Abnormal Grief

A Conversation with Dana Jean Rider

Houseboat initially caught my attention for two relatively disparate reasons—the first being its on-page methodology for portraying intensely flawed characters, the second being a particularly vivid image of Mickey Mouse… liquidating his assets on the top of page two. Dana Rider’s style  is deeply interior and constantly engaged with evasive feeling, which is to say it simultaneously creates the mess and works to clarify it. The processing of ugly emotions as a guidebook during my first reading—one which informed much of the story’s dry sense of humor, kneecapped grief, and occasionally uncanny interactions between its characters. Much like Liza and Bill and even Winnie, the reader is constantly thrust into a space of emotional paralysis between what is felt and what remains a terrible mystery to them. As a human being, I found this nuanced and affecting. As an editor, I found it wildly entertaining.

Dana is currently pursuing an intensive PHD over at University of Cincinnati (in my beloved home state), but spared a lovely morning to hold court on all things Houseboat - from grief writing to triangulating endings to incorrectly spelling Tallahassee (hassie? hasee?) across three months of email correspondence and Google Doc comments.

Connor Harding: Thank you so much for joining us today. We are thrilled to be able to host Houseboat on the website, and even more thrilled to talk to you about the craft and legwork that goes into making a cool, character-focused piece like this.
For our first question today (starting just about as hoity-toity and craft-focused as possible), I wanted to ask about formal challenges surrounding important characters who don't physically inhabit the dramatic present of a story together. Winnie's relationship with Liza is a major pivot joint for Liza's continuous interiority and acts as an inciting force throughout the entire plot of Houseboat. And much of that dramatic tension comes to rely on the changing nature of their bond, to the point readers feel ample narrative weight in both what Liza can remember about Winnie, as wells as what she never learned about her in the first place. When you craft a pair of characters who are very emotionally close, yet completely removed in time and space, how do you make their applied absence feel intentional/propulsive to the story that you're hoping to tell?

Dana Jean Rider: In some ways I think of this question as being how do you put somebody on the page when they are not actually in the story? That’s always in conversation with something I'm frequently exploring in my writing, which is sideways or abnormal grief. You've got memories of the person, but also whole emotional pictures of who they were to you, the last time that you knew them—which is not, you know, yesterday. It's perhaps many, many years ago. I was particularly interested in having that be in the hands of this character who kind of can't stop the tide of thoughts about this person who's gone, but also cannot stop bringing it back to themselves, too. For Liza, there's these warring forces. It sets itself up as a sort of back and forth, almost spiraling motion within the story. The way that I tried to balance that (and one of the ways I think can bring balance in general) is by using an external motor or challenge. Like other people who also knew this person who have a different impression of them than you had.

As a writer, I'm very interested in the question of how you put somebody on the page who isn't actually on the page. There was a really good story I read like a million years ago now—I don't know if you know the author Mary South?

CH: That’s a new name for me, I think.

DR: She had a story in her collection You Will Never Be Forgotten called “Camp Jabberwocky for Recovering Internet Trolls.”

CH: Holy shit (laughter).

DR: Amazing title, right? In that story, there's this camp, and one of the campers has run away. You get these three perspectives and they're all people who are trying to find the missing camper. He isn’t there, but he gets rendered on the page really clearly, even though you've got three narrators who can't stop thinking about themselves the whole time. They're on this mission to find him (in their own heads most of the time). Obviously I won't spoil it for you, but by the end, I think you have a clear sense of who that missing character is. I think about that story a lot when setting up somebody's presence when they are in fact completely absent.

CH: They should have sent me to that summer camp when I was thirteen, that’s all I’m gonna say.

DR: It really is a fantastic collection if you have time to give it a look. The other thing that I would say about this is that I'm currently working on a novel. That's always the story, isn't it? Everybody's working on a novel.

CH: No, absolutely. If I hear the word query again this month I’m gonna go rabid. 

DR: There’s this inverse problem in the novel where the person who is dead (this is a theme in my work), the narrator is one of only a few people who knew her at the start of the story. And that kind of ends up granting her this sole authority on who this person was, right? And finding different ways to challenge that authority in those circumstances is a fun craft problem.

CH: I agree! When I think about characters who are important but mostly absent, in recent times we have Barbara from The God of the Woods and Blandine from The Rabbit Hutch, where you're constantly getting people passively observing them or creating mythos or motif or metaphor out of them from a skewed personal history. But I think there's something to be said about the way consensus of people's observation does eventually create an excellent outline of their subject on the page. I also think a lot about Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, except in a reverse order. In those works she  judges everybody else, but through the constant stream of those judgments, you get an outline of her as a narrator as well. I think there's so many interesting craft tools that allow you to create that non-present presence. 

DR: The Cusk books seems like a really interesting counterpoint. I wrote a paper on Outline earlier this year for an intro to critical theory class. And one of the things I ended up talking about was how Faye will not identify herself unless forced to. So it's sort of an inversion of what we're talking about. You don't even get to find out her name until she gets the call about the loan from the bank while she's teaching.

CH: Just because a character is not present and just because the narrator has the comfort of guiding the story does not mean they get to enjoy the comfort of not being known. And I think that applies to Liza as well.

This actually leads really cleanly into the next question. I wanted to talk a bit more about consensus, singularity, and isolation. Liza, throughout the course of the story, is isolated (geographically, spiritually, and ideologically) from any kind of familiarity or agreement. She's on her own island as a self, with just occasional moral support manifesting from Jay over the phone. Even her memories of Winnie are constantly falling under scrutiny by what the story refers to as the limited slices the Wattersons have developed over the course of their few years with her. In a narrative that is somewhat invested, I think, in the incompleteness of memory and the inadequacy of mutual human understanding, what roles do self assurance or emotional truth play in illustrating what is a very real perspective between characters who remember the same thing or same person completely differently?

DR: For me, emotional truth is the entire thing that I'm trying to conjure. I'm a fiction writer. I occasionally dip my toe into the waters of nonfiction, but for the most part, I'm never after factual truth. Maybe nonfiction writers would say this about themselves as well—creative nonfiction writers anyways (laughter). They, like us, are after emotional truth. I'm not writing about hashing out the details of who is right/wrong, because that seems a ludicrous task to me. I'm not sure that I believe it's possible. So I'm always chasing some degree of emotional truth instead. Even if it's relatively rare that a story has some direct one-to-one with my life.

A part of that conversation for me has always been that I default to the nonlinear and fragmentary, and try to trust that a story will tell me if it wants to be linear or contiguous. Maybe that’s the inverse of how we're “taught” to do it. But I had enormous gaps in my creative writing education. I never sat down to write a Raymond Carver imitation. I was interested more in the nonlinear.

CH: There are plenty of Raymond Carver impersonators. I think that’s fine—we have enough of those.

DR: I do worry that we're entering some new territory where everyone writes in a fragmented, nonlinear style. Increasingly I've been trying to push myself to write things that are more contiguous. But I do accept that it is maybe the flip side of people's normal writerly journey. Some of that defaulting to nonlinearity or fragmentation relates more specifically to how I think (or maybe how people think in general). It's also more broadly what I'm interested in writing about—which tends to be a lot about friendship or grief or loss and a lot about memory. Maybe those things just invoke memory naturally.

Simultaneously, I'm  invested in keeping things sharp without wholly losing myself to nostalgic ennui that is so readily accessible in literary fiction as a genre.

CH: For your style, the use of fragmentation feels especially useful for the portrayal of things like friendship or grief. If I ever met a human being that was like, Yes, my grandma died, here's a chronological history of the ways in which I loved her and considered her life. I would not trust that guy. Like at all.

DR: (laughter), No, yeah, You’d think, You are a liar, you are constructing something.

CH: Maybe a liar. Maybe a psychopath. Maybe both? Or they just take really great notes.

DR: I suppose that's an option too. There are the very meticulous among us.

CH: I think there is a borderlands of intention when it comes to fragmentation. When it comes to something that is based around invocation, like memory or grief, or weird esoteric connections we make with people. I think fragmentation is an organic lens for it because they occur before they are constructed. You can’t define the nexus or force that draws you into those thoughts. They break apart and then they come back.

DR: I feel like that's where it starts for me. Then as a writer, I have to supersede myself somehow and enforce some degree of logical organization on it.

CH: Structure and plot and all that other gross disgusting nonsense. Yeah.

DR: Horrifying. Why do we do that to ourselves? I think maybe we should all just buy a journal.

(laughter)

CH: That's really funny. But you know, there is a point sometimes when I'm reading a work and things dive completely into raw image or strange, speculative space and then I begin to lose that thread in a completely different way. Fragmentation is an incredibly precise tool in my mind. Not a baseball bat.

Let’s move along to our third question—a little closer to Liza this time. I wanted to take a moment to kind of highlight Houseboat's attention to physicality  and the human body. It is stated in the story that Eliza prides herself on having her body be a naturalized fact to her person, which is then paired intensively (and with a degree of deconstruction) with the physical noticings of others. One of my favorites was when she sees Bill's freckles and scars and other bits of facial tissue that have experienced alteration over the course of his life and describes it as a cultivated result of living. Like it's a reward that comes with time. And then of course later comes the claustrophobia the reader feels when the Watterson brothers are being complete creeps to the young women on the rafts, dismissing them into objects through their sheer presumption.

So, what is your approach to rendering the physicality of your characters? And how do you think the body can serve as both a naturalized fact of the character's living as well as an intentional lens that helps to construct the story you're hoping to tell?

DR: I like this question because it also gives me an opportunity to reflect on the writerly journey, as it were. I usually don’t default toward a lot of embodiment. That's something that has been a big push for me in recent years, to try to make things more physical alongside more ephemeral themes. I don’t think Houseboat even started in a very embodied place. This story actually started in a wildly different mode of telling than it used to have. The original form was almost “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”-coded, just sentence-fragmentary first-person. That changed, of course.

To get toward the body of the piece, Liza got that particular component of herself, like her body neutrality or attempt at body neutrality, from me. That one came very much from lived experience. She lives in the same world that I do, one  that is constantly drawing her attention back toward her body and back toward everyone else's bodies. So you've got one set of ideals and another set of writerly observational tools. With those in mind, I am constantly trying to thread the needle of what I believe about fat liberation, and what I believe about what we owe to each other in terms of how we talk about bodies and physicality. That includes aging and scarring, too. And with that set of observational tools I've been given as as a writer, which tends to be, you know, vicious when left without restraint— 

CH: No yeah writerly comparative statements get MEAN, dude.

DR: And I really don’t want to be mean/vicious! But I also don't want to not notice.

CH: Sometimes it feels like we think in metaphor and simile and personification and embodiment as one thing jammed inside the aesthetic package of another thing. When it comes to the body, that becomes, I think, a potentially very jagged saw to work with.

The intersection of those two things is both a part of the trade and a responsibility of the writer to navigate. That exploration goes for both their own process and their own body. I’m always interested in how writers deconstruct bodies in their varied ways. We just have to manage where the cold viciousness of the tool intersects with the living truth of the person, you know?

We get that a lot in the story. The way Liza navigates/perceives bodies is often quite informed by the residue of this world’s meanness. But at other times she just very casually navigates space with people in it and you're reminded more of that naturalized state of things. Things real and fabricated coexist. 

DR: My particular position on this feels informed by both as I'm reading increasingly older fiction. It's started to age poorly and really grate on me when I see flippant meanness about the way people's bodies look.

As a caveat, I'm not interested in presenting a character who has figured all of this out and is completely at peace. That maybe isn’t an interesting character to analyze beyond the surface, you know? Imperfection is part of what I'm interested in. We're all somewhere on the journey, even though we're probably not at the end state yet.

CH: You make a good point. Especially on older literature. As a bit of editor lore—when I was first getting into writing back in my early college days, I focused a lot of my studies on postmodern lit. I have never in my life, upon revisiting those, seen a shittier interpretive mindset for the way that people look and move about the world. When you give a man in the 70s an inch of satire, he will portray the most villainous thoughts on the human body that have ever been recorded. 

DR: (laughter)

CH: And sometimes that makes it hard to revisit. But I think it also works, at least in my own capacity, to reflect on maybe how time has changed the way that people want to engage with these truly inherent parts of themselves. I think a lot about Emma Copley Eisenberg, who is very body-forward in the way that she presents her fictitious characters without waving any kind of weird flag or moralizing their very being. There are so many people doing so well to advance our zeitgeist as an industry, from cookbooks to translated work to food narratives. Not to be too hopecore, but I like to think that the looking back informs the looking forward. And forward looks a lot better than what Don Delillo was doing in the early eighties.

DR: I’d certainly hope so. I certainly hope that’s the case.

CH: Scooting along to our next one! Another moderately heavy-handed craft question.

DR: Love it. Keep ’em coming.

CH: Another element Houseboat uses quite deftly is threaded anecdote (or more colloquially, the flashback). When discussing Houseboat with one of my fellow Chatterbox! editors, I kept relating to the motion of scenes in this story and the general reading experience that I had to a stylized braided essay, which is really telling for the way that Houseboat is able to capture lived experience in its own capacity.

Ultimately, I'm always interested in talking with writers about when they choose to fragment or break chronology of a sequence. Now I'm gonna ask you the same. When you're drafting a new piece, what is an impulse you feel (or how do you know) when it's a good time to dive away from the dramatic present and let us live in the past or in memory to inform what comes next?

DR: I have a slightly roundabout way of answering this question—as though I've answered any of the other questions straight-on (laughter).

CH: We hate a straight answer around here anyways.

DR: In a lot of ways I would love to describe the narrative strategy of Houseboat as “The way a mind might wander during a huge cleaning or organizational effort”. That isn’t how it started, but now I get to say that it was 100% intentional all along. So I would think then, if I'm not shooting for causality in the foregrounded plot, then association has to be the other way to travel, right? So you proceed by association between the kind of fragmentary elements. Because it's all kind of one in the same for Liza at that moment.

Some of it proceeds from character as well. She's in this unfamiliar place that she's been told belonged to somebody that she once knew well. So she's both looking for Winnie and also a little bit scared to find her. Since Winnie isn't actually there, all Liza really has is this group of strangers she obviously doesn't like very much. A bias formed for some prejudicial reasons and also some valid ones. And then she has memory. She's got strangers and she's got memory. 

CH: It's hard to like somebody when the basis of your relationship is how they don't remember the important thing you remember the way you remember it. There's something primal about somebody denying your mind, in saying that's not how I remembered it. 

DR: No yeah, absolutely. 100%.

CH: Some of my favorite moments in the story are the ones you set during procedural cleaning—in the use of those small inherent objects that we find. Not just the shoebox with the cat, but also the pondering about the fast food cups. The use of object within that space as a part of the procedural that acts as a diving platform into memory. I think it does a great job of highlighting Liza's thought process, but more than that, Liza's sense for incongruity. Whenever something strikes her and we dive into memory, I notice a lot of it is because she recognizes something is off, and gets pulled completely into it. I feel that triggers a more visceral and backward-facing response. I think it creates its own network of definable logic that the reader can really follow across fragments. 

DR: I also think that Liza is determinedly not playing detective. In her mind Winnie wants her to stress about fitting the pieces together. Whether that's actually true or not, we'll never know, right? But she thinks Winnie wants her to sweat it, so she won't. Liza is being presented the pieces of this miniature detective story and refusing to engage with them on those terms.

CH: I can completely see denial of it. Winnie feels like an incredibly intentional character. That comparative mindset we were talking about before (one that sharply cuts into things like a writer's perspective) I can sense coming from Winnie, too. That one scene with the jeans was absolutely abominable, and it was based on a comparison that she wanted Liza to notice within herself. That’s mean as hell.

Then there's the allure of memory. I think nostalgia, while it is a comforting thing, is also dangerous. Especially when it comes to a story like Liza's, the more that I think she engages with it, the worse the dissonance becomes with the Wattersons and people around her. That reinforces even more dissonance. An entire negative feedback loop. So her choice to break that cycle helps to define her character for me as well.

Moving right along, we only have two questions left and—oh my god I just saw your note. Had I been spelling Tallahassee like that (spelled Talahassie in-document) the entire time?

DR: (Laughter)

CH: Oh my god. I think I have to hang up the (English Major) gloves. I’ve been doing that for months? That's crazy (laughter).

Okay. Putting aside my shame. I was hoping to discuss where a character focused narrative truly ends both for you as an author, and for the experience of the reader. Houseboat itself, as we’ve talked about, is somewhat procedural because of the project of de-cluttering and a self-contained visit to Tallahassee. But the story itself obviously exists more within Liza's recollections, her own unrequited complications, and her willingness to excise or not excise the ghosts of Winnie from her life (while physically digging through what remains of her being here).

The final image of the story, which the Chatterbox! Editors deeply adore, is of a snake coiling once around Liza's ankle before slithering away, and having Winnie pedantically prod at her psyche one final time in that dangerous passing. I’d love to know, has every version of Houseboat ended this way? On the Watterson property with the snake? Or has your exploration of Liza's character taken you to a number of weird, different beats that felt like an ending in their own right? Along with that,when does it feel right to drop the curtain on a story that will follow its main character forever after the page is finished?

DR: I'd said earlier that this story has changed quite a lot. Maybe it has changed more from start to finish than any story I've ever had published, or even every story I've ever written. Despite all of that, the ending has always been in that moment. The ending has strangely stayed the same throughout all of those different versions. This is honestly often the case for me. I've heard craft books wax nice and poetic about how we're supposed to mistrust endings when they show up too early. And I rarely enter a story with a sense of how it's going to end. But it does usually occur to me, maybe somewhere between 30% to 50% through the drafting. And I sort of have to set it aside, and evaluate later whether it's the right one. When I do change my endings, it’s usually done by hacking them off at the ankles. That I ended six lines too late and needed to delete that last paragraph. Easy in some ways, right? I think a ton about endings, too. I think of the authors who I really admire for their endings. Like Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho. The endings she writes, whether you're thinking of them as chapters or stories, are exceptional. They are like I feel like I could teach a class just based on the endings in that book alone.

CH: I feel like endings get a little neglected throughout my education in writing spaces. I’d love to take a class like that.

DR: Right? And you pair it with a revision workshop or something. One of my peeves as a teacher is that I would rarely have time to kind of do secondary workshops where we get to see how each student has chosen to revise. Another person I would bring up is Louise Erdrich, who gave an interview earlier this year in Electric Lit. She was giving some wonderfully brief answers to these interview questions. One of them was literally how do you know when you've arrived at an ending? And she just said, “a sense of inevitability”.

And that's it, isn't it? You know it when you see it. It feels like it can't be anything except this. That's how the snake felt for me. This story is part of a collection I'm trying to place, and a friend of mine very graciously read it for me earlier this year and pointed out that snakes actually show up a lot in my fiction. So it turned into something of an unintentional motif of the collection as well.

It’s so nice to get to put the snake in a spot of prominence (laughter).

CH: Having snakes be a motif that's very Louise Erdrich coded in itself, you know? 

DR: Oh yeah.

CH: Also I think when you publish as much as Louise Erdrich has, you can have two word answers in an interview. You unlock it as an author feature.

DR: I would love to attain that earned brevity one day.

CH: I love craft books, too. I love craft books the most when they don’t meander in the navel-gazy soup of esoteric writing processes. So much of what we do is practicing without precise intention until intuition forms. Whether that be for an ending or realizing when you need to kill some darlings—or even recognize that you use the word “world’ every other paragraph and vow to never use it again.

DR: Or you lean into that term and use it constantly (I do this with the word anyway).

CH: I like that both… worlds are possible there. Like it’s part of the trust that you formulate in yourself as a writer, especially when something really sticks with you. In the same way you formulate the engine of a story, I think recognizing when something creates the space for itself becomes an integral part of building that engine as well.

Do you have any other endings that come to mind where they simply feel right as they are when you encounter them?

DR: Part of my problem answering this is that I think I'm actually a pretty generous reader. I'm usually willing to go along with things. But I think about the end of the first Neapolitan novel. The context that surrounds the focus on the shoes has always stuck with me, like it feels perfectly built-up, and stays with you a long time after. Like a feat that feels nearly impossible from my vantage.

CH: No, yeah. I have the tendency to try to take too big of a swing during endings and then sometimes people leave notes like, Hey, reel it back, champ.

DR: Or hack it off at the ankles, which for the record I got from one of my MFA professors.

CH: Brutal.

DR: No, it's been incredibly helpful to me. Just the ability to look a little bit higher up in the word doc feels so powerfully clarifying to me. Suddenly I’m like I have no darlings. Get rid of them all.

CH: I've never had a darling once in my life (laughter). But I assume having the snake, that true endpoint, was probably a pretty liberating feeling in and of itself. You know what you're working towards, so the character can just exist between the sandwich of where we start and the known point of exclusion at the end.

I got one more for you before we call it quits here ourselves. If you haven't guessed it from our general vibe, we love J. And, as you know, all three of us on the editorial side (and also you as a writer) are involved very intensely in the American creative writing landscape. I’d bet my life savings that we’ve all met at least one guy who wants to break into the consumer market by making pieces that exclusively critique capitalism and consumerism.

DR: (laughter)

CH: And while that is never not a little bit stomach-turning, I also deeply appreciated the way that later in the work he gives this kind of goofy, simplified answer to the navigation of an intense emotion which helps to actually comfort Liza. There's something attached to that simplicity that makes me feel softer towards what is otherwise, a highly satirized character. My final question for you is in two parts. First, were there any artistic inspirations that shaped the absurdist work/character of J on the page? Second, what do you think your response tends to be when you're faced with a “bad piece of art” (whether that be oversimplified or trivial or surface-skimming or even weirdly harmful) when it's made by the hand of an artist that has an earnest vision or care for the work they’re doing?

DR: I have a just wonderfully convoluted series of answers for you.

CH: We’re ready for it.

DR: J's art was the first piece of this story that showed up for me, as in it was what I started writing when that piece was disconnected from all other pieces. The individual elements of this story showed up at different points. We had the writer Danielle Dutton visit our program earlier this year. And when our class got to talk to her, she said she needs just three things to fall into place before she knows she's ready to start writing a story.

That hasn't been my experience on the whole, but I do think it was my experience for Houseboat. First the art appears and I'm writing about the art and I have these little vignettes describing the art and what each piece is called. Then I have the houseboat itself, a kind of fascination with houseboats and this lifestyle I am not living and perhaps wish to live, except minus all the trash, right? And then I had Liza and Winnie and their relationship. Those three threads came together over time, and I started trying to braid them together.

But Jay's art in particular, I just think it exists. I certainly don't know the names of the artists because that's not usually how they share their work. For the most part, these are like actual images I've seen, you know, my older relatives share on

Said Together: Facebook (laugher).

DR: It's the internet version of trying to seem deep, right? And I think the question of earnestness is interesting in this context because I am very attracted to artistic earnestness—which can sometimes be a little hard in the lit fic world, which really likes to dance around things. There's always a kernel of earnestness, but boy, do you have to work to get it. I'm not really sure if I would call that type of art bad. Like the art itself obviously is, not the artist, and I can't identify intent across a screen because I don't know any people who are making it. I know people who are making things adjacent to it, but maybe not making that specific style. I think AI could make it now. It feels like a very known entity to me. That style was made to be shared on a version of Facebook that's been dead for a decade now.

I’d probably still call it bad art, though, even as I hesitate to use the term. There's something about believing that art can be taught in some way or another that is proportionately at odds with calling something bad. I'd hearken back again to knowing it when I see it. (You know, the evergreen phrase.) As a teacher I’m constantly working to demystify earnestness, goodness, badness—but I find it important things remain a little bit mystical. I'm not fully resistant to the mystical either.

To be frank, J is another thing that changed a lot in this story. When I initially brought drafts to workshop, the feedback said he was too much of a punchline right now, like he's too stupid. I feel like I've met a lot of Js. I do not hate Js. I appreciate Js and their role in the artistic ecosystem. And so maybe there’s something to his worldview and the comfort it grants Liza. Though much of his thinking I feel is something worth resisting.

CH: Sometimes I think I might be jealous of Jay. He has a true chalance, and he makes things unabashedly. He doesn’t feel like much of a punchline by the ending, either. I’m interested in the way the story navigates that difference. Or maybe I’m just intrigued by his delusion. Maybe I want to be delusional myself.

DR: I think it would help all of us to be a little bit more out of touch at times. That is to say—we all have to find ways of getting our earnest art out there.

CH: Maybe we should post this Chatterbox! Interview to a Facebook subgroup and see if that does the trick?

DR: There you go.