Page 11 - the Noise March 2017 Edition

Two AZ Authors on Writing the West
Carter: The Degenerates follows two Surrealist artists from France and England all the way to the US and Mexico, and it was very different writing about places where I have travelled but never lived.
Also, the book is set eighty years ago, so the places, especially the cities, have changed. When I was in Paris I walked the streets and went to cafes in Montparnasse, where the artists were living in the thirties, and I tried to imagine what it had been like before the monolithic glass buildings were there, before the cafes were full of tourists.
Much of my work on this novel felt like dreaming. The photographer Lee Miller took a number of wonderful photographs of Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst in the French coun- tryside of Saint-Martin D’Ardeche, where they made a home together just before the war. I’d look at the photos and imagine the sense details — how the sun felt on their skin, the smells of the French countryside, the lavender and the wild rosemary. They found a sense of home, of belonging to the land, but when the war came to France, they had to leave it all.
DeFreitas: What marvelous imaginative work, to see the past superimposed on the pres- ent within a landscape, a cityscape, a town — and how appropriate that much of your work on this project “felt like dreaming,” given its focus on the Surrealists!
Coincidentally enough, the next project up to bat for me is a short-story collection entitled Dream Studies. After publishing Hot Season, I went back and forth on what to tackle next, as I have two more books set in AZ in various stages of completion. But eventually I decided I needed to switch gears from straight-up realist fiction to explore more speculative work.
A story from this collection, “The Mind-Body Problem,” was published last fall in City of Weird, an anthology of speculative fiction set in Portland, Oregon, and the rest of the stories in my collection fall very much along similar lines — they’re stories with either an overt or implied magical element that are grounded in a particular place, often from the timeline of my own life.
There’s a group of kids in a back-to-the-land community in rural Michigan playing a ver- sion of Dungeons and Dragons that may not just be a game; a student who discovers a sort of “monster of the mind” at the bottom of the ravine that intersects her college campus in Portland; a young woman who discovers a network of tunnels beneath the Elks Theater in Prescott housing problematic artifacts from the city’s past.
In each of these stories, I found it helpful to know not just where the story is set but the particular buildings in which it occurs. To me, there’s something very different between a scene that takes place in a bar like the Monte Vista in Flag and one like, say, The Antler in west Michigan, where I grew up. And I think part of that too is the way the past is superimposed on the present — these buildings are a reflection not only of the local culture but of the point in history at which they were built.
Carter: I can see how having very specific buildings in mind would really help ground those magical realist stories in realism.
Similarly, the indoor spaces in Further Out were based on buildings I knew intimately — the club near LAX where I did a stint as a dancer in the early nineties, and the apartment building in the Miracle Mile, which was upscale when it was built, in the thirties, but sixty years later had tiles falling off the moldy shower and a roach infestation. The dilapidated
and Michaela Carter
photo by Emelyn Morris-Sayre
building was a real place, and it was also a mirror of the state of Gwen’s relationship and life.
DeFreitas: Now that you point it out, the importance of the buildings in Further Out seems obvious — I can easily recall them, and their particularities have so much to do with the way the book feels, the impression it leaves.
I loved what you said earlier about how the Rodney King riots in LA showed you that you needed to “change your life.” The characters in Hot Season are definitely working with similar realities, in that ostensibly political events — and when we use that term, I think what we’re really talking about our moral realities — push them to shift and grow, to change. Likewise, the tales in Dream Studies tackle, in ways both overt and oblique, issues related to gender, race, or the environment.
I’m wondering, are there political realities you’re working with in your current novel, the one set in Oak Creek Canyon, that are particular to that place?
Carter: The political aspects of my next book have to do with the ways we relate to the natural world. How kids learn about species being endangered before they learn anything about the species itself. And how frightening it is to befriend the natural world, because we know it is imperiled, and to love something means terrible pain if it’s lost.
Having spent a lot of time in Oak Creek lately, I’ve fallen in love with the river otters, the kingfishers, the sycamores, and the cottonwoods. And I’ve come to realize just how vital wild rivers are as corridors for wildlife — especially in the Southwest, where water is so precious.
DeFreitas: I’m looking forward to reading it, Michaela. Thanks for talking with me! Carter: Thanks, Susan! It was fun!
| Susan DeFreitas is the author of the novel Hot Season (Harvard Square Editions, 2016), hailed by Read It Forward as “earth-shatteringly good.” Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in The Utne Reader,
The Nervous Breakdown, Story, Southwestern American Literature, and Weber — The Contemporary West, along with more than twenty other journals and anthologies. A longtime resident of Arizona, she is currently based in Portland, Oregon, where she serves as a collaborative editor with Indigo Editing & Publications.
| Michaela Carter’s poetry has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. Her debut novel, Fur- ther Out Than You Thought, published by William Morrow, was an Indie Next, Ari- zona Republic Recommends, and AZ Central’s BEST critic’s pick for 2014. LA Magazine called it “a glittery, smoke-encrusted Proustian madeleine.” In 2012, she cofounded Peregrine Book Company, the independent bookstore in Prescott, Arizona.
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