This week’s story, “Annunciation,” takes place primarily in Northern California. How important to the story is the setting?
I’ve lived in Northern California twice in my life, both times in an attempt to change myself radically. One summer in college, I dropped everything, flew out to San Francisco, lived in a youth hostel in Chinatown, and worked at the Macy’s in Union Square. I wanted to believe that I was considering not going back to college, but I was too much of a good student to drop out, and anyway found myself too chilly and lonely by the end of the summer to stay. The second time was after graduation, and my now husband and I lived in a converted pool house not unlike the one in the story, sharing the tiny space with a rescue Shar Pei that had such severe separation anxiety, he twice jumped through closed windows and we had to follow a trail of blood to get him back. I had so much energy then that I had to expend it by training for marathons up in the hills. I associate the place with a high emotional pitch and an extreme feeling of freedom, which is to say that the setting is the story to me.
When the narrator first sees the cottage—or pool house—that Griselda is renting, it seems to her like a place out of a fairy tale. And Griselda herself seems like a character out of one. Do you want us to be thinking about fairy tales as we’re reading?
I do want the reader to be thinking about fairy tales. In some ways, “Annunciation” hinges on the plausibility of storytelling, and, in fairy-tale logic, the implausible is part of the weave of reality. Also, the explicit end point of fairy tales is happiness, and this is a story that considers happiness. I had tried to write different parts of this story in different ways for a decade. Then, on Twitter, the writer Ben Percy and I were drawn into a conversation about how short stories rarely operate in the realm of happiness—though obviously they contain lightness, beauty, joy, humor, there are only a few, very rare, “happy” short stories—and a bet sprang up between us as to who could write a “happy” story first. “Annunciation” is not necessarily a “happy” story, but it is a story about happiness, which I call close enough. I win! Ben, you don’t need to send a trophy; a bottle of bourbon will do.
I also have to say that I couldn’t have written this story if there hadn’t been a tiny window, in May and June of 2021, when it seemed that the pandemic was letting up, and if, during that time, the unimaginable gift of a stay at Civitella Ranieri, a residency program in Umbria for international artists, hadn’t fallen on my head, all roses and sunshine and ceramic rooster pitchers of wine. It felt like waking up to morning light after an extended nightmare. I ran a lot in those Umbrian hills, which reminded me of running in the hills of Northern California. It was there that my friend the brilliant poet Kaveh Akbar said in passing the line about grace that I paraphrase at the end of this story, which he kindly gave permission to do. Through that line he gave the story the structure that I’d been trying to find all along.
In “Annunciation,” the narrator has a temp job processing children’s files for a social-services agency, and she discovers that one of her colleagues has a violent ex-partner who tried to kill her. Several of your recent stories, such as “The Wind,” have been concerned with domestic violence. Why did you want to return to the subject in this story?
If fiction writers knew clearly why we return to the things that obsess us, we probably wouldn’t have to write our fiction. I can only analyze in retrospect, and come up with probable explanations. Maybe it’s of significance that my recent stories that touch on domestic violence were finished during the pandemic, which was not only quite dark globally, obviously, but also pretty claustrophobic, personally. There was a six-month span in 2020 when I was alone in the woods with my two sons, having to be the sole parent and teacher and tech support and nurse and chef and a host of other things, few of which I felt particularly good at or relished doing. Domesticity felt extraordinarily heavy. At the same time, I knew that I had it relatively easy, that a lot of people were trapped in far worse ways, and there was a feeling of compounded collective anxiety, empathetic anxiety, that felt protean and diffuse because the scale of the suffering was so vast, almost unthinkably so, beyond the tight confines of our own little domestic spheres. I probably won’t write any kind of direct COVID-19 narrative, but of course the time will reverberate in indirect ways, and clearly it has through the subject matter here.
Griselda tells the narrator two things that she has never forgotten. One is an observation, from Nietzsche, that we have art so as not to die of the truth; the other, that in every human there is both a god and an animal wrestling unto death, she can find nowhere else. Is that something you feel in all your characters?
I feel this in all human beings, not just in my characters. I think that true evil probably does exist, but it’s extraordinarily rare, and that most evil effects come from impulse, selfishness, mixed emotions, greed, unkindness, momentary lapses in judgment, mistakes, refusal to fully engage, all the ways in which the animal body asserts itself over more pragmatic reason. This seems more and more true the older I get. This also means that, the older I get, the more able I am to forgive others for animal lapses, and sometimes even to forgive my own younger self for them, as well.
