On the surface, Mark Mayer seems like a normal enough guy. He’s polite, a little awkward, and a little anxious to please. When we were at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop together, it was his job to set up the chairs and the mics for readings, and the chairs were always arranged in nice, straight, punctual rows. His stories, too, have a veneer of normalcy. Model-train enthusiasts dutifully mind their toys, a nephew worries about his anorexic uncle, a parks-and-rec employee tries to get laid. But you can sense, beneath the normal, an abiding weirdness and darkness, a fascination with the sinkholes in the back of the mind, the places where consciousness plunges through the cloud floor of this world and into some other one.
Mark’s weirdness has something to do with tenderness. Weirdness for its own sake is just quirk, but in Mark’s stories, solid-state relationships undergo a phase change right at the moment when love gets hard. (...)
There are so many tender relationships in this collection—children and their uncles and aunts, parents, brothers, friends. What is your interest in these dynamics?
Love is a really hard thing to do right in life. I love reading stories where the hero is affronted by something external, a mean neighbor or an alien, but those kinds of conflicts can feel safe to me because all the character has to do, really, is figure out some way to close the relationship, walk away. Intimacy is more vexed. We’re all carrying around our histories—our bad programming, our genders, our wounded egos, our stink—and then we build little brick houses and try to live in them together. It’s a crazy thing to attempt. So I’m interested in stories that go into that space where we can’t escape each other. Family is claustrophobic, love is claustrophobic, which is what makes it meaningful, too. We can’t help but actually encounter each other.
In these stories you swing from gentleness to menace and back again, and I emerge from each either with my heart overflowing or chilled to my core. Do you think about reader experience or expectations when you’re writing? How do you cultivate mood and atmosphere in your work?
It’s funny to me that the mood of a story or book can be atmospheric, but our own moods are supposed to be things we can pick from the emoji spread. I think it takes all the meaning and threat out of sadness or anger to imagine them as discrete, specific, capsulized experiences, when really sadness, fear, and jealousy are these atmospheres that flood through life and mix in with the sweet stuff, too. You can name the emotion on a face in a photo, but in real time faces are basically liquids, flowing, reacting, breathing, speaking. I’m drawn to fiction—like yours—where I’m given room to feel many ways at once, since that’s how I feel in life. Like, menace is menacing because of how it abuts and butts into gentleness. I try to remind myself it’s never my job to summarize or conceptualize experiences, neither my characters’ nor my readers’. If I feel like I really understand what an event means for them, then I’m probably not living it deeply, since it’s not like I go around fully understanding what the events of my life mean. (...)
Your sentences are so gorgeous. Who are your favorite prose stylists? What is your sentence-creation process like?
I admire the paragraphs of thought that Mavis Gallant can fit into a single line like, “Childhood recollected is often hallucination; who is to blame?” I think my whole book might fit inside that sentence. I wish I could deploy semicolons like that. For commas, I go to Alice Munro, her lists—wardrobes, merchandise, character quirks—where each item somehow contradicts the previous, leaving paradoxes everywhere. And Marilynne Robinson, whose sentences are like spaceships, coming out of nowhere, gliding along on superior technology, which is also older technology. “By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.” That’s her description of conception! “So they seal the door against our returning.” Like anyone, I love the metaphors and similes that make you feel you’re putting on glasses for the first time—like how garbage men call maggots “disco rice”—but for me, the sound of a sentence matters most. Rhythm means more to me than 20/20 vision, and often the best rhythms are the simplest.
by Carmen Maria Machado, Paris Review | Read more:
Mark’s weirdness has something to do with tenderness. Weirdness for its own sake is just quirk, but in Mark’s stories, solid-state relationships undergo a phase change right at the moment when love gets hard. (...)
INTERVIEWER
There are so many tender relationships in this collection—children and their uncles and aunts, parents, brothers, friends. What is your interest in these dynamics?
MAYER
Love is a really hard thing to do right in life. I love reading stories where the hero is affronted by something external, a mean neighbor or an alien, but those kinds of conflicts can feel safe to me because all the character has to do, really, is figure out some way to close the relationship, walk away. Intimacy is more vexed. We’re all carrying around our histories—our bad programming, our genders, our wounded egos, our stink—and then we build little brick houses and try to live in them together. It’s a crazy thing to attempt. So I’m interested in stories that go into that space where we can’t escape each other. Family is claustrophobic, love is claustrophobic, which is what makes it meaningful, too. We can’t help but actually encounter each other.
INTERVIEWER
In these stories you swing from gentleness to menace and back again, and I emerge from each either with my heart overflowing or chilled to my core. Do you think about reader experience or expectations when you’re writing? How do you cultivate mood and atmosphere in your work?
MAYER
It’s funny to me that the mood of a story or book can be atmospheric, but our own moods are supposed to be things we can pick from the emoji spread. I think it takes all the meaning and threat out of sadness or anger to imagine them as discrete, specific, capsulized experiences, when really sadness, fear, and jealousy are these atmospheres that flood through life and mix in with the sweet stuff, too. You can name the emotion on a face in a photo, but in real time faces are basically liquids, flowing, reacting, breathing, speaking. I’m drawn to fiction—like yours—where I’m given room to feel many ways at once, since that’s how I feel in life. Like, menace is menacing because of how it abuts and butts into gentleness. I try to remind myself it’s never my job to summarize or conceptualize experiences, neither my characters’ nor my readers’. If I feel like I really understand what an event means for them, then I’m probably not living it deeply, since it’s not like I go around fully understanding what the events of my life mean. (...)
INTERVIEWER
Your sentences are so gorgeous. Who are your favorite prose stylists? What is your sentence-creation process like?
MAYER
I admire the paragraphs of thought that Mavis Gallant can fit into a single line like, “Childhood recollected is often hallucination; who is to blame?” I think my whole book might fit inside that sentence. I wish I could deploy semicolons like that. For commas, I go to Alice Munro, her lists—wardrobes, merchandise, character quirks—where each item somehow contradicts the previous, leaving paradoxes everywhere. And Marilynne Robinson, whose sentences are like spaceships, coming out of nowhere, gliding along on superior technology, which is also older technology. “By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.” That’s her description of conception! “So they seal the door against our returning.” Like anyone, I love the metaphors and similes that make you feel you’re putting on glasses for the first time—like how garbage men call maggots “disco rice”—but for me, the sound of a sentence matters most. Rhythm means more to me than 20/20 vision, and often the best rhythms are the simplest.
by Carmen Maria Machado, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
