Featured Writer of the Month

Twenty-nine

Location? 
I live in Columbia, South Carolina.  Let’s say I never dreamed I would be living here, but the backwardness has kind of grown on me. 

I’ve been writing on and off since 4^th grade.  I won honorable mention in a poetry contest (the poem involved an intricate rhyme scheme composed of such words as shoe laces, braces, faces and places).  I wrote poetry all through high school and during college, but it wasn’t until I took Jennifer Fink’s experimental writing class my senior year at Georgetown that I decided I wanted to be a writer.  Actually, I will be more pretentious and say an artist.  It was at this time I decided to focus on the short story as well.  Now I’m in my second year at the University of South Carolina hoping to trick them into giving me an MFA. 

If I have ever placed a comma in the proper place in any of my work I would consider that an accomplishment (There should be a comma in that sentence, right?  Is that comma behind the word sentence right?)  Well, it would be more like luck.  I have not come to this moment yet, but I think the greatest thing you can accomplish as a writer is to stop caring about what everyone else wants from you and write what you want from you. 

I’m working on a short story collection that keeps changing what it wants to do.  I have managed to place at least one dead body in each story (I think the elephant counts in this one).  I started writing the book as a way to deal with a death in the family and a relationship that turned sour.  The two have conflated in my mind and I guess the conflation = dead bodies.

I write because it’s the only way I can live.  It’s sounds desperate and trite, but it’s true.  I sat in an office for ten hours a day staring at a computer screen for two years and wondered how I was going to get through life this way.  I hated living in a cubicle and wasn’t incredibly interested in continuing to do that.  So I sat at work and began a novel, sent it in as a writing sample and Elise Blackwell, David Bajo and the rest of USC’s English Department were kind enough to let me in. 

“Kingsport, Tennessee.”  It’s pretty simple: a town gets together and decides to hang an elephant.   

Well, I was a GIA for Elise’s class and we were teaching Lydia Millet’s collection, Love and Infant Monkeys.  One of the stories in the collection was about Edison electrocuting an elephant (this was for some scientific purpose that I still don’t understand) and she mentioned Mary, the elephant and flashed a large picture of an elephant hanging from a crane.  I was disturbed, but then forgot all about it until my friend Will was talking about teaching a book that involved the story in his class.  Later that day, I had workshop.  We did a writing exercise in which we attempted to write in the voice of Eugenides’ narrator in Virgin Suicides.  I had Mary on my mind and began to wonder why a town would choose to do such an absurd thing.  It really strikes me more as something (the act not the story) coming out of Kafka or Schulz than real life.

The book I read once every year is The Sun Also Rises just so I can enjoy the build up to the final line.  The book that has inspired me the most as a writer is Hans Richter’s  Dada: Art and Anti-Art.  I’m reading Julio Cortazer, essays by Jeanette Winterson and John Berger as well as Barthes at the moment.      

Borges

I really need to have dinner with the protagonist of the novel I’m contemplating writing so he can give me the plot for the book. 

Thick.  It sounds like what it means.  The word I have to delete while editing every story I write is just. 

Any final words?
I’ve been spending my free time searching for incredibly innovative short stories.  If anyone has something that blew him/her away, I’d love to read it.  I’ll throw one out there to start….Cortazar’s “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris.”  It’s easy to find on the Internet.  Nothing like a person vomiting bunnies as a premise.

View Lauren’s work in Issue Fifteen of Crack the Spine