Issue 94: Carmen Maria Machado

THE WEIRD AND THE WONDERFUL are more than welcome in the works of Carmen Maria Machado. Her prose explores the messy, and often grave, corners of the human experience all while playing with the typical conventions of literature. Machado reinvents our relationship with narrative by speaking to the reader directly: inserting imagined research to introduce a classic, instructing the reader how to read and act while traversing a story, and even implicating the reader within her own history through use of the second person and the Choose Your Own Adventures trope. Johanna Thomas-Corr wrote of In the Dream House, “What makes Machado’s memoir so distinctive is not just its inventiveness but its unflinching honesty—about the indignities of abuse, about the vulnerability of growing up feeling fat . . . and also about bodily desires.”

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017), the graphic novel The Low Low Woods (2020), and the memoir In the Dream House (2019), which was awarded the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGTBQ Nonfiction. Machado has also been the recipient of a Shirley Jackson Award (2017), the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction (2018), the IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award (2018), a Judy Grahn Award (2020), and seven others. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, The American Reader, and many more. Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties was also a finalist for The National Book Award.

We had the pleasure of meeting with Carmen Maria Machado at Spokane’s Montvale Hotel in an arguably haunted conference room on April 12^th, 2024. We discussed everything from research and adaptation to expression and sexuality, all tied up in the exploration of horrors that are rooted as deeply in the real world as in our imaginations.

SHRAYA SINGH

I had my students read your memoir, and we discussed the shifting points of view, how the second person offers distance between the speaker and the author and how it might be connected to the distance you had from the dream house at the time of writing. Could you speak about your choice of point of view, how it worked with the story you were trying to tell, and how it may or may not have changed your way of approaching different sections of the memoir? Is this a point of view you feel comfortable with and plan on going back to?

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

The journey to that structure began by accident. It’s funny, POV is so important, but it’s something I slip into. I don’t think about it in a conscious way. After my first book was published, an interviewer said to me, “All of these stories are in first person,” and I said, “Really?” When I initially sold the memoir, it was about forty very rough pages. There was no research. They bought it because I’d already written a book for them. I had put it on the backburner because I was in the middle of touring my first book. When my editor finally said to me, “I want to talk about the fact that all of the pages you sent me are in second person,” I was like, “Are they? Good to know.” Clearly, I was not paying attention. My editor said, “You can totally write a memoir in second person, the only thing I want to make sure of is that you’re not writing it this way because you’re so traumatized that you’re keeping the material at arm’s length.” And I thought, okay that’s a super good point, let me think about it. I decided I was just going to put it into first. I read out loud when I write. I was reading the sections I was changing into first, and it just didn’t sound right, it kept hitting my ear wrong. Clearly, there’s something in here that wants to be in second person. And I wanted to do all this researched historical material; that would be weird in second person. I was also thinking about putting in contemporary sections of me writing the book, but that also felt weird.

The book that really clarified it for me was Justin Torres’ We the Animals, a novel I’m obsessed with. It’s in this plural first voice. It starts as we, and then at the end when the bad thing happens, the POV breaks down. It’s this rupture that exists in the marrow of the text. When I first read that book, I was sobbing hysterically. Something about that switch destroyed me. I began thinking about the memoir material, the past material, as this young self I’m looking at from a distance. The you is both a way of speaking to her and a way of implicating the reader. A good example is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” chapter where the you becomes muddled. I put the rest in first person. The you acts like a distancing, but not as in I don’t want it anywhere near me, more a way of intimately conversing with this past self who I can see super clearly. She can’t see me, but I can see her.

DYLAN COOPER

It’s interesting to think about point of view as something unconscious when that’s often the first thing we talk about in the workshop setting.

MACHADO

It’s happened before where I’ve been in a POV that isn’t working, and then I’ve switched and found it works better. But I just don’t think about POV much. I do it almost automatically. People have a lot of feelings about first versus third, and obviously second person is like the redheaded stepchild. People get very weird about second person, bent out of shape. Everyone’s like, don’t. Second person is fun. It’s an incredibly powerful and challenging mode. When it’s being well executed, it fires in this way that’s so interesting. But yeah, I don’t think about it a lot unless someone makes me think about it, and then I’m like, sigh, okay, fine. I’m trying to write this novel right now that’s rotating POVs.

SINGH

You mentioned that an early draft of your memoir didn’t have the history in it. One of our nonfiction professors talks about the process of turning a personal document into a public document in nonfiction. Your memoir started as personal and became public, and it is often used as a tool for queer theory for a lot of people who aren’t familiar with it. What was your journey from the memoir to the final thing?

 

MACHADO

It’s interesting describing it as queer theory. I’m not an academic even slightly; I studied photography in college. I tried a bunch of majors and was like, I just want to take photos, I don’t want to do anything else, I’m not an academic. I would die if I got a PhD, I’d never make it. I spent a lot of time writing that book teaching myself how to read, and I did a lot of asking friends who were academics how to interpret certain material.

I was teaching myself research as I was working on this book. Part of the project of the book was this thing that happened to me, and I’m trying to figure out contextually where I fit in this history of narratives of domestic violence and how it exists in the queer space. The answer is in other books, in documents, in research people have done, in academic work. There were all these moments doing this research where I was beginning to understand why we don’t talk about domestic violence in queer relationships the way we do in straight relationships, why we don’t think of women being capable of committing violence in the same way we think of men able to commit violence, why female queerness dissociates—like lesbians are this third gender, not men or women. I’m reading these essays—Saidiya Hartman’s essay from Silence of the Archives—and I’m like, this is exactly what I’m trying to articulate and now I have this academic framework. Could I have written a memoir that was just my personal experience? I could have, but the project is elevated by the context. It felt bigger and more interesting to think about those tree rings. That thing would be thin and wobbly if it was just my story, but that other material creates this mighty oak because it’s all working together. It got me over a lot of my fear about research.

For my first book, I did one piece of research. I looked up when trick-or-treating began in the United States. I was trying to make sure it fit into the time period. Five minutes of googling and I was like, okay, I’m fine. But now I’m working on this book that has a lot of historical fiction. Research can actually give you new material. It can give you all these interesting spaces that you can explore. The value of research in the space of creative nonfiction and how that relates to speculation and imagination is really interesting.

BLAIR JENNINGS

When editing Carmilla, how did you decide which sections to expand on via footnotes, and were there any sections you wished you had elaborated on?

MACHADO

It was by coincidence that I had agreed to do Carmilla while I was at this residency working on the memoir. Carmilla was a break from that pure, unmitigated depression and grief. Some days I was like, I am not working on the memoir today, I’m going to work on this Carmilla thing. I’ve done a lot of introductions for texts, but I had never been asked to edit anything before in quite that way where I have control over the body of the text itself. Because it’s in the public domain, I could do whatever I wanted. I first planned to just do a straight edit, but I was like, I’m not an academic and they know that, I’m not going to give you an academic kind of text. So I began thinking about the contradiction of the text in terms of it being this iconic lesbian vampire text that predates Dracula and is written by, ostensibly, a cis straight white Irishman, but also being like, this is about orgasms and there’s so much gay stuff in here! I was playing around with footnotes, adding a little bit of context. If I had to look something up, I’d think, that would be a good footnote to indicate to the reader something logistical. And then there were funny bits where I thought, that’s definitely an orgasm and it’ll draw the reader’s attention.

In the introduction, I was trying to reconcile questions about authorship. I’m sure you all are familiar with this idea of writing what you know or staying in your lane. So I wondered, what does it mean that this man wrote this novel? Did he know it had lesbians? Like, did he know? I ended up writing to the editor with this crazy idea where I wanted to write a fictional-nonfiction introduction to Carmilla where I invent a bunch of text and engage with it in this metatextual-fictional, artificial way. I asked, “Is that okay? Because that’s a different thing than you asked me to do.” They said, “We love it, yes, do it.” I was having a blast. If I hadn’t been working on this other really hard thing, maybe I would have done more footnotes or created something completely different in them, but it just wasn’t meant to be. But I do love it, and I’m really proud of it. It’s a great project. It’s funny because they are constantly going to reprints. That book sells and sells and sells, which is great for them. I love that.

JENNINGS

There are many red flags that should have alarmed Laura and her father about Carmilla’s vampiric nature, yet they always find excuses for her. As someone who has experienced an abusive relationship, would you say that the magnetism of a person blinds us to their red flags? And if so, how does one avoid falling victim to a beautiful monster if they cannot see straight?

MACHADO

My god, if I could answer that question, there would be no problems in this world. It would fix everything. I mean yes, I think so. But what’s maybe more relevant or interesting is that we are drawn to what we lack, or what we think we lack. It isn’t so much that Carmilla is just attractive, as I suppose she’s rendered in the text, but there’s a magnetism to her. It’s really common for first queer relationships to be abusive, which is to say that sometimes when you don’t know what you’re looking for and then you find it, it’s very exciting. You’re willing to overlook a lot of other stuff because you’re like, I’m where I want be or, I feel really good or, it feels really right. I think that’s common. I also think that people who are abusive are often looking for people who have that kind of vulnerability. I mean I’m not a psychologist, but I think Carmilla— door slowly creaks open

Is this a haunted hotel? It feels like it’s full of ghosts. I got here and thought, for sure people have died in here, I have no doubt. Anyway, it’s all young love, being young and dumb and horny and a little crazy. As a person who has been there very deeply, that makes sense; it feels like a first love story. And if you think of vampirism as a metaphor for predation or abuse, that all tracks together.

COOPER

You mentioned implicating the reader. A lot of your stories involve the reader in a very direct way, for example, addressing the reader in “The Husband Stitch” with instructions for how to read it. Any piece of writing can be viewed as a collaboration between reader and writer in some way, but your stories often seem to make that a lot more visible, especially stories like “The Husband Stitch” where the reader is not necessarily expected to fulfill the role you’ve given her. What role do you imagine for the reader while you’re writing?

MACHADO

This is a question authors answer really differently depending on where you are in your career and what kind of a writer you are. For example, people on the more commercial end of writing are often very active with their audiences because they’re writing in this very specific, transactional way, and so who the audience is and what the audience wants are relevant, economic questions.

I give different answers. One is I don’t think about the reader at all because you’ll go crazy if you do that; you’ll never be able to finish anything because you’ll constantly be anxious. And you can’t possibly know who your audience is. Even though I think I know who my audience is—young queer people—last year I was in Ireland, and I met an 85-year-old Irishman who had read everything I had ever published, every magazine, everything. He was like an OG Carmen Maria Machado fan. I was overjoyed. I’m so arrogant thinking I know who my audience is—I would have never picked this man out of a lineup to be the biggest fan.

On the other hand, when I was writing the memoir, I was thinking extremely actively about my audience. Who is this book for? The book is for everyone, literally—it’s dedicated, “If you need this book, it is for you”—but also, I was imagining an audience like me. But even before the book had come out, people were writing me. One woman wrote, “I’m not gay, I’m straight. But I’ve never seen anyone write about emotional abuse this way. Thank you so much for doing this.” And a man wrote, “I’m a straight man but I was abused by an ex-girlfriend, and I’ve never seen anyone write about a woman committing abuse in this way. Thank you.” My own preconceptions about my audience were completely blown apart. You can’t know because it’ll make you crazy, and you can’t write for everyone, so you have to just write for yourself. Ideally, you’re writing for history and across time. I have readers reading my books in languages I don’t speak. One day, I’m going to die. I hope it’s a long time from now, but I’ll be dead and people can still read my books in the way you can read a book from somebody who died two hundred years ago, and you’re still having your half of the conversation with that artist even though they’re long gone, even if they couldn’t possibly conceive of you as a person. The thing about reading is that you get to engage across these seemingly impossible barriers, including death.

The fun thing is getting to be kind of cheeky and directly reaching out of a text. It happens less now, but when my first book came out, people were like, I did the thing in “The Husband Stitch” where I moved the curtain and it was raining. That’s so funny. I mean, it’s a joke, or a metatextual audience gesture, whatever you want to call it. The “Choose Your Own Adventure” chapter in the memoir is another example of implicating the reader. I was actually initially thinking I wanted to gaslight the reader. Really early on I had written, “Gaslight the reader?” and circled it a bunch. I wanted to do something where I create for the reader the experience I went through. And the way I figured it out was the “Choose Your Own Adventure” where I got to yank the reader up by the nose, yell at them, make them go in circles, do all the things that felt appropriate to what I was trying to describe. It’s making explicit what’s implicit in the contract of writing, which I love.

SINGH

It’s clear you like working with fragmented narratives; I haven’t come across that so effectively done in the mainstream.

When you initially worked on the stories in Her Body and Other Parties, did you get pushback from mentors or peers? And if so, how did you overcome that and decide that this was the best form for your prose?

MACHADO

The fragmented text—narrative generated through smaller parts—is very old. I’m thinking about The Pillow Book [by Sei Shōnagon] from the 990s Heian period in Japan. And the Bible is essentially a large text with lots of little fragmented texts. That’s true of a lot of literature—it’s true of a lot of things, right? In terms of more contemporary stuff, in grad school I was really interested in the organizational principles of Singular Pleasures by Harry Matthews. The whole book is tiny little fragments of people masturbating, and they’re unconnected. They’re very short; you can read the whole book in less than an hour. The audacity of that is so interesting. Harry Matthews was the president of Oulipo, a French literary movement of constraint still very active in France. They’re into constraint-based writing and creating restrictions on the text itself, like a novel written with no letter e in both the French it was originally written in and the English [Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright]. And there’s a sequel called the Les Revenentes [by Georges Perec] where e is the only vowel that appears, and there’s no a, i, o, or u. Another book I read in grad school that I love was 253 by fantasy writer Geoff Ryman, initially written as a hyperlink novel. It took place on a train in the London underground, and you could click on different passengers and go wherever you wanted. He wrote and set the novel on the date his best friend told him he was dying of AIDS. The train is going to crash—the driver of the train is going to fall asleep—and it goes through two stops; people either stay on the train or they get off. There’s 253 passengers, each passenger gets 253 words, a little profile of each repeating the same events over and over and over. You’d think this would not work, but it works so well. It’s so devastating when you get to the end.

When I started submitting work in workshop, some people didn’t know what I was doing. My teachers generally knew. I did have a classmate say, “Can she do this?” And the teacher was like, “Yes.” And that was the end of the conversation. I submitted SVU [“Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU”] from my first book—the longer, surreal fanfic that has the Law and Order episodes. A classmate really hated it and walked out of the workshop. But most of the class loved it and my teacher was like, “Incredible, I love this, how can we make this better?” He began giving this incredible lecture about, he called it, “symphonic structure,” a plot graph, or an orchestra of individual parts that feed the others in different ways. It was a really useful way of framing it. Something about that structure makes it possible for something bigger to happen. When I wrote “Especially Heinous,” it was the longest thing I had written— eighty double-spaced pages or something. Because I had this artificial form I had imposed on the text, I had to keep going until I had filled in all the episodes. It was this way of generating friction or energy that allowed me into a piece of writing. Some people liked it and some people didn’t. People have been like, I loved your first book but I hated that story “Especially Heinous.” That’s weird to say, but okay. Either you like a more fragmented structure or you don’t. I love it, but people complain about it in reviews of other books. What was that thing that Joyce Carol Oates said on Twitter? I love Joyce Carol Oates.

BUCKINGHAM

That makes a lot of sense that you love her.

MACHADO

Oh, I love her, she’s great. She’s so chaotic and I’m amazed—I sort of love how chaotic she is in public. She was on Twitter, and she said something like “wan little husks.” That is the funniest thing. I think she was talking about auto fiction—she was really mad—it was so funny.

BUCKINGHAM

I don’t know if you’ve read Janet Kauffman’s book Characters on the Loose where each chapter is erotica about a single letter, from A to Z. I was thinking of that and “Inventory.”

MACHADO

This is ringing a bell—I have definitely heard of it. I was in a workshop and this guy had written a story that had sex in it. It was very misogynistic, which I said in the class, and he made some comment afterwards about how I clearly didn’t like sex in writing, and I took that really personally. I was like, I’m going to, out of sheer spite, write this story that is literally all sex scenes. And after writing it I was like, oh, I have to have plot, it can’t just be an endless sequence of sex scenes. And then came the thing of a pandemic and what it would mean if you were trying to come into yourself sexually, but you’re also shut off from other people and you can’t access that safely. Sex is the structure—a person’s sexual life or sexual landscape becomes the spine of the story, the backbone.

BUCKINGHAM

The first thing that struck me about your stories is how prominent their structures are. You’ve talked about point of view being psychological—perhaps structure is in part also? Where does structure fall in the process?

MACHADO

There are lots of ways into stories. A thing writers say a lot is an image strikes them or finds a character speaking to me and I followed them into the story. What is that thing Faulkner said about what led him to The Sound and the Fury—the image of a  little girl climbing the tree and of her muddy underwear? I do get images really clearly, though they’re not usually the thing that’ll lead me to the story. And I’m not a person who generally, a character is speaking to me. My ideas come from structure and genre. I’ll really want to write a demonic possession story.

Or a haunted house story. Or I really want to use a kickstarter as a structure. That’s the way that I get in. The Wayside School stories by Louis Sachar opened me to fragmented texts—tiny little chapters, all different characters, and tales of this building. It’s a thing I enjoyed as a young person, so it makes sense that my brain latched onto this way of telling stories—having these fun little conceits or premises. Structure or genre is a stepping stone to something bigger and more interesting. People get really fixated on categories—if it’s this way it has to look this way. No no no no no. You can do whatever you want, you’re the god of your own universe when it comes to writing.

 

ANNABELLE MORRILL

Stories from history, urban legends, and campfire stories seem to be important. In “Especially Heinous,” we have television, in “The Husband Stitch” campfire or folk stories, and even in Carmilla the insertion of letters or stories of other people. I was interested in the importance of pulling from or building on established stories.

MACHADO

Adaptation just makes sense to me. Once I’ve absorbed a text, I’m already interpreting it, I’m already adapting. The Little Mermaid was the first movie I ever saw in a theatre. I was three. I was obsessed with it. I still have the whole thing memorized from beginning to end. Someone from some birthday, probably when I was eight or nine, gave me a faux leatherbound classics series, and it included Hans Christen Anderson’s fairytale collection. But then reading The Little Mermaid I’m like, oh my God—it’s so violent and gruesome and awful and has a sad ending, and there are angels—what the hell is this? I was just beginning to understand: you can tell the same story over and over and it changes, and why it changes depends on—I don’t think I had this language at that age—but there’s an agenda. The way we interpret and retell stories, even Bible stories, and what stories get told, and what lessons we pull from them, is so interesting.

My father had a very traumatic childhood that he cannot talk about except when he would tell stories that were supposed to be inspiring but were horrifying. One time he told me how when he was a kid he was so good at listening—“One time your grandmother, my mother, told me to stay and watch TV and not move because she had to go to the store. While she was at the store, a fire started and I stayed right there.” Sorry, is the moral of the story that if a fire starts, I should just stay put and burn to death? What’s the point? And he was like, no, you should listen. I don’t think that story tells me the thing that you think it’s telling me.

Even at eleven I thought, this is wrong.

Through time, stories change. I read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening when I was a teenager, and I barely understood it. I reread it in my twenties and I was like, huh. And in my thirties I was weeping hysterically. Your perspective on life and art changes as you have experiences and you become a different person. The text itself is fixed, but you are constantly changing. Stories are repeated, told across time, across cultures. Stories have lessons or morals that won’t necessarily adapt. I think about “The Frog Prince,” the story of the girl who has a golden ball and throws it down the well. She wants her ball and the frog is like, “I’ll get it for you if I can come sit by your plate at dinner and sleep in your bed at night.” And she says, “Okay,” because she wants her ball. She goes back to the house and her dad says, “What’s the frog doing?” and she says, “I told him he could sit on my plate and also sleep in my bed because he got my golden ball.” And then she’s like, I’ve changed my mind, I don’t like this. And the dad says, “You’ve got to honor your promise.” This story ends up being told in many different ways across time, but reading it contemporarily, this is a super rapey story, this is a story about consent. But that was not necessarily the original framework. Law and Order: SVU is another great example, which was kind of a contemporary fairy tale. We have lots of these stories, they’re variations on a theme. The early Law and Order: SVU is really good—every episode in the first two seasons is a banger—and also incredibly problematic, and now the episodes are bad but they’re way less problematic. There’s an interesting inversion—they’re riffing and correcting themselves from past seasons. This is all to say, I think there’s something really exciting about those forms. One of the fun things of being a writer is that you get to absorb all these stories and then you also get to retell and recast them.

JENNINGS

Rewriting stories is part of your graphic novel The Low, Low Woods. It reads like heightened commentary on rape culture. The men in the mining town rape the women at will and then use the magical water to wipe the women’s memories, which in turn makes the women slowly lose their personhood. There is more nuance to the situation in our world, but I’ve experienced moments in my life where I think, oh my God, this is like Shudder-to-Think. Is there a danger in portraying this issue in such an extreme light, especially in young adult literature? And what are the benefits of doing so?

MACHADO

I don’t think of this book as young adult literature. I know it has teenage protagonists, but that’s definitely not what I was thinking about when I was writing it. But I think one of the purposes of art is making people see clearly what you see. If I’m writing something, I’m like, do you understand? Do you see it how I see it? I’m making explicit what’s implicit. The origin of this story was that I was having a lot of nightmares, and I had one that was exactly the opening of the book where I dreamt that I was in a movie theatre and I knew something was going to happen. If I opened my eyes, I would not remember, and I had to keep my eyes shut. Normally my dreams are not helpful, narratively speaking. I write them down, and when I wake up it’s absolute gibberish. But this was useful; it was so vivid and creepy, I wrote it down. That was years before I wrote this book. Then, when I was asked to pitch the project, it felt like it had a rich, narratively interesting space to start, so I began to build out this world and these characters. But also, things in this book that are real might feel really absurd. It’s based on a real place—Centralia, Pennsylvania—which has been on fire for decades and decades and decades. I call it Shudder-to-Think. It comes directly from accounts of Centralia—like the snow falling and melting into the paths of the coal, that’s real. How much of this is exaggerated? It’s less than you would think. There’re no deer women, no skinless men, those are invented. I wanted to tell a story that made sense in terms of how I was thinking about the world. One way you do that is to create these scenarios that are fictional but just barely.

When COVID started, this funny thing happened where I was one of a couple of writers who kept getting interviewed because I had written a pandemic story. We were asked, “How did you know?” I wrote “Inventory” eight years before COVID was a reality, and I was really just writing this story about what it means when your world’s coming apart and you shouldn’t be around other people but you can’t help being around other people, which is not me predicting anything. It was just understanding how people are. Obviously, pandemics are real, skinless men and deer women and magical water are not real, but it’s not actually that much of a leap.

COOPER

What you’re saying about asking a reader to see what you see, I wondered if you could speak a little bit about that. Your characters both resist and buy into social norms. For instance, a lot of your characters are sexually liberated or unapologetic in their sexuality. But in “The Old Women Who Were Skinned,” they were not free from ageism or conventional beauty standards. How much do you think about that?

MACHADO

“The Old Women Who Were Skinned” is a funny example because that one’s a very straightforward adaptation of a really horrifying Italian fairytale called “The Old Woman Who Was Skinned.” I just made two of them instead of one. The premise of it is exactly the same, about an old woman who wants to have sex. I wanted to try my hand at adapting it, but it’s a fairly straightforward adaptation. I’m more updating it.

But, generally speaking, I write, as you say, sexually liberated characters. I’m not interested in homophobia as a plot point, or prudishness as a plot point—that’s just not interesting to me. Some writers who write about queer people, that is interesting to them, so it exists in the text. I’d rather characters be going through other stuff. Once the book had come out, this really sweet person asked me a similar question and I was giving my answer and they said, “Yeah, sometimes you’re gay and a ghost appears.” Yeah! Sometimes you’re gay and a ghost appears. They don’t have to be related to each other. We don’t interrogate a straight character and assume it’s related to them seeing ghosts, so why would we assume this for a gay character? I want it to be coincidental. I want it to just be the reality, and I don’t want judgement to come into it because it truly is not interesting to me. Writing the memoir, I had to think a lot about homophobia in the world and my own pain. But for fiction, it feels like a baseline question—not that it’s not real or important, but it’s just not the thing I want to be exploring in my own art. I’m more curious about power and desire than the politics of sex.

SINGH

Graphic novels are very different from literary prose, so how did you adjust your normal writing style while working on The Low, Low Woods? And what did you enjoy about working in a different medium?

MACHADO

It is really different. When DC asked me to write it, I’d never written a comic. The cool thing about writing and also having success is people will reach out to you and be like, do you want to try this? They said, “We’ll walk you through it, we’ll give you an artist, we’ll teach you how these scripts are written.” The script is a hybrid. It’s kind of prose-y, kind of screenplay-y. You basically describe the panels to the artist—panel one, one-third of the page, upper left, these characters. You’re describing it like you would a screenplay, but in panels. But this form allows things that would be harder in a screenplay. For example, narrations. You can, of course, have voice-over in a film, but here it’s hard to pull it off. I’m actually working on proper screenplays right now, and having my narrative voice taken away from me is very specifically a weird thing because I’m not able to get into that comfortable first person voice I know so well.  It was a learning curve. I had to learn really basic stuff that might seem obvious. For example, one time in the book where the two friends are on a bike and they’re just chatting and chatting and chatting for multiple panels, the editor said, “Okay, so, totally you can have this, but you have to say in the description how these panels differ because you can’t just have nine panels where they’re on a bike just with different backgrounds and they’re talking. That’s boring. Think of the lens of a camera. Are we close to their faces? Are we far away? Are we above them? Are we behind some trees, which implies someone is watching them? Where is the movement of the eye, of the camera, of the image?” Another thing they had to tell me was if you want a surprise, like a monster jumping out or something, then you have to put it on the odd pages because your eye always shoots to the right. You want to turn the page and then there’s a thing that’s startling. I never in a million years would have guessed that, but it makes total sense—it’s a visual medium. Once I began thinking about it in that way, it became easier to think about how panels are laid out and what it means to have one big page.

Describing characters and then getting pictures of them back is the craziest thing in the entire world. The artist, Dani, who is amazing, would send me character drawings of their outfits and their general vibe. And I was like, yeah, that’s the character I wrote. Describing the town or location, the art was what I was imagining, which, as a person who could not draw to save her life, is truly magical.

SINGH

You said you don’t write a lot of place-based things, but In the Dream House and The Low, Low Woods feel very place-based. You also establish the idea that place is inherently linked with abuse. Place and setting play a very active role in heightening the narrative tension. What are some authors or books that climatized you to the importance of place in a story, and how much can place be a character of its own?

MACHADO

Place can absolutely be a character. Technically “Inventory” is set in a bunch of places because she’s moving across the country. So it’s an American story. “The Resident” is set in Pennsylvania, though I deliberately anonymize it—I said the P mountains because it’s the Pocono Mountains, but I wanted it to be divorced. It’s funny because the initial title for In the Dream House was House in Indiana. And people started mentioning it in my bio. Or when I would do events, everyone was like, oh, are you from Indiana? I’m from Indiana. Do you have thoughts on Indiana? What’re your thoughts about Indiana? I don’t want to talk about Indiana, stop. Stop it. Just stop asking me. People can get very fixated on location in this way that can be distracting.  I love getting to write Pennsylvania gothic fiction because Centralia loomed large in my imagination as a young person from Pennsylvania. The cool kids would go and photograph Centralia. I didn’t go because I was not a cool kid. I was too afraid to skip school. The phenomenon of Centralia is international. All over China, whole cities, environmental disaster zones, have been evacuated because of underground fires in coal mines. This exact thing has happened all over. Centralia, for some reason, is the well-known one, at least in the US. So even though it’s set in Pennsylvania and uses some Pennsylvania details, it’s also a story about what it means to be in an environmental disaster space where forces at work in the government and the corporations are completely out of your control, and your safety and your health is forfeit for all kinds of reasons like class and race and gender and sexuality. The very land you live on, the space you exist in, is forfeit.

So for me it doesn’t need to be specific. I’ve lived in a lot of places—Pennsylvania, DC, California, the Midwest, all over the place—and maybe that’s part of it. “Eight Bites” is set in Provincetown in the winter, but I don’t name it on purpose. A tourist location, a beach town, in the dead of winter emptied out for the season is such a creepy, weird thing. I was there for a few days and it was so eerie, which I basically described, but it wasn’t important that people knew it was Provincetown. That’s actually less interesting. I don’t want people to be distracted or territorial about a space when it’s not the point or it’s not that interesting. Setting is important, but setting and place are not the same thing. Setting should be vivid. Setting is informed by psychology, by trauma. Setting is informed by point of view. It’s more important to know what the space is and what it means as opposed to literally where it is. We could walk into the exact same place, but if I had a really awful event happen there and you have zero context for it, you would be like, this is just a random place, and I would be hysterically sobbing—oh God, I can’t be here. Settings have meaning because we give them meaning. That’s what a ghost is. It’s this intersection of past and present in a location, in a space.

MORRILL

Have you always gravitated toward horror, or is that something you came to later?

MACHADO

I write in a lot of different genres, but horror feels like the one that’s most consistent, the most interesting, that I return to over and over. It’s funny, I was a huge scaredy cat as a kid. Totally terrified. I read so many books I should not have read, and then I would be up all night, hysterical, beside myself, with nightmares. My mother would treat my books like pornography— Goosebumps—she would be like, “What is that?” “My friend let me borrow it!” “No! I’m taking this away!” And I would get more of them. Why on Earth would a terribly frightened, deeply anxious child return to these anxiety-inducing texts over and over? I think it’s the same reason we get on a rollercoaster, which is a way of having an emotional experience in a safe and controlled environment. When you read a novel, nothing’s happening, you’re just reading a book. You’re not actually in danger of any kind. People really overstate danger—it’s just a book, you can close it if you have to. It’s this way of having an experience or an encounter with yourself or something else that can feel devastating and happy and exciting and terrifying and all these different things, but you have control over it. I find horror very comforting. I watch so many horror movies. When I was writing the memoir, I was alone in the woods doing this residency, and I watched endless horror every night because it was so relaxing. It was all I wanted to do. It’s a genre that can be really subversive and offers ways to think about yourself and your own mind. I’ve also written sci-fi. I’ve written all kinds of stuff. I don’t feel hemmed in by genre. But horror feels closest to what I’m doing. It makes the most sense to me, feels the most consistently true. It’s the genre I read the most. People have lots of strong feelings about horror. It’s controversial. But it’s also a genre that offers really good insights into ourselves and other people because it’s a fearless genre that has the capacity for such excess and energy.

I did an event with Gretchen Felker-Martin recently, in the last couple years, and we talked about how we both get asked, “The world is so awful, why would you write more awful things?” That’s assuming the whole point of the book is to just make other people experience awful things, as if we were complete sadists, which is not true. All the horror writers I know are very nice, well-adjusted people, which is funny. I don’t know if you’re aware of this meme about how Hayao Miyazaki, who writes gorgeous, life-affirming films, is this grouchy, cynical misanthrope. And then Junji Ito—gruesome, gruesome horror manga author who writes truly mind-bending, can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head stuff—is the most cheerful man alive.

COOPER

It seems like there’s a sense of playfulness or joyfulness in the writing.

MACHADO

Yeah, I think so. It makes me feel like I’m in my element. And it’s funny because again, as a kid I was so afraid. My mom used to tell a story about how, when I was probably five, she left me with my father to go run some errands. When she came home, my father was asleep in his chair and I was watching Poltergeist, the original. For years, I was plagued by nightmares and images, which I later learned were from Poltergeist, but I was so young I didn’t remember where the images came from. In my twenties, I was like, oh, this is actually very healing to know this is where this all came from—they weren’t organically from my brain. It’s funny how that person grew up being so interested in these edges and these spaces, but it also makes sense.

SINGH

I read your short story collection after reading you memoir and found a lot of similarities between scenes and characters. I guess it’s safe to say that your identity plays a significant role in your work and that your fiction is autofiction a lot of the time. Where do you find yourself on the autofiction scale, and how do you feel that informs your writing and revision process?

MACHADO

I have asked friends to explain autofiction to me so many times. I do have a story, “The Tour.” It’s going to be published in my new book, but it was published in a magazine two falls ago. It’s fiction. The premise is that an author publishes a memoir about a bad relationship; then, when she’s touring the story, there’s this celestial event that disrupts spacetime, and she becomes a different person who can slip into different timelines. It’s her own life, but it’s different realities that normally you would have no access to. When I read it to a friend of mine he was like, “Oh, you’re into autofiction.” And I was like, “What does that mean?” And he said, “Well, the story is obviously designed to create parallels between you and the protagonist. She’s not called Carmen, but she’s on tour.” It’s meant to muddle how close this character is to me. It’s meant to be ambiguous, which is funny because there’s this part of the story where she goes off on this rant at a literary event: “I hate doing tours, I hate reading to people, I hate all these things,” and everyone’s always like, do you really feel that way? No, I actually don’t. That’s a moment where the character, not me, is speaking for herself, even though I’ve created this deliberately muddled thing. It’s a story that’s supposed to hold all my feelings about what it felt like to tour the memoir, which was really intense and hard. It’s sort of a sequel to the memoir, but it’s a story with mostly fictional gestures, while also implicating me, the writer, as the character of the story. In that way, the story is autofiction.

What autofiction is and what it means I could not tell you. I don’t fully understand it myself. I write autobiographical material in my stories, but all writers do that and have forever. In the last few years there have been all of these high-profile—I don’t even want to call them scales because scales give them too much energy—discourses? God forbid—about what it means to write stories that either include material about you as the author or other people you know. These discourses have gone deeply off the rails in a way that disturbs and upsets me because we’ve always written this way. We’ve always, always, always integrated ourselves and other people into our fiction. And people talk about it like it’s this crazy weird thing. How dare you include your mother or your friend or your ex in your short story. Literally, that’s just how we do it. It’s always been that way. If you’re doing your job correctly, most people won’t know.

When I put out “The Resident,” they’re like, who are the people she’s talking about? What residency is she talking about? The only thing that I pulled from real life is that I did go to girl scout camp, I did have a fellow troop member sleepwalk into the woods in the middle of the night, and we woke up because she was screaming and the leaders had to go find her. That is all that’s in there from my life. “The Resident” is invented. None of the characters are based on anybody I know. In fact, I wrote it before I had gone to a residency. There’s way more from my life in the Law and Order story and that’s a way weirder story. It’s way more divorced from reality. So unless you know me or I tell you, you just don’t know.

By design, these texts are a container that can hold our experiences or my experiences, they can hold stories I’ve heard in my life, they can hold what-if scenarios. In my new book that I’m working on, the character has this incredibly humiliating, embarrassing thing happen to her, and at the very end, she punches the face of the person who did this to her, which I did not do. It’s literally me, word for word what happened, and I imagined a different outcome where, instead of being humiliated and running away, this person takes control in a very violent and direct way. It can be an experience that’s important to you but happened to somebody else. It can be something that you heard once. That’s the thing about fiction, it has this capacity. And if you’re doing your job correctly, if you’re writing with the same energy across the board, it’s going to be hard for a reader to tell unless they know you. But using autobiographical material doesn’t make it autofiction, that’s just fiction. It’s how fiction gets written.

Years ago, there was controversy over “Cat Person”—not the story itself, but the essay written afterward, and that discourse made me completely insane. I was so frustrated by how people were like, how dare she write a story about a person she knows. We always have done this, this is what we do all the time, and to act like this is a crazy weird thing—the weird thing is, that story went viral. Nothing else happening here is weird, it’s all very normal. I remember saying at an event that I’m actually worried about a generation of young writers who are hearing this story and thinking they’re not allowed to write about stuff they’ve heard about or people they’ve met. That actually worries me way worse than anything else relating to that story.  I think that autofiction is a very specific thing; it’s trying deliberately to blur the line between this question of the author and the subject—because normally you cannot assume the “I” in a piece is the author. You can never make that assumption. The author can be whoever. “Who Is the Bad Art Friend” was another lit-world controversy that bubbled up over COVID about who was writing about whom. Do you guys know what I’m talking about? Don’t look it up, just don’t bother, it’s so stressful, it’ll make your eyes bleed. No one’s nice in this story. Everyone’s mean. It’s a weird social energy, but also, we are allowed to write about whatever it is. It might cause problems for us, it might create a personal conflict, it might be done incorrectly, but you do have space, and I want to always encourage, in my capacity as a teacher or a mentor, room—there’s infinite space for you as a writer. I don’t like when people feel shut down in these ways. It feels unhelpful.

BUCKINGHAM

It’s sort of the opposite of “you can’t write about people who aren’t like you,” which is another message that gets overstated.

MACHADO

It’s related. You can write about whatever you want. You can do it badly. You can fuck it up, and then you’ve written something that’s racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever, and that’s a problem you’ve got to deal with, and there are ways to avoid that. But to suggest that we are only allowed to write about people who look like us, only using our own personal experiences, or stuff that is completely invented—it’s counterintuitive. That’s just not how anyone has ever done this for all of time, and it’s really weird that in the last five years we’ve somehow reimagined this weird moral code around fiction. I worry that it creates this space for writers where they can’t be audacious. I’m a human vacuum. When I’m in the world, I’m plucking little details from everywhere. That’s what I do, and it’s the only way I know how to do it. I don’t know how anyone else does anything different.

SINGH

I’m so glad you said we always have autobiographical things in fiction because a poet friend said, “I could never write fiction, that’s all made up.” I was like, what?

MACHADO

Oh, I hate that. Nobody invents every single thing that happens in their brain. That’s just not how the brain works.

COOPER

We’ve received advice as students about sex functioning in a literary way—

MACHADO

Oh, no. I dread to know what you’ve been learning.

COOPER

I don’t know that it needs a literary meaning. What are your thoughts on that?

MACHADO

I’m concerned, as a teacher, about how people talk about sex in fiction, in writing, in art in general. There’s not enough sex in any art being made right now. Our media landscape is so prudish, especially in the US. It’s actually maddening. American culture is so historically prudish the way we talk about sex in general, but also how it functions in art. It has become very dramatic in the last couple of years. The thing that concerns me is the question, “Is it necessary? If it’s not necessary for the plot then why would you put it in there?” Because we’re human beings, most people enjoy sex, sex can be an interesting experience, it can be a wonderful experience, it can be a terrifying and terrible experience, it’s part of the fullness of the human condition. Why would you not? It’d be like saying, do you need to put a meal scene in there? Why are they eating? Take it out if we don’t need it. Sometimes you just want somebody to eat a plate of spaghetti, and it’s okay for them to eat the plate of spaghetti. And to think that there’s something distinct between these is so silly. They’re just different pleasures of the body and of the experience of being alive and being a person. You can say, I don’t want to write that, or I don’t want to read that, or I don’t want to do that, and that’s fine. But to talk about it as if it’s some plague that has to be eradicated or we can put these conditions on—like, if it’s necessary to the plot then fine, but if it’s not then take it out—is just the most— why are texts only allowed to have necessary content? It’s not a fucking tweet, it’s a piece of art, it’s a book, it’s a story, it’s a poem, it’s meant to prick a human consciousness, it’s meant to alter the way that we see things, it’s meant to connect us to time and space, to a human being. The cold, hard utility, the necessity for plot, it doesn’t mean anything. That’s the most irrelevant question I’ve ever heard in my life. I see it more and more now as a teacher in conversations and discourses. Why? I had to get off Twitter. It just stresses me out. I’m sure part of it has to do with COVID and that people’s relationships with their bodies and with other people and dating got really fucked up because of this weird, wild thing that happened to all of us that got to everybody’s mental health and everyone’s ability to be in the world.

Perverts make the best art. I think that, I genuinely do. People will always come for the most interesting stuff first, and that’s what they’re doing. People get really fixated on moralistic questions around sex. You’re no different than the homophobes who want to ban books in Florida, you’re just coming from a different political angle. But this articulation of a text being tainted in some irrevocable way because it has a sex scene that you don’t like or a sex scene whose moral intentions are ambiguous—I’m watching this conversation unfold in a way that makes me feel removed. Some of my favorite books are books where sex is the central focus. I love Nicholson Baker. He writes with such a joy and interest in sex and bodies and people’s experiences with pleasure, it’s gorgeous—Vox and The Fermata and House of Holes. He’s like, yes, this is a perfectly valid subject for a piece of art, the same way that any other thing would be.

People seek to restrict either explicitly through exterior forces or implicitly in terms of moralistic scolding, what belongs in fiction or doesn’t. Sex is a good way to make plot happen because it can be messy and interesting and revolutionary, and you can have epiphanies, you can destroy your life. I had a teacher once say to me, give your characters a roll in the hay, they worked hard, they deserve it. I love the idea of letting characters be human beings.