Bonnie ZoBell: Great to talk to you, Claudia. I read Quarry Light several months ago, and it’s really stayed with me. The elegance of the writing is so impressive, and there’s a certain spookiness that permeates the collection in a way that makes it hard to stop reading. This spookiness is mostly psychologically, not Friday the 13th, though I did sometimes worry about characters’ physical well being. Did you set out to write a spooky book, or did it just kind of evolve?
Claudia Smith: A few years ago, Bobby Byrd at Cinco 
Puntos began working with Akashic Press on the noir anthology Lone Star Noir. My friend Susan Post, the owner of BookWoman in Austin, had shown Bobby my first collection of short shorts, The Sky Is A Well. Bobby thought I could write a good dark story and asked me to send him something.
I sent him “Catgirl.” I’m not sure I would have written the story had I not set out to write something for that anthology. Before sitting down to write, I read some noir. I wanted to get a feel for the genre, so I read the great book, Bunny Lake Is Missing, by Merriam Modell writing as Evelyn Piper. It came out in the late 1950’s. It’s so spooky; it all takes place within the space of a day, and it is about a young single mother who goes to pick up her daughter from her first day of daycare only to discover she is not there.
After that I returned to one of my favorite books, one that is in some ways the opposite of noir in my opinion, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I love. I can’t put it any better than the critic George Steiner when he said that the book is written in such a way as to give a kind of “psychological order to a piece of implacably authentic, documented life.”
I read it again, in an Airstream, in the middle of a pitch black night in a remote area in Texas that at the time didn’t even get cell phone reception. Let me tell you, that was spooky. Even spookier with my son fast asleep in his tiger sleeping bag beside me. Then I wrote the story after a short break, during a busy semester while I was a student at the University of Southern Mississippi. The first draft was written within a couple of days. Some stories take months, even years to write, but that one really just sort of took me over and came to me all at once. I hardly knew what to make of it myself; I only knew that I had written something different, and it felt like a watershed of sorts. I write about what haunts me, as do most writers. Childhood trauma and violence are definitely themes that preoccupy my fiction. But this was different. I am not sure, even now, whether that piece is realistic – it falls into a kind of dream state, and the violence feels almost hallucinatory. But, in my personal experience, that is what memory can do to traumatic events. I wanted to respect my readers with that piece, but it was important to me that I capture that feeling, of looking back and being taken over by the impact of that kind of violence.
Melanie is perhaps the most seductive character I’ve ever written. She was loosely based on a woman I loved when I was a child – a woman who was most definitely not evil, or psychotic. As a child I spent summers with a close friend at her family’s beach house, and her mother was very beautiful, very fun, and probably drank too much. I loved her and would never call her a Melanie in a million years. I think that story is the result of a lot of my own fears and dreams, working off of a landscape that helped form me.
After writing it, I began to write about violence differently. The stories that came after, including “As If Someone Had Polished The Air,” which is a reworking of a story I wrote over ten years ago – were all variations on the themes I first wrote about in “Catgirl. “I’m so glad Bobby asked me for a story.
BZ: I loved all of these stories in Quarry Light, but I can’t help thinking “Catgirl,” is the most chilling. As you say, Melanie, the twins’ mother, is very seductive. She starts out being so free-spirited around her daughters and their friends; she’s so much more fun than anyone else’s mom. Even at the very beginning, though, our adult minds start ruminating in a way the girls’ can’t—how much wildness is okay in a mother? Is dancing with any stranger who wants to at a beach bonfire okay, especially when your daughters are there, too? Soon there are other goings on that are definitely wrong, and by the time we get to the close, we see the mother as a monster.
Her creepiness is not just what she does at the end, though, but her disloyalty to her daughters’ friends who have idolized her. In many ways she’s disloyal to the reader as well since we’ve identified with the girls and idolized her, too. This is tricky territory for a writer—you don’t want the reader to get too angry with you–but it absolutely worked here because I realized how psychologically and emotionally involved I got. Was that your plan all along? Did you feel this danger as you were writing? Also, do you think a woman can be so free-spirited and still be a good parent?
CS: I would say yes, I did feel that danger. I scared myself with this story. I suppose I was addressing my own nightmares with it. One of my mentors, the writer Steve Barthelme, said it was truly a story about violence. Loss of innocence can be brutal. It certainly is in this story.
And to answer that last question; I suppose it depends on what you think of as free-spirited. Appearances can be deceiving, especially in families. Melanie, perhaps, is fun without soul.
Parenthood is – it’s hard. And before I had a child, I thought I knew how I would do everything. But you learn, or I did, early on, that we can’t always choose the path we are on, and adapting to change isn’t necessarily bad for kids. I’ve tried to give my children a feeling for magic, but also a sense of stability. I sure do hope they take both from their childhoods.
These are good questions, hard questions, and I’m glad my story brings them up to you. I’d probably have a strong answer for you if I weren’t a mother. I am, though, and this fact influences the things that frighten me in ways I can’t really begin to measure. Oh, maybe this is material for an essay I’ll struggle with over the next six months and wait to submit for publication after both children are grown.
BZ: The way you clue us in right away that something is very wrong in each of these tales is done expertly and subtly. This type of psychological trouble—at least in my mind—is far more frightening on a gut level. Do you have a theory or any advice for other writers about getting that fear just right without going over the top, which would have made the stories far less powerful?
CS: I think everyone has their own process. I really didn’t do anything differently in my psychological approach when I wrote these stories; whenever I write, I try very hard to be honest with my characters and the moment I am writing about.
I will tell you that when I wrote about the rape in “His Lovely Hands” (spoiler alert, I suppose), it was one of the hardest things I have ever had to write. I wrote it on a hot summer day, years before I wrote the story, in San Antonio, with the window unit air conditioner blasting and a television on low volume in the background. The white noise made it possible for me to visualize that scene. For me, one of the most terrible moments is her gradual realization that they are eating Hamburger Helper and watching Hee-Haw afterwards. I let my surroundings in the moment seep into the story. I do that sometimes.
BZ: Sometimes writers have trouble marketing their books or agreeing with agents and editors about whether a book with a child or teen narrator is an adult book or a children’s or YA story. Yet when I started reading these, I knew instantly they were for adults. Have you ever had any of this kind of problem with editors or agents? What do you think distinguishes a child or YA book from an adult one?
CS: I’m so bad at marketing Bonnie. It is something I need to work on improving. I’ve been lucky in that I have had good writers, editors and friends, to guide me over the years. It can be very hard to pinpoint, but these stories are definitely for adults. I think of Mary Miller’s The Last Days of California the same way. It’s not YA fiction, not the way, say, The Fault In Our Stars might be.
I’d like to read more YA fiction, honestly. It seems to have changed a great deal since I was a teen.
A long time ago, Mike Young at Magic Helicopter told me he would be interested in doing a book with me. I’m so glad he was because I’m not sure I could have ever gotten an agent to take this collection. I have yet to sell a novel or a book to a big publisher, and I don’t have an agent right now although I am thinking I might start those query letters again when things slow down a bit for me. Maybe it’s time to put myself out there that way, finally. I did years ago, when I was publishing a lot more. And I’ve seen friends whose work I admire finally getting paid for their good work. That may just inspire me enough to get out there and try for it again.
BZ: What were you like as a kid? As a teenager?
CS: I read a lot, and didn’t want to grow up. I didn’t want to get out of make-believe. In high school I felt awkward. I didn’t date until I was in college.
BZ: What are you working on these days?
CS: Thank you for asking! Originally, the longer story in the collection, “Lucy,” was part of a longer work, a novella that kept growing and growing and has become the draft of my first novel, Box City. A portion of the book was published online at New World Writing, here.
I’m going to return to it soon, hopefully. In the meantime, I’ve been working on nonfiction – specifically, memoir and essay. It’s challenging, and scary. I’ve written things I might not submit, or if I do, I might write under a different name. I was really inspired by Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and The Story; the summer my toddler was a nursing baby, I set out to read many of the memoirs she discusses in that wonderful book. The book is about personal narrative, but I have found Gornick’s insights have helped me with my fiction as well. She asks the question, how does one pull from this messy, agitating life something meaningful? I think I ask myself that every time I sit down to write, and usually come up with the answer after I’ve been writing myself into the story for a long time.
I wanted to write about a little book tour I did last February with my kids. It was an important trip for me, in many ways, and I wanted to shape it into some sort of cohesive narrative. Mike Young thought I could perhaps submit it somewhere, and we both thought it might help promote the book. I kept writing and writing, writing that thing, and I still haven’t finished it. It just hasn’t taken off. Finally I sat down and wrote another personal essay. It came to me much in the same way “Catgirl” did, and I wrote it during my daughter’s naps over the span of a couple of days. I submitted it to The Rumpus, and they took it. It’s forthcoming soon. It’s called “In My Clothes.” Anyway, I am very nervous and excited about having it out there. There is no fiction to hide behind. I keep bumping into topics I’m not sure I should have out there, at least not while my kids are small.
That’s the thing about this writing thing. I can sit down to write about oranges and I end up writing about oranges, but also the secret I’m not comfortable saying out loud to anyone I know, a secret I didn’t even know until I stumble upon it as I am trying to write about the price of oranges.
BZ: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk, Claudia. Can’t wait to read the next one!
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