Bus Stop Of The Mind: An Interview With Rebecca Bernard
Interview conducted by Colleen Mayo
Rebecca Bernard’s debut collection of stories won the 2021 Non/Fiction prize from The Journal and was published by Ohio State’s Mad Creek Books in August 2022. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Wigleaf, Witness, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Fiction from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Vanderbilt University. Her work received notable mention in the Best American Short Stories of 2018. She is an Assistant Professor in the English department at Angelo State University. She serves as a Fiction Editor for The Boiler.
Colleen Mayo: I admire you and your work so much. We’re going on our fourth year of knowing each other (woah, time) and I’ve been lucky to read your writing since we met at University of North Texas back in 2019. Actually, I remember reading some of your publications before I moved to Denton—stories that would later appear in Our Sister Who Will Not Die like First Date and Harold, Protector of the Children—and thinking, “wow, if this writer is at UNT, that’s a place I want to be.” I was an immediate fan. You write with such wholeheartedness about complicated characters who’ve done condemnable, often terribly cruel acts—and there’s lots more to say on this—but what I fell most in love with four years ago were your sentences. Your language. You bake many dimensions into those lines. Even as I re-read stories from your collection to prepare for this interview, I kept stopping to appreciate the work your sentences do. They bring us so close to the characters.
Maybe this is a weirdly micro place to start, but could you talk to me about how you think about sentences and voice in your writing?
Rebecca Bernard: This is a great question, and thank you for the very kind words! For the record, I am also a huge fan of your writing (and your sentences) so it’s a real honor to get to have this chat.
I am definitely someone who’s drawn to the lyric in fiction, so for me a story with a wild plot and strong characters is fine and all, but if it doesn’t have that image or syntax that I would never have imagined myself, then, for me, it’s not hitting that highest point. I value writing where you come across a sentence, and you’re like, wow, I never would have thought of that description, that metaphor, etc. Rachel Kushner comes to mind here, but there are so many writers I admire for this reason.
So I guess this is what I strive for in my own writing. I tweak as I write, constantly re-reading what I’ve just written, though much of it, or at least the sentences I feel most proud of come from that gut instinct place. The ones where you read them later, and you’re like, how did I think of that? Whatever juices/forces are rolling around up top that somehow get delivered to the page. Maybe voice helps here because when you’re with a character, they’re helping you on that ride, I think, telling you what to say. So maybe writing is a little like acting? Or like music. There’s definitely a sense where I see a sentence like a chord you keep strumming till you get it right. Some of them come out on their own and others need cajoling. And some, frustratingly, you never feel like you get all the way right.
CM: I love the analogy to strumming a chord until the sound is just right, and the balance you’re speaking to between revision and instinct (and I’m also a Rachel Kushner fan!). I’m teaching Introduction to Fiction right now and my students have these wondrous conversations about fiction’s ability to make characters real. When I first heard them speak about it with such reverence, I realized I’d lost sight of my own awe that fiction does this. It strikes me that your unique, gut-attention to sentences opens the mind to an empathetic treatment of character and story. I bet you rarely lose sight of fiction’s capacity to make readers believe in and feel for an imaginary being.
Speaking of my students, they read your story “First Date” and were obsessed with how details from Jamie’s storyline do and don’t get revealed. It’s still on the first page of the story when we read, “the homicide of his father is never meant to be a first date conversation”. So there’s no withholding of what Jamie has done but there’s also not a centering of it. It’s his psychology and his present situation that the story cares about, or that’s my read. What kinds of questions or concerns do you keep with you when you write about your characters? I’d love to hear about a specific story!
RB: Thank you again (and thanks to your wonderful students!). That’s funny because this semester I have had multiple students remark (about things we’ve read in class) that the details made them think the people were real or the situations were real. So yes, it’s totally something I guess I take for granted. Although I think for many writers the characters do feel real when you’re writing them. I see them as fully fledged people just hanging out, killing time. The old bus stop of the mind.
I think my big questions about my characters tend to revolve around motivation. I mean, in many of these stories in particular, they’re based on this curiosity on my part about understanding why someone would do something brutal or cruel, and how through understanding the ‘why,’ our empathy might be deepened or stretched. So let’s take Maxine, the protagonist of the opening story. With Maxine it was a careful progression, following the path of grief to see how that might push someone to do something they’d never intend or even fathom. Without spoilers, this one evolved from me thinking about how someone might cross a line, and how I could use interiority as a means to trace that crossing, so even as we might resist as readers, we’re made to see how her actions make sense. We understand her, and maybe that’s disturbing, but we also get to see her humanity and the complexity of something which might otherwise feel inexplicable. I hope that answer doesn’t read as a vague-tweet (the worst tweets!). Maybe to answer the question with Jamie from “First Date,” we know he killed his dad early on (as you noted) and so the motivation instead is how to find connection when you own this truth (or it owns you). So here my question is, how would sitting with that knowledge of what you’ve done affect your interactions with other people, and how do you prove your nonviolence when there’s this moment from your past that really happened, that you can’t undo?
CM: There’s a relationship between the questions we ask and the shape our work takes. With your stories, I feel immediate trust; I trust that this author knows their characters. It makes me sit up straighter. It makes me take part in your curiosity. And, Maxine! She is one of my favorites. I’ll never forget this line about Maxine from the opening paragraph of “In the Family”: “Maxine Jackson is laid bare. She was already laid bare.” Ooof. I trust it. I’m paying attention.
How did you curate your collection? Did you keep certain priorities or strategies in mind? Did editors play a role? Are there stories that didn’t make the cut? I’ve heard authors compare their collections to musical albums and the stories within them as individual songs, that there’s an experience being created through the rise and fall between pieces. Please share reflections or pieces of advice might you have for another writer assembling their collection!
RB: I made an order for the collection when I submitted it to contests and that remained unchanged through the process. And the stories here are all the stories I wrote during PhD workshops, so everybody made the cut.
In terms of order, I thought a lot about alternating first and third person stories, as well as published and unpublished stories. When I courted my original agent I sent them four stories including “In the Family,” and they said that story was the one that cinched me as a client, so that became the first story in my mind even though I couldn’t place it till after the fact. (It also earned me the best rejections of my career thus far). I think in many ways that story speaks to the full aims of what I was doing, so maybe that’s part of its place in the beginning; if you’re willing to go along with that narrative, then you’ll keep reading (I hope!). Then it was a matter of scattering the published stories (because I assumed those ones were at least somewhat proven) and making sure the voicey first person stories were given space among the third person pieces. I also remembered advice from my MFA that said your opening stories and your closing story needed to be your strongest, so those were the main principles I followed. I also felt that front-loading the more brutal narratives probably made sense, so that by the end of the collection we could see narratives that were shifting toward hope and uplift rather than the darker themes.
As I was writing the stories I was working toward a conscious theme, so this was useful in terms of cohesion. Though by that final workshop I was already moving into new terrain narratively because I think it’s tough to sustain a theme too long. We get angsty as writers. Or at least I do/did.
CM: Thank you for sharing all of those considerations with us. They’re all concrete, smart, and generous notes. To close us out I have a list of “greatest hits” interview questions. Time for a rapid-fire round!
What does a “perfect story” do? Are there any stories you carry with you as pinnacles of the form?
RB: I’d say the magic of the short story is that there are SO many possibilities, so no, I don’t think I have an answer for what a perfect story does in terms of craft, but I would say a perfect story provides a certain kind of wonder and feeling. One of my all time favorite stories is “Nephilim” by L. Annette Binder which was originally published in One Story and then in her collection Rise from Sarabande. I cry every time I read it. It’s about a giantess. It’s gorgeous. And it’s relatively short–maybe the most impressive stories know just when to fade in and fade out (of scene and start/finish).
CM: Do you read your own work after it’s been published?
RB: Oye. Sometimes? I mostly skim and/or read bits and pieces. It’s exciting when you discover a sentence and you’re like–wow! How did I write that? Less exciting when you’re like, oh boy. I’d revise that…
CM: Do you ever feel you’ve “finished” a writing project? If so, how do you know?
RB: Finished is tough. I’d say, yes, there are some pieces where they just feel like they’ve been taken as far as I can take them. I tend to submit too early, and I also tend to let an acceptance translate to ‘It’s finished!’ whether or not this is true. I’ve started thinking of my stories/essays as darlings that I send out to the universe and so when they come back (rejected), it’s a good thing because I’m here to soothe, to say it’s okay.
CM: Oh wow, I really love the soothing. I have a lot of stories that require soothing right now. And, finally, what are you working on right now?
RB: Oh how I long for writing time. I’m in revisions on a novel about generational violence, In the Way of Family. And I should be drafting my novel-in-progress about film making and suicide. But I’m mostly trying to find time to work on a new story called “The Theft” about a theft, of sorts.
Thank you for this time and this chance to talk about my writing. It means so much to me. Please go read Colleen Mayo here or here! She’s a real wonder.
CM: I am looking forward to all of these things! Thank you.
Colleen Mayo’s writing appears in The Sun Magazine, Crazyhorse, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, Salt Hill, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received special mention for the 2019 Pushcart Prize, the Jerome Stern Series Spotlight Award for nonfiction, and an AWP Intro Journals Award for fiction. She holds an MFA in fiction from Florida State University and is a PhD student in fiction at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX. Colleen is the Managing Editor of American Literary Review.