First – thank you so much for the lovely compliments and this amazing opportunity. Sound is really important to me in writing, probably because of my experience with poetry. More recently, I have been really interested in prose that is more poetry than story because I simply feel more connected to it. For some reason, if I let go of the story and focus on the language and the rhythm, then something happens and I feel a stronger connection to the character I am trying to create as well as the story simmering beneath the language. I think I’ve always wanted to write something musical for that reason – it feels more visceral to me, and makes the process more physical. I think I need that physicality more with fiction or prose than I do with poetry. For this particular story, sound was so central to the creation of it because it was first conceived of as a story where the girl was going to only speak in song lyrics (that has changed quite a bit as you can see). I feel music and lyrics has very much influenced how I write and how I think of language, so I guess you could say they just go together for me – I used to sit down and write all the lyrics to my favorite songs and memorize them. I would also memorize sonnets just for the fun of it as well as poems (for example, I loved memorizing poetry by Maya Angelou and reciting them for my friends). I can’t exactly pinpoint just when I felt this strong attachment to music in language– but I have a feeling that it goes back to that physicality of music and its ability to make us move. I think language should always try to make us move like music. That’s at least what I am going for in my own work.

 

 
“...she realized the song was saying that Virginia, like any state, was a metaphor for all the women of the world, that too many did what they didn’t mean, that pedestals and thrones sat too high, too lofty in the wind."

 

Ah – yes, Laura is definitely a deep soul. Wise, as you say, perhaps in certain ways, and not so wise in other ways. Here, she realizes that women in particular hold each other or themselves to these standards that are flimsy and unreal, unreachable. This moment, when her friend chooses to get an abortion, is a really big deal for both of them because Laura understands loss to an extent and sees this abortion as very similar. Yet, somehow, she’s able to realize that her friend’s decision is most likely the right one. She is really kind of torn here, I think. She uses song lyrics to understand her friend as well as herself here – I believe a Train song, “Meet Virginia” was in my mind because that song creates a character who is really kind of strange and exotic – someone who most likely doesn’t even exist – and the singer wants to meet this person. Well, Laura kind of realizes that person probably doesn’t exist, especially not in the ways we’ve imagined or hoped for. This is really important because it will eventually help her realize she is also holding her brother up on a high pedestal and that perhaps he is more human than she has considered.

 

 

I think you are spot on – she wants to feel something other than pain. And at the same time, she can associate pleasure with pain as well, as if they are interchangeable, which I find really interesting about her as a character. She wants to stop the pain, but can’t really figure out what emotion it is she wants to feel. In fact, that’s why she has to look up words in the thesaurus over and over again – the language is never enough to explain what it IS she feels. It is pain yes, but even deeper than that. So, she forces herself to experience physical things, thinking maybe that will help her get away from the pain, and instead she finds that she feels much the same. She also tries to use song lyrics to explain her pain, but the words are never enough – they never quite get it right. And I think that’s a big comment on language in general and perception. No matter how much we try to explain it or understand it, it’s always a bit distorted. I think this is something Laura eventually comes to understand – or at least I did while writing it.

 

 

My love of language started early – isn’t that the cliché with us writers? But honestly, one of my earliest memories with language is in a fourth grade class when I lived in California and we were studying poetry. For some reason I fell in love with limericks and ended up writing a small collection of them. My teacher had me help “teach” the class about poetry because I fell in love with the forms book she let me borrow. I kept writing. I got journals for my birthday and Christmas and I would fill them up and have to get a new one. In fifth grade, I started writing plays with a friend of mine and we would hold auditions on the playground, do our casting and rehearsals during recess, and we eventually talked the principal into letting our class take a half-day off so we could perform our play for our parents. Those two years really exposed me to writing, to loving it and seeing the power in it. I still have all my journals – my first one has a cat on it. And I wrote a lot of rhyming poetry and stories that mimicked fairy tales. But I loved immersing myself in it. The whole imagination thing really captivated me, I guess you could say.

 

First, I have to say that burning has always baffled me. I had a friend who wrote a whole novel on a typewriter and then burned some of it and let the wind take the rest of it away. I understand that our writing is fleeting – but I also have always felt so connected to it and feel it tells me more about myself than anything. Burning would be so hard! But I also understand that it would be the ultimate way to force yourself to rewrite something in the way you actually meant to. So there is definitely power behind that!

 

Many writers have influenced me – I have to mention Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, Michelle Boisseau, Natalie Goldberg – for poetry and journal writing and Sherman Alexie, James Joyce, Annie Dillard for prose/fiction. There are obviously others, but when I am in a funk and need inspiration, these are my go-to writers.

 

There are quite a few contemporary writers who have recently inspired me to try new things and step out of my comfort zone and I always look forward to reading work by them: Meg Tuite, Roxane Gay, Molly Gaudry, Rae Bryant, Erin Elizabeth Smith, Lisa Marie Basile, Callista Buchen and Meghan Kaminski. These writers always inspire me to try something new.

 

I recently finished my first collection of poetry, Mythology of Touch. Right now I am working on a hybrid chapbook titled The Dopamine Letters – it’s kind of a story or internal character sketch in prose poems and verse. And I have another chapbook titled Autopsy of Me that I am working on – but it may be part of my next full length collection of poetry, which is in the beginning stages, so I don’t quite have a vision just yet for that one. For the next few months I plan to focus on poetry but I am sure something else will come up. I’m just excited to see what can be accomplished in 2012. I am really a project person, but bad at finishing them. So we’ll see what happens!

 

Thank you so much, Mary, for sending Connotation Press one of your exceptional stories. Good luck with all of your projects. I can tell you that I will be purchasing every Mary Stone Dockery collection available. Congratulations on Mythology of Touch and your two chapbooks, Aching Buttons and Blink Finch. Can’t wait to read them!