, was published by Red Hen Press back in 2020, and her first novel, Bind Me Tighter Still, will publish in 2025, also from Red Hen. She also hosts a conversation series, Writer Mother Monster, and is the founder and director of Thought Fox Writers Den.
We chat about her work as well as Wild Milk: Stories by Sabrina Orah Mark, published by Dorothy, A Publishing Project. It’s a fantastic collection: feral, fleshly, and truly wild in its imagination and skill. We spend a great deal of the episode just digging into all the things that make these stories work and the many, many things we don’t understand how Mark pulls off so well. One of our favorite conversations so far!
Authors mentioned (another curriculum for you!):
Lydia Davis
Karen Russell
Kelly Link
Katherine Dunn
Ali Smith
Marie Ndiaye
Angela Carter
Elizabeth McCracken
Aimee Bender
Amber Sparks
Amelia Gray
Ramona Ausubel
To hear more from Lara follow her on Instagram (@lara.ehrlich) and Twitter (@TheLaraEhrlich), and follow Thought Fox on Instagram (@thoughtfoxwritersden) and Twitter (@ThoughtFoxDen). And be sure to pre-order Bind Me Tighter Still from your preferred indie bookseller!
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and find us on the socials: @lostinredonda just about everywhere.
Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction: Lost in Redonda Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hey, Lori, how's it going today? I'm great, Tom, and you? Doing well. It is cold in Chicago, but sunny, so I'll take that. We're slowly working our way towards spring. How's Dallas? It's probably like in the 70s, right?
00:00:31
Speaker
No, actually, we're having a little bit of a cold spell, too. I think it's only 60 right now. OK. So we're going to define a cold spell as 60. And it's spring equinox. I can't even say it. It's spring equinox today. So the winter's got to be over soon. Come on.
00:00:49
Speaker
I very much, very much hope so.
Meet the Guest: Laura Ehrlich
00:00:52
Speaker
Today, we have a guest. Very pleased to say that Laura Ehrlich is with us. A quick bio on Laura before we let her talk, I guess. Laura is the author of the novel By Me Tighter Still forthcoming from Red Heading Press in 2025, and Animal Wife, a collection of stories about women's transformations from girls into wives, mothers, and monsters.
00:01:15
Speaker
Animal Life also has what I think was one of the absolute best covers that came out that year. It's fabulous. It won the Red Hand Press's Fiction Award, judged by Anne Hood, and was published back in 2020. She is the founder and director of Thought Fox Writers Den, which builds community and supports writers of all levels with in-person and virtual workshops, coaching, events, and more. And she lives in Connecticut with her husband and daughter. How's it going today, Laura?
00:01:45
Speaker
Hi, Tom. Thank you for the introduction. Things are great and it's nice to meet you too, Lori. We're really happy to have you here today to talk about this wonderful book that you picked for us.
Laura's Novel: A Siren's Journey
00:01:55
Speaker
Yes, I'm really excited to speak with you both about Wild Milk by Sabrina Ora Mark.
00:02:02
Speaker
Well, before we launch into that, let's give you a second to talk up some of your work maybe. So why don't you tell us a little bit about Bind Me Tighter Still. Full disclosure, as Laura and I established before we began, we've known each other for 20 years, which seems impossible, but here we are. And I know you're writing, and I know a little bit about this novel, but I have not read it yet, and I'd be
00:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, I'd be happy. I think we'd both be happy to hear you chat about it for a second. Sure. Yeah, this is good practice for 2025. Find Me Tighter Still is the story of a restless siren, Seto, who in her restlessness decides to become human. So she sacrifices her tail to become human.
00:02:49
Speaker
becomes married, has a daughter, and realizes she's just as dissatisfied on land as she was in the sea. So she leaves with her daughter and opens a kingdom for sirens on a cliffside. And there she runs and performs in a mermaid burlesque. So she performs as a mermaid for an audience. And when her daughter reaches the age of about 15, she starts pushing back against this world that her mother has created
00:03:19
Speaker
essentially to keep her safe and to empower her. And she begins to question whether this world is really as empowering as her mother has led her to believe.
00:03:28
Speaker
So that's the story. It's a really brief story of Seto and Naya. Naya is her daughter. And just a fun fact for research for this book, I went to Wiki Wachi in Florida, which if listeners haven't heard of this place, it is a essentially a theater, an underwater theater in a spring where women have been performing as sirens since the 1940s.
Research Adventures: Wiki Wachi Mermaids
00:03:52
Speaker
And they performed for Elvis and in films and all sorts of places. It was a roadside attraction that since become sort of a theme park. And women still perform there as sirens. And every summer they have a camp where you can go and wear a lycra tail and learn to dance as a mermaid from the legendary sirens, who are the sirens who performed in the 50s, 60s, 70s.
00:04:15
Speaker
sort of the old guard of sirens. And I am not a good swimmer, but I did this because I felt that I needed to understand how it would feel to swim with my legs bound together. And it was very hard, as you would imagine. That's incredible. And I also like the term the old guard of sirens like that. That by itself sounds like it should be like a novel title or the title of a series of novels. That's amazing. Oh, totally.
00:04:42
Speaker
I feel like I might need a life preserver to do this. To swim with your legs bound? I don't know. That seems very hard. It was so hard. But my legendary siren Rita King, who is was in her, I want to say late 60s or early 70s, she had this
00:04:58
Speaker
a flotation device, and she was my instructor. And she told me around the spring on the flotation device as if she was, I don't know, like 20-year-old Olympic swimmer, this woman, with her in a tail. And she just kind of like pulled me around the spring for hours. It was amazing.
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like it'd be very hard to pull off having any sexual allure like a siren should have if I'm like almost drowning, you know, trying to deal with this tail as I'm in the water. Probably not a good look. No, yeah, we did. I did do the photo package for posterity. And they teach you to open your eyes and smile alluringly under the water. And I got my pictures back and I thought I had done a great job of doing this.
00:05:44
Speaker
Oh, the pictures are so embarrassing. I have seen at least one of these pictures and you did a great job. I was very impressed because there's no way in hell you could, and I am a good swimmer, there's no way in hell you could convince me to even attempt any of that. So that's very impressive, Lara. All in the name of book research. Exactly. Yes. And it actually ended up being one of the best things I've ever done. So, you know, I say for book research, but really it was for me.
00:06:14
Speaker
Well, sirens are actually not a terrible jumping off point for discussing wild milk.
Exploring 'Wild Milk': Dream-like Logic
00:06:20
Speaker
Um, so as you said, it's by a Sabrina or a mark. It is a story collection published by Dorothy, a publishing project back in 2018. And, um, yeah, Laura, why don't you tell us a little bit about why you, why we asked guests to suggest a number of books and then Lori and I kind of figure out which one, you know, can we can do.
00:06:41
Speaker
And there's an upcoming one that we may have bit off more than we can chew because the book is just massive, but we'll figure it out. But yeah, why, why wild milk? What, what is it about this book that you wanted to chat about? And then we can kind of dig into it a little bit further.
00:06:55
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. So first of all, I love the prompt of sending five books along and then choosing one collectively to discuss. So I send you all a list of books, primarily by women, because, well, it sort of ties in with my platform for one thing. And I do believe strongly in lifting up women writers. So I do that in my podcast, Writer, Mother, Monster, and just anytime I can, especially women writers of indie books.
00:07:24
Speaker
whose books are not widely read, but maybe could or should be. And this is one of those books, I think, that is so beautiful and strange. And it is by a woman who reminded me in many ways of, if folks know Lydia Davis, or maybe Karen Russell. So some of those sort of better known Kelly Link, really short story, strange fable-like prose.
00:07:52
Speaker
that is in many ways also lyrical and poetic. So just, I guess, short version. This is an absolutely beautiful book of very strange, compelling stories by an interesting and compelling female writer from a small indie press.
00:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, Dorothy, a publishing project, published this one. And yeah, they're one of my favorite small presses. They publish just two books a year. So you know that it's going to be good, pretty much, because they're very picky about their curation and what they publish.
00:08:25
Speaker
One of the things I think about this book just in general is the imagination behind it astounds me. I read these stories and I think, wow, that's really inventive and creative and I'm not quite sure how someone's mind
Crafting Stories: Imagination and Ambiguity
00:08:44
Speaker
works.
00:08:44
Speaker
quite like this. And so that's part of the fun because for my way of thinking at least, which is probably kind of very boring, Germanic, and rational, these stories seem really like out there and unexpected and surprising to me. What's your take, Laura, on kind of if you've got one about how Sabrina or on Mark kind of develops her stories or comes up
00:09:25
Speaker
connections that feel like leaps in rationality and leaps in reality at the same time. It feels like a dream-like book in many ways that follows the logic of dreams where you wake up and you've just gone through a narrative and it made sense as you were embedded within it. Then when you come back up to the surface, it starts to fade and you can't quite recall what it was about.
00:09:36
Speaker
with her ideas for her stories.
00:09:51
Speaker
And I feel like that's the experience of reading these stories is that I would, as I was reading them, I became invested and I began to understand the logic of each of the stories. But if I had to tell you what I think they're about right now, I think I'd be hard pressed to do that, which makes this an interesting book to discuss. Yeah, very much so. I mean, I think I'm also curious, and I mean, this is not a question that we can
00:10:15
Speaker
Any of us can probably answer. But I'm very curious about the construction of the collection itself. There are some very specific through lines across the stories. Laurie, in an email you brought up the repetition of mice, like a mouse keeps appearing throughout. Certain authors, Kafka, pops up more than a couple of times. There are stories, especially towards the end. And maybe it's because it's just how the collection has built up to that point that as you're saying, Laura, I'm starting to
00:10:44
Speaker
understand the flow and what's what she's getting at what she's pointing towards that very much feel at times this feels less like a collection of stories and more of a novel in stories. I don't know that I would make that claim for it as a whole, but there definitely are sequences of stories here that really do kind of are in conversation with each other and more than just a the same writer is writing them manner. And that again, that could simply be a function of the
00:11:13
Speaker
the dream logic at play and the way her prose cascades, one to the next, that it's forcing you to create the connection. She's not giving it to you, which is a very challenging way. I think it's challenging for the reader is very challenging for the writer to successfully pull that off, I think. I totally agree with you. It's something I think a lot about is
00:11:38
Speaker
the line between, and I know I put this in an email, intentional ambiguity and unintentional confusion. And it's something I really focus on in my own work too, is to ensure that the reader feels as though you're taking them on a journey that might be confusing at times or ambiguous, but that that's intentional. That there's a reason for that, whether it's stylistic or character driven or plot driven.
00:12:05
Speaker
whatever the reason behind it, but that you feel that there is intentionality behind it rather than a story that feels sloppy or confusing and you don't have faith that the author, it sort of intends for you to feel that way. So you feel like you're missing something.
Themes in 'Wild Milk': Transformation and Understanding
00:12:21
Speaker
And I definitely with Wild Milk feel the former.
00:12:24
Speaker
in that I feel as though, as you said, the author is giving you or empowering you to make those connections between stories, between sentences even, between themes, and that there is an element of trust there where you can tell that she has mastered the form and that she's leading you on a journey and you just need to kind of give in and let her do it.
00:12:49
Speaker
What you were saying, Laura, made me think about this relationship between understanding and misunderstanding that seems to happen in almost all of these stories, often among family members, but sometimes not. The first story, Wild Milk,
00:13:09
Speaker
which is truly a wild story. Sabrina Orenmark likes to play with words and word puns and kind of use words in unexpected ways. But I feel like there's a certain level
00:13:26
Speaker
of understanding between the narrator of that story, a young woman with a baby who drops her baby off at daycare and the daycare worker. They seem to have a little bit of a
00:13:42
Speaker
a common affinity for the fact that G isn't life kind of weird. But we understand each other even though to the reader, the way that they're speaking and interacting seems very otherworldly and kind of strange.
00:14:01
Speaker
But then there are other stories like Mother at the Dentist, which is also a fantastic story where you feel like there's this disconnect almost throughout most of the story, maybe not so much at the very end of it, but between the mother and the daughter in terms of what the mother's doing and her reliance on the daughter and what she expects from the daughter and just this kind of
00:14:28
Speaker
disconnect. So the the theme of what the characters are understanding about each other, and then what the reader is understanding about the text and about those characters, I think is is a really interesting kind of almost circular relationship. Oh, that's so beautifully said. Yes. Yeah, it made me think as well of you'll have to forgive me, I'm horrible with titles and names, but the one about the maid, it might just be called maid.
00:14:57
Speaker
But it is a woman, I think her name was Lydia or maybe the maid's name is Lydia, but either way, it's a woman who is wondering what is happening with her maid who is suddenly not cleaning anything and not showing up or sleeping all day or what have you and they go out for a walk and a snail falls from the maid's mouth and the maid has been stealing or keeping or ingesting the narrator's collection of snails.
00:15:24
Speaker
It's ridiculous when you try to talk about it, but as you're reading that story, just as you were saying, Lori, the relationship between the characters and the world that they're in makes sense to them, even if there's that strangeness that makes it sort of dreamlike for the reader. And then in all of those stories, there's also an element of transformation, I would say, in the ones, Lori, that you mentioned, and in the one about the maid as well, where you're not quite sure sometimes
00:15:51
Speaker
if a character is morphing into another character or if that other character is an extension of the narrator. And in my favorite story in the collection, Spells, the narrator's sons turn into daughters, but also possibly geese. So it's this amazing, this sort of a slippage of reality within each of the stories that's really interesting.
00:16:16
Speaker
I think slippage is a really great word to use there, much better than what I was going to use, which was blending. And especially the one with the May that you were referring to, they both call each other Lydia, but Lydia is not either one of their names. Mark does this all the time where she pulls in, where she just names characters, but then doesn't actually name them. There's the suggestion of a name without the, and that lack of specificity is so
00:16:44
Speaker
Unmooring that it really enhances that effect, but especially with wild milk and the maid
00:16:51
Speaker
I think that the blending between the primarily female protagonists of the story, when that slippage happens, it's usually with someone like the maid, like the woman at the daycare, who is taking care of a job that would traditionally be assigned to the woman, to the mother, in some respect, like taking care of the house, taking care of the child. And suddenly there's this movement
00:17:18
Speaker
in between the person who is taking over that role and the woman herself. But when it's intergenerational, I think the lines are much more clearly defined, even if it's still very strange and has a dreamlike quality to it, that that slippage among the characters doesn't happen quite the same way.
00:17:38
Speaker
And I wonder if, in some ways, Mark is kind of reflecting on feelings around responsibility, lack thereof, and also, especially with the intergenerational point, what is expected of women, of mothers.
Folkloric Narratives: Mark's Unique Style
00:17:56
Speaker
across all of this. And again, it's really, really freaking hard to talk about when it's very hard to point to like a set passages like, ah, there it is. Cause there is no, there are absolutely gorgeous lines all through here. And I think that some of the power of them comes from how, um, tricky the rest of it is and how the sentences in some way, some ways tumble against each other. But yeah, I don't know. I'm at this point possibly rambling ever so slightly.
00:18:24
Speaker
No, not at all. No. Oh, there's so much to what you said there that's amazing. I love the observation that, first of all, that these are primarily female protagonists and the sort of domesticity, the sphere of domesticity in which many of them are existing and in some ways breaking out of. And I think just the title Wild Milk, right? In the story, the milk sort of has different roles, but primarily
00:18:50
Speaker
It's a story about breast milk and about the woman's milk going wild, and so she's unable to use it to feed her child. So really, the title wild milk could stand in for that battle or that tension between the domesticity and the wildness of these
00:19:07
Speaker
characters and in that story spells where the sons turn into daughters as well that the woman's role there is to pick the lice from people's scalps so she's brushed she's combing lice from her son's hair which when you think about a sort of domestic task that's
00:19:26
Speaker
certainly one of them. And it's sort of enticingly disgusting, as many of her stories are, where they're, they dig into small creatures that could be considered infestations, like we going back to the mouse and how mice sort of come up in this store in the stories often, and lice are an infestation of small creatures in your
00:19:49
Speaker
hair, it's really gross, and oh the snails in the story about the maid. There's a story about seahorses where a woman has a collection of seahorses and they multiply and they come pouring out of something that I can't remember because it was again a very dreamlike scene. So yeah, these sort of infestations of small creatures throughout the book as well are, it's really interesting.
00:20:13
Speaker
There's also the shrinking of people. One of my favorite stories is my brother Gary made a movie and this is what happened. Basically, he's making a movie called My Family. The narrator follows him through the living room and it turns out that other than Gary and herself, the entire family has
00:20:41
Speaker
shrunk to this kind of almost finger size height and they're kind of in a pile on the floor, wrestling around and arguing and yelling with each other and yelling at Gary and the narrator. There's definitely a focus here I think on, I don't know whether it's just on small things or tiny
00:21:10
Speaker
Living creatures or it's more Or maybe also it's a statement upon how characters or how we ourselves in a relations to each other in the world Magnify or diminish things about each other
00:21:26
Speaker
Yeah, because in the story that you're referencing, my brother's titles, again, they get me every time. But the one about the brother, he has sort of reduced his family members to props in his film, right? And interesting, this is a bit of a tangent, but she also plays with time a lot in interesting ways. And these family members have been
00:21:46
Speaker
behind the couch in a heap, I think they say for six years or something, right? And they say, oh, I guess I'll just stay here for another six years. And obviously that's impossible. But again, back to the dreamlike state of these stories. Within the story, you don't question it. You're like, okay, the little tiny family members have been behind the couch on top of each other for six years, sure. But yeah, smallness and how we engage with and build up or reduce each other, I think that's really insightful.
00:22:15
Speaker
And I think there's also, Laurie brought this up in an email. We keep saying in an email, we do do some prep work, but it's not all improv guys. We make it just, we're very good at making it sound improv, but the folkloric quality to a lot of these stories, which I think ties in also to the Mark previous to this published two poetry collections. And I think there are times where these stories get much closer to poetry than prose and then pull back from that.
00:22:45
Speaker
Cliff. I think the folk lore combined with the almost poetic prose style really emphasized the wrong footing of the reader to really incredible effect. By also the shrinking of people, the transformations that we're talking about, those could be right out of
00:23:05
Speaker
of so many, so many folkloric traditions. Well, it's also interesting, really interesting how she uses words and derivations of words and even words to name people. My favorite beginning of any story in this collection is the beginning of the story, everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
00:23:28
Speaker
And it's a 67 year old woman standing on the three of a hopscotch game in a playground and a playground bully comes up to her and says, if you love poems so much, why don't you marry poems? You know, like that stupid stuff that we've all said or had said to us when we were in grade school.
00:23:50
Speaker
And she replies, listen, I did marry poems. We've been married for years. And then she just refers to poems, the husband, like throughout the book and it's or throughout the story. And it's it's really fun, I think, to see a writer with that kind of linguistic dexterity that can just kind of think about think about a word and how a word can be used in a really, a really unexpected way.
00:24:17
Speaker
She also does that in, I think it's called Three Jokes Walk Into a Bar.
Emotional Depth: 'Two Jokes Walk Into a Bar'
00:24:22
Speaker
Oh, that's a fun one, yeah. Two Jokes Walk Into a Bar, and then a third joke joins them. And it's, I mean, in some ways, this is like the most tender story in the entire collection, because one of the jokes, his, I think, brother is about to die. And eventually, eventually, the other two jokes walk away from the bar.
00:24:42
Speaker
and then a rabbi and a priest walk in and they start to hold hands. And then someone makes a joke and everyone laughs. The joke who is waiting to hear about the death of a family member, his phone rings and he refuses to answer it because he knows that once he does, he won't laugh for a long time.
00:24:59
Speaker
But to know how to take the premise of a rabbi and a priest walk into a bar and then turn it into two jokes, walk into a bar, but then then pull back in the rabbi and the priest and just and the thing is she does that in functionally three pages. And these are not this is not a oversized book like this. This is a very, very tight three pages that she's accomplishing this in.
00:25:22
Speaker
It's a very impressive and it's, it's one of the, going back to your point at the beginning, Laura about, I mean, in some ways the control, like she, she's always in command and that is what I think gives her the permission to do what she does, but also gives the reader the permission to feel comfortable and to let it take you into all the very odd directions it's going to take you.
00:25:47
Speaker
Yes, yes, and I was so impressed just to build off of that with her confidence because not only was she in command the whole time and you felt that she has the authority to carry you.
00:25:58
Speaker
through this sort of waterfall and then you're in the rapids and then you're in a calm pond and then you're somewhere else. So she's sort of taking you through the journey of this book, but you feel that she has utmost confidence that she can let a story stand on its own, where I feel that a newer writer or somebody with a little less confidence might feel that they would need to explain a little more or tie things up in a bow at the end, that whole
00:26:27
Speaker
way we were taught in grade school that you know you need to bring everything to an end and complete all you know dot the I or yeah dot the I's across the T's and she has the confidence to leave those T's uncrossed and those I's undotted and kind of let you take from the story what you will and I find in my own work that I have that sort of tendency toward wanting to tie things up and it's very hard I think to let things stand
00:26:57
Speaker
and to trust your reader to make those connections. And not all readers will get it. I took a look at her Goodreads ratings for this book, and it's so polarizing. And I always find that really interesting that there's a good number of people who say, I just don't get these. What is she talking about? One star. And then so many more people, I will say, who say, this book is so mysterious and compelling and poetic, and it's still haunting me, five stars.
00:27:26
Speaker
So I think also she's sort of, this book is not for everybody. And if someone doesn't get it, that's fine. But I think the people who really it's going to resonate with are those who are comfortable with being uncomfortable.
00:27:38
Speaker
And I wonder, and perhaps it's a failing on my own part, not really understanding the distinction, but the book is called Stories, Wild Milk Stories. You know, are these stories or Tom Ray's, you know, are some of them poems? Are they flash fiction? I mean, the longest story in this collection is nine pages, but more of the stories are half that size. I mean, they are so
00:28:07
Speaker
They are so short and they really do oftentimes leave you kind of at a point where you haven't stopped scratching your head and then it's over and you're still scratching your head because you're like, well, I have an interpretation of what was going on here, but really what was going on?
00:28:29
Speaker
Well, and there's also such different emotional effects of the stories. I mean, some of them do feel, as much as she is letting it stand on its own, a number of them do feel like it's a closed loop, like this is the end of the story, and that's okay, and you're still pondering it. And others, because of the emotion that she's playing with, feels like there's something more that's going to come out
00:28:53
Speaker
after. After you turn the page, now that it's done, it's still going in a way that others don't. I feel like the taxman, which might be my favorite in the collection, has such a heart and just amazing transformational element to it that like
00:29:11
Speaker
God, that one I almost want to have keep going in a way that the others I'm much more comfortable with, like, okay, that one is that one is closed off. We can move on. In some ways, I have no idea what happened. In other ways, I know exactly what happened. But yeah, it's trying to figure out a taxonomy for these is really, I agree, Laurie, it's really difficult if we wanted to get into the weeds of taxonomic understandings of writing.
Prose vs Poetry: Reader Expectations
00:29:41
Speaker
But I think she'd be totally opposed to that. I don't know whether there was a negotiation that happened about calling these stories, but she's so fluid with the way that she writes and her characterizations and the way words become people and taxmen come for hearts and all these different things that
00:30:10
Speaker
I think that she's almost challenging us to define her or define these stories because I think she prefers that they just remain, well, for lack of a better term, wild. This is just kind of what came out of her head.
00:30:31
Speaker
Um, she's putting it on paper and there's not, there's, there's no taxonomy or, or recipe that she's following that I can tell. Um, it's just, they, they feel very feral. Oh, that's really good. Feral is a really good way of putting that. Yes. Yeah. And I think, um, Tom, your question about whether it's poetry or prose, I've been thinking about that ever since you posted over email.
00:31:01
Speaker
before we hopped on here, and I don't have an answer either, but I do think generally, and I don't want to generalize too much, but I do think generally people are more comfortable with ambiguity in poetry and with being swept up in the lyricism and the mood and the words and language
00:31:25
Speaker
then they tend to be in fiction. And I know this again, this is such a generalization, but I love that she leans into that, into that ambiguity and the love of language and wordplay and characters transforming and becoming words and vice versa in these, whether they're stories or poems in these pieces.
00:31:48
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree with you, Laura, that I think there's a reader expectation, right? That you're not going to, for the most part, I mean, maybe if you're reading Whitman or something, but to be able to, in poetry, that
00:32:03
Speaker
every word is going to literally mean and represent what the dictionary definition would be. You know what I mean? We kind of expect a lot of license with our poets and not as much with our prose writers. So, yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah. In prose, we tend to talk about characters and plot.
00:32:28
Speaker
intentions and stakes and style comes sort of at the end, usually for people. So I just I loved reading these in part because the language is so front and center, which is not to say there are not characters and there isn't plot, but it's much more it's more feral, to use your great word, Laurie. This is feral prose, or maybe
00:32:52
Speaker
pros like poetry. I'm not sure. Whatever it is, it's, it's really interesting and again, really hard to talk about. So I'm impressed with us so far. I think it would actually be fascinating to get a visual representation of her process would be really interesting. Like, even if it's just, you know, a screen to progressions of like a first draft to edits to another attempt to, what does that actually look like? How much is there a last stripping down that's taking place? Is it actually like a,
00:33:22
Speaker
a effort to embellish, to make it clearer how much cutting out one sentence from later in the story and then dropping it back in order to really enhance the effect. That's just me being curious, I guess, of what she's doing, what she's playing with.
00:33:40
Speaker
how she is accomplishing this and frankly I'm just curious how how her mind works and in some respects I feel one of the one of the great effects of these stories is it feels like the
00:33:55
Speaker
very loose connections that exist in a person's brain, in a person's mind, as they see the world, as they understand it, as things that occurred to them in the past suddenly have an effect, things they've never really even thought about, how they choose to present or not present themselves to the world. Our first season was
00:34:19
Speaker
reading all of Javier Marias on this podcast. And what I love about his writing is how he reconstructs the moment in a person's mind between one sentence and the next. And in some ways, that's kind of the feeling. I mean, this is a radically different style from that. But
00:34:40
Speaker
That's kind of what I was feeling like in some of these stories is that this is also recreating or representing a person's personality, the way they look at the world, the way they ingest it. There's a lot of ingesting in this collection, which is in its own way interesting. I feel like a lot of writers don't like to deal with the consumption of things in that way, because it's weird. It feels weird, but yeah.
Rhythm and Style: Challenges in Editing
00:35:08
Speaker
Well, related to consumption and after I've just made the argument that these stories are feral, there is a meter or a tempo, I think, to a great number of these stories and probably my favorite story of the collection, Mother at the Dentist. There's a repetition here that's just lovely. This woman's mother spends a lot of time at the dentist.
00:35:35
Speaker
and calls her from the dentist. And the mother says, can you believe I am here? She asks again, and I can. There are so many teeth. And this is repeated in this very short story at least five times. And the story isn't even five pages long.
00:35:55
Speaker
That feels a little bit poetic to me, or at least kind of trying to capture a rhythm of language and words. As an editor, I'm used to reading manuscripts and offering developmental edits and feedback and critique, etc.
00:36:14
Speaker
But this is the type of story that is my nightmare to edit for just the reasons that you both have articulated because it is so much, or it reads so much as if it were Mark's sort of internal, like an internal sort of monologue or an identity or a way of being. I don't even really know how to describe what
00:36:40
Speaker
I don't know what I would do if someone gave me a story like this and said, give me some feedback because it is so confident and confidently strange that I feel that anything that I would say that is a criticism
00:36:54
Speaker
or a suggestion would miss the point. I don't even know what I'm trying to say here exactly. Hopefully you understand what I'm saying. No, I mean, you're absolutely getting across I think a lot of what these stories feel like at times where like you're trying to in the role of an editor
00:37:11
Speaker
In some respects, you're kind of trying to parse it ever so slightly, right? And these are not exactly stories that are designed to be parsed. You could. You could spend a lot of time doing it. You could rip into questions of identity. What are some of the antecedents? Some of these feel like Yiddish folktales in a way, in really strong ways. Some of them very overtly that. Others
00:37:36
Speaker
much more subtly. So you could get into that. But at the same time, I will say this, if someone handed you, if Mark handed you one of these stories and asked you for editorial feedback, I don't know. I think she knows that it's a done story. I don't think she's really looking for feedback at that point, maybe earlier in the process. But even then, I don't know.
00:37:57
Speaker
I don't know what you do with that. Totally agree with the conundrum that that is. It just reminds me in an interesting way of I took a folk song as social history class in college and we listened to folk singers who were professional folk singers like the Clancy brothers or some of these others.
00:38:17
Speaker
But then we also listened to folk singers who were just sort of seniors in their community who have memorized the stories that have come down through the generations and their voices are not polished or professional. But those songs were sometimes more powerful because they were so raw and
00:38:35
Speaker
carried a tradition of generations before them and this is not to say that these stories are raw but it's sort of the same feeling of how do you critique something that is in the form in which it's meant to be and the form is just is integral to the the content itself so the the dreamlike quality of these stories is so tied to the way that they're told and the language and the characters and all of the
00:39:04
Speaker
craft elements that it's impossible to kind of pull them all apart and say well you could develop a character in this way and then you need a plot point here or this sentence isn't really doing as much work as it could. I know I'm sort of rambling here and these don't need feedback or criticism obviously but I guess it's just to say I don't even know how say a book critic would approach this book.
00:39:31
Speaker
you know, or a reviewer, because what do you do with this? It's just it is its own thing. And it sort of defies. It defies categorization to me. Yeah, I think that that's a good point. It's like the the content dictates the form and the form of these really short snapshots or look into some kind of bizarre world. And when you were talking, I was
00:40:01
Speaker
thinking about maybe the content absolutely requires that these be very short like they are. And it reminds me of Saturday Night Live skits where there are oftentimes ones where the first two and a half minutes is really funny because you're like, I can't believe they're going there. I can't believe they did that. Look at that impersonation. And then it just gets bogged down and you can't
00:40:30
Speaker
I think for many, if not all of these, if they went on for, if any of these stories went on for 30 pages, I think that the, well, first of all, the surprise factor would wear off, right? But then also just the premise or the, it just wouldn't work, I don't think. I think it would just, they've got to be really short to be effective.
00:40:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's likely the case. I mean, I think also we use the word feral to describe it, which I think I need to figure out a way to get into the episode title.
Emotional Resonance and Relationships
00:41:04
Speaker
But I mean, I think as much as you can say this about a collection of stories, there is in some ways an attempt to get past the language in these stories that it's really trying to
00:41:16
Speaker
dig into something else and affect a feeling more so than I think a lot of other stories even think about. You would even consider as an aspect of what they're doing versus presenting a narrative. Even some incredibly experimental stuff wouldn't be so bold as to say it's trying to get past language. I have absolutely no idea what Mark's philosophy or approach or what she would claim her overall project is or if there is one.
00:41:46
Speaker
I feel relatively comfortable having read them to say like there is something, some aspect of that movement beyond language that's running through quite a bit of this. Yeah. And isn't that what dreams are really there? They get beyond language, beyond reason, beyond.
00:42:02
Speaker
plot, and it is really a world dictated by mood and emotion. So yeah, I see what you're saying. And also these kind of relationships that we have with each other, with our family members, with people in our community. I think this whole kind of concept that we
00:42:23
Speaker
we so often miss the mark in interpreting each other and and someone can say something to us and we take it one way and it's like oh no that's you know that's not what i meant at all and she's almost
00:42:41
Speaker
She's almost exaggerating that. What is the craziest thing and seemingly almost nonsensical thing that I could say to this other character in this story, but that there's still some kind of understanding that we have on the very base level about
00:43:03
Speaker
our relationship to each other or who i am or who they are it's pretty fascinating really i just opened to a story called sister which i think speaks to exactly that point and even the first sentence what is the meaning of sister is i am unable to say
00:43:21
Speaker
Actually, I should read that again, what the meaning of sister is, I am unable to say so even the construction of that sentence sort of tripped me up and made me reread it, which I think again is intentional to make you sort of wonder what the meaning of sister is and what's the meaning of the sentence. And then it's the sister and mother who invite the narrator out.
00:43:40
Speaker
for lunch and the sister is always disparaging the narrator in some ways, whether it's intentional or unintentional. Like she wears designer sweaters while the narrator, we assume, does not. And I love, I remember,
00:43:54
Speaker
Whereas at the very end, I think this goes along with what you're saying. If my skin, like the sycamore, flaked off in large patches, could there ever be a sister underneath? Maybe not a whole perfect sister, but a little piece of sister, such as just a small terrified piece of sister bursting out of me. Like the sense of, again, slippage between characters and between the narrator and other family members and other characters in the stories and other creatures if we want to bring the mouse back into it. So fascinating.
00:44:24
Speaker
and lots of women turning into trees and trees turning into women throughout the stories.
Sentence Crafting: Powerful Messages
00:44:30
Speaker
But also on the note of sentences that just sort of floor you in the midst of it and spells, peace is what pain looks like in public.
00:44:42
Speaker
And this is towards the end of the story. The daughters are putting a lot of pressure on the husband and mother. And just for my husband and I display ourselves to the daughters at dinner, we stand side by side. We do not quarrel. Peace is what pain looks like in public. But also, that sentence fits so perfectly within her writing.
00:45:06
Speaker
But it's also such a different kind of sentence from all the other ones that are in there that it even stands out more. That sort of declarative, especially a declarative like that, is not unusual, but it just sort of pops on the page in a way that's really interesting. And yeah, it's neat. She's very, very, very good.
00:45:29
Speaker
all that alliteration with all those P's. Oh, yeah. It's also like it trips you, right? It is a sentence that is tripping along and tripping you as you go. The sentence is not going to fall, but you are as you try to parse it, as you try to, as I alliterate, try to pull it apart, as you try to really kind of get into it. And that's damn, damn, damn impressive, I have to say.
00:45:54
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Yes. And then just the matter of factness as well to some of these sentences that are so beautiful that they trip you up. But then at the same time, they are so sort of on the mark and they land, as you said, with such impact. I'm just going to point to another one I love in the story, Are You My Mother? where the narrator is looking for her mother and she tries Hillary Clinton and Jory Graham and
00:46:23
Speaker
Diana Ross, and then she says, if Francine Prose is not my mother, and Hillary Clinton is not my mother, and Jory Graham is not my mother, and Diana Ross is not my mother, maybe John Berryman is my mother. I go to John Berryman's house and knock on his door. He is dead, but he opens anyway. Just the sort of matter of factness of he is dead, but he opens anyway. And you don't question it within the context of this story, although if you literally try to imagine
00:46:49
Speaker
what's happening there that he's dead, but he opens anyway. Like, is he a corpse? Is he just a ghost? Like, it sort of, again, defies parsing or, or nailing it down to a visual. And I agree. I think that's, that's really hard to do and really impressive.
00:47:07
Speaker
Another favorite line of mine comes from the very nervous family, where the son very desperately wants to ice skate and he's told not to. We are not family who ice skates, but then the line builds. Mrs. Horowitz gathers her very nervous son in her arms and gently explains that families who ice skate become the ice they slip on.
00:47:35
Speaker
I'll be thinking about that one for quite some time. It's really just incredible. It's quite remarkable. And this, again, goes somewhat to the construction of the collection.
Recommendations: Authors Similar to Mark
00:47:50
Speaker
A number of these lines that we're bringing up are happening further in. We're past the third mark. It's not a very long collection at all. We've already covered that. But in some ways,
00:48:00
Speaker
we've been trained at this point as readers to what these stories are like what to expect and now she's kind of rolling out the big guns now now now she's uh hitting us with with additional things that fit within the larger dream logic but also stand out in a different way yeah it's it's really
00:48:21
Speaker
It's really quite remarkable. I purchased this book from a store I was working at back in 2018, which I only know because I can read the labels in the back of the books still. And I just didn't get to it at the time for whatever reason, but I never donated it. I always knew I would. So I was very, very pleased to see it on your list, Lara. I was like, aha, now I have to read it. I have to get this one under my belt.
00:48:45
Speaker
Oh, I'm glad we did. And talk about great covers. I mean, this one too, just to spend a second on the cover. I mean, it is just this amazing illustration of this sort of sad or wistful or a woman with an inscrutable expression wearing a clown nose, which is just
00:49:08
Speaker
I think like the perfect illustration to encapsulate this book. It is, it has humor, but it's also emotional and sad and funny and it's all of that.
00:49:19
Speaker
It's also strange, like you're looking at this cover going, what is this? And I mean, I'll say it, it's an arresting cover such that folks pick it up and they look at it and if they read a few, a few couple pages and it grabs them, they're going to buy it. Cause it's the kind of book that once you start reading, you're, you know, you're unlikely to encounter something like it again. So if, if it speaks to you, you better snatch it in that moment. Cause you may never find it again. Absolutely.
00:49:47
Speaker
Well, Laura, you already threw out. So one of the things we do, and I didn't prep you for is we ask for backlist or other, not backlist necessary, but other authors that resonate with, with a title or with, with a writer. And you already did your work on that. Bringing up Leah Davis, Karen Russell, et cetera. Lori, I don't know if you had any ideas. Um, I had exactly one and that was, uh, Catherine Dunn of geek love. Oh my gosh. Um, that's one of my favorite books of all time.
00:50:15
Speaker
But I think there's a geek love as much.
00:50:19
Speaker
as straightforward as it can be, of a narrative. But there is a similar strangeness and a similar askance look at the world. And yeah, a little bit of a dream logic running through it that I feel like this collection and that novel are kind of like cousins of a sort. They're definitely in a similar conversation. But since I didn't prep it, Laurie, if you don't have any others, it's cool. But if you do, that'd be...
00:50:47
Speaker
I think I mentioned mine in our email communication before we started, Allie Smith. Oh yes, you did. Absolutely. For the bizarre elements, this book is perhaps a little more feral, I'll use it again, than some of Allie Smith's stuff, but the word puns and just like
00:51:07
Speaker
the use of language and the way that people communicate using words in a very what seems at first blush to be nonsensical and how am I ever going to interpret any meaning out of that or how would the person being spoken to understand what the person that's articulating the words meant
00:51:29
Speaker
I feel like Allie Smith does that again and again, especially in some of her earlier works like There But For The, which is a great, great novel, Hotel World a bit. Just this really surprising and actually accelerating use of words that it's just like,
00:51:48
Speaker
Wow, that is a really interesting way to communicate a thought and it's so unusual, but it sparkles in a way just because it's so unique. I wonder if you'll agree with this one that occurred to me as you were bringing up Allie Smith, Marie NDA.
00:52:05
Speaker
Um, some of the more surreal qualities of her work, I think, and a sort of under background that gloom, I mean, almost like the darkness behind the stage sort of thing that happens in, um, and the NDIs, NDAs work. And, um, this one, I think kind of, kind of our chatting with one another too.
00:52:29
Speaker
Yeah, we read My Heart Hammed In together, Tom. That's one of my favorites on the backlist. And yeah, there's this otherworldly kind of strangeness to her books as well. So I see that similarity.
00:52:46
Speaker
I also think though that when we were talking about whether these stories could be any longer, I think what NDA is doing to make it much more of a narrative and make it much more of a thing that the reader can really follow you on is maybe the kind of adjustment that Mark would have to make to do a longer form version of some of these stories. Almost like she's feeling in the sentences that she removed between the sentences that remained in order to create this effect is what would happen.
00:53:16
Speaker
Oh, it's a fun, fun little thought experiment. You all gave me a list of authors to look up and I, a few more struck me if you don't mind. I'll tell you. Just a list. Just a list. I won't go in each one, but.
00:53:29
Speaker
It makes me think of Angela Carter with fairy tales and strangeness and slippage between characters, especially the book Passion of the New Eve. If you both have read this one. Oh, it's one of my favorites of all time. And Elizabeth McCracken, but particularly her short stories. And I think she's actually quoted on the back. Yeah, she blurbed it. She blurbed it. Yeah. Yeah. And I can see why. Talk about a strange and wonderful writer.
00:53:57
Speaker
And then Amy Bender, again, with some fairy tales and dream-like logic. And let's see, Amber Sparks, Amelia Gray, and Ramona Asabel are three others I would want to.
00:54:11
Speaker
Amelia Gray, yes, I would very much agree with that, especially the notion, the movement between bodies and the way bodies can blend and fleshliness is very much a thing that Gray gets into to a number of effects that Mark doesn't quite touch on here. But yeah, that one is a really, really great call.
00:54:34
Speaker
Flushliness. I like that word too. Fierce. What is it? Feral fleshliness. Maybe that's the episode title if Lori lets me get away with that.
00:54:47
Speaker
Yeah, this has been so much fun, Laura. Thank you so much. We will have in the notes some links to Laura's projects. I think it's a little early yet to pre-order her upcoming novel, Bind Me Tighter Still, but do pre-order it. Pre-orders are great. And pre-orders through your local indie are even better. So yeah, Laura, thank you so much for the great conversation, for recommending this book, and for chatting with us.
00:55:17
Speaker
No, thank you both for having me. This was such a pleasure.