The Lightning Room with Jessica Alexander

Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Jessica Alexander’s piece “Daughter” appeared in our April issue – below, she and Simon talk condition narratives, desperation, and volatility.

1. This piece is written as a series of twelve steps along the disappearance of a daughter. What is this the path to? Acceptance? Annihilation?

At the time, I’d coined this phrase “condition narrative” – and I was very proud of it – as in a physical or mental condition. I thought I was finished with events. Done too with characters and settings. I’d just write condition narratives. I’m no longer sure what that meant. I remember thinking a condition is a pattern, not a plot; a repetition, an obsession, or a personal discordance with public time or progress.

2. A sense of abject, frantic loss runs through this piece. I can imagine that things that disappear without explanation are much worse than those you watch vanish before your eyes (or perhaps it’s the other way around) – is this, do you suppose, a universal reaction to this kind of grief?

I have no idea. At the time, I was reading Bataille’s Visions of Excess and I was really struck by the violence of substitution. To me it seemed like he kept situating animals, planets, body parts in a space of impossible longing. So what interested me was not so much the disappearance of a thing, though that’s significant, but that space of impossible longing where objects are almost mythical.

3. In this story, the daughter has a number of different manifestations – a school girl, a creature coated in feathers, a hand. Can you talk a little about these, where they come from?

Sometimes it’s more accurate to say my friend turned into a garden hose, than my friend got a job in Ohio. To me it conveys that a thing can be irrevocably lost yet malleable, erratic, and unstable. I’ve learned a lot from writers that make psychic realities physically manifest and erratic as moods.

4. This piece also reads like a constant upheaval of memory, in which any minute action can serve to trigger the narrator’s loss, her desperation. I’m curious to know how you arrived at some of your imagery – there’s a motif of consumption, of animal hunger – what does this say about our tendencies as parents?

I’m not sure I’m qualified to discuss parental tendencies, but I can speak to your comments on tone, volatility, and process. The story was kind of an experiment in tone and syntax – like what is the syntax of hysteria, obsession, and, as you say, desperation? I think it involves negation and the copula, a restless movement between equating and negating one’s experience. I guess, one of the things I was curious about when writing this was what an erratic, unstable, volatile sentence might look like.

5. Why Coney Island? A place of transient crowds? Missing persons?

When I think of Coney Island, I think of dime museums, burlesque, sideshows, vaudeville, alcohol, swimming, children, and yes, crowds! It’s a place of celebration – but to my mind – a terrible kind of celebration, the terrible and lonely spectacle of public celebration.

6. In this case, the despair eventually turns into something (or has always been something) violent and self-inflicting. The final image of the story is especially hard to bear – I guess you’ve maybe already addressed this in the first question, but is this mutilation something we’re all headed towards?

Absolutely.

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Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.