A Snow Globe Theory of the Short Story

I met Nora Lange in the dream space of the Brown Creative Writing MFA Program where I was teaching and she was a graduate student. As a student, she seemed all possibility, all wonder, and I, the witness to that nascent, vulnerable state of becoming. There was an openness, a tenderness and hope, an optimism, an irreverence, a crazy faith. I loved her quiet audacity, her willingness to fail when need be, her tolerance for the unknown, her acute take on all that surrounded her. Nora had a great spirit and an enormous verve—the quality that is immediately recognizable in those students who are up for anything.

The anything in those days was weekly or bi-monthly writing assignments conducted in the experimental narrative laboratory being run under the guise of a writing workshop. Nora recently reminded me of one of the things her cohort was up to at the time: They had been asked to create a Cornell box in which the page itself would serve as the box or the container and the task would be to place within this box disparate, trembling, precious images and narratives that might speak to each other and resonate in mysterious ways. The anything might be to create in language a vestibule that would then open onto an enormous concert hall; the anything might be to conjure a “Tristan chord” filled with longing and dissonance that, over pages, might move toward a kind of resolution. Or to create a truly bifurcated piece, or an oracular piece, or à la Georges Perec, attempt to exhaust a space in Providence . . .

Years pass of course. Students come and go, the so-called real world imposes its directives and preferences, and somewhere along the way too often a tacit agreement is entered, understandably so perhaps, an acquiesce, a surrender where essentially the same literary formulas, dressed albeit in cool clothing, are reinforced and prevail.

Nora does not succumb to the borrowed, the inherited, the familiar tropes, the conventionally legible expectations. More and more she grows incandescent, fierce, her work unique, the stories a series of intensities before us. Unapologetically, she steps into her talent. Her new collection of stories, Day Care is an extraordinary record of our moment—of what it is like right here, right now. She asks of the page what far too few writers ask, and she ventures far—passionate, restless, full of wonder, not already decided, alive.

Recently after many years Nora and I found one another again and wrote back and forth for a few weeks before conducting this interview online from our far flung perches in the country. Oddly, though it had been more than a while, and much had transpired for both of us, it felt as if no time had passed at all.

Carole Maso: These stories are astonishing in many ways—they are what I admire most in writing, an event and not just the record of an event; they are a genuine experience on the page. What informs your work? What are your influences?

Nora Lange: I’m influenced by curiosity. I am influenced constantly. I can barely read or see anything without wanting to make notes. I have piles of magazines, cutouts, emails, saved drafts, notebooks, passages underlined. My dreamworld consists of a ceiling made of glass, definitely impractical (this is a dream world!), sleeping surrounded by books, and absorbing what I do not have the time to absorb under ordinary circumstances through osmosis. I work for my family at times—working harvest, or selling wine. For instance, mid-book tour, I’ll be in Charleston, South Carolina working an event called “Pinot in the City.” Often I’m asked at these events, red or white? To which I dutifully answer: Both. 

My influences are vast. You, Carole, for one. Anne Carson until I return to water. Muriel Spark. Lucia Berlin. Lydia Davis. Claudia Rankine. Maggie Nelson. Adrienne Rich. I realize it might be annoying to say, but I am grateful and loving for so many writers and their work. And I write beside them. I live beside them. 

CM: I very much like your stories because they reside in a slightly more abstract and heightened space and are not prone to the usual and often far more facile psychological assignment and expectation novels seem susceptible to. Can you talk about the different forms for you? What draws you to each? What do you hope/want from them formally? What do you think a story might do or might be?

NL: Someone for Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “Lange’s well-honed stories build to stinging epiphanies,” and, not to be so intellectually vanquished as to lean on the review, but that sounds about right. The hope is to build to some kind of release. 

For me, a story feels closer to my life. Active psychosis meets regular therapy, a luxury I do not have, so I write with language to discover. Sometimes I just get brushed with a line. I have many emails to myself with one liners and reminders to build on these or consult later. For instance, one recent Saturday while walking on the treadmill at my daughter’s daycare, I wrote an entire story on my cell phone inspired by a woman—sassing to an alarm—next to me on the stair master. It was a challenge to type as fast as my mind was bending. This is not to say the story is complete. No way. But some part of that experience, and of the text that was written that day, will be folded into a story that I’d like to orchestrate around a kind of alternative self-help group. 

Sometimes (often, I should admit) a story is a problem to view, or a puzzle to sit with and to try to put together (though you’re surely missing pieces!). I have no interest in solving anything. Stories feel alive in a different way than a novel. They have a different pulse. They are bursts and composites and have some constraints (like word count). They are contained in a different way than a novel, which has a different, roomier, perhaps more flexible architecture where, even as the writer, I am allowed to get lost.

I feel the need for a story to be perfect. That’s why, for me, they are incredibly time consuming. It’s like a carving. Or maybe it’s the way a photograph needs to come into focus—this is your shot. Which isn’t to suggest, not at all, that the entire image needs to be in focus. It could just be the daffodil teetering on a windowsill that is sharp while everything which surrounds it is not. 

I can say that with each story I am setting out to explore something in particular. For example, in “Owls Yawn Too,” the mother is absolutely in love with her owl, a kind of rapturous love. Very romantic. Or in “Dog Star,” I wanted to write a story that took place inside a snow globe—how would that work? Which I guess could sound “surreal,” as some pieces in the collection have been dubbed, but living inside a snow globe doesn’t really feel off the mark: People and industries interfere, or intrude upon the ways of life of others all the time. “World building,” such as a lifestyle or data collection center—these have interiors and exteriors in sometimes abstract, “sophisticated” ways, like governmental policy or mining. Or direct, smaller ways like the leaf-blower next door. Now, looking at that language above, I ask myself: How do I say this? How do I say what I want to say? I shall try again, but if this were a story, I would have deleted the former. Whereas here, I’ll leave it be, an experiment. What I mean to write is there are effects of industry and policy that we do not see, which isn’t to say we do not experience them. We do, absolutely. But they are an altogether different kind of imposition, one where most individuals wield little to zero power. As opposed to a smaller, more direct “intrusion,” or interruption (less severe) like a Jehovah’s Witness ringing your bell. 

CM: In this collection there’s an exploration of sentiments, sciences, human dynamics, which is to say animal dynamics. How does language reside in you? 

NL: I just found at the back of my desk, as I sat down to write to you, a slim slip of paper about the size of my ring finger with the handwritten words: 

Patterns of behavior

Alimental, gametic, climactic 

And off to the left, written in a pyramid shape: Causes of migration. 

This is my handwriting. This snippet of paper, with this text, came from my time living in Chicago for years in the ‘00s. I had done a play (written and directed) called Aviary based on the migrational patterns of birds and captivity and other undergraduate musings! The point is, I have carried this snippet of text with me for all these years—and I have moved a lot. I mention this, not only because of the serenity of finding it as I was sitting down to write to you, but because these are the themes that I find myself returning to: a longing for air, preferably fresh, and survival of any sort. 

CM: I feel a hedge against death, a fending off, honoring and bringing up close the chaotic and the dread, perhaps to disarm death in some way. Can you talk about death (in any way you like)?

NL: Odd you ask, as I’ve just completed an ongoing interview with palliative care neurologist and writer Anna DeForest for a column she’s doing in The Believer on this subject. 

I could spend my whole life talking about death, I came to realize in corresponding with Anna. I am realizing now that perhaps I have been doing this from the start without knowing. When we talk about survival we cannot leave out its twin: death. For many, these are the counterpoints which make up life. That is, living it. I am not talking about dying in old age—or surviving elderly existence—but of migration, even the day to day, for many. My mother lived from paycheck to paycheck, and survival was about having just enough. She “held it together” until she didn’t. The force, the weight of getting by, for so many is often alarming. A detail about my childhood, and my life with my mother and brother—which I absolutely understand, though I wish had been different for her—was that soon after divorcing, she remarried. Maybe it was for love. I’d wager it also had something to do with finding support. Working full-time and raising two very young children alone, in a new city, family dead, or far away, can be daunting. I highlight this as a way to illustrate the complexity of a woman’s choice. 

CM: I’m left with the feeling of a world as it vanishes, and so all is heightened and precious in a way not often felt in fiction. Sometimes, as I mentioned, it feels as if it vanishes as we read. The cherished but lost world, or about to be lost, or, if in a precarious present, there’s a tenacity, a holding on as all blurs and dissolves. On this note, the book feels very much a picture of cherished things. As it all disappears, goes to smoke now, what did you think was beautiful there? 

NL: I think to be touched by things is beautiful. Sometimes we—myself and Sylvia (my daughter who is three and a half)—just pull up the heavy black blinds in our rental to watch and discuss the squirrels scurrying along the electrical wires. She will call out to me from the living room to come to see the moon, which after the daylight savings time change is a night-like moon at seven a.m. 

Beauty is to stop and marvel, to be touched. I believe to allow yourself to be touched is radical. I hope that these stories cause people to stop to marvel for a minute, or to meditate on cherished things. But the book will not disappear. Unless of course there’s a flood, or an earthquake, which might prompt any number of things. Perhaps even a divorce in which one partner gets it in the settlement. 

CM: Also conveyed is the mystery of existence, the baffling project of being alive. You create subterranean, complicated responses in the reader that only literature can do. Can you talk about how you move through the world? What is your day-to-day like? What makes its mark on you? 

NL: Interacting makes marks for me. That can happen in reading. I interact while reading, do you? It could be that I stop to look a word up, or write a note or something in the margins, or “JUST THINK.” 

My day-to-day is extraordinarily unglamorous. It involves a lot of discussions with a toddler, who calls herself “kitty cat” and “buttercuppy” and “Jew.” She might be all these things. I have a limited concept of my origins. Recently, under the guise of research for a character that I’m writing, I did the Ancestry thing—spat in a vial and sent it off for DNA testing, which hasn’t shed any light on anything. 

The other evening we passed out fliers around our neighborhood. Posters is probably more accurate. I had written on them: Dear Neighbors! And I was pointing out to Sylvia that the neigh in the word was the sound that a horse supposedly makes. It’s also a word, neighbors, that I notoriously misspell. That evening, even when I’d felt confident I’d spelled it correctly, after the third or so poster spelling it out, I still had to confirm. Self-doubt is all consuming. I work really hard to reject it, if I can. If I’m able. I really do believe that those who want more power, those who have all the power and want more power, want to erode our memory, our sense of self. Therefore, I feel a constant need to legitimize my understanding—even researched—and my intuition—less researched though often accurate. Like when I was in labor but nobody believed me until the baby was nearly on the floor. Or when my water broke and I was asked if I had simply peed my pants when I’d said so. If a person is exposed to enough of that questioning, to that implicit or explicit doubt directed by others, how is one supposed to touch base with themselves? 

CM: Mother runs through many of your stories. Or a mother force field, a mother-feeling insinuates itself often into the prose, even when it remains outside the story’s parameters. What is your experience of motherhood? What windows has the experience of being a mother opened or closed?

NL: Chimera—as the word relates to Greek mythology—generally speaking, a female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. Can birth be so wild an animal that it’s transhuman? 

More calmly, motherhood is time travel. That is how I see it, in all seriousness. On a cellular level and more. I feel very much a part of the circular atmosphere, more now than ever before. On motherhood time travel: I am to write about this very topic soon. Stay-tuned. 

CM: Perhaps a simple question to end on, but Nora—what brings you to the page? 

NL: A deep longing to be there, wherever “there” is at any given moment in time: seated on an airplane; reminding Sylvia to (please) not throw sand in a playground’s sandbox; in a grocery store checkout line; horizontal at rest listening to her breathing beside me. 

An obsession. Raging curiosity. A resolve to participate no matter what angles or forces wish to take me away. Writing is an act of engagement, and I would not know how or what to be without it.