I knew and loved Abby Frucht's work before I knew and loved her. Fruit of the Month, Licorice, Are You Mine?, Life Before Death, Polly's Ghost--all are books that are dog-eared from rereading. Abby's won two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, A New Voice Award from Quality Paperback Club, and several citations for notable books from the New York Times. She also teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I'm so jazzed to have Abby here on the blog today. Her new collection The Bell at The End of a Rope is spectacular--and so is she. Thank you, Abby.
What I loved so much
about this collection was the strange, eerie quality, that reminded me of your
novel Life Before Death. So I have to ask about your world view. Have you
always seen the weird side of life?
When I first read this
question I thought: What she’s really asking is, Am I strange? (Caroline: For the record, I adore Abby and I gravitate to these things, so this question is actually a high compliment.) So I asked some of the people who know me
best, “On a scale of one to five, with five being the strangest and one being
the most normal, how strange am I?”
My friend Kathleen, who I
love FOR her strangeness, rated me a 1.
“You’re not strange at
all!” she said. “You’re a great mother,
you have a good job, you dress well, you drive safely (I was in the process of
driving her to Madison
when she said this, she being not a safe driver at all,) and you’re a great friend. You even came up with a name for my new
stuffed pink dog.”
I next asked my son Jess,
whom I admire for his groundedness, his reasoned forthrightness, and his
ability to tell me roughly how much money my ex husband has made in the stock
market. He rated me a 4, citing what he
called my intelligence and my “unfilteredness.”
Because “Unfilteredness” is not a
word he ordinarily uses, I assume it emerged from a conversation he had with
his fiancée last week after I met her parents for the first time.
When I asked my son Alex,
who is unusual in several ineffable ways, he said promptly that I am a 3.8, but
when I asked him to explain, he said, “I don’t know,” and, knowing him well
enough to know that if I asked again, he would only grow impatient with our telephone
call, I didn’t ask again, after which he promptly surprised me by asking when I
was coming to visit.
Finally I asked Chuck,
with whom I have lived for twelve years.
“You’re not strange,” he
said.
“What do mean I’m not
strange?” I said.
“Oh. Would you rather I said you were?” he said.
I pretended I didn’t hear
that question, and he didn’t ask it a second time.
The only other way that I
can answer this question is that it always interests me when people respond to what
they call the weird things in my stories, since, to me, a lot of the things
aren’t weird at all, they’re normal. My
sister Liz understood this best when she rated me a 3, explaining that most
people are 3’s because most people are weird.
I aruged that didn’t make sense, because if everybody were a 3, being weird
and being normal would be identical, to which she said, “Yeah, that’s what I’m
saying.”
You’ve written both short
stories and novels--is the process different for you? Do you prefer one of the
other? Or since, these wonderful stories are all sort of linked thematically,
does it feel like writing a longer piece of work?
Aside from the stories all having something to
do with childhood, the links didn’t make themselves known to me until just a
few years ago when I began to compile them into a book, at which time I
realized that my childhood neighborhood and many of my childhood friends,
neighbors, babysitters, family members and pastimes were included in them. Once I realized that these links were
present, I played them up a little in revision, not in hopes of creating a book
of linked stories, since of course this book is not, but rather to bring myself,
and my reader, nearer emotionally to the world out of which the stories
emerged. They were written over a period of nearly twenty years, during which
time I wrote three novels which have nothing to do with each other. I don’t have a preference as to writing
novels or writing stories. It’s an equal
opportunity struggle for me to write one or the other, and there is equal
enjoyment.. What I DO enjoy struggling most over are the individual sentences, no
matter of what they are a part.
The collection is so
unexpectedly funny even as it deals with really serious issues--the death of a
spouse, for example. But I also love the language. In Choir practice, Emily
signs her letter “your fateful friend,” which is actually more accurate than if
she had used the word faithful. Have you always been attuned to the frisky
possibility of language?
The other day I asked Chuck if he could
explain the meaning to me of a dream I had had the night before. I loved the dream and was scared by it but I
didn’t have a clue what it meant. I told him that in the dream we were walking
in a place that is like most of the places in the dreams I have been having
lately, a place both inside and outside, a forested, verdant landscape studded
with architectural elements like columns and archways and doorways guarded by
rabbits. In this particular dream, Chuck
and I were walking, and a beautiful but unfamiliar wild creature that in the
dream was understood to be a lion kept leaping out at me and nibbling gently at
my hand, and when I looked at my hand there was a large, gaping hole in it that
went all the way through to the other side, but it didn’t hurt and there was no
blood.
Chuck said, That’s easy.
You were dreaming about Ike.
Ike was our dog who died a
few months ago. He was a golden
retriever. He looked like a lion, and I often used to say to
him, “You’re a ly’in on the bed!” or “You’re a ly’in
on the floor!” He made me and Chuck whole, but now that he’s gone there is a
hole in us.
When I used to cry, Ike
always came up and sat near me. The foster dog we now have is at this moment
entirely oblivious to my crying, and she is not a ly’in on the pillow. She is a
foster dog on a pillow. This doesn’t
mean that I won’t someday fall in love with her, Chuck says…and when I tell her
I love her, she believes that I do, and at this point, that’s what matters.
I want to ask about your
publisher, Narrative Library, which is part of Narrative Magazine--which I
love. Their tagline is “storytelling in the digital age.” So, I have to ask,
what was the experience like and how did it differ from working with
traditional publishers?
Editorially, the experience
I’ve been having with Narrative Library is every bit as good and as warm as the
best of my editorial experiences with more conventional presses. The people at
Narrative have been on top of everything and have taken me through five or six readings
with three different people. They’re
really in it for the labor of love aspect…and they would be the first to admit
that they can offer comparatively little by way of conventional distribution and
sales, which is something I’m happy enough to live with, given that I haven’t
ever made a sales splash anyway. Since
they’re in it for the love, and since I am too, I know that we won’t disappoint
each other.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
My sister, Sylvia was just named a judge
by the governor of New Mexico (The reason I didn’t ask her to rate my strangeness is because she’s in the middle of all
that right now) and what’s obsessing me is
precisely how I will make it to the
swearing-in ceremony and still make the trip I was supposed to take with
Chuck and his son and daughter-in-law before going to teach in Vermont this
winter. I WILL manage, I’m sure, but I hate logistics and
making travel arrangements and thus I tend to obsess over them. Other than that, physical exercise is always
at the top of my list.
What question didn't I
ask that I should have?
As Alex might say, there
are 3.8 of them but I don’t know what they are.
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