PANK and Tawnysha Greene – author of the short story “Daddy’s Teeth” in our December issue – talk scars.

1. This is an immensely physical piece; the casual, bodily damage it describes is almost difficult to read. Can you tell us about the experience of writing this? How did you know you’d succeeded in drawing out the most discomfort?

“Daddy’s Teeth” is actually a chapter in my novel-in-progress, A House Made of Stars, and I wanted this story to stand out as a moment of darkness and desperation in an already bleak narrative. I decided to make this chapter one of the shortest in the novel and use the starkest descriptions I could think of in narrating the scene, so that the moment almost seemed like a flashbulb memory in that while the moment is brief, small details such as the smell of the father’s breath and the blood he spits into a pot would stand out so much more than they would in a longer, more fully developed chapter. I had also hoped that the brevity of the chapter would intensify an already heightened moment and together with such stark descriptions would frighten readers as the child protagonist feels frightened and overwhelmed by what is happening in front of her.

When I wrote the story, I tried to frighten myself with the details. I strive to empathize with my characters as much as possible when writing, so I kept asking myself – what would make me uncomfortable, what would shock me, what would scare me? I didn’t realize the full extent of how the story could affect readers until it was published in PANK. So many friends and colleagues wrote that they had tried reading the story, but couldn’t get past the first few sentences, and it was then that I saw that when I scared myself, I could convey those same feelings to those reading the story.

2. This story, though written from the viewpoint of a child, is centered on the pain and slow destruction of the father. How did you decide to narrate the story from this perspective?

I decided to write from a young child’s point of view, because I felt that I could write scenes of trauma best from a child’s eyes. I find that a child’s point of view is less complicated than an adult’s and while the child in a story may not always understand what is happening to him/her, the audience, of course, does. In trusting readers with this understanding, I felt that I could write these scenes more truthfully than I could with an adult narrator. Continue reading →