Ask The Author: Sarah Malone

Sarah Malone’s “Light At New Latitude” appeared in the November Issue. Here, Sarah answers questions about time, awkward jokes and walks of shame.

1. What is the most awkward joke you have ever told?

My subconscious is probably using this to obscure some horrible elementary or high school stumble, but what comes immediately to mind is trying to share memes and so forth, web humor, in person, in the ’00s—repeatedly… oh, the patient, pitying looks… and yet I kept on, certain that if I only told it better… but even among people who are all equally up on those kinds of jokes, they really do not translate off the computer screen.

2. Why do we call it a walk of shame? Depending on the kind of night, could it be referred to as a walk of fame instead?

I think so! Because really, inside, isn’t one shouting LOOK, WORLD!!! I DID IT! [NAME] LOVES MEEEEE!?!?

Also: early morning New York, when you and the coffee carts getting set up own the city. It’s an amazing feeling. Or so I heard from a friend.

I credit the usage to expedient (false) self-deprecation,  and envy channeled into mockery: shame-wink-ha-ha when referring to your walk, don’t-you-wish-it-were-shame when referring to someone else’s. A very ’90s usage, all the context-dependent layers of intention.

3. What made you choose to jump around in time in “Light at Latitude”?

I’ve long been drawn to non-linear structures in fiction. Dana Spiotta has a passage in Stone Arabia: “She was going about this all wrong—sequential, linear, chronological. From day to day. There were other ways, other connections that were maybe deeper, other ways of ordering and contemplating and telling and showing.”  That really resonates with me. In workshops there’s a tremendous aversion to “backstory” but when we’re reading as readers, not workshoppers, we often go back and forward in time from our point of entry into a story without it really registering. It’s rarely a good idea to impose a form for its own sake, but insisting that only linearity maintains narrative tension sorely reduces what we’re able to say. I think what makes trips into the past die on the page, when they do, and register as “backstory” (I don’t even like the term), is when they’re solely functioning as explanation—that’s why he’s a murderer, all those times left alone when he was six—which only flattens out drama, instead of adding something that’s still pending. But if one breaks down, sentence by sentence, or within sentences, the time being implied or addressed, the richest passages, even in very spare fiction, often have astonishing temporal complexity.

In “Light at New Latitude,” the jumps are more blatant. Orbiting certain moments seemed to me the heart of this story; so often it’s what we do with trauma, re-think, re-live, until what we’re experiencing is much more about the process and experience of recall than getting closer to the original experience.

Dramatically, the problem I ran into in earlier, more linear versions of this story was that it covers well-trodden ground (affairs, Anglos/Europeans abroad) and so despite its physical action, there was a foregone quality, and having a linear structure meant there wasn’t room for tension other than what was generated by the timeline. Also once Marie is injured, the story is necessarily static—she can’t get out of bed. But she can ruminate and recall, and by jumping between her post- and pre- injury, the story both follows her thoughts and keeps all its questions pending right up to the end. The dual revelations—readers are finding out what happened, she’s finding out how she’s going to deal with it—seem to me rewardingly asynchronous; readers get to have both in their heads at once.

I struggled with this story for a long time. Once I settled on the non-linear structure, I was able to write it quite quickly and it led me to the last line, which is one of my favorite things I’ve written.

4. What fictitious vehicle do you wish you could drive?

My id says battlestar Pegasus, but who wants to look at space through a dradis screen? So I’m going to go with starship Enterprise, Star Trek VI edition—graceful, clean, not filled with lens flares, and WITH A KITCHEN IN SPACE. I love the Age of Sail sense that universe gets at times: who knows what island we’ll land on, and while we say what we want is landfall, really we’re always happiest with our faces turned to the stars, on the lookout for the next landfall we’ll be relieved to leave behind. That restlessness and eternal continuation (or deferral?) is really appealing, though for me it’s become much more appealing fictionally—I’ve turned into a real homebody.

5. How do you feel about fish?

Delicious! Seriously, though, the depletion of the oceans absolutely terrifies me. The New Yorker, I think, had a piece last year about tuna, how bluefin weren’t prized until very recently, and in a few decades we’ve managed to bring them to the point of collapse. I fear we’re incapable of the degree of collective decision and self-restraint needed, at this point, for ecosystems to survive.

6. What side are you on?

The West Side.