It’s not easy to objectify someone when you can relate to them on a human level.
This is such an incredibly poignant and comic story—and I’m particularly drawn to the fact that the story exists entirely in one scene—so I want to start off by asking what inspired your choice(s) to write this story and write it in this way?
That would be the way I write most of my short stories. I think it’s the immediacy of it. Slowing time down so that minutes can be opened up, stretched out, giving me the opportunity to really dissect the moments.
I’m curious about the ways “looking” operate in this story. The narrator and Joe are peeping on Bambi, the narrator is conscious of themselves and how others see them, including harassment by Bambi, but also the moment halfway through the story when the narrator directly addresses the reader: “Can I share something with you?” What went into that choice to bring the reader into the story?
I wanted to have the older narrator break the 4th wall and engage the reader. Sort of grab them by the shirt collar. Also, it’s a nice way to allude to the future of this narrator, to touch on the effects of this one event on her life in the present. Lastly, I liked the casualness, as if the narrator is sitting across the table telling the story to the reader over a cup of coffee or a shot of tequila.
What, if anything, is this story trying to say about the ways people look and are looked at?
Honestly, I really struggled with this story. In earlier versions, I felt like Bambi had little agency, she was completely objectified. And while the source material that inspired the story does that, it was written by a straight white man. I’m not that. I’m a woman, and being someone who has had to endure the occasional peeper in my early days, I wanted to open up this idea of looking. What we see, what we don’t see. How the narrator looks at Bambi reveals something about the narrator herself. How she feels about her own body, her sexuality, which of course is rather conflicted. While she’s drawn to Bambi, she’s also in equal parts repelled by her, which I think mirrors how she feels about herself. The narrator doesn’t just notice Bambi, she notices everything. She notices Bill’s ham-colored face, the way he walks on dead grass. She notices the yard, the rusted clothesline, the busted-up lawn décor.
What went into your creation of the characters in this story? And what impact does the narrator’s equal parts attraction, identification with, and disgust at Bambi have on the story?
With Bill, I wanted to the narrator to have an accomplice/ally. But I also wanted to contrast the differences between Bill and the narrator, basically the difference between a straight boy and a gay girl. Where for Bill this is a simple act of peeping at a hot girl, which in the time the story is set was naughty but socially acceptable for a guy. It’s much more complicated for the narrator. I also wanted to make Bill a little more nuanced. For Bill, it’s really not a big deal that the narrator likes to look at naked girls like he does; he hasn’t developed that prejudice yet, or maybe never will. For Bambi, it was about giving her agency, more to do. I wanted her to have the qualities that the narrator yearned for in herself. Attraction, identification, and disgust is key. It’s not easy to objectify someone when you can relate to them on a human level. And that disgust is what the narrator feels with herself.
What role does character play for you when you are writing your fiction?
For me, it’s about establishing the narrator. Everything is filtered through this first-person. All the characters come into view through her perspective, her take on them. But that can be difficult when one has a particularly opinionated and slanted narrator. With this material, I felt it best to have an older narrator to look back on this one event, to gain a kind of perspective that the younger self would not have. That way we have a clearer view of Bill and Bambi. Writing these characters, I needed to ensure the narrator saw more than the superficial qualities of Bill and Bambi, and really see them as whole, fully formed characters, each with their own wants and needs. There’s no room in a short story – or maybe any story – for stock characters and stereotypes. We hopefully see them with a decent narrative distance With Bill and Bambi (and I’m just realizing both their names start with the same letter. That was not done consciously), I was trying to push away from stereotypes.
The second half of this story, when the wall finally breaks down between the narrator and Bambi, both literally and metaphorically, is described in minute and precise detail. What was the writing process of that section like? What did you hope to achieve by not shying away from any of the details of that moment?
I think the best fiction can be found in these uncomfortable, even cringy moments. What happens when the fence falls down and the narrator is literally caught with her pants down? There’s so much pain and humor to be discovered. I wanted to stay with the character throughout. The more uncomfortable it made me, the more I wanted to dig in, giving myself permission to stay in the moment. In early sexual situations, the feeling is heightened—we notice everything. So, the pacing is a function of the narrator’s memory, heightened because of how this first time with Bambi was so intense.
What do you see as being the relationship between religion and sexuality? Did this influence your writing process for this story?
Yes, I was raised Catholic and lived in the Bible belt. The church has always had a weird relationship with sexuality. And because of that, I grew up feeling a great deal of shame about any sexual urges, particularly the girl-on-girl variety. I wanted to explore the juxtaposition of religion and sex and how in some instances it can actually fuel the sexual tension, to the point where it explodes.
What do you hope people take away from this story?
When I first started writing the story, I wanted to write about how disappointing sex could be, especially how we as a culture tend to romanticize it. But then as the story evolved, I started to look beyond this, to divisions, barriers, like the fence, like class, sexuality, I started to broaden the message. Sex is complicated, attraction is complicated, consent in some instances is complicated. Sometimes there’s very little distance between pleasure and pain.
What writers inspire you? Any particular stories that you return to time and again?
- Anything by Flannery O’Connor
- Any of the short stories in Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow
- “Christ Their Lord” by Stacey Richter, from her short-story collection Twin Studies
Also, novels & novelists
- Phillip’s Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint & Sabbath’s Theatre
- Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Eileen
- Sorry to Disrupt the Piece by Patrick Cottrel
- Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead
- Fiebre Tropical by Julian Delgado Lopera
What are you currently working on?
I’m a working on a novel titled The Anger Book. An episodic journey through the stages of anger.
