CutBank Interviews: A Conversation with Amy Bonnaffons
By: Emily Collins
Amy Bonnaffons is the author of two acclaimed works, the novel The Regrets and the short story collection, The Wrong Heaven. In her work, we meet characters who are loving, wounded, and struggling to coexist with themselves. Bonnaffons uses a fantastical/magical lens in her fiction to reflect on the hilarious and heartbreaking nature of reality. Like many magical works, her writing is intuitive, thoughtful, and versed in the unusual ways we search for meaning.
Emily Collins: In your wonderful short story collection, The Wrong Heaven, lonely and incandescent characters (not all of them human) try desperately to escape themselves in highly inventive ways. In "Horse" a woman undergoes medical injections to become a horse instead of undergoing a similar procedure to have a baby, as her close friend does. In "Alternate" a woman believes she can fix a relationship through a recent purchase of a Dali Lama poster. Have you always written about desire and struggle through a fantastic lens?
Amy Bonnaffons: First of all, I love the way you put that—that the characters seek to “escape themselves in highly inventive ways.” Thank you!
I do see self-escape as a primary theme of the book (and of my novel, The Regrets, as well): my characters tend to feel trapped by their circumstances, by others’ gendered expectations of them, and by their own fears. They try to transcend their limitations through everything from sex to God to (yes) becoming a wild horse. This wasn’t a conscious intention; it was a theme I noticed over time.
I started using a fantastical/magical lens in my fiction during grad school. I was working on a story for my MFA workshop—the story that would become “The Wrong Heaven”—and found myself frustrated by my failed attempts to illustrate the main character’s tortured relationship to her Christian faith. The story just wasn’t working. In a moment of desperate late-night loopiness, I thought, “What if she actually did bicker with Jesus, and he was kind of bitchy to her?” I imagined that she had a Jesus lawn ornament that came to life and started talking. I had so much fun writing their dialogue, which eventually anchored the final version of the story.
After that, I didn’t always set out to use a fantastical lens, but I always saw it as a possibility. It was incredibly freeing to not see “reality” as limiting my options for exploring and dramatizing my characters’ dilemmas. Once I’d made this shift, it seemed obvious. What is “reality,” anyway? I’d always had a vivid dream life and an interest in far-spectrum spiritual experience. Now I didn’t have to separate those interests from my fiction, and the resulting stories became much truer to my worldview.
EC: In your debut novel, The Regrets, we revisit themes of loneliness and desire among the living and the dead. What was it like exploring these themes in the world of the novel as opposed to the short story?
AB: The novel gave me a much broader canvas to explore certain questions—in this case, what happens in the blurred region between life and death? What do sex and death have in common? How do we use both to escape ourselves?
Writing a novel was a struggle for me, after only writing short stories. I’m not the kind of writer who outlines in advance—I proceed by feel—so it took me years to understand the shape of the story. I wrote hundreds of pages that I ended up throwing away. I went down dead-end streets and blind alleys that cost me months or years (I don’t actually believe we make any “wrong” decisions during the writing process—nothing is wasted, and “mistakes” teach us something important—but at the time it wasn’t always easy to see it that way).
That said, it was freeing and fascinating to have so much space to explore these questions. The novel has multiple points of view—in its final form it has three POV characters, and in earlier drafts there were four or five—and this multiplicity enabled me to inhabit different subjectivities and approach my questions from various angles. By the end of the writing process, I felt like a different person. I had really worked something out. I didn’t have answers to my questions, exactly, but I had worked through my relationship to them so thoroughly that I felt ready to move on to new ones.
EC: In both The Wrong Heaven and The Regrets, we encounter religious characters and symbols that are neither irreverent nor evangelical. Can you speak more to how religious stories, iconography, etc. have influenced you as a fiction writer?
I’ve always been fascinated by religious symbols and myths. There’s something so intriguing about the diverse ways that people have tried to interpret mysterious or transcendent aspects of experience: the images and stories, the rituals, the taboos.
I’ve had an eclectic spiritual journey myself. I was baptized Catholic but grew up in a progressive Episcopal church; my family wasn’t particularly Jesusy, but I did grow up hearing Bible stories and singing hymns. I was really curious about the Bible and read it cover-to-cover when I was 9 or 10. Later, I lived in Thailand for a couple of years and studied Buddhist thought and Vipassana meditation. Since then, I’ve found my way to shamanic journeying and energy work.
Each of these traditions has offered me something—but ultimately I think spirituality is about developing a relationship to Mystery. It’s about learning to relate to those aspects of life that we can’t control, to perceive and work with invisible energies, and to coexist with our unanswerable questions concerning where we came from and where we’re going. I have no desire to simplify the mystery or lock myself into one particular belief system.
I’ve found that fiction is a great venue in which to explore those edgy aspects of reality that religion and spirituality also deal with: death and birth; sexuality; the terrifying space that exists between and within people. My characters are trying to make sense of these aspects of their lives, and they sometimes turn to religious figures for help—often misguidedly. Humor comes in because it’s all too easy to take religion and religious figures way too seriously: to think that they have all the answers, or that they can save you. I’m interested in compassionately portraying the absurdities that arise in our search for meaning—and in showing the ways that the great Mystery always slips out of our grasp, eluding our attempts to pin it down. Laughter is one way of dancing with it.
EC: Your work tends to explore the relationship between a character's ideologies and their present, contradictory reality. They want the things they either don't have or aren't supposed to desire. This tension makes great fodder for fiction. When you begin a story, are you already aware of this tension, or do your characters slowly reveal it to you?
AB: Again, I really like the way you put that—thank you!
To answer your question: sometimes I’m aware of it in advance, and sometimes it reveals itself as the story evolves. One perhaps interesting example is that the idea for “Horse” came to me in a dream: I woke up with an image of a woman injecting herself and the sentence “The opposite of having a baby is becoming a horse.” I knew from the beginning that the story would be about the tension between those two distinct desires: the desire to involve oneself more deeply in intimate human relationship, and the desire to escape the weight of human relationships completely. This enabled me to explore conceptual tensions that interested me: wildness vs. domesticity, entanglement vs. independence, etc. In some ways these are false binaries, and that’s exactly why fiction is such a useful space for exploring them: through character and image, we can explore all the nuances that lie in between, and also the surprising overlaps (in what ways is having a baby exactly like becoming a horse?)
EC: I notice that most of your work is written in the first-person. I think one of the challenges of writing in the first-person is creating a sense of trust with the reader that transcends the narrator’s limited perspective. I feel like your work establishes that level of intimacy. Does writing in the first person come naturally to you or is this a deliberate craft choice?
AB: It comes naturally. It’s really hard for me to write in third person, actually—there are only a few times I’ve done it successfully. When I try it, it usually feels awkward and forced. I can’t explain why this is, other than to say that the character’s voice is always primary for me. It always comes first. When writing is going well, it feels less like I’m composing and more like I’m channeling, as though the voice is speaking directly into my ear.
Amy Bonnaffons is the author of the story collection THE WRONG HEAVEN and the novel THE REGRETS, both published by Little, Brown. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, The Sun, and elsewhere, and has been read on NPR's This American Life. She holds a BA in Literature from Yale, an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, and is working on a PhD in English and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia.
Amy is a founding editor of 7x7.la, a literary journal devoted to collaborations between writers and visual artists. Born in New York City, she now lives in Athens, GA.
Amy is interested in creativity and spirituality, multimedia experimentation, and the intersection of art and social justice. She has taught writing in universities, elementary schools, hospitals, and a women's prison, and has led workshops combining writing and shamanic journeying practices for over a year.
Emily Collins is a first year MFA in fiction student at the University of Montana and the Interviews Editor for CutBank. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Orleans Review, The Florida Review, The Atticus Review, The South Carolina Review, and others. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. When she’s not interviewing incredible writers, she enjoys hiking and volunteering.