Interview: Alan Heathcock
CRAFT is thrilled to welcome Alan Heathcock as guest judge for our 2022 Short Fiction Prize. Heathcock is the author of Volt, a collection of short stories from 2011, and 40, a debut novel that publishes on August 2,…
CRAFT is thrilled to welcome Alan Heathcock as guest judge for our 2022 Short Fiction Prize. Heathcock is the author of Volt, a collection of short stories from 2011, and 40, a debut novel that publishes on August 2,…
Content Warnings—cesarean section, traumatic birth I could not milk. Was it due to upset levels of oxytocin, prolactin, beta-endorphin? May have been the morphine pump I kept firing like a trigger from my hospital bed in the postlabor/delivery room.…
We had gone to bed late, on usual terms: “Let’s just talk about this in the morning.” That night we did what we called “No Touch Sleep,” a nickname for exactly what it sounds like, lying next to each…
Thank you for your submission. We must begin with the lines—far too restated in this piece. Like I’ve mentioned before, a good artist looks more at their subject than at the paper. Think about what your mind is naturally…
I We’re closer than sisters. That’s what she tells me on the night of the full moon. We undress in her bedroom and wrap our hair with twine. This is what sisters do, she says, spreading a deck of…
The blocks of the Westside development whipped by us. All the houses bled into one another, a single stroke of adobe beige. No veterinarian had settled into this part of Albuquerque—it was too new, plastic, hollow. If one had…
We can’t take Mam’s new baby to school, the boys guess as much from my silence and nobody wants Mam to wake and make Baby cry, so when I put him to feed there’s quiet, just suckling sounds and…
Honey, MS, 1973 I When it gets cold in the South, Mama puts Devilish-Daddy out, again. It’s where he belongs, she says, cold is like warm milk to funny daddies like the one y’all got. All it gone do…
Moores lived next door. He worked construction; she stayed home. I don’t know how old he was, but I remember that on her birthday, she turned twenty-two. It seemed old. I was twelve. Moores had a baby, Sidney. Their…
Hunger never came naturally to me. As a baby, I didn’t cry for milk, preferring to gaze at the mold-splashed ceiling and grab at dust motes, twining my tiny hands through their light. Elaine told me this was because…
“Graftings” started with a series of photographs by Luo Yang. They depict a Chinese woman during her pregnancy: her, standing at a window, watching her growing waist; her naked reflection, blurred by glass; her stomach itself, a slash of melanin streaking down its bulge. The images provide a clear jumping off point for the story, unraveling from the mother’s pregnancy and childbirth to the relationships between her, Charity, and Elaine.
Although this piece began with imagery, point of view was also central to its construction. Told in the first person, the story focuses on Charity, who narrates her upbringing from birth to the age of twelve. Notably, she cannot remember her own birth or the early years of her life—her understanding of these events is shaped by her sister, Elaine, and the stories she tells. However, due to the surrealist nature of the premise, Charity cannot know whether Elaine is telling the truth or if she has fabricated a narrative of her own. I wanted to emphasize the secondhand nature of Charity’s story by prefacing sections with “Elaine said” and “according to Elaine.” I used a double filter of unreliable narrators and left the intentionality of their unreliability purposefully vague. Charity herself cannot verify the events of her birth, which is the supposed cause for her mother’s hunger and the reason Charity has none herself. No matter how hard she looks, she never sees a scar on her mother’s stomach. She never finds tangible evidence for her pain. Still, she relays these events to us like they are a concrete truth, an undeniable part of her past.
I especially wanted to consider how easily Charity believes her sister’s stories. She clings to them despite their fantastical nature, highlighting her childlike imagination, her deep trust in Elaine, and her desperation to believe her mother’s cruelty is out of her control. I wanted to ask how a child might filter their parent’s neglect to explain it to themselves. Since young children are less likely to oppose their parents, would ascribing her mother’s violence to the supernatural separate her from her actions? Would it decrease her perceived agency, her ability to do conscious harm? Despite everything, Charity instinctively turns to her mother, watching her from stairwells and doorways, suffused in the shadow of her hunger.
Although this point-of-view framing is merely that—a frame through which the main events are presented—I wanted to peer into Charity’s worldview, her fragile yet desperate construction of her past, and see how she engages with family through it. How she keeps searching for an explanation, how she keeps reaching out, and out, and out.
STELLA LEI’s work appears in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Four Way Review, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. Her debut prose chapbook, Inheritances of Hunger, is forthcoming from River Glass Books in 2022. She is an editor in chief for The Augment Review, she has two cats, and she tweets @stellalei04.