Interview: Amber Sparks
Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, and the co-author (with Robert Kloss and illustrator Matt Kish) of the hybrid novel The Desert Places. You can find her most days @ambernoelle and some days at ambernoellesparks.com.
TCJWW Interview: Amber Sparks
TCJWW: Last summer, you published an essay called “NEW GENRES: Domestic Fabulism or Kansas with a Difference” on Electric Literature which sets out to define “domestic fabulism.” We’re fascinated by this concept! Can you give us some background? What was the inspiration for this essay?
Sparks: Sure - EL editor Lincoln Michel and I actually came up with the idea together. I was interested in writing a piece for their New Genre series, and he suggested something that involved fairy tales, fables, magic realism - the sort of writing I read (and write) a lot of. And from there we figured that no one had really written much about the sort of magic realism, or fabulism, that takes place not in far-flung, fabulous locales and long-ago - but rather the kind that operates within the domestic realm, which has been traditionally the proper place of realism. And from there, the idea took off.
TCJWW: Tell us about the need for a definition. What, if anything, has defining this concept changed? How have writers responded?
Sparks: I think sometimes a definition, though never necessary, is freeing for writers. That may sound like a paradox, but I think defining a thing that you do, naming it, can give it a sort of power - a legitimacy, and a way to talk about it. I suspect this is especially true for women writers, which is part of why I wrote this essay. So many amazing women writers have taken on domestic fabulism and of course since it's "domestic," aka the sphere (diminished) of women, it's never really been discussed as a legitimate genre, which I think it is. The response has been kind of amazing. I couldn't believe how many people shared and discussed the piece, and contacted me about it - including you! Even now I get people tweeting it out every now and then or letting me know otherwise how excited they were to find someone giving a name to something they do. Naming the work you do cannot be underestimated. It's very empowering.
TCJWW: We’re so excited for your new book, The Unfinished World and Other Stories (Liveright/Norton 2016). How has the idea of domestic fabulism shaped these stories? Who are some of the characters we’re going to meet in this book?
Sparks: Thank you! I think domestic fabulism has shaped many of the stories in the collection. Many of the protagonists are women doing traditional women's work: cleaning woman, librarian, artist's muse, prostitute, dutiful daughters and mothers and wives - and something fabulous and surreal and wonderful happens to allow them to turn the tables, to take revenge, or simply to hold a mirror up to the prison their station and sex has created for them. Not all of the stories are what you'd call "fabulist," though many are. And not all are about women - there are plenty of male protagonists, too. But I usually try to explode their own prisons in the same way - and so you have a hero who's stuck in an unheroic time, a young simple mute who's really neither, bone hunters feuding their way into obscurity. Soldiers robbed of all agency by the war they've fought in. Does that sound just too depressing? I promise it isn't! Or at least, there are some funny bits, too.
TCJWW: Do you have a favorite character, setting, or story in the new collection? (I know it’s unfair to ask!)
Sparks: Well, no one ever wants to play favorites, but I will admit that of all my protagonists, Louise, the taxidermist in "The Cemetery for Lost Faces," is probably most like me. I'm not sure if the house in that story is my favorite setting per se, but I could play around there endlessly in fiction. It's loosely based on the House on the Rock in Wisconsin, which is one of the most bizarre places I've ever been. You couldn't ask for a better story setting.
TCJWW: We want to read this book! And we want to read more. What books or authors inspired you as you worked on this book?
Sparks: Well, thanks! Oh, so so many. I mean, I was reading a lot of stuff about the Jazz Age, I reread Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned for about the 80th time, and was reading a lot of non-fiction, too. I read Matt Bell and Karen Russell and Kelly Link and Anne Valente and Joy Williams and Laura van den Berg and John Crowley and Isak Dinesen and Aase Berg and Nabokov and Mo Yan and Joanna Ruocco and Can Xue and Lidia Yuknavitch and Amelia Gray and Lindsay Hunter and Sarah Rose Etter. And a ton of fairy tales and myths, too. Angela Carter. Melville. Lots of books about explorers, about early archaeology. Should I just say everything ever, ha?
TCJWW: Do you consider this new genre confined to prose? To me, Ansel Elkins’s “The Girl with Antlers” (https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/own_words/Ansel_Elkins/) feels like the perfect example of domestic fabulism:
The woman was worried when I would not wear dresses. I walked naked through the woods. She hung the wash from my head on hot summer days when I sat in the sun to read.
I love the image of a mythical creature girl with wet laundry hung from her antlers—it seems perfectly domestic fabulist. I know you work primarily in prose, but do you see this poem fitting the genre?
Sparks: Oh, absolutely! I think there's so much wonderful poetry that fits the genre perfectly. Molly Gaudry's work, for example, I consider to be a prose poetry that focuses on domestic fabulism (and I talk about that a little in the essay, I think), and Aase Berg, too, and so many others who do this grounded but almost mythological transformation stuff. It's almost a way of going back to the Artemis myth. Alice Notley, in many ways, though I'm sure she'd vehemently disagree. I used to write poetry (and hope to again) and I usually see very little difference, beyond form, between fiction and poetry - I think anywhere one can go, so can the other.
TCJWW: Finally, we’re excited about The Unfinished World and Other Stories but we’re also curious: what are you working on now?
Sparks: Right now - oh, so many things. A novel that I don't want to jinx, a book of poetry about medieval women, an art project or ten, a book of non-fiction essays - and also raising a six month old baby, which is easily the most challenging and reward project I've worked on so far. I think it's going to take me a few years to finish that one, though.
