The Bushwick Review: Interview with Elle Nash
There’s a particularly delicate yet redolent allure to the “and” found between some of fiction’s greatest love stories. Jules and Jim. Henry and June. In the case of writer Elle Nash’s novel Animals Eat Each Other, it’s Matt and Frankie. Tales of love and loss, instability and stasis, all told through the lens of a 19-year-old narrator adrift in Colorado Springs are what line the pages of Nash’s brutal and endearing debut.
In partnership with The Bushwick Review, an independent literary and art magazine, Nash chats with editor-in-chief Kristen Felicetti about her editorial origin story, the importance of bisexual representation in fiction and how to ignore people who talk about her baby’s socks.
Animals Eat Each Other was published by Dzanc Books last year. The UK edition will be published by 404 Ink in May.
Kristen Felicetti: I’d love to hear how Animals Eat Each Other came together. From the initial idea, to its development, to its publication with Dzanc Books.
Elle Nash: It started off as a short story in one of Rae Gouriand’s six-month writing workshops online. At first, I thought it was a story that could be told in just a few pages, but then I began working one-on-one with Tom Spanbauer as a mentor, and he kept saying, “What about this?” which made me realize how much I was glossing over, and kept prompting me to expand on so much of the story. I think that lasted about two years. The process really taught me how to slow things down. At some point, Michael Seidlinger, who was working with Dzanc at the time, asked if I was working on anything and so I sent him this manuscript, which he loved and which then-editor-in-chief of Dzanc, Guy Intoci, also enjoyed. After a while, they offered to publish it. Feel like I got really lucky with that, as Dzanc has been a great publisher. Michelle Dotter, the current editor-in-chief, is a wonder to work with.
KF: I really like how spare, direct and visceral your prose is in this book. Did that style come pretty immediately to you for this novel, or is this something you refined in its editing?
EN: I think it was definitely refined in editing. Although I worked a lot with Spanbauer as a mentor while I was writing this book, and his style is also minimal in that way (he was a student of Gordon Lish, along with Amy Hempel, etc), towards the end I found myself rewriting entire chapters. I find myself using things like metaphors as almost a shortcut to what I really want to say in a story, and so I tried to find those and expand on them as much as I could.
KF: You recently tweeted “what are your fave books that feature bisexual people” and I saw that in another interview for this book you mentioned wanting to create a book with a bisexual character, because you don’t see bisexual characters that often in fiction or media. I hadn’t really thought about that much, but it’s true. While in real life I know people across the queer spectrum, I can’t think of a lot of bisexual characters in fiction. The other thing I liked about the narrator’s sexuality in the book was that she doesn’t seem to be concerned with attaching any labels to her identity. She’s just driven by her own desires and behavior. She has sex with men (Sam, Matt), she has sex with women (Jenny, Frances), but I don’t think she even once uses words like “bisexual,” “queer,” or “gay.” I’m not sure what my question is here [laughs], I’m just saying you gave me interesting things to think about. Do you want to talk more about any aspect of this?
EN: Yes! And people had a lot of great suggestions — Mean by Myriam Gurba; anything by Kathy Acker; Henry and June by Anais Nin; Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai; The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson — I need to read all of these, obviously!
I really just love to see and want to read books about and by people who are outside of this realm of what a traditional relationship looks like, even if there is not a particular label on the character’s sexual identity — and I think the reason for that is because growing up, perhaps, I felt I was exposed to a lot of books that dealt with young adult issues but the particular issues became the entire character’s identity. For example, The Best Little Girl in the World, (or Wasted, even though I love that book), or Cut by Patricia McCormick, Crank by Ellen Hopkins, Smack by Melvin Burgess. These books were all great, but in them, the characters’ lives are consumed by their troubles, it becomes their entire identity, and I really favor work that illustrates the life of a character that, for example, is affected by these kinds of important issues, but also shows how there are other facets to their identity. Being bisexual is not the only thing that I am, there are many facets to a person, and so that seemed important to express in a book, to show a character’s life like that.
KF: In addition to Animals Eat Each Other’s recent release, the magazine you edit, Witch Craft Magazine, also just released its most recent issue. Can you talk a little about the process of putting that issue together? What’s the process of working with your co-founding editor Catch Business, your team of assistant editors and the writers you publish?
EN: Yes! That was a tough issue, mostly because the original release date was on the heels of me giving birth, and so we had to push it back. I had also just moved out of the city that Catch and I lived in together, and so we’ve been doing everything via email, text and Skype. Catch really has kept the sails up while I’ve been less involved because of the baby, and the assistant editors I worked with for issue four (Asha Dore and Gwen Werner) made some excellent selections for non-fiction and fiction this go around. The hardest part is staying on top of email. I just spend less time on the computer these days, and it can be hard to respond to things. I always feel like I should be doing more. In the past, I’ve made the trailers for the issues as well but our art editor Carabella Sands took the lead on that front for issue four and it was great. I’d really love for us to expand and do more but right now it’s just something we have to do slowly.
KF: You recently became a parent. We’re around the same age, and I haven’t decided whether I’ll have a child yet, but I’m pretty nervous over whether I’d have any time left for writing/being creative or even how I’d grapple with the identity of being a mother or being seen as a mother. Obviously I’m not the first female writer to ever have these fears. Did you have any of those same anxieties about being a parent or not? And do you still or is that just not as big of a deal once the moment actually arrives?
EN: I did and do have anxieties over time, but to be honest I have always had anxieties over time — when I had a full time job, I felt the same way, that I wasn’t getting the time I needed to write and that I might die before the work I need to do gets done (I always feel this way!). When I had a part-time job, I was spending a lot of time doing freelance transcription work to make up for my loss in income and so I worried about wasting my time there as well. And with a kid, it is harder because I am currently on her schedule, but I still do find the time to write while I can. She naps, for example, and so I make the best of it. Also knowing that she slowly gets more independent and that the process of her being a baby is a temporary one helps, and that a writing career is a long-term goal, that expands over multiple decades (as long as the existence of a life allows). But I mean, yeah. It is always hard. I like to be alone a lot, at least when I write. I don’t get the uninterrupted five to eight hour stretches of time inside my head anymore, like I could with a day off work, but since her birth, there’s been somewhat of a schedule (which does change a lot), and I’ve been able to polish 20 pages on a new book, write some essays, do interviews, polish a short story… and waste a lot of time on Twitter. I started dictating some of my essays/stories for example when my hands were busy and she just wanted me to hold her or while I was breastfeeding (though I haven’t done that for a while). I think for anyone who does have anxiety about time but WANTS a kid, the best advice I have is to just not stress yourself about it or push yourself to do it if you really can’t. Some days I wake up and I just think, “I can’t do this today” (“this” being all of the responsibilities of being a parent and also the pressures I put on myself to write, etc), and so I won’t write that day. It’s both hard and not hard. Time just keeps moving and the child keeps growing, and I have to be willing to go with the flow of that. If I fight it, it’s too hard.
On the identity of being seen as a mom — sometimes I think, “I’m too butch/dress too XYZ/am too sad/insert identity label to be a mom!” like when I think of how my mom was/dressed/etc, and because I got really hung up on my assumptions of how a mother should be. But, I am also surrounded by a lot of great mothers who are themselves/their identities intact/are full, sexual, beautiful, creative, independent people, and that helps me not be hard on myself. I wondered if my identity would change, and I don’t think it has, really, I just have become less patient for other people’s bullshit and am very strong about enforcing my boundaries now, in a way that I wasn’t before. People in public make comments a lot (like, for example, if the baby is not wearing socks outside, I know someone will say something), and you really have to ignore it. You just have to become really all about yourself and the kid and fuck what other people say about how you should parent. It’s just not their life. That’s become extremely apparent.
KF: What are some things that inspired Animals Eat Each Other or other recent work of yours? It can be other books, but also films, music, people, things in nature, anything.
EN: So many things! I think the biggest inspiration I drew from was Tom Spanbauer’s book I Loved You More, which is a masterpiece about three people who love each other and how hurt/heartbreak rippled through them. It’s an important book about relationships. I listened to a ton of The Weeknd while writing the first draft of the book, I think because it is easy to listen to his music on repeat a lot and is very melodic, and also listened to a lot of Lund. The film Manchester by the Sea inspired me, as well, because in the Amazon reviews so many people hated the movie because it felt unresolved and depressing to them, and I love that kind of work. I read a lot of things that inspired me also — Mila Jaroniec’s Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover; Elizabeth Ellen’s Person/a; Juliet Escoria’s Witch Hunt; Something To Do With Self-Hate by Brian Alan Ellis; and Waves by Lucy K Shaw.
loved doing this interview with Kristen! <3 thanks to her and the Ace Hotel.
