The Lightning Room With Alice Bolin

Alice Bolin’s “Pool” appeared in our December issue (and also made the longlist for 2012’s Wigleaf Top 50). Here, we talk about the desolation of childhood, BLACK HOLE, and abandonment.

1. This piece reads almost like a ritual to me: in the autumn, the narrator treks to the empty pool at the abandoned house at the end of the block, avoiding the boys who lurk in the abandoned lot, and, once she arrives at the pool, curls inward – it feels like something that happens again and again. What might we make of the places we are drawn to, the processes we repeat over and over?

Personal rituals are something I am extremely interested in. I was a furtive, emotional, mystically-minded child and I did many strange things out of varying ratios of boredom and anxiety. I hid my belongings outside, hoarded stones and other outside things inside, wrote things on my body, named the places and landmarks I discovered. The places and procedures of rituals like the one in “Pool” are huge in distinguishing the child world from the adult world it exists alongside.

2. The detail in “Pool” is beautifully stark, to the point where, to me, it seems almost desolate. It may be autumn in a back alley anywhere, but it feels troublingly like the end of the world. What inspired the setting of this piece?

I like that you picked up on the end-of-the world feeling, because I think that has a lot to do with the mood and setting I’m evoking in this piece. It comes from a full-length hybrid manuscript called BLACK HOLE that is very concerned with the powerlessness and emotional apocalypses of childhood. I’m pretty interested in the uncanny element of domesticity, the menace found in wholesome scenes.

More directly, though, the abandoned lot is sort of a scene from my childhood distorted through a nightmare lens. There was an open lot of grass in my neighborhood growing up in Idaho where my older brother and his friends used to play football. Later someone built a duplex there, but for some reason I still always thought about the green space that had been there.

3. Building on a theme: this piece is written with extraordinary precision, yet is so vivid. When crafting a story like this, what’s your process like? How do you winnow down to the essential?

Writing the stories in BLACK HOLE I focused on describing the characters’ physical sensations and their surroundings with absolute precision. I have a theory I’m working under that a child’s feelings and motivations are often hidden from herself. They way she acts, the strange behaviors she is compelled to perform, reveals the way she feels. In these pieces I want the feelings to sort of seep from the landscape, rather than my writing much about the character’s thoughts and emotions.

4. The boys in the empty lot antagonize the narrator as she passes with a ferocious, sexual force, roaring and bashing against the fence like animals in a cage; a predator/prey dynamic. What are the origins of this menace?

I didn’t have any really traumatic experiences with them in my childhood, but in my mind 12-year-old “older boys” are still exemplars of the the ruthless, the unpredictable, and the bizarre.

5. The empty pool represents a womb-like place to hide, a safe space among the vestiges of abandonment and displacement (the empty house, the lot) – “Its decrepitude is comforting.” Can you talk about this paradox at all? Is what we’re seeking just an absence of stimulation?

I think what is comforting is the breakdown in boundaries between what is “natural” and what is man-made. The fact that spiderwebs and leaves and birds’ nests can start to overtake a human structure reveals some unity. I think it is also comforting in a world–the man-made world–that is secretly fake and falling apart to see real evidence of its instability.

6. And yet, at the end of the piece, the narrator realizes that nothing can ever truly be drained, that even empty houses gather dust. What is the everything we want to leave behind but can’t?

There is a weird phenomenon that physical junk rushes in to fill any site of emptiness, of destruction. No desolation is ever left alone. Stuff–threads, leaves, dust–and animals and people invade it, absolutely irreverent. The relentlessness of time and the dispassionate gaze of history are, of course, painful. I think a lot of people are also familiar with the feeling of wanting to unload some of the detritus of personality–memories, emotions, relationships, dreams, questions, unconnected dots. So, like always, the world is objective correlative for the self: both are too full.