A Full Range of Emotions: Cara Blue Adams Interviewed

ML What was the process of writing the stories like?

CBAI wrote them over many years, usually one at a time. The oldest story is from the very first fiction workshop I ever took in college. It started out as a different story. It had the same first two paragraphs and then the story went elsewhere. My professor circled those first two paragraphs and said, Good, and then gently told me that the rest wasn't necessary.

ML That's good advice, though. 

CBA It was great advice, and being young and not too attached to what I'd written, I just lopped off the rest of the story and wrote a different story with those first two paragraphs that felt more urgent and true. The most recent story was written many years later. After I put the stories together and did work to link them, I started to see where there were gaps that I wanted to fill in, as opposed to gaps that felt productive. 

Initially, I did not imagine the stories as being linked by character. I wrote and published something like twenty stories before I actually made a collection. That’s a little strange, maybe, but I liked that private moment in a writer's life when you're creating something on your own without other voices. That space was rare and special, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about what I wanted to make before giving a book to readers.

When I put some of the stories I most wanted in the collection together and showed that manuscript to a few readers, two said it would be really interesting if some of the characters who seemed similar perhaps became the same. I thought it would be an interesting aesthetic challenge, so I did some revision work as an experiment to see what possibilities that opened up. I got excited and new stories with those characters started to suggest themselves to me.

ML For a collection that dwells on loss and longing, it leaves Kate in a moment of happiness, looking forward optimistically towards a new beginning. People have become so skeptical about the idea of a happy ending that this felt radical to me. Why did it feel important to give her a hopeful ending?

CBA It also felt subversive! Happy endings are difficult to do well, and there is a sort of orthodoxy that they are by necessity less complex or less real than a different kind of ending. I don't think that's true, and that story meditates on the idea that any story can be happy or sad depending upon where you decide to end it. So hopefully there's an idea built in that it's not that her life will be just terrific from this point forward, though we are leaving her in a happier, more hopeful moment. To depict a life accurately means also to depict moments of optimism, moments of joy and moments of happiness. The collection asks a lot of the reader in terms of staying with Kate through some very difficult moments in her life and so it felt right to me to give that to her and give that to the reader as a resting place at the end. Olive Kitteridge, which is a book I really love, ends in a similar manner.

ML When I was thinking about your choice to end the collection that way, I wondered if it was influenced by thinking about Kate's journey and particularly her background. I think there can be an expectation that working-class stories must always be stories of struggle and turmoil, but as you're saying, joy, hope, and optimism are part of human experience. 

CBA There can be a tendency to reduce working-class characters to either an easy sentimentality, or to write a story solely of struggle, and not allow characters who live through poverty or violence or trauma to have a full range of emotions and of human experiences. Also, to not allow those characters to be intelligent, to love to read, to love art. Something that I loved about Sara Majka's collection Cities I've Never Lived In is that she does allow her characters to both experience poverty and to be engaged with art and literature and the life of the mind. I was very much thinking about the ways that I'd seen characters depicted in the past that felt not entirely true to me, and how to write into that material in a way that would be a little bit more accurate or honest. 

ML This feeds back to what you were saying before about the idea that the happy ending is the most simplified version of events. In your collection, I feel like the happier ending is the harder choice. There’s a sense that Kate is choosing to be optimistic where she could otherwise choose not to be, and I found that really interesting. So much pathos is generated reading the stories in order. How did you approach structuring the collection? 

CBA The book moves largely chronologically but not entirely, and so structure was something that required a fair bit of thought and experimentation. That’s something that I love about the linked collection: it offers the flexibility to treat the stories as individual stories, but also to weave them together and to play with time in a way that you might in a novel. I was thinking of some of these stories as functioning almost like backstory.

ML It mirrored a real relationship in that I felt like we got to deeper wounds as we spent more time with the characters. There was this slow peeling back of the layers. 

CBA I love that articulation of the book’s movement. 

ML One of the things that I loved about the collection is how you capture those years of one’s mid-twenties that can feel very lost, when life can feel like it's just unspooling and losing its trajectory. What was compelling to you about exploring those less familiar, less obvious turning points?

CBA I wanted to defamiliarize the world throughout the stories, and one way to do that, I think, is to examine the moments that aren't the ones that we might all scrutinize. Leopoldine Core is a writer who I think does that really well. So many of the important times in my life have had that feeling of in-between, where something is being made but I don't know what it is yet. I suspect that life continues to do that. I imagine that in your fifties or seventies life continues to surprise you and require you to move through an unknown territory and create something new 

ML One of the most important through lines in the book is Kate's own artistic development. In the story “Vision,” we see her struggling with writer's block while she's away on an artist residency. Why did it feel important to show that frustration and doubt that is so much of a part of the creative process? 

CBA Well, maybe because I've experienced it! (laughter) For me, so much of the difficulty of writing is sitting through those moments when you don't feel that you have anything to say, or you’re unable to say it the way that you want to. Those silences or moments of frustration can be very uncomfortable and difficult. In “Vision” she’s asking herself, should I walk away from this? Just like she decides to stay in a relationship that does involve a challenge to her way of being, she decides to stay with this process of attempting to write even through moments of despair. I guess that just feels like life to me. Anything worth creating, worth doing, does involve difficulty, does involve those moments of wondering if you should walk away. I suppose that's one reason I was drawn to writing about it.

ML There's such interesting contrast in that story, too, between Kate and the older painter she meets at the residency, who is losing his sight but has this kind of "blind" confidence in his ability to make art. 

CBA Yes, and even though he can seem a little too focused on himself, he does want to gently encourage her to move forward. He says to her, “For the abstract expressionists, there were two things: action and hesitation. And only one was worth something.” 

ML What influence has visual art, or other art forms, had on your work?

CBA I can't perhaps say in any simple way, but I think the act of looking is really crucial. I studied art history and studio art in college and one of the assignments we had was to draw a sheet that was tacked up on the wall and to try to render it realistically. It was such an intense experience, although it doesn't sound like it would be, but I came to know that sheet really well! (laughter) I remember spending fifteen hours in the studio looking at every fold and every shadow, trying to bring that sheet to life. It was this constant process of going back and forth between the paper and the object in the world and trying to create a correspondence. 

As a writer, I am trying to do something similar—create a correspondence between the world as I know it, which doesn't mean that it's factually accurate necessarily, but that the nature of the world is captured accurately. Visual art also gives us a chance to see the world through someone else's eyes in a way that isn't linguistic, which can be helpful because language, of course, is a mediating force. It can be hard to access the part of the brain that doesn't use language to think or experience, and so the visual arts give me a way of re-understanding language as a medium. 

I also love to read poets. I love the way that the musicality and the texture of language can be so much a presence in a poem. Circling back to an earlier question, I'm thinking of a Mark Doty poem about grief. It meditates on a whale who is stuck in a harbor, but it ends on a moment of joy. The final lines are, “What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?” 

MLThat really captures what we were talking about with the ending of your book—that joy is not necessarily the easy way out of a story. Joy isn’t one-dimensional, it often encompasses grief and loss as well. To embrace something can sometimes mean turning away from something else. I think we see that in this collection. 

CBA Musicians and painters, I think, have a little bit more leeway to explore an emotion like joy. Agnes Martin says in an interview that she draws a line and everything above the line is happiness and joy and friendship, and everything below is despair. She exists above the line and that's what she wants her paintings to do, too, and they are complex and endlessly enigmatic and rewarding to spend time with.

ML We talked about Munro before. Who were your other guides or inspirations when you were working on this collection? 

CBA Because I wrote the book over so many years, there were lots of very different inspirations. Certainly Elizabeth Strout. Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife, a really complex, beautiful memoir-in-essays—many of which were first published in the The New Yorker—about his relationship with his mother, who was creative and a free spirit, and who also had a drinking problem. But it’s also about his life as a writer in New York. Later he published a collection of stories, The Emerald Light in the Air. Some of those stories are strictly realist, some are a little fantastical, more in the vein of his novels. I studied those stories, too: as is the case with his essays, they are beautifully structured and reveal character in sophisticated and unexpected ways. That’s true, too, of Amy Hempel’s stories, and Ann Beattie’s, and Edward P. Jones’s, and another inspiration, Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son. 

ML Such a great collection. 

CBA I actually hated it at first. (laughter) I didn't understand what he was doing. Johnson’s stories can be very unsettling, and they're very disjunctive as well—formally challenging. And then I came to see the humor and tenderness and beauty in the stories. What was your experience of reading him? 

ML That collection has a really special place in my heart. And I think that he is a writer who, as we've been talking about, turns towards joy and embraces moments of tenderness and beauty in the most surprising ways. He’s interested in transformation, too. 

CBA Structurally, my own stories are fairly different but a lot of those interests are shared. In Jesus’s Son, the narrator, Fuckhead, is a guy in the 1970s drinking and doing drugs in the Midwest; in a way, I think his life was a bit like my father's life at the time, though he lived in the Northeast. The father in my book is modeled on my father and some of his friends, the men I grew up around.  I came to think of the narrator of my book as being a little bit like if Johnson’s narrator had had a daughter and she’d gone on to lead a different kind of life. 

ML I think that there’s an assumption that if your parents have led a somewhat bohemian, chaotic life, that you will also live in a bohemian, chaotic life. In my very personal experience, it’s often a very conscious choice to do the opposite. 

CBA If you live in that chaos as a child especially, you experience the drawbacks. It makes sense that it leaves a mark, but that shows up in multivalent ways. You might seek out order and stability as a result, but perhaps also still be drawn to the potential for joy and being startled.

ML Your book has such stunning composure on a sentence level. Kate describes coming to writing as a way to “write myself out of rage I didn’t want or understand.” This is a surprising line, I think, because the stories feel so emotionally precise—which is not what I associate with rage. Can you talk about that line, and if you see your own writing as being driven by a particular emotional engine? 

CBA I’m so glad you bring up that line! That line initially belonged to a story that I wrote years earlier. As I was putting together the collection, I read it over and thought, Oh, I don't want that story in the book, but I do want that line. I think that what readers hopefully experience as a certain poise or composure on the surface of the stories reflects the way the character is attempting to take whatever rage and capacity for chaos or violence she has and to create a container for it.

There will be moments when that composure cracks, as in "Shoulder Season," for example, when she recounts breaking up with someone who she was deeply in love with and then falling apart. I was thinking a lot about anger and rage versus sadness or grief or melancholy. I'm not sure that I can say what emotional engine drives me as a writer exactly, but whatever it is, it does encompass a great deal. Those moments of joy or beauty, I want to record them and get them down. The moments of confusion or pain I want to capture precisely, too, because they also feel like a crucial part of being alive. Longing, or missing something and wanting to spend time with it again in my mind is certainly a reason that I write, but I'm not sure that I can pin it down.