Again and Again
An Interview with Autumn Fourkiller
What initially caught my eye about Indian Giver was its innate talent for complication. Autumn’s prose style, focus on characterization, and sense for maintaining mystery effortlessly pushes the reader into a continuous cycle of care and inquiry—like dropping individual stones into a deep well, over and over, until the water’s surface finally catches the light.
It was an absolute pleasure to speak with Autumn this week about labels, truth, and the developing impact of the gooner.
Connor Harding: To start us off, I wanted to discuss the art of the opening line. Juxtaposition is a wonderful way to shock and invite the reader into a narrative’s deeper interior, and with Indian Giver, those opening moments immediately frame our narrator’s dissolving dramatic present—both professionally and romantically. What drew you to paralleling the narrator’s firing from the federal government and rapidly developing sex life as the reader’s entry point to the story? And what is your process for crafting that first, perfect line?
Autumn Fourkiller: First off, thank you for these questions. I feel that the whole editorial team really understood the “vision” so to speak, and have really probed my work in a way that delights me. We love indie media! Honest gushing aside, what drew me to paralleling the narrator’s firing and their, let us say, both developing and disintegrating sex life was simply that both entry points felt bloody in the same manner. The narrator considers their (unpaid) sex a type of mental work, maybe more so than they consider their actual employment. Their employment, then, takes up more psychic space than it does physical. It’s the psychic weight that they lug around, the carcass of everything they’ve experienced, that I consider one of the most vital (if not the most vital) aspects of their character. The first line of this story in particular came to me unbidden while I was writing on one of the patios at Reed College during the Tin House Summer Workshop with my friend Kayla, but other first lines usually occur to me first as a mental image only, with no words involved.
Connor: One element of Indian Giver I was entirely fascinated with was the protagonist’s sense for clinical observation. Their narrative style worked equally to curate and deconstruct everything from relationships to systems of government funding through flat description and in-scene action. How do you work to render a consistent sense of observation/reaction within the interiority of your characters? Is it an exploratory process for you? Or do you enter a fresh draft with that character’s perspective already closely in-mind?
Autumn: Thank you! Their sense for clinical observation is exactly what drew me to this character, and this story. When it comes to rendering a consistent sense of observation, I have found that plenty of re-reads, especially reading aloud, really helps me center a different experience than my own, though in this case, some readers might consider Indian Giver a type of autofiction (more on this later). One of the things I’d like to be more consistent about in the new year (lol) is to take a more exploratory process to my work. Generally, however, I enter a fresh draft with a character’s (or characters) perspective fairly close in mind. My narrators often feel to me like an assortment of blind spots yet somehow possessing an all seeing inner eye. By that I mean they know exactly what is wrong with them, and yet always refuse to name it clearly.
Connor: Alongside their keen sense of observation, the narrator of Indian Giver also displays an immense and tender commitment to avoiding, obfuscating, and compartmentalizing information related to their own storytelling. The reader is even treated to an interlude as we approach the halfway point of the story where the narrator nods toward the futility of labeling their experiences as short stories or essays. As a writer, do you feel that a binary distinction between nonfiction and short story muddles the truth of a person’s lived experience?
Autumn: God, they really do have an immense and tender commitment to avoiding, obfuscating, and compartmentalizing information related to their own storytelling. As a writer, and as a person, really, I feel that a binary distinction between nonfiction and short story does muddle the truth of a person’s lived experience, but also, I feel that those labels in general don’t really matter all that much, besides in the capitalistic how do I sell this way. I cut my teeth on “nonfiction,” true, but I never saw anything I wrote as some kind of exercise in empiricism. Rather, I was focused on what I felt was the beauty of the piece, the way it sounded and sang. Maybe that’s a little high-handed of me, but I don’t know, it just seems weird and fascist to constantly try to catch artists out about something in their fiction. People want to know if it “really happened” and it’s like, is that really what matters here?
Connor: Following up on the prior question, how did the metatextuality and general self-awareness of this story’s own telling affect your relationship to Indian Giver as its actual author? Does the inclusion of a direct address to the reader bring you closer or further away from the work as you draft and revise it?
Autumn: Not many of my projects come to me because I have an idea I want to write about but I don’t want to sell it, market it, or code it as an “essay”, but certainly some of them do. I’m a hypocrite I know, ha! For a time, a terrible time, I worked for the federal government, just like our narrator. We share other demographic data, too, and historical experiences, but I am not meaningfully them, nor are they meaningfully me. When first drafting Indian Giver, whose original title was Mommy Issues, I was thinking a lot about Jung (don’t cancel me) and my relationship to my own shadow. It wouldn’t be unfair to call my notes on this piece an exploration of that shadow self -- I thought about what it would be like if I gave a narrator my own worst impulses, personality traits, and the like, but gave them no stopgap measure. If I had given in to everything. If I kept giving in. Thus, the inclusion of a direct address to the reader brings me closer to the work as I draft and revise it. I get to embody both the reader and the writer, again and again. It’s both a little humiliating and thrilling.
Connor: Indian Giver also does a great job of exploring the murkiness of identity, without ever pushing to “solve” it. From gender to sexuality to indigeneity, the narrator continuously comes face to face with the most formative nature of what we can never comprehensively understand about ourselves. When writing a character study, how do you decide what elements of a character will forever remain a mystery—even to themselves?
Autumn: This is a great question, because I feel I am not really capable of writing a character study wherein elements of a character are not under at least a bit of contention, or that aren’t cloaked in a bit of mystery. Perhaps this is where the “autofiction” label comes to be applied to some of my work. It feels like a very American problem to me, to feel identity less and incapable of comprehending the self in such terms. I wrestle with this a lot in my novel (second draft incoming soon) -- what is it to “be” Native without actually feeling like you are, and if feeling like you are is actually the thing that matters, among other things. In Indian Giver, it’s gender and sexuality and indigeneity, but it's also a wrestling with caring with those things at all. The narrator wants to cut out their care, and yet they display such unexpected tenderness. So I guess the answer here is that what I really have to decide on when writing a character study is what very few things the character does know about themselves. The murkiness is the easiest part.
Connor: To end off on a less serious note - let’s talk about terribly awkward sex scenes. The amount of psychic damage I personally take from writing them is absolutely paralyzing, and figuring out the Goldilocks Zone for secondhand embarrassment for this kind of thing is quite the fine-tuned skill. Did you struggle in depicting the… less than appealing encounters depicted in Indian Giver? And do you have any words of wisdom for what can make terrible sex paradoxically enticing within the pages of fiction?
Autumn: Let’s talk about terribly awkward sex scenes, PLEASE! Let me not be remiss in forgetting to say that when I read “less than appealing encounters” I did fully laugh aloud. Maybe this makes me a real sicko, but I find it a lot harder to write an appealing encounter than I do an unappealing one. It’s very easy for me to tap into the more “cringe” and ridiculous aspects of sex on the page -- I feel like being raised Southern Baptist with zero sex education until I was out of my mother’s house explains a lot of this, plus my propensity to pluck at a cultural wound. Good sex writing to me is always a little melodramatic and dirty, which again, could probably be explained by all the fanfiction I consumed as a teen, but still. That said, I do find myself drawn to depicting realistic sex rather than idealized sex in an artistic sense, it feels so rich to me in pulling out threads of character, and the narrator’s abject disgust for the act and yet their willingness to participate was one of the most interesting parts of writing this story for me. I think that terrible written sex is so paradoxically enticing because it holds up a mirror, perhaps to yourself, sure, but also to some of the best kind of gossip, the thing you’ve never told another person that happened, and the impact of the gooner, to be frank. We like to microdose the awkwardness of such an encounter, not to inoculate ourselves against it, but to remind ourselves that such things to happen with a enough regularity that people want to capture it.