Aimee Bender graduated from UC Irvine and teaches at USC. Her books have received accolades in all the major outlets: from the New York Times, LA Times, & MCSweeney’s, to Oprah. Her latest novel, published July 2020, is The Butterfly Lampshade. When I was rattling off the list of Bender’s books, Kate deadpanned, “So she’s basically taken all the best titles from the universe.” In this episode, Bender reads from her latest novel. Of it, an astute reviewer wrote, “[it’s] as if we’d shrunk to fit inside a Joseph Cornell diorama... we feel as Francie does: that anything and anyone might be a two-way street, capable of passing from our side into theirs by means of illustration—or from their side into ours by means of emanation...and after ‘slipping into being...we really ought not to be here.’” Listen as we discuss why exposing your kids to things like modern dance and The Blue Man Group is a good thing, how to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on but also feel confident enough to vary your form as a writer, and remembering the mindless goodness (and potential writing prompt) in just staring at an object in space. (N.B. Your phone’s screen does not count.) Honorable Mentions: Flannery O’Connor’s reminder to us all: “There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.” (from O’Connor’s essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”) Best writer note to your younger self: “Write what you like, kid. Enough of this posturing.” Aimee Bender’s Incredible Backlist: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories The Color Master An Invisible Sign of My Own Willful Creatures: Stories

Published Date: February 2, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This is a special episode of F***ing Shakespeare, recorded in collaboration with the 2021 AWP Conference & Bookfair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a second year, and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Jessica Cole:

I'm Jessica Cole.

Phuc Luu:

I'm Phuc Luu.

Kate Martin Williams:

I'm Kate Martin Williams.

Jessica Cole:

And this is F***ing Shakespeare by writers-

Kate Martin Williams:

... for writers.

Jessica Cole:

Aimee Bender graduated from UC Irvine and teaches at University of Southern California. Her books have received accolades from all over. New York Times, LA Times, McSweeney's. Everywhere. Her latest novel, which was published in July 2020, is The Butterfly Lampshade. When I was rattling off the list of vendors' books, all of which I have read, all of which I love and have been meaningful to me as a writer and a person, Kate deadpanned, "I see. So she's basically taken all the best titles from the universe." Welcome, Aimee.

Aimee Bender:

So kind. Thanks.

Jessica Cole:

So, I'll just start from the beginning. Your debut short story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, came out a few months before I started my MA in creative writing at UC Davis. And my cohort was just abuzz with the possibilities of your writing, where metaphors came to life so believably in a sustained way. And unlike Kafka, you were alive, a young woman, and you're fantastic in both senses of the word, metaphors kept opening and unfolding, as if the cockroach had continue to morph. Your stories and maybe your novels showed me that story didn't have to fully be based on realism and still be considered literary, which I really hadn't been exposed to before. Then I read more widely and knew that you weren't the only, only one, but you were the first in my reading life. Now, I've gotten to know The Butterfly Lampshade, which is extremely beautiful and seems completely written for this time, whether you meant it to be or not. Would you start us up and read a little bit of it?

Aimee Bender:

Sure, absolutely. And thank you for saying that. There's something so meaningful about hearing about your personal experience of reading something. So, that's just really nice. Thank you.

So I'm going to just read for two-ish minutes of chapter eight, which is a short chapter, because it explains the project of the character and therefore the project of the book, which is that it's a young woman, about 26, looking back at a transitional point in her life when she was eight. And so she's kind of trying to conceive of this point in the book. She's been thinking about her mom who had a psychotic break when she was eight, or not the break, but a psychotic episode. So there had been other ones, but this one was kind of more extreme, and so there had been ... That's what she's referencing when she talks about this at the beginning.

"I think of this now from the balcony of my apartment in the depths of the San Fernando Valley where I live on the third floor of a sand-colored stucco building about a 10-minute bus ride from my aunt and uncle's home. I have lived here in this particular apartment for three years and have stayed in Los Angeles for nearly 20.

One afternoon, many months ago, on a day of nothing notable except a certain familiar emptiness rolling out at its edges inside me, after walking home at dusk from my managerial job at the framing store down the street, which I had taken because it was maybe of interest to me, frame business, although I disliked the place and the hours and the act of constant framing. I'd settled on the balcony eating a bag of potato chips, gazing at a couple of leafy orange trees, remnants of a bygone grove.

For whatever reason, something was unusually quiet inside me that day, looking out as if some new space had opened up for a moment, like a rotating door revealing its slim aperture of access to the outside. And through this opening, an image had slid into my head, steady and true, of what it had been like on the playground in Portland at Lewis and Clark Elementary those many years ago.

There I was, eight years old, standing by myself in the middle of the playground, totally still with the windy air, the diamond-patterned fence, the melting cracker taste in my mouth, tracking. How the other kids running around thought I was still frozen from some long past game of tag, and on the way back to class had swatted my shoulder to unfreeze me.

From the balcony, I could see someone walk out of a store and someone walk into a store and cars pulling away from the metered curb and new cars gliding into place. My apartment was near the corner, so my scope of view included pedestrians stepping into their cars on Chandler and a glimpse of Victory Boulevard and all the commercial activity there. It was a cloudy afternoon in July, and the blasting heat of summer had not yet fully baked the valley into brown, so the hills still showed swaths of rolling green, patched with bands of blazing yellow. I ate my bag of potato chips and sat next to the small succulent plant in its terracotta pot left behind by a previous tenant, and for a moment felt myself living inside both times at once.

Why had the memory risen up right then? I did not know. It was overall a scattered time in my life. I was 26 years old. I went to my framing job nearly every day and stood behind the counter and took orders and offered opinions on metal versus wood. I filled up my Friday and Saturday nights with activities initiated by others. I attended a few dinners, in which I and another person eyed each other as potential mates after a recent breakup with a fellow who my aunt and Vicky had asked about almost constantly with delighted winks in their voices. But other than my continued weekend outings to yard sales to hunt for items to sell online, it all felt like further performances of participation, just as I had experienced in the third grade classroom sitting at a table and talking and joking with the other students as if I were there.

I inhabited none of it, and the sensation I was recalling right then on the balcony, the memory of standing still and paying attention until that hand arrived on my shoulder, of the girl calling, 'Francie's frozen again,' and all the kids laughing, this memory evoked something different, something else, like catching a whiff of a fragrant long-ago scent from a far off and regal country. I hadn't even minded being teased about standing so still like a lump. It had been sweet, the teasing. It had never stopped me.

On the balcony, a breeze flew over my face, and cars stopped at the red light and then moved forward at the green light, and the memory of the playground began to slip, the hand releasing my shoulder, freeze tag over, body disappearing into time. Then I went inside, threw out the potato chip bag and made some plans for the weekend and forgot again."

Jessica Cole:

So, you write that Francie looks for small things to hold onto, handrails to find. And most often, they're objects, not people, and they're objects that she's imbued with a certain kind of... She's granted, basically, an elevated status of some kind for good or for ill. I'm just so curious about your process and who first gave you permission to do that. I mean, the fact that you did it so young and so early in your career right away.

Aimee Bender:

I have a very creative mom who was really encouraging of strangeness, and that definitely helped. She was teaching modern dance and choreographing modern dance when I was a child. We would go to a lot of modern dance concerts, and they were really, really weird. There were people barking on stage. There was just a lot of that. And she just... The arts, to her, are a language of communication and love, so it really felt like that.

Like, I remember we saw Blue Man Group once and we drove home and we were just drumming the car. And it was a communication. It was a kind of intimacy between me and her, but it was non-verbal. So there's something like... Although writing is the medium by which I like to make stuff, I do feel like it's wanting to drop down to some place that's not verbal and try to let that inform the language that gets used, so it's a little more primal in some way. It's hard to explain.

Jessica Cole:

That makes a lot of sense.

Aimee Bender:

I guess certain teachers and just that.... and books I've read and art that I've seen where you just feel like something shows you that there are no limits on the things we can do to express our experience. And there shouldn't be because our experiences are so layered.

Jessica Cole:

Absolutely. Right. Yeah. It was so incredible to have your book as this kind of talisman because I was so steeped in realism. And I love realism. There's a lot of wonderful stuff there. I feel like you never retread either. How do you constantly evolve your form to... I mean, this book is so much about mental health, to put it in quotes and to reduce it to the most plodding language possible. But how do you keep your finger on the pulse and adapt your form at the same time? Or are those two things co-evolving?

Aimee Bender:

I mean, it's nice to hear you say that because I think there are also people that will just be like, "It's similar territory," and I'm aware that it's similar territory. But also, I think the thing I believe so strongly about writing is that you don't really pick what works. And so I'll be trying so many things, and then one of 10 will start to feel like it has something in it that has some resonance.

And I can't force the other ones to have resonance. You can't make something layered. It just is or it isn't. So because of that, it feels like there's certain area... objects, relationships, connections and misconnections, and parents, families. All this stuff feels like... I like to hang out in that area and the blurry line between imagination and reality and also when that can become dangerous for someone like it does for Francie's mom and at times for her. I guess I just really like spending time thinking about all those things, so I'm glad to hear you say that.

And I think it's mainly that... I believe that the writer will tend to naturally push herself because we're not going to write the same thing again. You're always going to write it in a slightly new way because you're living a life and things are changing, and the way you process the material changes. So it just feels like... Sometimes I'll have students who'll be worried that they're writing the same breakup story or something. And it's like, well, why not? Eventually, you're going to write the breakup story that-

Jessica Cole:

It's impossible.

Aimee Bender:

Yeah, I mean, breakups are important to write about, and they may get larger and the scope may change or it may narrow and deepen. There's all kinds of ways to approach it.

Jessica Cole:

Yeah. I think that's one of the myths, possibly, of creative writing programs, that it always has to be new ideas. And I think the impetus is probably very... I know it's in good faith and good intention to experiment, and here you are in this phase. But right, sometimes we only have four stories that we're going to tell in a myriad of ways, and that's also totally cool.

Aimee Bender:

Right. Exactly, exactly. Why not? I mean, some people say, "You just have... Each person has a limited amount of preoccupations." Because that's who we are. And what's interesting is it's not like I think about objects all the time in my waking life, my non-writing life, but they're just clearly affecting me and I'm processing them in some way.

Jessica Cole:

I feel like we all are, and that's, I think, what was so illuminating about first reading your work and then reading and reading everything since, that it reminds me that I am and that we all are. And then I just tend to... As observant, as I supposedly am, I don't consider objects as much because I'm so obsessed with someone's eyebrow going up in a certain way, come to think of it.

Aimee Bender:

Totally.

Jessica Cole:

But speaking of spaces like MFAs, and so you're currently the director of the Creative Writing and Literature program? Yes.

Aimee Bender:

I'm not anymore. I did it for six years and it's now the wonderful Dana Johnson who I'm doing a panel with tomorrow, a colleague and friend. And so she's taken the helm, which is great, but I did do it for six years, and it was it very enjoyable.

Jessica Cole:

So, Kate and I met in an English department at the University of Tennessee.

Aimee Bender:

Awesome.

Jessica Cole:

Slightly random. And since neither of us are from Tennessee, that's the only thing that's random about it. I was in the second cohort of people doing PhD in English at a creative dissertation, and Kate did a master's in creative writing.

Aimee Bender:

Nice. Great.

Jessica Cole:

So, that's where we met. And so of course, I have great reverence for those spaces and also there was a ton of other stuff overall, like a really incredible experience. What would you say to someone who is thinking about applying or put on your administrative hat for?

Aimee Bender:

Yeah, of course. I mean it's really interesting because it's so different than an... it's different than an MFA. No, it is quite different. And so I feel like the students that come in, I mean, it's tiny, too, that we're taking three and fiction a year because we want to fully fund everyone for five years. And so, I think it's a really good match also for someone who's very good at bouncing back and forth between the analytical and the creative or even merging the two, like a Maggie Nelson who's at USC, too, someone who's able to hold both orbs of the brain in that way. And I think that tends to be maybe the happiest student in the program, that sort of profile.

But I think mainly because they're taking a fair bit of seminars and their exams and there's all kind of concretized hoops for the critical side and less so for the creative side. So, it's just really important I think for the writers to kind of make sure that they're also doing their creative work because the sort of PhD-ish aspect of it can dominate.

Jessica Cole:

Yeah, I did all one and then all the other.

Aimee Bender:

Interesting.

Jessica Cole:

I [inaudible 00:15:14] do that. I couldn't really figure out how to do.

Aimee Bender:

Yeah. So you did all one for a certain amount of time and then sort of-

Jessica Cole:

Yes, I did all the critical, got it out. I just raced through sort of a lot of really good teachers because I was so after this. I really wanted to write my novel. Then of course, I was done really early and I sat down and I was like, "I don't know how to write a novel." Oh my god. [inaudible 00:15:38]

Aimee Bender:

And you have to kind of shift gears because you can't... I can't at least be sort of knowing what I'm doing as I'm doing it. I have to really sort of be a little bit like Flannery O'Connor's grand of stupidity. You just have to not really know what you're doing.

Jessica Cole:

My adviser quoted that to me, which was my dissertation director, which was so helpful.

Aimee Bender:

It is. It's validating.

Jessica Cole:

It's very good. So, you didn't start The Butterfly Lampshade. You're probably... Were you editing during the beginning of the pandemic? Or where were you in the process? Because I feel like this book is so, of its time, is almost eerie.

Aimee Bender:

Yeah. I mean, it was so unrelated, but I had a lovely student mentioned that she was, at a time, when I was sort of creatively unproductive and solitary, it was nice to think about being creative without being sort of overtly productive, a kind of internal productivity that was really nice to hear.

Yes. So I wasn't thinking of lockdowns and quarantines at all, but I finished, I think, the final draft in February. And then, they were just going to turn it around quickly because it was 10 years since Lemon Cake. And it felt like maybe that was kind of a nice number, and I think it just felt like that was a good time. And the election, that was the other thing. They were going to aim for fall. And then they were like, "No one is going to be in their right mind in November."

Jessica Cole:

We did the same thing. Yes.

Aimee Bender:

Right. So they did July. But, yeah, then of course a year ago, March, we were all sort of reeling and trying to understand what was going on. Still barely. I still like I'm so day to day and not able to get any distance from the experience yet.

Jessica Cole:

And speaking of objects, I feel like... I went back to your book, your books, I mean, An Invisible Sign of My Own, particularly, for some reason and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake because now objects were screaming at me because I am in the same four walls all the time. And I felt like, yes, I mean if Aimee Bender didn't foresee this, then she knows. She just knows.

Aimee Bender:

It was cool. I teach this fairytale class and I have this undergrad Stephanie Chen who said this brilliant thing the other day, so I'll credit her because she said... We were reading Angela Carter's Bloody Chamber, and Angela Carter has this moment of the dismembered... the lilies floating in the greenish water look like dismembered arms, totally grotesque. She said something like, "It reminds me of what it was like before we had phones, and you'd be at the doctor's office and you'd just stare at things." And she's like, "I just don't do that anymore."

And it was so wonderful to think of what is that state of mind where you just kind of space out on a thing that gets... that the phone has become the thing and the phone doesn't allow spacing out in the same way because there's stuff coming at you. So, it was just great. And then I had them do a little writing exercise about what was something that they stared at when they were a child. And they came up with great stuff because it's just like what... So, I think in terms of what you're saying, the pandemic heightens maybe the experience that we all had as children a little bit, which was like you are in a kind of smaller space for a while and you tend to encounter the same objects, but they're imbued and projected upon with so much material that's internal. And so they aren't just regular, they're bigger than they are. Are we-

Jessica Cole:

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I realized I could learn from my son who's nine, who is really having a much easier time with things probably because he has his whole... He doesn't have a phone and he has his whole imagination at his disposal.

Aimee Bender:

Yeah, totally. I-

Jessica Cole:

I mean, he's still so.... he's just now reading big fat novels and that's just, thank God, he gets to disappear and escape in that. Really cool.

Aimee Bender:

That part is really nice. I have seven-year-old twins and their... the amount of levels of sort of imaginative storylines that are running through the household and that there's rough parts to this for them, of course. But I think that's been so sustaining. There's the bath storyline, there's the one about the outside and with the dirt, and then there's this one related to the TV show, and then there's the one [inaudible 00:20:25] it just feels like there's a lot of frequencies.

Jessica Cole:

Perfect.

Kate Martin Williams:

I wonder, Aimee, you've had this enviable trajectory across your books and your writing career. Is there something that you would tell your younger self that maybe would apply to? We talked to a lot of debut novelists on the show or people who are just starting out and emerging. Is there something you would tell your younger self, career-wise or with regard to your writing that you wish you had known?

Aimee Bender:

Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably a lot of things. But I think one would relate to what Jessica was saying about so meaningfully about that experience of feeling like things didn't have to be so realistic or they didn't have to be bound to realism. That I really had that notion, too, that things... that literary writing had to be a certain way to be accepted and respected. So that was so freeing when that got loosened up.

So I guess, some sense of just... or even books that I didn't discover till later, if I could have stumbled upon Calvino a little earlier or stumbled upon, even Toni Morrison, I feel like is such a model for how to use magical. I mean, she completely... There's a feeling with Morrison that you feel like the whole toolbox of a fiction writer is available to her, and she will use whatever and that the breadth and greatness of her ability to go deeply into all of those parts.

And so I guess I just would've... I think I felt pretty bound up for a while, and it would've been nice to know... I think it just would've been nice to know, like write what you like, just write what you like, kid. Let's stop this posturing. Just do what you like. Enough of this faking... fake New Yorker story. It's no good.

Kate Martin Williams:

That's great.

Aimee Bender:

If you like to read and think about just-

Jessica Cole:

Like your metaphors, right? You're like, "Okay, I'm going to just write things as they are, and they're flat," and then go where the layers are.

Aimee Bender:

Yeah, totally. And that all we have is ourselves. That's all we have is our own experience and our own perceptions of the world. That's the stuff. So use that stuff. And I think it just takes a while. It's dating, right? You're presenting another person to the date instead of being like, "This is who I actually am." It's dating the page where you're like, "Just be yourself on the page, what that looks like." And it doesn't mean it has to be your experience, but it's your interests, it's your preoccupations, it's just your own-

Jessica Cole:

I don't think that was taught to us. I feel like I... I had some great teachers, but I think there was always a standard, a certain standard. And maybe it's also because I have, whatever my relationship to authority is, and so I perceived things that other people weren't. But I think, yeah, it's being a teacher now, I feel like that's the main thing I want to tell my students.

Aimee Bender:

Yeah. And I think a lot of the walls have gotten broken down more in terms of genre or-

Jessica Cole:

Definitely.

Aimee Bender:

And that's a big relief. But yeah, I know what you mean. I think there's a-

Kate Martin Williams:

And also who we read, the order in which we're exposed to things like you were saying, Toni Morrison or Alice Munro. That was way later for me, and it was like, "Wait, why am I just now figuring this out?"

Aimee Bender:

Right.

Kate Martin Williams:

Why wasn't this earlier?

Aimee Bender:

Like why did I read Somerset Maugham? I mean, what's that about? I don't remember a single word. Maybe really good, like maybe I'd like him now, but I was 17.

Kate Martin Williams:

Really [inaudible 00:24:27].

Aimee Bender:

[inaudible 00:24:28]

Jessica Cole:

Yeah. My parents are huge readers and our house is full of books, but it was their taste and it was mostly from their sort of college, adulthood. I mean, we had our kids books, but yeah, it was... We didn't have the access the way we do now. Yeah.

Kate Martin Williams:

Thank goodness.

Jessica Cole:

Wow. Thank you so much, Aimee. I feel like I could talk to you for the entire evening, my entire afternoon, yours.

Aimee Bender:

Thank you so much, Jessica and Kate. Yeah. Well, it's just wonderful to be on this and to talk to you.

Jessica Cole:

Thank you so much.

Kate Martin Williams:

It was an honor hosting you. Thanks for making time.

Aimee Bender:

It was an honor. Just fun.

Phuc Luu:

Thank you so much, Aimee.

Kate Martin Williams:

Thank you.

Phuc Luu:

We appreciate it.

Aimee Bender:

Oh, my pleasure.

Phuc Luu:

And Lily is clapping her hands.

Aimee Bender:

Oh, thank you, Lily. Ramon

Phuc Luu:

And Ramon. This has been a live recording of the F***ing Shakespeare podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2021 AWP Conference & Bookfair.

F***ing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary in association with Houston Creative Space, hosted by Kate Martin Williams and Jessica Cole, and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trustee and hardworking intern is [Sanditi Seda 00:25:51]. Please subscribe, rate, and review wherever podcasts are found.