A conversation between authors can have the delightful familiarity of friends gathering to talk about other friends – the characters in their respective works – and when Elise Levine and Marcia Butler connected, their characters took center stage. If you’re interested in how fictional humans can take on a life of their own in literature, as well as the importance of a well-loved setting, the blending of genres, and much more, you’ll love getting lost in their dialogue. Marcia’s debut novel, Pickle’s Progress, was released on April 9 and Elise’s latest story collection, This Wicked Tongue, was released a month later on May 9. 

Elise Levine: Marcia, your novel Pickle’s Progress is a marvel of fast-paced narrative construction, ingenious in how tautly it moves along and allows your reader to engage fully with your bristling, marvelous characters. How did you approach plot and structure?

Marcia Butler: First, thank you for your close reading and kind praise! I wish I could give you an answer that makes any sense, but this book rolled out of me one page at a time, with no outline, no conscious notion of plot, and no idea who the characters were. This is my first book of fiction, and I was very much writing by the seat of my pants. However, through my experiences in other artistic disciplines, I have come to understand that the unknown, or feeling at sea, is not such a bad place to be. I began with an inciting incident I thought would be intriguing in a NYC novel. When I wrote that opening chapter, it remained there for the entire time it took to write the novel, and over many, many drafts. With each successive chapter, I set the characters in place and witnessed the action unfold. At times, my characters took hold of the narrative, and did and said things that surprised me. They seemed to have a need to reveal their true nature. So, it was all very unpredictable, kind of the way life is!

_________

MB: Your exquisite new story collection, This Wicked Tongue, begs the reader to slow down in the best possible way. By slow down, I mean to relish your language, to glean all the plot and character details that are meted out precisely, sentence by sentence. There were so many instances where I marveled that you gave me information at exactly the right moment. Do you plan this out? Is this talent intuitive? I ask because it reads so effortlessly.

EL: Thanks, Marcia. I’m so glad you found that the stories read effortlessly. My characters in This Wicked Tongue all go on bumpy journeys of sorts, in which they long for independence and attempt to rewrite the old scripts of their pasts — and though readers might slow down to read the stories, I’m hoping they’ll feel the thrills and chills too. But I do wish my process had been effortless. I don’t plan so much as chronically revise. Many of the stories went through something like forty or fifty — seriously — iterations. Sometimes it takes me a lot of mucking about to find the right form. And to figure out what the characters really want. I do spend an insane amount of time working over the structure, heightening pivotal moments, seeding significant elements in the opening and checking that they’re unfolding in ways that will feel like fresh discoveries for the reader. As part of this, I try to fine-tune the pacing — really important for generating momentum and a kinetic feel.

_________

EL: NYC in some of its many dimensions features as prominently in Pickle’s Progress as your characters. How has your own relationship to NYC affected you as a lifelong creative? I’m thinking here of your background as a world-class oboist, a successful interior designer, a celebrated memoirist (your The Skin Above My Knees was published to great critical acclaim in 2017), and now a debut novelist. Oh yes, and also a documentary filmmaker, with The Creative Imperative, set for release in May 2019.

MB: I moved to NYC when I was 18 years old. This city has shaped me as a woman and a creative person. I have loved deeply and achieved some goals, but I’ve also lost much. So, after my memoir was sold and I turned to fiction, there was no doubt that I would set my first novel in the city I knew so intimately through music and design, and now with words. It felt correct to place my characters in my “hometown”, because the sounds, smells, colors, and architecture of NYC are embedded in my psyche. In fact, NYC became a potent backdrop character in my novel. And while I wrote, the city itself grounded me, comforted me, especially when I had no idea what would come next! At least I knew the territory and had endless options of where Pickle and Karen would play out their drama. Pickle’s Progress is, in many ways, a love story to NYC.

_________

MB: Many of your stories focus on young people in the throes of the challenges of growing up and managing hardship. One character, Martin, is a brilliant eleven-year-old nerd with an absent father and a disturbed mother. I was thrilled when he showed up again in another story, as an adult in a committed relationship. What attracts you to story-telling of the young?

EL: I’m fascinated by our acts of self-creation. And while I often write about adults, I also love looking at how young characters arrive at formative moments in which they’re learning their own language, in a sense. That is, they’re acquiring the ability to shape how they present themselves to the world — and to themselves as well, as their self-awareness and internal voice evolve. Plus their perceptions can be at once limited and wide open, making them interesting observers, and loaning themselves to stories rich in irony and pathos, and humor. Young characters are also newly formed agents of dramatic choices with far-reaching consequences. Overall that’s a lot of energy ripe for exploration.

_________

EL: Okay, your characters! Your novel’s eponymous hero — or anti-hero — Pickle is a wonderfully hard-bitten New Yorker who is also an identical twin. Your novel’s other focal character is Karen, Pickle’s sister-in-law, a high-end interior designer. They’re both funny, gritty, and driven by reckless passions and intense backstories. With their aspirations and longings, they charge through each other, powering toward recognizably redemptive urges. What I love most about them is that they’re so human in their excesses. How did you build character — and empathy — in your novel?

MB: I’m the first to admit that my characters are flawed to the max. I happen to adore them, even though they behave in the most appalling and, at times, hurtful ways. But most people, at least in their minds, are reckless. We think unimaginable thoughts every day, which is just human nature, and of course, most of us rarely act on these impulses. We tack to civility and the norms of how society gets along.

But I wanted to explore pushing the boundaries of recklessness. And particularly, explore the question of what makes people go to the edges of bad behavior. Where does that bravado come from? Pickle and Karen, both, straddle this line throughout my novel. Yet, that must be countered and softened by excavating the reasons why they do the things they do. Emotional context is essential, which then elicits empathy from the reader. The underpinning to all outward behavior of my characters has to do with the deprivation of primal love and childhood trauma. We discover this in backstory – how my characters experienced deeply flawed initial love, and we also learn about the environment that produced that damage. This is the springboard for all their present-day shenanigans. I hope that brings nuance to Pickle and Karen as they grapple with the considerable obstacles they face in the novel.

_________

MB: Let’s talk character and voice. Your stories certainly have plot. But what stands out is that you dive into character from, it seems, the very first sentence. At the same time,  the voice of the character is clearly defined as well, and from the get-go. I believe this is just one thing that elevates your collection. Because, I was so curious to know these people from the beginning of each story. And I found myself musing to myself, “how did she think this up?!” How do you see these two essential aspects of fleshing out the people you write about: character and voice.

EL: I think that how we sound, both in speech and through our internal voices, is both a measure of who we are, and who we’re not, since sometimes there’s a gap between our authentic and ‘false’ voices. And I believe that out of that fissure, created either unwittingly or in full awareness, steams some of the most powerful human emotions, including the desire to change. This urge to transform and transcend is what powers the characters in each of the stories in This Wicked Tongue, and shapes their adventures, exiles, and (hardly) prodigal returns. From the first line of a story, voice helps launch this dynamic.

I don’t begin to really work on a story until I get the voice, usually in the opening lines and sometimes the closing ones too. I also have an expansive notion of voice. It’s not just how the character sounds in dialogue and internal thought and feelings. Voice is also the sound or style of the story, including the shape and pace. For example, the first story in This Wicked Tongue, “Money’s Honey”, features a teenage runaway who hitchhikes across the US. On the surface, she appears mentally slow, disconnected, not all there. Underneath, she has tremendous self-knowledge and the smarts to strategize her way to safety. I tried to convey a voice and thoughts that on one level seem as loosely connected as her seemingly aimless journey, but on another level are sharp and funny as she sees through people and situations with great clarity. And I also use very short sections to tell the story, and some very short paragraphs too — so there’s a lot of white space, gaps, to get at her sense of dislocation. The story speeds through these sections, which increasingly reveal her single-minded astuteness about where she’s eventually headed, both physically and emotionally.

_________

EL: I love how your novel features depictions of art and other forms of creative endeavors — Fragonard’s painting The Progress of Love, interior design, classical music — to relay significant aspects of characterization, as well as thematic interests. Can you talk about these impulses in your novel?

MB: The way people experience sounds and sights is through the prism of their emotional psychology. For instance, a specific piece of music can bring a person to tears in seconds. This may have to do with an emotional memory from an important moment in life, such as a first kiss or a funeral. And revisiting a great work of art in a museum can also be a “Madelaine” of sorts to another time and place. We tend to connect the beauty of creation to the threads of our lives. I used these elements – music, art, the impact of architecture – to build a sensate environment for what transpires in my novel.

At the same time, I was playing on the “highbrow/lowbrow” division between Pickle and Karen. Karen lives in a gorgeous Upper West Side private brownstone and runs a high-end boutique architectural firm which caters to millionaires. Pickle is an average working-class guy living in an apartment building that straddles the Cross Bronx Expressway. Yet both of them are fully aware of their aesthetic surroundings. This is a dimension of my novel that I hope provides another way in which my characters are fleshed out and understood more deeply.

_________

MB: It’s wonderful to read a collection from an author who is not wedded to a recognizable “thumbprint” in terms of style. A few of your stories read like narrative poetry. Are you a poet in your heart?

EL: I like how you put this — the “thumbprint” of style. Some of the stories in This Wicked Tongue are flash fictions of 1,000 words or less, and some of these lean on lyrical devices such as images and sound to evoke the characters. I think this is why some of the stories might feel like ‘narrative poetry’. They’re like bursts of compressed plot and psychology. At the same time, these more ‘poetic’ stories are still very narrative. Each coils around character arc, and conflict, and choices with stakes, which vault the stories forward. So they’re still very much in conversation with traditional story structure.

I’m liking the term “hybrid” to describe my flash fictions since it gets away from the possibility of invoking an implied — in my view — false binary between poetry and fiction. Or any binary thinking about genre that serves to enforce a rigid, limiting approach.   

_________

EL: Part of the pleasure for me in reading Pickle’s Progress lay in your adroit mash-up of genres that seemed to hum along just beneath the surface. Pickle at times seems very lean-and-mean noirish, and Karen and her husband Stan seem right at home in the world of glossy shelter magazines. Did you start with conceptions about handling genre in your novel, or did these arise organically?  

MB: This, again, came instinctually; I planned nothing with the exception of placing the story in NYC. But the genre bending kind of makes sense because NYC holds just about every sort of person on earth. In fact, Sunnyside, a small town in the borough of Queens is the most ethnically diverse area in the country with over 200 languages actively spoken! The 7 train, the subway line that serves much of Queens, is jammed to the gills at three in the morning with shift workers who run the underbelly of New York. The city literally “never sleeps” and all you have to do is ride that subway in the early morning hours to understand this. So, from the Lipstick Building, where Karen and Stan work (also the scene of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme), to the granite yard where Pickle performs one of his most cunning acts of twin deception, one can cull NYC for endless sources of genre.

_________

MB: In the story titled Made Right Here you place a cop inside an ancient cave in the South of France. This juxtaposition of setting and character is intriguing to say the least. The protagonist, Bryce, is not only feeling claustrophobic inside the cave but is also trapped inside his marriage and the life he has led, which makes for a great metaphor. What made you choose that particular location? And in general, how much research is necessary for you to feel comfortable enough to inhabit location?

EL: I lived in Chicago for eleven years, and had long nursed the idea for a story about a Chicago mounted police officer, his possible role in police wrongdoing, and his fraying marriage to a ‘failed’ artist. I saw the relationship as a way into examining how marriages can warp couples, and how people can ultimately discard their dreams. I knew I wanted to set the story in France, where the police officer would feel out of his element, and his wife would be trying to live a cherished vacation dream. But I kept getting stuck. The story wouldn’t open up. But in researching background for my 2017 novel Blue Field — which featured underwater cave divers and their physical and emotional risk-taking — I read about the trove of prehistoric art in a dry cave at Lascaux, France. I learned that there’s a replica cave built next door to the real one, for tourists to view in order to protect the original from pollutants. And there it was — putting my characters in a fake cave would highlight and increase the pressures they’ve been under, and dramatize how they’re wrestling with what is illusory and true. Once I knew what the specific setting would be, the rest of the story came clear.

I really believe that a writer doesn’t necessarily need to know a setting in real life for the fictional depiction to work. Careful research and meticulous imagining can do the trick — and though I have no formula for how much, there need to be enough accurate-seeming details to animate the character and make sense for the reader. In terms of “Made Right Here”, I haven’t myself visited the replica cave in Lascaux, but aside from reading up on it and other caves that contain prehistoric art, I’ve toured a number of dry caves in the US, and have a sense as to what such spaces and tours are like. Also, I gained some freedom in depicting the setting since I don’t specifically name the cave in the story, and only refer to the general region in the south of France. With all the stories in This Wicked Tongue, the characters seek freedom through leave-taking and sometimes through attempting to return — and for this reason, notions of place and home, as well as the specific details that bring them to life, are central to the collection, and so is a sense of range to the settings for the collection overall. They vary greatly from story to story — from Chicago to Toronto, Budapest to the Mojave to medieval south-eastern England.

_________

EL: What shifts did you undertake in how you approached writing as you went from crafting a memoir to a novel?

MB: This is a great question! I am aware of only one difference. In my memoir, I knew the plot. In my novel, I did not. I wish it was more fascinating, but I believe the craft elements of writing in most genres (with the exception of poetry) are pretty much the same. Narrative arc. Top story/bottom story. Tension/relaxation. Conflict/resolution. Economical and eloquent sentences. Bottom line, the author’s job is to tell a good story; to bring the reader from point A to point Z with words that, hopefully, transform that reader in a meaningful way.

I am relatively new to writing, but I see now that I pulled heavily from my years of being a professional oboist. A successful musician must be able to play all styles of music. From Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to Stravinsky to Carter and beyond, a musician must be flexible, just like a writer who works in fiction, non-fiction, memoir and essay. But specific skills must be in place, such as a scary good technique on the instrument. A gorgeous sound helps, yet the musician should be willing to change that sound as is required by the music. Flexibility is a must on stage when what has been rehearsed changes spontaneously during the flow of the performance. All the tools are close at hand. And this is the same for writing. A musician shapeshifts based on the composer’s needs. A writer digs into craft to render the best words for whatever genre is currently on the page. Toolboxes!

_________

MB: Elise, you are a prolific author! You’ve published two novels: Requests and Dedications and Blue Field. And your first book, the story collection Driving Men Mad, will be reissued by your publisher in July 2019. What’s next for you? What are you working on now?

EL: I’m less prolific than I am stubborn! I just keep chipping away at stuff and not giving up. Right now I’m working on a pair of linked novellas, “Eva Hurries Home” and “Son One”, collectively called The Takeaway. Together they zero in on the illusions we buy into in order to enliven our lives and the costs of those self-deceptions. “Eva Hurries Home” explores the experiences of a newly middle-aged woman whose job in Washington, DC, is both unfulfilling and in jeopardy due to an institutional financial restructuring, and her sideways and yearning recollections of a cousin with whom she had an affair when she was in her early teens. She decides to visit his old family home in Oregon, and then meet with him in prison, where he’s been incarcerated for the murder of a lawyer. In “Son One”, family members of the murdered man travel from Chicago and Boston to Seattle for the trial of the killer, and in encountering this trauma they relive and reignite past griefs.

_________

EL: What’s on deck for you, Marcia?

 

MB: I am almost finished with the first draft of my next novel, which is about a moose named Bindle who lives in rural Maine. Bindle roams on land owned by two families. One is 4th generation Mainer, and the other is a relatively new transplant of about 20 years. I explore aspects of a complex social class system in this wonderful state through the prism of the two families and how they perceive each other. Of course, Bindle looms large in the action. And yes, she has a POV! Working title: Bindle Rising.

My documentary film, The Creative Imperative, is the distillation of working in several artforms throughout my life. I have interviewed twenty people: musicians, artists, writers, actors, and dancers and have asked them the same three questions. Through their answers and stories, I hope to distill and illuminate the essence of creativity. Anyway, something like that! This is a project I have been thinking about for a very long time and it all came together in my mind about a year ago. I am in process of editing the footage now and we will release in May 2019.

Elise Levine is the author of the novels Blue Field and Request and Dedications, and the story collections Driving Men Mad and, forthcoming in May 2019, This Wicked Tongue. Her work has also appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, PANK, The Collagist, The Walrus, Blackbird, and Best Canadian Stories, among other publications, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions 2018. She is the recipient of a Canadian National Magazine Award for fiction; awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council; and residency fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, among others. She lives in Baltimore, MD.

 

Marcia Butler has had a number of creative careers: professional musician, interior designer, documentary filmmaker, and author. As an oboist, the New York Times has hailed her as a “first rate artist.” During her musical career, she performed as a principal oboist and soloist on the most renowned of New York and international stages, with many high-profile musicians and orchestras – including pianist Andre Watts, and composer/pianist Keith Jarrett. Her interior designs projects have been published in numerous shelter magazines and range up and down the East coast, from NYC to Boston, to Miami. The Creative Imperative, her documentary film exploring the essence of creativity, will release in Spring 2019.

Marcia’s nationally acclaimed memoir, The Skin Above My Knee, was one of the Washington Post’s “top ten noteworthy moments in classical music in 2017”. She was chosen as 2017 notable debut author in 35 OVER 35. Her writing has been published in Literary Hub, PANK Magazine, Psychology Today, Aspen Ideas Magazine, Catapult, Bio-Stories and others. Marcia was a 2015 recipient of a Writer-in-Residence through Aspen Words and the Catto Shaw Foundation. Her debut novel, Pickle’s Progress, will be released on April 9, 2019 from Central Avenue Publishing. She lives in New York City.