Dana Diehl
In Conversation
Daniel Davis Wood speaks to Dana Diehl about her story collection Our Dreams Might Align.
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Let’s kick off by talking about science. One of the things that readers of Our Dreams Might Align will notice immediately is that it’s populated with characters who have an interest in science, or even expertise in some particular scientific field. There are teachers and researchers of various stripes; there are narrators who give Latin names for different species of animals and minor discourses on biology. Why? Why does science speak to you and what led you to decide that it should colour so many of your stories?
The sciences have always been present in my life, so it seems inevitable that they’d be important in how I tell stories and parse out the world. I was raised by geologists. My parents taught me to always be observant of the natural world: the placement of moth on trees, the movement of animals on the edges of my vision, the shape of rocks. Growing up, everything in nature seemed to hold a secret story. My parents could tell the journey a stone had taken by holding it. When we went canoeing, my dad could read the creek and know where underwater logs or rocks were hidden before he could actually see them. It was the real-world version of fortune telling and palm reading.
I love the language of science, especially Latin names, because these words often reveal just as much about the humans who assigned them, as they do about the animals or plants. Our words reveal our values, our reference points, and what we think of as extraordinary (for example, the Latin name for hippopotamus translates as ‘horse of the river’). I also love the vocabulary of science for its specificity and clarity. Sometimes I try to write without science. Sometimes I succeed. But most of the time, my worlds feel duller and less magical without it.
That’s really beautifully put. And what’s fascinating about the role of science in your stories is how it plays out exactly as you describe, giving a certain tint to your characters’ perceptions. It’s not just ornamentation; it doesn’t just set up a situation or push forward a plot. It allows some people to see the world in ways that others can’t see it, or to express themselves in ways they couldn’t if they didn’t have scientific concepts to fall back on. I’m thinking especially of characters in stories like ‘Closer’ and ‘Going Mean’.
Even today, there’s still a lot of validity to the old ‘two cultures’ complaint from C.P. Snow, fifty-odd years ago: that the discourses of the sciences and the humanities are incompatible or irreconcilable. But you sometimes think of them as overlapping; you invoke science to convey aspects of human experience that maybe can’t be conveyed using ordinary language. Obviously, this is an unusual thing for someone to do when they’re so clearly committed to a language art!
How conscious are you about writing for readers who might be unfamiliar with science, or puzzled or put off by it? How much effort does it take to work it into your prose without letting it overwhelm your readers? Or do you imagine yourself writing for readers who are likely to find it appealing no matter what?
I don’t worry about the science being too much for my readers, because I’m not a scientist myself. I usually don’t do much or any research prior to writing a story. I do the research while I’m in the process of writing to preserve that sense of mystery and discovery that I want to feel while writing, and that I want my characters to feel, as well. In most of my stories, I’m more interested in my character’s imperfect interpretations of science than I am in reporting the facts.
I have plenty other worries, though! I worry that my use of science will become tired. I worry that I use it as a crutch. I worry that a connection I see between science and life will feel forced. And most of all, I worry that one day a real scientist will read my stories and call me out on an inaccuracy I’ve inevitably missed.
So how did you end up going down this path rather than, say, following in the footsteps of your parents? What was it that led you to literature and to wanting to write stories?
When I was in Kindergarten, I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. Specifically: a book illustrator. But once I learned how to put together sentences, I quickly transitioned into wanting to be a writer instead. I have a clear early memory of sitting in my bed, rearranging word strips on my blanket, being amazed when the right arrangement created a thought and image in my head.
I was lucky to be surrounded by adults who encouraged my writing and helped me to see myself as a writer from early on. Some of those adults included my parents; my Kindergarten teacher, Pam Kastner; and my high school English teacher, Victoria Krout. My teachers gave me the confidence to submit to writing contests. My mom filled our house with books and was my first editor.
What I have consistently loved about writing stories is the magic of creating something out of nothing. I also love the puzzle of putting a sentence together. By the time I was a junior in high school, I was determined to major in Creative Writing. I went to undergrad at Susquehanna University, a small school in rural Pennsylvania with an incredible Creative Writing program. Some of the stories in Our Dreams Might Align were born from that program.
It’s interesting to hear you mention that, because your stories don’t come across as the results of conventional ‘workshop’ exercises. There’s very little interest in the affairs of everyday life, there are no real epiphanies for any of the characters, there are very few dramatic arcs. Some of them are almost static descriptions of what an unusual state of being feels like (‘Astronauts’, ‘Once He Was a Man’). Others, such as ‘Closer’ and ‘Going Mean’, depict characters undergoing transformations that don’t always have clear causes or clear consequences.
How much of this is the result of a conscious effort on your part? How much of a constructive role has the creative writing workshop played in your work, and to what extent have you turned away from some of the writing it tends to produce?
I generally don’t feel in total control of my style. I think that part of my style has been born from what I perceive to be my weaknesses as a writer. For example, I don’t feel especially good at plot. So, my stories aren’t very plot heavy. That’s just not what I prioritize.
I’ve been really lucky to have some incredible teachers who exposed me to different kinds of writing and didn’t push the traditional workshop story. As a young writer, in my sophomore year of college, I took a writing workshop with Silas Dent Zobal at Susquehanna University. For the first time, I was assigned to read authors like Aimee Bender, George Saunders, Ander Monson, and Susan Minot — all writers who feel playful and experimental in their content and form. Prior to that, I’d mostly only read traditional short stories written by men who were long dead. Though I think there is absolutely value in reading the ‘classics,’ reading these modern and experimental writers was so exciting. Their stories made me feel awake. They made me feel like I didn’t have to be so serious with my writing. I could have fun.
I also think I learned early on to take workshop comments with a grain of salt. You can’t please everyone with your story, and you shouldn’t try to. In most of the workshops I’ve taken, I’ve identified two or three of my peers whose opinions I trust the most and who I think understand my aesthetic. Instead of writing for everyone, I write to them. It’s been three years since I’ve been in a workshop. I still hear some of my past professors’ voices in my head when I’m writing a first draft, but I try to turn those voices off. I have to trust that I’ve internalized their lessons enough to work on instinct. When you’re a writer, you need to be open to criticism, and you can’t be too precious about your work. But I think you also have to be a little stubborn. Stubborn enough to stick to your vision and not listen to the voices that say, “It can’t be done.”
Speaking of the writing process, what exactly is your process? Notes first, then a draft? Longhand or straight onto the computer? Timelines for completion? What about revisions?
I almost always type my stories. I like being able to write non-linearly and to move things around as I go. My first draft is usually a skeleton of notes that range from mini scenes to reminders to myself (for example: “Maybe a pig attacks her now?”). The next step is adding flesh, making it into a story. This is the hardest part of the process for me. The first few pages are the most painful, because I haven’t found my voice yet and my inner critic is being especially chatty. Deadlines are helpful, because they force me to push past this difficult stage.
Revision is the fun part. I feel like I can relax, because the hard part of generating something is over, and I can start playing and experimenting. It’s important to me to re-type each new draft of the story (at least until I get to final, language-level edits). Re-typing the story helps me to truly immerse myself in the new draft. I get to know my story better than I would by just re-reading it.
You’ve published widely, in places like PANK, Hobart, and SunDog Lit, and you’ve had some non-fiction in The Collagist. It’s probably fair to say that these are all venues known for their edginess, their openness to unusual work. Do you see yourself as firmly a part of this alternative literary scene (if that’s the right word for it) or do you also have more mainstream interests, as both a reader and a writer?
It’s flattering to be identified with the alternative literary scene! I have a lot of love for indie presses and lit journals that publish ‘unusual’ work. Most of favorite books have been published by indie presses and contain stories that first appeared in journals like the ones you’ve listed above. I admire that these journals and presses are taking risks.
I definitely feel most comfortable in this alternative literary scene. However, I am open to exploring other genres and modes of writing. I think there is a lot of good fiction aimed at kids, and I’d love to write a middle grade novel one day.
Finally, a question of form. Or, rather, a prompt: “Your thoughts on the novel vis-a-vis the short story: preferences, ambitions, possibilities, limitations, and your future. Discuss.”
George Saunders has a great metaphor for a short story that he shares in a Colbert Report interview. He asks you to imagine that there’s someone you’re in love with and you want to tell them how you feel. There are two scenarios. In the first, you take a train ride with your beloved and have a week to share your feelings (this is a novel). In the second scenario, your beloved is about to get on the train and you can’t follow her. You only have three minutes to say what you want to say (this is a short story). I love that the short story is precise and can be experienced in one sitting. In my own life, I have a lot of anxiety around uncertainty and unanswerable questions. But in short stories, uncertainty is celebrated. In short stories, it’s okay to leave questions unanswered.
My future? This past fall, I finished a collaborative short story collection with the amazing Melissa Goodrich. The collection is fabulist and inspired by odd things we’ve seen and heard working at an elementary school. I have another short story collection, or an idea for a collection, in the works, but it feels like bad luck to say what it’s about. You’ll have to wait a couple years and see!
All right, let’s take a look directly at Our Dreams Might Align. It seems like there are two kinds of stories in the collection. A lot of them are short pieces that range from surrealism to magical realism to outright fantasy. Then there are a handful of longer pieces that operate more in the mode of realism even though they don’t always deal with down-to-earth themes. Despite this, the collection has an overarching unity to it, thematically and structurally. That’s something I want to come to in a moment, but for now I’d like to ask you about each of those two kinds of stories.
The depth of your shorter stories is often quite startling, especially since some of them are only a couple of pages long. By this I mean that instead of starting with a narrative premise and elaborating on it or complicating it in dramatic ways, you tend to leave it uncomplicated and then meditate on it, delve into its emotional implications while keeping the narrative action pretty spartan. It’s almost as if you inhabit the skin of a character in a given situation without pushing them to do things for the sake of storytelling, without forcing them to change their circumstances or engage in a sequence of events that might feel forced.
One of the most beautiful examples of this strain in your work appears in ‘Astronauts’. The wife of a man who has gone into outer space reflects on the fact that her husband could survive in a vacuum for eight seconds without his space suit, and then she wonders: “For those eight seconds, for the stars tangling in his hair and catching in the corner of his eyes like gnats, for the feeling of skin-to-space, might death be worth it?”
What does it take for you to get into this speculative frame of mind, and then pluck out a kernel of thought to assemble a story around?
An image almost always comes first for me, and the writing process is about exploring that image, figuring out what it means and why it has stuck in my brain. Initially, my characters are secondary concerns. I like to “write into the mystery”, as I think Anthony Doerr once said in an interview.
For example, in ‘Swarm’, I started with the memory of my dad burning bag worm nests from trees in our backyard as I watched with a mixture of relief and sadness and disgust. I built a story to help me to understand these emotions, which felt contradictory to me.
‘Going Mean’ was born when I heard the story of a man being killed and eaten by the two Komodo dragons he kept as pets in his apartment. It was a true story, as far as I know, and I wondered why someone might want Komodo dragons in the first place. What might they represent to someone? What needs might they be satisfying? So my stories usually start with images like these, and then the images raise the questions that power the stories.
I’m not sure why my fabulist stories tend to be so much shorter than my realist stories. Maybe I’m afraid that writing anything longer would risk losing control of the magic. When I’m writing a story with a fabulist bent, I feel like I’m holding onto a string attached to a helium balloon. If I let the balloon go while it’s still full and let it float into the sky, the balloon will always be remembered as a mysterious and magical thing. But if I hold on too long, it will deflate and its magic will fade.
It’s interesting that you mention your father in connection with ‘Swarm’; you also mentioned earlier that your parents are both geologists and that this has influenced the scientific vision of your stories. Not that I want to speculate on your family life, but the subject leads naturally to your longer stories — the stories in more of a realist mode — because so many of them revolve around family disagreements, or unspeakable things between people who share family bonds.
Some examples. ‘Burn’ is driven by the tension between two estranged sisters; ‘Animal Skin’, ‘Closer’, and ‘A Place Without Floors’ are all about fraught mother-daughter relationships; and then ‘Swarm’ and ‘Going Mean’ both revolve around two lovers are looking ahead — very uncertainly — to their future as a family.
What is it about the imbalanced dynamics of family life that makes them such fertile ground for your exercises in realism?
I fortunately have a happy and undramatic relationship with my family, so the conflicts in my stories are never actually inspired by my own relatives! However, I’m very interested in the concept of family and how being related by blood to another person can have mysterious and not always obvious effects on our lives. Family is fertile ground for stories because family can make people act illogically. For our families, we break our own rules. Also, every family is different, so you can write about families endlessly.
I’m especially interested in motherhood. I’m not a mother, but I feel like it’s something I’ve been imagining for most of my life, ever since I was a kid playing with dolls: my mom was pregnant with my brother when I was two, and she gave me a little boy Cabbage Patch kid so I’d have my own baby to take care of. Being a mom seems impossibly scary and strange and magical, and I waver between wanting it and not understanding why anyone would want it. A mother’s role in her child’s life is constantly evolving, and how difficult must that be?!
That’s a timely thing for you to admit. You’ve written a new story for Splice, which deals with issues of motherhood in an unusual way — in fact, in a way that’s quite different even to the other stories about motherhood in Our Dreams Might Align.
The scariness of motherhood is vividly presented in stories like ‘Burn’ and especially ‘Animal Skin’, which depicts a mother’s reaction to finding a tick latched on to her seven-year-old daughter, and the daughter’s reaction to the exposure of her body to her mother… I wonder if it’s possible to draw together some threads here and start to look at the collection as a whole.
In ‘Burn’, your protagonist is pregnant but hasn’t told her fiancé, Todd, and as she muses on her unborn child she thinks of it in scientific terms: “A piece of Todd’s DNA was entangled with mine now, growing larger and less abstract every day. … [S]oon I’d have a baby that shared not all of my DNA, but half.”
In ‘Animal Skin’, the mother of the girl reflects on her daughter’s changing behaviour — “A year ago, I was still bathing her every night”, she says, but “since around Christmas she hasn’t let me see her naked” — and she comes to look at the situation in a way that echoes those lines from ‘Burn’. “[I]t’s unsettling”, she says of her daughter, “to have a body that was once part of my body hidden from me.”
This idea of bodies being shared, or being in alignment, runs throughout the collection. Pregnancy and motherhood are obviously one way that bodies can enter this state, but it’s not the only way. Even in ‘Swallowed’, the two brothers trapped in the stomach of a whale “feel our we dissolve into I”. And as bodies in alignment start to diverge, your protagonists recurrently hope that they can return to some simpatico way of being, even if they can’t rely on their bodies to get them there. This is why the title Our Dreams Might Align (which comes from a remark in ‘Burn’) speaks to the concerns of the entire collection.
Where else do you see these ideas reverberating throughout the collection? And to what extent did you consciously write towards some of these ideas, once they began emerging?
When I was writing the stories in this collection, I wasn’t working toward a themed collection. I don’t think I even realized how often I was writing about motherhood until I saw the stories lined up next to each other. I’ve written a couple of themed projects since completing Our Dreams Might Align, but this collection feels like a true and natural reflection of my daily anxieties — one that I didn’t have to force.
In some way or another (and I can only see this in retrospect), all of the stories in this collection are about being simultaneously linked to and at odds with the world. They’re about trying to find a connection, a feeling of balance and belonging. Looking at motherhood is one way I explore this idea, but I think I’m also doing it in my characters’ relationships with nature.
My characters all find elements of themselves in their environments. In ‘Going Mean’, the narrator attempts to understand her own wildness in the face of domesticity by looking at the Komodo dragons’ way of interacting with her home. In ‘Closer’, Justine tries to understand the physical distance between herself and her father, as well as the emotional distance between herself and her mother, by obsessing over the ways whales traverse great distances.
Of course, these characters are only projecting human qualities onto the animals that surround them. They want to understand themselves by looking at nature, but they’re also striving for a sense of belonging. They want to understand not only how they’re connected to other people, but how they’re connected to the world.
One of the other ways you give the collection some unity is by sharing images between one story and another. The structure reminds me somewhat of a cat’s cradle, fingers connected with a web of yarn or wool. You take an image mentioned in one line in one story, and you bring it back elsewhere, in a story that is otherwise disconnected from the first — and it’s possible for a reader to leap from story to story, back and forth through the collection, by using these images as a springboard.
So, for example, imagery of astronauts appears in ‘Astronauts’, of course, and then it recurs in ‘Swarm’ and ‘Once He Was a Man’. Imagery of the inside of a whale also appears in ‘Once He Was a Man’, and obviously in ‘Swallowed’, and then reappears in ‘A Place Without Floors’. Imagery drawn from geology animates ‘A Place Without Floors’ and ‘Closer’; the imagery of the Mariana Trench appears in ‘Closer’ and ‘Swarm’; and so on and so forth.
How much of this is due to chance, and how much is due to design?
Again, this wasn’t something that was very intentional in my first drafts. I find myself drawn to certain images or metaphors repeatedly, and I don’t think this is a bad thing. My favorite short story collections are those that seem to be mulling something over, exploring an idea from different angles, using different characters and situations. Shared images make a collection feel like it belongs together.
However, when revising my manuscript, I had to be careful to not overuse an image, to let it become stale or lose its power. There were some images that I cut or toned down once my manuscript had a shape. Here’s a kind of silly example. My partner, William Hoffacker (a very talented writer and editor), pointed out that I kept using the word “belly” in my metaphors. The belly of the canoe. The belly of the river. The belly of the sea. I had some bellies to get rid of!
I like that. I also like that in your forthcoming story for Splice, you seem to have compensated for erasing all those bellies from Our Dreams Might Align: there are lots of bellies in it, and they’re not really metaphorical!
Which brings us to the work you’ve got on the horizon. Not the distant work, not the things that haven’t taken shape on the page just yet, but the polished pieces that your readers can expect to see pretty soon. In addition to new work for Splice, you recently won the New Delta Review chapbook contest for a collection that will now be published by NDR. How does it relate to Our Dreams Might Align? Continuation or departure? And what prompted you to take your writing in this direction?
My chapbook is called TV Girls, and it’s a collection of flash fiction pieces inspired by American reality television shows. There are stories based on Sister Wives, The Bachelor, Cake Boss, House Hunters, and a couple others. All amazing shows, and amazingly horrible. TV Girls is definitely different from the other work I’ve done. I think it’s funnier, but I also think it’s angrier. My characters are women who have been given roles to play under the guise of reality, and they are angry. I started writing these stories because I wanted to show myself that I could do something different from what I was already doing. Also, I think reality TV is fascinating. I both love it and hate it, and I wanted to see if I could engage with it through fiction.
About the Author
Dana Diehl is the author of Our Dreams Might Align and a chapbook, TV Girls, as well as the co-author, with Melissa Goodrich, of the short story collection The Classroom. Her work has appeared in numerous venues including Smokelong Quarterly, The Collagist, and Necessary Fiction. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.