The Lightning Room With Molly McArdle

Molly McArdle’s “The Wearied Cords” appeared in our December issue. We talk about rewriting geography, the reversal of colonial power, and building out of loss.

1. Tell us a little bit about the process of building “The Wearied Cords”; where the inspiration came from, what research was involved, etc. What was the initial spark that brought this story to life?

I was born and raised in DC, and I’ve always been really passionate about city history, especially hidden or elided or forgotten or ignored histories. I had (and have) been toying around with this idea of a series of short stories that illuminate iconic – even mythic – aspects of DC history or culture or geography and look at them from an unexpected perspective. One of the first things that came to mind was the Three Sisters Islands, a tiny outcropping of rocks that lie just north of Key Bridge in the Potomac River, right beside Georgetown. I always thought there was something romantic about them growing up, because of their name, because of their size, because of the opaque and imprecise myths about their origin, which the story draws from. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I found the framework of the story on the village’s Wikipedia page, where I read about the capture of this British captain, Henry Fleet – the narrator’s father in the story. I loved this reversal of the traditional colonial power politics that our histories have recorded: unblinking domination by British forces alongside a seemingly inevitable destruction for outmatched native communities. I loved too that Fleet was forced to assimilate into this community’s language and culture, not the other way around. I ended up reading some of Henry Fleet’s memoirs, century-old essays by DC historical societies, websites written by Fleet’s descendants, lots of weird historical flotsam and jetsam. My primary concern wasn’t so much accurately representing a historical moment in time, but allowing this story exist there in a natural and believable way.

2. So much of this piece is concerned with the names of things, the variations in what we call something, whether it’s the name of a colonial force or the place where we live. How does this play into the relationship between the English and the Nacotchtank in the story?

Names are so important. Growing up in DC, I’ve seen Malcolm X Park – located in a once primarily black neighborhood – increasingly referred “Meridian Hill Park” as the area gentrified. The buildings where my family lived in that same neighborhood were once called Clifton Terrace, but are now called Wardman Court – renamed after a renovation (and one’s conversion into condos) that occurred only after money began to flood into Columbia Heights. I’ve seen the geography of my childhood rewritten before my eyes. It’s so disorienting! It’s also a profound expression of power, a way for a new group of people to claim ownership. The erosion of the name of the place I write about in the story, which here I’ll call Nacotchtank, is a testament to this effect. Even though the village was a very important trading center in its day, no firm or authoritative version of its name exists today, just various Anglicizations. But just as (re)naming is an enormously powerful tool for any kind of encroaching force, its also a potent instrument for fighting back against that encroachment. It is a way to say this is who I am; know me.

3. The narrator of “The Wearied Cords,” Whyinguaque, has a Nacotchtank mother and an English father, which allows her to help facilitate communication between the two cultures but also informs her identity. Can you talk at all about this balancing act?

The primary reason for this narrator’s existence is that I was uninterested in writing a story from Henry Fleet’s perspective, or really any British perspective. We have more than enough of those kind of stories. I also wanted to empower my narrator, give her a plausible mechanism to be master of both her own and English culture and language. I wanted her to be knowing – I’ve read and seen too many stories that feature native peoples puzzling over Western words or implements, often as comic relief for a Western-oriented audience. (Think about the Coke bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy.) Her dual heritage seemed like the most efficient way to do that. I also liked having a character whose identity complicated matters for her. What is more American than this kind of mixed heritage? I was also, frankly, concerned with the insertion of my own voice – which is a 21st-century white voice – into the mouth of a 16^th-century Nacotchtank woman. Do I have the right to tell this story? Is this act of storytelling another expression of my power as a white writer to write about anything that strikes me in a plausible way? (How would editors, for instance, read a story by a writer of color about a 17th century English woman? However you slice it, it’d likely be different.) So in this context, Whyinguaque’s partial whiteness was a way for me to acknowledge my own whiteness in writing the story.

4. As with its narrator’s mixed cultural origins, this story mingles history with elements of Native American folklore and myth, with English poetry, resulting in a fascinating blend of cultural referents. How important to you is the hybridity of this telling of history?

So important! History is hybrid, anyone who tells you different is mistaken or lying. I like, in retrospect, the way the Three Sisters myth and the Wyatt poem interact juxtaposed with Nacotchtank-English relations. The stories are never really in competition (though the cultures they belong to increasingly are) and they buoy each other up, converse with each other. The Wyatt poem captures the desolation of being lost, the Three Sisters myth provides a model for how something new can be made from that loss. Its only through literature, stories, that Whyinguaque is able to reconcile both of these opposing cultures in her own life – she is most comfortable with her English heritage as it exists on the page.

5. Towards the end of “The Wearied Cords,” the narrator’s aunt remarks that when Whyinguaque reads English poetry, it’s as if she’s reciting a spell. Can you share a choice spell from your arsenal?

Probably my favorite spell is Fireball. I like to get a bunch of enemies in a bottleneck, usually behind a door, and send one (or several) of these in. It makes the whole situation much more manageable.

6. In this story, one of the myths is that after we die we become islands. What do you hope to eventually settle into?

Well, I am less concerned with my afterlife than my characters (when you are dead, you are dead), but I suppose it would be nice to become dirt that trees grow on.