Christina D'Antoni Interviews Venita Blackburn

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, DIAGRAM, Split Lip Mag, Electric Literature, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, The Spectacle, Los Angeles Review of Books Print Quarterly Journal, American Short Fiction, the Georgia Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award and recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. Current projects include finishing a new novel.  She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Blackburn’s second collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl, will be published Fall 2021 by MCD Books of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

From Associate Editor Christina D’Antoni: Venita, thank you for spending some virtual time with me today! In a recent interview with SmokeLong Quarterly, you said that “normal is gone forever.” What has replaced normalcy for you during the pandemic, and what do your days look like now?

Venita Blackburn: When I said “normal” at the time, I meant the philosophical version. The macro version of the world has changed dramatically and not just the logistical steps of our days but our expectations and our ways of relating to each other have too. There are a lot of doom and gloom predictions floating around too about what that change will look like. I used to be one of them that expected the worst, but now I’m not so sure. That kind of thinking is probably just built around selfish ideals. As for me personally, I hope a lot less, these days. That sounds bad ha, but I really mean that I live without hope. I like to look at the world, the day, the moments more honestly for what they are and not what I expect them to be. I’ve really come into the present moments a lot more now. I reminds me of a time when I had to grieve deeply for someone I loved; every sense at the time became vivid. My “normal” self is very cerebral. I tend to live in reflection and anticipation rather than in the current moment. This year has been a time to struggle against all of our selves across time. My struggle has come to peace in the now. I’m doing weird things from the past though like roller skating for the first time in a couple decades and listening to man-bands from the 90s. So, I’m gathering old comforts from my past and exercising them in my present. 

CD: I’m a first-time teacher, and I’m wondering if you could speak to how you navigate the virtual teaching space? Are your goals for the classroom different than they used to be?

VB: Welcome to the teaching biz! It’s fun. Only do it if it feels fun though. I tell everyone, if you are feeling sick and want to throw up every time you go to class, stop it. Do anything else. Public speaking is not for us all. Do not invite that kind of suffering on yourself. I’ve taught online before, and it’s unnatural for sure. No matter what we tell ourselves in our pro-technology age, it isn’t great. We have physical bodies and behaviors that respond to each other in physical space. It is unique, and it should be honored. Still, we have tools that can accomplish certain things, and I find the online environment is great for archiving work and listing options for practice and posting lectures and films for review. Discussion is different in these spaces in a way that really helps some and hinders others. I make sure to do one on one conferences with students in person and online. Zoom is new and fancy and people love it. I do not ha. It’s ok, but let’s not pretend this is better than real space. I love having my refrigerator so close to me during class though. That’s cool. Mute. Snack. Good deal. I miss group laughter and precise eye contact lol. My best advice is to remember that this should be temporary and optional, not normal. We all need to remember our bodies and care for them and each other now and tomorrow.

CD: At Hayden’s Ferry Review, we have a series called “Space Exploration,” which asks writers to share their necessary spaces, both physical and mental. What physical and mental spaces do you occupy when you write?

VB: That’s a great question. I write in my office on campus now, which is a very bleak space. My desk faces a wall. The light is not great. The furniture is uninspired. It’s perfect. There is no other space that will allow my mind to flee from it so completely. I can’t write at home because it’s too comfortable, too many distractions, too many sounds. Mentally, I’m writing work that is very very far away from our present time, so I am thinking about the macro world a lot using a unique voice as the filter. What helps me to get into these mental spaces is doing a little journaling, emptying out my own worries for a while in a kind of pretend jar then putting a lid on it for a while.

CD: On its jacket, your award-winning collection, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes is described as a book that “chronicles ordinary people achieving vivid extrasensory perception while under extreme pain.” In some of your stories, such as “Brim,” I witnessed this “extrasensory perception” as a momentary obliteration of that extreme pain, and in other stories like “Ravished,” I felt that pain injected with joy. I’m thinking of the last paragraph of “Ravished,” especially the lines, “...it’s when you fall down together in leaves and roll around and splash until it feels like drowning—it’s when a boy does karate kicks around your head but always misses…” How do you conceive of pain in your work?

VB: Ha, that was a fun line. I’m sort of a funny person. I laugh a lot and tell a lot of jokes. Usually, people like me have gone through a lot of trauma and developed a way of not coping with but accepting reality for the full range of emotions it provides. Very serious moments are often ridiculous. The big ones, funerals and weddings, and the small ones too (going to the gym and the gas station). Look at all of us just roaming around touching the cheeks of dead people and a few yards away chewing beef jerky in a parking lot. It’s all such an odd show, life as a whole. I suppose intellectually I see it as all connected, pain and pleasure, ecstasy and despair. We get in trouble when we get stuck, when we create hierarchies of feelings or misname some of those feelings. I argue about the definition of jealousy and possessiveness a lot. One sounds more acceptable than the other because of connotations and cultural norms, but they are very similar yet different regardless of perceived value. I feel that way about ecstasy and despair. We should dare to allow ourselves to feel what we feel and not judge it positive or negative. Our behaviors, however, can have positive or negative outcomes for sure. 

CD: I noticed numerous mentions of food in Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, including mentions of lasagna, canned ravioli, Froot Loops, Pop-Tarts—the food eaten by those dealing with the emotional and financial tolls of grief. How do you see food working in your stories?

VB: I consider myself an “eater”. Food is a great pleasure of life. Meals are not to be trifled with. The idea that food is only fuel is one of the most depressing concepts I have ever encountered. When people tell me they had a bad dining experience I mourn with them deeply. It is sad. Food is also emotional. We make choices for food based on what we need emotionally. Food of romance vs that of loneliness is profound. Nobody eats chocolate covered strawberries when they visit a hospice. A big bowl of chili on a honeymoon night is weird. I’d do it, but that’s just me!  Seeing the kind of foods mentioned in Black Jesus is hilarious because it speaks to my own financial status at the time of writing it, during the previous recession and while dealing with personal losses. It was a time of Pop-Tarts and canned survival food. My next book might have some more upscale culinary items now that I have a full-time teaching job and discretionary income, but I’m not sure! I’d love to see an analysis of that later.

CD: You’ve talked about your inclination for flash fiction that can somehow hold years or even lifetimes in a few pages. In an interview with Malinda McCollum for Fiction Writer’s Review, you explain how you cut down your MFA thesis to a four-page story, leaving your favorite lines. Is this still how you compose today? When writing flash, where do you begin?

VB: Oh my, fortunately I don’t have to revise that aggressively anymore. It seems the more I write the more my instincts for editing as I’m writing become sharper and more discerning. I like what I like on the page, and I’m always writing to see that, and I can think a few sentences ahead of time before committing to one. My tastes in flash are always evolving. I still love sweeping generational stories compressed into the flash fiction scope. That might be a forever love affair, but I’m also dazzled by odd structures that sill manage an emotional resonance, a touch of the sacred and vulnerable.

CD: You’ve called yourself a voice writer. I whole-heartedly agree. For me, the voices in your work begin with the very first line and never falter. Some of my favorite first lines from your collection: “Water balloon wars are primal, vicious productions.” “We formed a coven in the fall.” “My lover wants to eat me, I’m sure.” “Blabbermouth Vicki caught me talking to the turtle tank in the break room.” I’m especially enamored with the voices of young people in your stories. What is your process for finding the voice of a story?

VB: Yassss. I can listen to all kinds of wandering, meandering nonsense if the voice is strong. Even my friends are like this. I’m not sure how interesting they are really, but they sound so weird, all of them. Sometimes I have to ask just the right questions to get the weirdness to start, but once it does, I’m riveted. I think about patterns of speech as reflections of the self. We are always trying to understand something about humanity through one character. We investigate a single bead of water in the ocean of civilization. I listen to the water first. I have to hear a particular voice before I can begin. I don’t start with an idea. I’m not trying to write about the patriarchy or femininity or race or America or gays. I do! It happens, but I don’t try to. That is context for a narrative that comes later. The voice comes first. That is my first entry point into the species, our language.

CD:Which writers’ or characters’ voices do you think your writing is in conversation with lately?

VB: That’s a terrific question. I was recently lamenting with a friend about the poets of our day like Danez Smith and Ocean Vuong that have created a cool sounding collective for themselves. I don’t have one ha. Where’s my collective? Who are my people? Can I get an invitation? I have my influences of course, you know, Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, ZZ Packer, Aimee Bender, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but they are not my peers. They have their own chic dinner parties together with shimmering glasses of booze, I imagine. I’m not that cool.

CD: Your next collection, How to Wrestle a Girl, will be published next fall by MCD books. You’ve said there is a sports theme and stories about athletic women and girls. Could you tell us more about a particular storyline or character that you’re looking forward to sharing with your readers?

VB: Characters from Black Jesus will be revisited in the collection along with a cast of newbies with their own psychoses and neuroses. I love them all. I would say this collection is more realistic, scientific than magical even though there is a world in one story where the dead come back to have one last conversation. My obsession with unconventional girlhood will always be with me. How I investigate that and what other avenues of existence I wander into will be an adventure. I look to the actual world for inspiration all the time. The title story, “How to Wrestle a Girl,” is based on a young wrestler I read about. There are fascinating women defying the rule book of life all around us. I enjoy celebrating their wickedness.

CD: Do you have advice for writers that are finding it difficult to write this year?

VB: I feel like a time traveler myself most of the time, living in the past and future. Let us all write like it’s 1999 and 2099 happening at the same time. Maybe that will offer some clarity on today. Write with foresight. Write with reflection and compassion. Be kind to your villains and ruthless to your heroes. They’re all us.

Christina D’Antoni is a writer born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Fiction at Arizona State University, and an Associate Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is at work on a collection of short stories about the lives of people from the Gulf Coast post-Katrina.