Interview with Ruth Lacey
Jun. 12th, 2010 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheenaghpughIt's a prose writer this time, or mainly so, though her luminous, lyrical prose makes many poets look prosy to me. Ruth Lacey was born in 1962 in Sydney where she grew up. She earned her law degree from the University of Melbourne, and an M.Phil in writing from the University of Glamorgan in Wales, in 2006. For the last two decades, Ruth has been living in a small kibbutz in the Galilee region of Israel, and has worked as a legal adviser, community manager, freelance journalist, magazine editor and copywriter. Her short stories have been published in literary journals in the US, UK, Australia and Israel, including The Best of Carve Anthology, Voyage, Arc, Overland, and Verbsap. Ruth has just completed a new novel, and is working on a new story collection.
SHEENAGH: Your writing has a terrific sense of place: Australia, Israel, India just come so alive on the pages. The sharpness of the vision is something I've seen in some writers who didn't have a settled childhood and never knew how long they'd have to look at and absorb the latest scene. Did you travel a lot when you were younger? How do you think living in many different places and cultures has affected your writing? And where, if anywhere, do you call "home"?
RUTH: I probably had the opposite of an unsettled childhood – I grew up in a boring city suburb. It's a place I've rarely written about. But my childhood was punctuated with exciting things – and I suppose that all of them were connected to place. When I went somewhere else, somewhere new – even for a weekend – that was when stuff happened. And we seemed to do that often, horseriding in the country every long weekend, travelling to exotic destinations, or even across the city to my grandparents' place, they had a house on a cliff above the ocean and a whole different culture, too.
As an adolescent I remember a lot of time passing just wishing that something would happen. Along with deciding I would never ever become a school teacher, I also remember deciding I would not ever live in the suburbs.
At 18 I went to Israel for a year (I'd already been there twice), then at 21 I moved from Sydney to Melbourne. Probably because I hadn't grown up there, and it was an intense time in my life, I was acutely aware of my surroundings, and I also had to literally find my way around. When I left Australia at 24 to move to Israel, Melbourne was the place I missed and wrote about. That's perhaps where the "unsettledness" is from, wanting to hold onto images and feelings of places so they don't disappear, kind of imprinting them. I was so far away and had uprooted so suddenly, and I was in a state of culture shock for quite a while, too.
I would add that at the same time (maybe it's just my personality), I find it very difficult to adapt to new surroundings. I like to travel but I always study the place I'm going to beforehand so I can imagine it – I even study street maps! I really hate being lost.
Home, of course is both where I live and where I come from. My house and the community I live in are in Israel and my kids were born here. I speak English at home with my Australian husband and kids, and we go back every few years. Almost all my POV characters are Australian because I write in Australian English, even when the stories are set in Israel.
SHEENAGH: Along with this sense of real physical location, there goes a parallel and very different strand of fairytale. Can you talk about the role of fairytale/folk-tale in your work, for it's clearly an important one?
RUTH: The first stories I remember writing were versions of The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. I was in 2nd grade, and we had this creative writing class once a week. I figured that if I could belt out a story really quickly, I could slip out of class and meet my friend in the playground. So what I did was rewrite that story every week – but differently each time – inventing plot twists and alternative endings, new voices and points of view. It was the best writing practice I ever did.
Also, I suppose that folk tales or myths were my favourite stories as a kid and adolescent – as a small kid my parents read me Greek myths and bible stories – then I fell in love with C.S. Lewis and Madeline D'Engle – but don't all kids read fairy tales and sci-fi?
This is an excerpt of something I wrote recently about a dog, Emerald:
When I began writing, I didn't plan for the dog to talk, and it was only once I'd finished the story that I realized I was using the dog's voice as the narrator's alter-ego. I find that introducing fantasy or magic realism – or mind-altering substances – into my stories gives me the chance to explore things more deeply because the usual laws of behaviour are suspended. I think they also act in a more obviously symbolic way, which is something I enjoy developing – or recognising afterwards.
SHEENAGH: Your answer on The Little Mermaid really interested me - because it was so practical, a means of getting off class early, but also because what you were doing, "inventing plot twists and alternative endings, new voices and points of view", was pure fan fiction, which is also something I've been interested in. Some folk are sniffy about this kind of riffing on established characters and plots, dismissing it as derivative and unoriginal. I recall your Little Mermaid and it was highly original in that the style was pure you, couldn't have been anyone else. What's your take on originality as a characteristic of writing - is it always a virtue and what does it consist in?
RUTH: Isn't fan fiction just like historical fiction? I think it is. You have a ready-made plot and characters and then you improvise and add your own voice. It's a bit like jazz – there are countless jazz standards based on Gershwin's "I've got Rhythm" (they're called "Rhythm Changes") and yet each one is an original work in its own right.
I think originality comes down to voice and the emotional and intellectual slant that you give to things – the meanings you create. There are not a lot of "original" plot lines out there, or even original types of people. And yet each person (including imaginary people) is absolutely unique, as is their life story.
Lately I've been working on a series of stories that introduce historical characters into my story line. There are certain personalities that have always fascinated me, so it was a lot of fun exploring what would happen if my narrators met them, and a neat way to tie the stories together.
SHEENAGH: What other influences can you detect in your work? I'm imagining the Eng Lit curriculum in Australia being very different from in the UK, reflecting a whole different tradition, but maybe that's not so?
RUTH: When I was a kid Australians were still embarrassed about our lack of culture, and we were still singing God Save the Queen as our national anthem. We studied Chaucer and Shakespeare and knew all the names of all the kings of England (luckily they were not very creative with their names). For my final school exams I got to choose which poet to write about – Donne, Yeats, Gerard Manly Hopkins or Les Murray (the lone Australian). I chose Hopkins, I still know his poems by heart.
It's hard to say who I was influenced by because I read so much. I was attracted to the sounds of words and their rhythm, and I studied theatre at uni which is also about how things sound out loud, I suppose. My grandfather was a great storyteller, and I spent a lot of my childhood with him. He came from a small European village famous for their storytelling – he said that Scholem Aleichem (who wrote the stories that Fiddler on the Roof are based on) used to come to their village to collect stories for his writing. But he might have made that up.
SHEENAGH: Oh, I hope it's true – though if it isn't, I suppose it just shows you come from a line of inventive storytellers! Your favoured form is, or was, the short story, but so many practitioners have to end up writing a novel because the short story market is so small. Are you doing that? And if so, to what extent is it a compromise with what you really want to write, or is it something quite other, a challenge in itself?
RUTH: I mostly write short stories, and it is frustrating in terms of getting them out to a reading public, but that does seem to be what I do most naturally. I've written two novels, both began as stories that developed into something larger and more complex than the short form could sustain, so I don't think I wrote them with the market in mind. The most recent novel was an idea that I couldn't let go of for ages – I even based a series of paintings and a one-act play on it. With stories, I write them and then the characters leave me alone, so that's really the difference, in terms of motivation.
A novel is a very major part of your life, though, for a long time, in a way that stories aren't. If it doesn't "work" on some level, then it can be years of your life spent working on something that won't ever see the light of day. I was prepared for that, but right now I feel like I need a break from the intensity, so I'm back to stories. I think it suits my personality better to work in short bursts and then very quickly feel a sense of completion and then wait for something else to grab me. I am also not a story-planner – I enjoy surprising myself, and that may not suit the novel form in the same way. What I enjoy about writing something larger, though, is the sense of purpose it gives me, the way that everything around me seems to be able to "fit" itself into a framework.
SHEENAGH: Your writing strikes me as very non-judgemental. People behave well, or badly, or foolishly, but the narrator-figure pretty much stands back from the action and invites us to observe rather than condemn or take sides. Is this conscious on your part, and is it, do you think, a moral stance or a purely writerly preference for a certain type of narration?
RUTH: I don't have a lot of well-developed evil characters in my work – most of my characters are pretty ordinary people struggling with the kind of situations and moral issues that we all face. I also try to explore my own faults, and challenge social judgements about what is acceptable or moral behaviour. As I said, I don't like to write about really dark characters, the kind I would necessarily judge. There is usually no violence in my work (or if there is, it's barely described and in the past). So it's probably just part of how I see the world, and which parts of it I choose to dwell on. And apart from that, I like the contents of the story to work on the reader, without my opinions interfering. Like here:
After this, I have a scene inside the husband's head: he goes on to agree with her because they've been having lots of sex lately…she goes on to run off with a stranger she meets in a café…
SHEENAGH: "I don't like to write about really dark characters". Now that strikes me as unusual. Most writers, I suspect, quite like their villains, for various reasons - one, it's often easier to make them interesting to a reader, two, you can use them to express bits of you that you might not allow to see the light normally! Can you elaborate?
RUTH: I meant that I don't like to delve into what I think of as real evil – rapists, murderers, paedophiles, that sort of thing. I do not want to explore how Nazis really feel. For me to write a rounded character (not just a bit-part) I need to be able to get inside their head to some extent. It's a bit like being an actor, I suppose. So I do have mildly nasty people who embody hidden nasty parts of myself (or less hidden parts of other people I have come in contact with), but that is as far as I want to go. I also don't read or watch anything with horror or violence in it. I suppose it's a way of protecting myself from things I can't handle.
SHEENAGH: I hate calling prose lyrical, because it sounds like a backhanded compliment from a poet - ooh, look, you're nearly writing poetry! - as if that were a superior genre, which I don't believe. But your prose, very often, does have that quality of fixing a lyric moment that one finds more often in poetry. You didn't start as a poet by any chance, did you?
RUTH: No, I only started writing poetry very late in the game, and there's not much of it. Funnily enough, I only consciously set out to write a poem when I want to express an opinion. It seems like the perfect vehicle – concise and caustic. But most of the poems I've written are from bits I find inside a piece of prose, so I extract them and work on them separately. This is a poem found inside a piece of prose I wrote when I heard that my friend's husband had been killed in a hang gliding accident. It was published in Voices Israel #29, 2002
Gliding
"A hand grenade," I heard them say,
but later, when I heard it said again, I understood
I hadn't listened, filling in the gaps
with words I'd come to know:
molotov cocktail, mortar fire, plastic explosives.
"Was it his first time?" I hear, then "three children"
"No, four."
"Windslip," I think someone's saying.
Now between the words, I see him differently:
Sailing from a tall cliff, right into the wind.
From the sky, the valley spreads out
deep and quilted, swayed from side to side
and just the stalks left from the harvest
unmoving. Unmoved.
End of summer: cotton balls packed up in bales
and loose pieces floating
like fallen bits of sky.
His boyhood dreams crowd in as they get closer:
rows and rows of whiteness growing
till they burst out of their cotton seams.
Two stories
1. A link to Ruth's story The Dress, published in Verbsap, Feb 2005
2. Ruth's story "Night", first published in The Best of Carve Magazine, vol 3, 2002
Night
When it’s dark, you can’t see their names, only feel the way the letters meet your fingertips.
I steal into the blackened mail room, feel my way past the obstacles: tables stretched lengthwise, the ragged edges catch my skirt; rubbish bin tipped on its side. My hand moves to the letters that spell out their names, prying open the metal flaps. My skin made raw.
It’s dark inside, but the moon is full. I take the contraband to my room, turn the key swiftly, sit on the cool stone floor with my back pushed hard against the door and prise open the packages.
The first letter is small and secretive, even the print is not bold. It’s been written hurriedly on one of those square coloured notepads used for meetings, stapled under the name, I have to use my fingernails to open it. “Sunday, twelve, under the date tree,” it says, as if there were only one. And then the next day: “watching you.”
Sometimes I hate it here, and sometimes I’d never be anywhere else. It’s small-time, narrow and bare, just rocks and sand out there through the half-drawn shades. I go through my routine: tend to the date palms, make sure the irrigation’s right. Watch the way the oasis rises and falls, changing the horizon.
Lunch times we all crowd in, doesn’t matter what the weather’s like, same time of day. If you don’t get in there twelve p.m. you could miss the bourekas or the soup, but I don’t usually mind it, gets a bit crowded in here, same faces same food, and town is only a twenty-minute ride. And it’s by the sea, open and windy, big hotels and sleazy shwarma joints, full of faces you’ve never seen.
Night. I love it just after the sun goes down, I know there’s only a few hours left. I feel like Peter Parker turned into Spiderman, there must be a female equivalent, but none comes to mind. I don’t need to dress up to do it, transformation at midnight, no catgloves or mice with carriages; my skin hides me.
It’s midnight. I push through the door. Some nights I am less careful, I let the light swell in through the slits in the hinges, leave it ajar. Tonight isn’t like that, though.
I push my hand into her letter box, it’s hard and cold. My fingers wrap round the envelope, I squeeze it out through the opening; it has her smell. I hear a sound, slip silently through the door with the blotches from sticky tape, “General Assembly. Membership vote,” says the sign up outside.
I take slow steps to my room, you can’t usually hear but it’s autumn now, and there’s crunching of leaves.
In the beginning he doesn’t say much, short notes about where they might meet or things that have happened during the day. I stumble across it by accident, between the postcards of topless beaches in Yugoslavia and the air-thin butter-stained aerogrammes and the thick birthday cards.
At first I don’t know where the letters are coming from, I find them in amongst her mail. Letters here tend to get mistreated, left next to the telephone, or under the dog mat or fallen inside the couch. The rooms are bare and sandy, and we use the roofs to keep cool, pull up ladders and spread out the thorny date palms overhead like a year-round succah, sitting on dusty mattresses on the floor. It makes us feel like nomads.
I watch for who he could be. Taking in all her moves: who she speaks to in the dining room, what clothes she wears, I begin to notice her in a way I never had. She’s always seemed reserved and almost mousy, restrained, but now there is an energy to her that’s unmistakable: a swing in her hips when she wears those jeans, buttoned, settled just under her waist; the clinging shirts with no bra. Other days, she seems just as she always had, neat and severe, hair pulled back tight in a chignon; even then there seems to be something burning inside of her that I’d never seen.
A week passes and I still haven’t figured it. The unshaven cowboy with low-slung shorts and heavy boots, black curls fall in his eyes when he smiles.; the cook, a little overweight, but muscly, bright with charm. The economic manager, slim and freckled, short hair and even features, quick on his feet – perhaps that’s what appeals to her.
On the outside, everything is as usual. Dates ripen on the palms, tourists drive by on their dusty way to the sea. But the world has taken on a different tinge: reds that glimmer like blood, dripping, and clouds of molten grey. When the sun rises it shoots out rays like a cannon. When she walks by, I lose my balance; her presence fills up rooms.
It doesn’t seem right to me: As if too much light has shone her way, she’s filled with it, it darkens the spaces around her, there isn’t enough to go round.
That is why I prefer the sunsets, twilight, charcoal smudged across the sky. Shadows. That’s when I come alive.
The note is written hurriedly on the back of a paper bag, as if he couldn’t hold the thought without writing it. “I fantasise about you,” it says. There are no details of any fantasy, though, just an oblique request. “I want to know what you like,” writes the heavy hand, I can feel his breath behind it while he scrawls the words.
I start to imagine him, as if the notes were meant for me. In my mind, he isn’t anyone I know, but I feel the suffering behind his words; the impossibility of what he’s asking for.
I don’t know if she answers him, I assume that she does, I assume that she knows who he is, that it’s just the edge of what’s happening between them that I see.
I can’t stop myself, it’s like an addiction, the way their existence intrudes into mine. I get control and it pulls me back like a loaded spring. Swamping my capacity for aliveness, heightening some senses till the others seem to fade.
That’s how my body feels every evening after reading the mail, like discoloured clothing, easily torn into shreds in the wash; too long on spin-dry. Everything wrung out except for my hunger.
Then one night I stumble across it. Her note in his letter box.
I recognise the writing. It is mine.
In the afternoon he walks right by me, as if I’m invisible, as if I’m not part of his life at all. He even slams the door.
But I know who he is now. That gives me rights. In the night it is never like that, he comes to me at will, he writes to her but the letters are mine: they’re meant for me.
At night he comes to me, his breathing is uneven, he opens the door to the mail room, reaching out for me in the dark.
I start to write to him, opening my body onto the page. Mix my letters with hers, giving him what he asks for; both of us as if we are one.
Her letters skirt the truth, fairytales that tease with their allusions. I set him free. Sealing the envelopes with my juices so he can bury himself in the smell.
She seems like she’s bursting in this place and there’s no relief. The way that we’re all so huddled together, you have to keep your boundaries drawn or things could overflow.
It’s not as if she isn’t getting her share, but there’s something else that she’s looking for, I can see it in the way that they meet, there’s something waking, I don’t know how they keep the tension masked like that, I can see it bubbling over the surfaces like ice cream plunged into soda.
He isn’t tall or blond, not black-eyed, thin. Not a man who’d stop you in the street, not even if you exchanged words. There is something primal about him, it’s not just sexual, otherwise it wouldn’t have that pull, not on her. Not on me. The way that he says too much but not what he means, things he doesn’t know how to say, that there isn’t vocabulary for. The way his body calls to her in the dark.
%nbsp Mine answering.
They are under the date palm, leaves throw their jagged light, cutting the space between them, something has to otherwise the force would be too strong. I watch from another place as if she is a separate entity.
As if she isn’t me.
When she’s with him, something dims in her; it’s the idea of him that’s keeping her alight. Seeing him is filled with an ache that she can’t comprehend, she wants to reach out but something stops her, it always does, and when she moves away you can hear some part of her being torn. Perhaps it stays with him.
I wonder what goes through his mind when he sees her like this, when daylight shows up her imperfections, her hesitancy, the lines creeping over her face and the greying hair, full lips that chafe when she speaks. In the daytime he doesn’t say.
In the day I watch them walk through the dining room, she sits at the furthest table; he walks right by. Their eyes meet in between spoonfuls of soup, can’t think why you’d want to serve it in heat like this, he wipes the beads of sweat off his forehead and looks over at her. Electricity, taut across the room.
“Hi,” I say to him, breaking their line of communication. “How are your kids?”
The Best of Carve Magazine, Volume Three, 2002
SHEENAGH: Your writing has a terrific sense of place: Australia, Israel, India just come so alive on the pages. The sharpness of the vision is something I've seen in some writers who didn't have a settled childhood and never knew how long they'd have to look at and absorb the latest scene. Did you travel a lot when you were younger? How do you think living in many different places and cultures has affected your writing? And where, if anywhere, do you call "home"?
RUTH: I probably had the opposite of an unsettled childhood – I grew up in a boring city suburb. It's a place I've rarely written about. But my childhood was punctuated with exciting things – and I suppose that all of them were connected to place. When I went somewhere else, somewhere new – even for a weekend – that was when stuff happened. And we seemed to do that often, horseriding in the country every long weekend, travelling to exotic destinations, or even across the city to my grandparents' place, they had a house on a cliff above the ocean and a whole different culture, too.
As an adolescent I remember a lot of time passing just wishing that something would happen. Along with deciding I would never ever become a school teacher, I also remember deciding I would not ever live in the suburbs.
At 18 I went to Israel for a year (I'd already been there twice), then at 21 I moved from Sydney to Melbourne. Probably because I hadn't grown up there, and it was an intense time in my life, I was acutely aware of my surroundings, and I also had to literally find my way around. When I left Australia at 24 to move to Israel, Melbourne was the place I missed and wrote about. That's perhaps where the "unsettledness" is from, wanting to hold onto images and feelings of places so they don't disappear, kind of imprinting them. I was so far away and had uprooted so suddenly, and I was in a state of culture shock for quite a while, too.
I would add that at the same time (maybe it's just my personality), I find it very difficult to adapt to new surroundings. I like to travel but I always study the place I'm going to beforehand so I can imagine it – I even study street maps! I really hate being lost.
Home, of course is both where I live and where I come from. My house and the community I live in are in Israel and my kids were born here. I speak English at home with my Australian husband and kids, and we go back every few years. Almost all my POV characters are Australian because I write in Australian English, even when the stories are set in Israel.
SHEENAGH: Along with this sense of real physical location, there goes a parallel and very different strand of fairytale. Can you talk about the role of fairytale/folk-tale in your work, for it's clearly an important one?
RUTH: The first stories I remember writing were versions of The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. I was in 2nd grade, and we had this creative writing class once a week. I figured that if I could belt out a story really quickly, I could slip out of class and meet my friend in the playground. So what I did was rewrite that story every week – but differently each time – inventing plot twists and alternative endings, new voices and points of view. It was the best writing practice I ever did.
Also, I suppose that folk tales or myths were my favourite stories as a kid and adolescent – as a small kid my parents read me Greek myths and bible stories – then I fell in love with C.S. Lewis and Madeline D'Engle – but don't all kids read fairy tales and sci-fi?
This is an excerpt of something I wrote recently about a dog, Emerald:
There is no straight line from the neighbour's place to mine. You have to take a hewn path through the forest scrub, and risk the bull ants and prickles. Otherwise it's a country mile along the road. From the looks of Emerald, she'd been taking the shortcut and got herself a bunch of ticks and fleas and scratches on the way.
"You wanna take a walk?" I ask her.
"You can't go there," she says.
"Why not?"
"It will look obvious."
"Then you go there and I'll come out to get you."
Emerald looks up at me with big eyes and then shakes her head as if she's trying to get a stubborn fly to move.
"You are incorrigible," she says. I don't even know what that word means.
"I knew you were a smart one when I got you," I say.
Emerald goes and sits at her food bowl, but when I bring out the dried stuff from the bag she tilts her head and wrinkles up her forehead. "I'm going for a long walk," she says. "I'd like some sustenance."
When I began writing, I didn't plan for the dog to talk, and it was only once I'd finished the story that I realized I was using the dog's voice as the narrator's alter-ego. I find that introducing fantasy or magic realism – or mind-altering substances – into my stories gives me the chance to explore things more deeply because the usual laws of behaviour are suspended. I think they also act in a more obviously symbolic way, which is something I enjoy developing – or recognising afterwards.
SHEENAGH: Your answer on The Little Mermaid really interested me - because it was so practical, a means of getting off class early, but also because what you were doing, "inventing plot twists and alternative endings, new voices and points of view", was pure fan fiction, which is also something I've been interested in. Some folk are sniffy about this kind of riffing on established characters and plots, dismissing it as derivative and unoriginal. I recall your Little Mermaid and it was highly original in that the style was pure you, couldn't have been anyone else. What's your take on originality as a characteristic of writing - is it always a virtue and what does it consist in?
RUTH: Isn't fan fiction just like historical fiction? I think it is. You have a ready-made plot and characters and then you improvise and add your own voice. It's a bit like jazz – there are countless jazz standards based on Gershwin's "I've got Rhythm" (they're called "Rhythm Changes") and yet each one is an original work in its own right.
I think originality comes down to voice and the emotional and intellectual slant that you give to things – the meanings you create. There are not a lot of "original" plot lines out there, or even original types of people. And yet each person (including imaginary people) is absolutely unique, as is their life story.
Lately I've been working on a series of stories that introduce historical characters into my story line. There are certain personalities that have always fascinated me, so it was a lot of fun exploring what would happen if my narrators met them, and a neat way to tie the stories together.
SHEENAGH: What other influences can you detect in your work? I'm imagining the Eng Lit curriculum in Australia being very different from in the UK, reflecting a whole different tradition, but maybe that's not so?
RUTH: When I was a kid Australians were still embarrassed about our lack of culture, and we were still singing God Save the Queen as our national anthem. We studied Chaucer and Shakespeare and knew all the names of all the kings of England (luckily they were not very creative with their names). For my final school exams I got to choose which poet to write about – Donne, Yeats, Gerard Manly Hopkins or Les Murray (the lone Australian). I chose Hopkins, I still know his poems by heart.
It's hard to say who I was influenced by because I read so much. I was attracted to the sounds of words and their rhythm, and I studied theatre at uni which is also about how things sound out loud, I suppose. My grandfather was a great storyteller, and I spent a lot of my childhood with him. He came from a small European village famous for their storytelling – he said that Scholem Aleichem (who wrote the stories that Fiddler on the Roof are based on) used to come to their village to collect stories for his writing. But he might have made that up.
SHEENAGH: Oh, I hope it's true – though if it isn't, I suppose it just shows you come from a line of inventive storytellers! Your favoured form is, or was, the short story, but so many practitioners have to end up writing a novel because the short story market is so small. Are you doing that? And if so, to what extent is it a compromise with what you really want to write, or is it something quite other, a challenge in itself?
RUTH: I mostly write short stories, and it is frustrating in terms of getting them out to a reading public, but that does seem to be what I do most naturally. I've written two novels, both began as stories that developed into something larger and more complex than the short form could sustain, so I don't think I wrote them with the market in mind. The most recent novel was an idea that I couldn't let go of for ages – I even based a series of paintings and a one-act play on it. With stories, I write them and then the characters leave me alone, so that's really the difference, in terms of motivation.
A novel is a very major part of your life, though, for a long time, in a way that stories aren't. If it doesn't "work" on some level, then it can be years of your life spent working on something that won't ever see the light of day. I was prepared for that, but right now I feel like I need a break from the intensity, so I'm back to stories. I think it suits my personality better to work in short bursts and then very quickly feel a sense of completion and then wait for something else to grab me. I am also not a story-planner – I enjoy surprising myself, and that may not suit the novel form in the same way. What I enjoy about writing something larger, though, is the sense of purpose it gives me, the way that everything around me seems to be able to "fit" itself into a framework.
SHEENAGH: Your writing strikes me as very non-judgemental. People behave well, or badly, or foolishly, but the narrator-figure pretty much stands back from the action and invites us to observe rather than condemn or take sides. Is this conscious on your part, and is it, do you think, a moral stance or a purely writerly preference for a certain type of narration?
RUTH: I don't have a lot of well-developed evil characters in my work – most of my characters are pretty ordinary people struggling with the kind of situations and moral issues that we all face. I also try to explore my own faults, and challenge social judgements about what is acceptable or moral behaviour. As I said, I don't like to write about really dark characters, the kind I would necessarily judge. There is usually no violence in my work (or if there is, it's barely described and in the past). So it's probably just part of how I see the world, and which parts of it I choose to dwell on. And apart from that, I like the contents of the story to work on the reader, without my opinions interfering. Like here:
"I'm going to buy a sports car," she told her husband. They were watching TV, repeats of Entourage, so it was OK to talk all the way through. In their done-up brownstone, Analise and Thomas spent most nights like this, alone. Their youngest child was travelling in India. Their oldest at the conveniently close Emerson College. You'd really have to hate your parents to not find a college in Boston or Cambridge.
"A sports car," he repeated, as the TV characters cruised in their shiny black Lincoln Continental. "I'm thinking of a Mazda. An MX5. I don't need back seats anymore," said Analise.
"But you can walk everywhere. Or take the T. Your old Toyota will do the trick for the occasional drive. Won't it?"
"Yeah. But I want a sports car. I always have. Now I can afford it."
"Can you?" he asked her.
"I'm sorry?"
"Can you afford it?"
"Well yes, Thomas. We can. You just got that severance package and I'm doing well enough with work. I've got a lot coming in."
"Ah. So you meant that I can afford it."
"I is we. Isn't it?"
After this, I have a scene inside the husband's head: he goes on to agree with her because they've been having lots of sex lately…she goes on to run off with a stranger she meets in a café…
SHEENAGH: "I don't like to write about really dark characters". Now that strikes me as unusual. Most writers, I suspect, quite like their villains, for various reasons - one, it's often easier to make them interesting to a reader, two, you can use them to express bits of you that you might not allow to see the light normally! Can you elaborate?
RUTH: I meant that I don't like to delve into what I think of as real evil – rapists, murderers, paedophiles, that sort of thing. I do not want to explore how Nazis really feel. For me to write a rounded character (not just a bit-part) I need to be able to get inside their head to some extent. It's a bit like being an actor, I suppose. So I do have mildly nasty people who embody hidden nasty parts of myself (or less hidden parts of other people I have come in contact with), but that is as far as I want to go. I also don't read or watch anything with horror or violence in it. I suppose it's a way of protecting myself from things I can't handle.
SHEENAGH: I hate calling prose lyrical, because it sounds like a backhanded compliment from a poet - ooh, look, you're nearly writing poetry! - as if that were a superior genre, which I don't believe. But your prose, very often, does have that quality of fixing a lyric moment that one finds more often in poetry. You didn't start as a poet by any chance, did you?
RUTH: No, I only started writing poetry very late in the game, and there's not much of it. Funnily enough, I only consciously set out to write a poem when I want to express an opinion. It seems like the perfect vehicle – concise and caustic. But most of the poems I've written are from bits I find inside a piece of prose, so I extract them and work on them separately. This is a poem found inside a piece of prose I wrote when I heard that my friend's husband had been killed in a hang gliding accident. It was published in Voices Israel #29, 2002
Gliding
"A hand grenade," I heard them say,
but later, when I heard it said again, I understood
I hadn't listened, filling in the gaps
with words I'd come to know:
molotov cocktail, mortar fire, plastic explosives.
"Was it his first time?" I hear, then "three children"
"No, four."
"Windslip," I think someone's saying.
Now between the words, I see him differently:
Sailing from a tall cliff, right into the wind.
From the sky, the valley spreads out
deep and quilted, swayed from side to side
and just the stalks left from the harvest
unmoving. Unmoved.
End of summer: cotton balls packed up in bales
and loose pieces floating
like fallen bits of sky.
His boyhood dreams crowd in as they get closer:
rows and rows of whiteness growing
till they burst out of their cotton seams.
Two stories
1. A link to Ruth's story The Dress, published in Verbsap, Feb 2005
2. Ruth's story "Night", first published in The Best of Carve Magazine, vol 3, 2002
Night
When it’s dark, you can’t see their names, only feel the way the letters meet your fingertips.
I steal into the blackened mail room, feel my way past the obstacles: tables stretched lengthwise, the ragged edges catch my skirt; rubbish bin tipped on its side. My hand moves to the letters that spell out their names, prying open the metal flaps. My skin made raw.
It’s dark inside, but the moon is full. I take the contraband to my room, turn the key swiftly, sit on the cool stone floor with my back pushed hard against the door and prise open the packages.
The first letter is small and secretive, even the print is not bold. It’s been written hurriedly on one of those square coloured notepads used for meetings, stapled under the name, I have to use my fingernails to open it. “Sunday, twelve, under the date tree,” it says, as if there were only one. And then the next day: “watching you.”
Sometimes I hate it here, and sometimes I’d never be anywhere else. It’s small-time, narrow and bare, just rocks and sand out there through the half-drawn shades. I go through my routine: tend to the date palms, make sure the irrigation’s right. Watch the way the oasis rises and falls, changing the horizon.
Lunch times we all crowd in, doesn’t matter what the weather’s like, same time of day. If you don’t get in there twelve p.m. you could miss the bourekas or the soup, but I don’t usually mind it, gets a bit crowded in here, same faces same food, and town is only a twenty-minute ride. And it’s by the sea, open and windy, big hotels and sleazy shwarma joints, full of faces you’ve never seen.
Night. I love it just after the sun goes down, I know there’s only a few hours left. I feel like Peter Parker turned into Spiderman, there must be a female equivalent, but none comes to mind. I don’t need to dress up to do it, transformation at midnight, no catgloves or mice with carriages; my skin hides me.
It’s midnight. I push through the door. Some nights I am less careful, I let the light swell in through the slits in the hinges, leave it ajar. Tonight isn’t like that, though.
I push my hand into her letter box, it’s hard and cold. My fingers wrap round the envelope, I squeeze it out through the opening; it has her smell. I hear a sound, slip silently through the door with the blotches from sticky tape, “General Assembly. Membership vote,” says the sign up outside.
I take slow steps to my room, you can’t usually hear but it’s autumn now, and there’s crunching of leaves.
In the beginning he doesn’t say much, short notes about where they might meet or things that have happened during the day. I stumble across it by accident, between the postcards of topless beaches in Yugoslavia and the air-thin butter-stained aerogrammes and the thick birthday cards.
At first I don’t know where the letters are coming from, I find them in amongst her mail. Letters here tend to get mistreated, left next to the telephone, or under the dog mat or fallen inside the couch. The rooms are bare and sandy, and we use the roofs to keep cool, pull up ladders and spread out the thorny date palms overhead like a year-round succah, sitting on dusty mattresses on the floor. It makes us feel like nomads.
I watch for who he could be. Taking in all her moves: who she speaks to in the dining room, what clothes she wears, I begin to notice her in a way I never had. She’s always seemed reserved and almost mousy, restrained, but now there is an energy to her that’s unmistakable: a swing in her hips when she wears those jeans, buttoned, settled just under her waist; the clinging shirts with no bra. Other days, she seems just as she always had, neat and severe, hair pulled back tight in a chignon; even then there seems to be something burning inside of her that I’d never seen.
A week passes and I still haven’t figured it. The unshaven cowboy with low-slung shorts and heavy boots, black curls fall in his eyes when he smiles.; the cook, a little overweight, but muscly, bright with charm. The economic manager, slim and freckled, short hair and even features, quick on his feet – perhaps that’s what appeals to her.
On the outside, everything is as usual. Dates ripen on the palms, tourists drive by on their dusty way to the sea. But the world has taken on a different tinge: reds that glimmer like blood, dripping, and clouds of molten grey. When the sun rises it shoots out rays like a cannon. When she walks by, I lose my balance; her presence fills up rooms.
It doesn’t seem right to me: As if too much light has shone her way, she’s filled with it, it darkens the spaces around her, there isn’t enough to go round.
That is why I prefer the sunsets, twilight, charcoal smudged across the sky. Shadows. That’s when I come alive.
The note is written hurriedly on the back of a paper bag, as if he couldn’t hold the thought without writing it. “I fantasise about you,” it says. There are no details of any fantasy, though, just an oblique request. “I want to know what you like,” writes the heavy hand, I can feel his breath behind it while he scrawls the words.
I start to imagine him, as if the notes were meant for me. In my mind, he isn’t anyone I know, but I feel the suffering behind his words; the impossibility of what he’s asking for.
I don’t know if she answers him, I assume that she does, I assume that she knows who he is, that it’s just the edge of what’s happening between them that I see.
I can’t stop myself, it’s like an addiction, the way their existence intrudes into mine. I get control and it pulls me back like a loaded spring. Swamping my capacity for aliveness, heightening some senses till the others seem to fade.
That’s how my body feels every evening after reading the mail, like discoloured clothing, easily torn into shreds in the wash; too long on spin-dry. Everything wrung out except for my hunger.
Then one night I stumble across it. Her note in his letter box.
I recognise the writing. It is mine.
In the afternoon he walks right by me, as if I’m invisible, as if I’m not part of his life at all. He even slams the door.
But I know who he is now. That gives me rights. In the night it is never like that, he comes to me at will, he writes to her but the letters are mine: they’re meant for me.
At night he comes to me, his breathing is uneven, he opens the door to the mail room, reaching out for me in the dark.
I start to write to him, opening my body onto the page. Mix my letters with hers, giving him what he asks for; both of us as if we are one.
Her letters skirt the truth, fairytales that tease with their allusions. I set him free. Sealing the envelopes with my juices so he can bury himself in the smell.
She seems like she’s bursting in this place and there’s no relief. The way that we’re all so huddled together, you have to keep your boundaries drawn or things could overflow.
It’s not as if she isn’t getting her share, but there’s something else that she’s looking for, I can see it in the way that they meet, there’s something waking, I don’t know how they keep the tension masked like that, I can see it bubbling over the surfaces like ice cream plunged into soda.
He isn’t tall or blond, not black-eyed, thin. Not a man who’d stop you in the street, not even if you exchanged words. There is something primal about him, it’s not just sexual, otherwise it wouldn’t have that pull, not on her. Not on me. The way that he says too much but not what he means, things he doesn’t know how to say, that there isn’t vocabulary for. The way his body calls to her in the dark.
%nbsp Mine answering.
They are under the date palm, leaves throw their jagged light, cutting the space between them, something has to otherwise the force would be too strong. I watch from another place as if she is a separate entity.
As if she isn’t me.
When she’s with him, something dims in her; it’s the idea of him that’s keeping her alight. Seeing him is filled with an ache that she can’t comprehend, she wants to reach out but something stops her, it always does, and when she moves away you can hear some part of her being torn. Perhaps it stays with him.
I wonder what goes through his mind when he sees her like this, when daylight shows up her imperfections, her hesitancy, the lines creeping over her face and the greying hair, full lips that chafe when she speaks. In the daytime he doesn’t say.
In the day I watch them walk through the dining room, she sits at the furthest table; he walks right by. Their eyes meet in between spoonfuls of soup, can’t think why you’d want to serve it in heat like this, he wipes the beads of sweat off his forehead and looks over at her. Electricity, taut across the room.
“Hi,” I say to him, breaking their line of communication. “How are your kids?”
The Best of Carve Magazine, Volume Three, 2002
