Vanessa Saunders is a New Orleans based professor and writer whose debut novel, The Flat Woman, is set in a not-too-distant future where a swiftly escalating climate crisis upends the life of a young woman struggling with a unique set of issues that threaten to collapse the distinction between herself and the outside world. I sat down to speak to Vanessa Saunders about the gendered nature of activism and culpability, the enduring hold that fairy tales have on our collective psyche, and the manifold small horrors that impending climate disaster threatens us with at ever-alarming speed.
How does your background influence your work as a novelist?
I’m from the Bay Area—Marin. Marin is an interesting place because people think of it as very environmentally conscious, and yet it’s also very wealthy. The residents have restricted public access to the nature, and I’ve always found that a little repulsive. BART won’t go to Marin. The thinking is we need to protect nature by limiting its access to people who can’t afford cars. So, while I’m grateful for being from a place that’s ecologically conscious, I’m also kind of aware of the not-so-great values behind some of the people who live there.
I went to San Francisco State, and I studied Creative Writing there. Things really turned around for me when I studied abroad at the University of East Anglia in the UK, an internationally prestigious creative writing program. I gained a lot of practical knowledge and elevated my discipline. I was also mentored there by someone who was very successful. Before, I was not that sure of myself, so the fact that someone who was very successful as a writer believed in me was a huge vote of confidence in my own desire to pursue this lifestyle, which can be incredibly difficult at times. I did my MFA at LSU, which is why I’m in the South. That’s how I got here. I had never been here before. At first it was a little bit of a “What have I done?” moment. I flew into New Orleans, and I immediately took a Greyhound to Baton Rouge. I had no money. I arrived at 2AM at the Greyhound Station in Baton Rouge. My phone was dead, so I had to call a taxi. And it was really, really hot. It was in August. I just felt like a fish out of water. And I did the whole time that I lived in Baton Rouge. Thankfully I moved to New Orleans my third year, which was also around the time I met my husband, and was able to make friends outside my graduate program, and kind of set up my own life here. I was an adjunct at Loyola for a few years, and then I got promoted to Professor of Practice. Getting promoted was really important to helping me finish the novel because adjuncting can be pretty tough mentally, and it was a struggle at times. I was working multiple jobs, and questioning. I always believed it would work out, but there was a second where I wondered if I had made a mistake in my career. But anyway, it ended up working out. About six months after I got the promotion, I submitted the finished manuscript—the version of it that ultimately got accepted. And so, it was a bunch of good things from there. But there were a lot of wobbles leading up to that happy moment.
One thing that Northern California and Southern Louisiana do have in common is that they’re both ecologically precarious. Did that fact inspire you to write speculative climate-change fiction?
Moving to South Louisiana obliged me to look carefully at the relationship between people and the environment, and I came away feeling that in Louisiana the environment often wins out in that relationship. There is a power struggle. The environment here is incredibly powerful. It always wins. Recently, we had a hurricane in Louisiana. A coffin came up in a cemetery during a storm that happened this week, and was floating around above ground with the corpse inside. And in terms of concrete things, there are so many strange, sometimes irritating things that just get ingratiated into your daily life because of the dysfunction of the city. Streets that get littered with potholes because they’re built on swamps, so they kind of just cave in, and the city doesn’t fix them fast enough, so you’re constantly off-roading on your way to work and your coffee’s spilling everywhere. Or there’s a flash flood so you have to move your car to higher ground, otherwise your car might get ruined. Or the Internet isn’t working because a mylar balloon explodes on top of a powerline. The infrastructure in New Orleans is not that great, and there’s not a lot of public money put into improving these things. There is a constant level of environmental threat that does make living here difficult at times, and I think that’s why there’s such a party atmosphere in this city, because you need that escape to deal with these small horrors that become a part of your daily life. Lightning struck a telephone pole near my house, and it fried all my appliances: my fridge, my microwave, my toaster. And then the powerline itself, the plastic coating on it melted all over my car. Because the lightning struck, the line sizzled and fried, and so my car to this day still has the last remnants of this black material that melted on my car, and I couldn’t get it off. I told my brother about it, who lives in LA, and he said it sounds like something from my novel. So, I guess there is this relationship between this sense of ecological dread, or disgusting and bizarre things happening, and these experiences that I was having here.
There are many small horrors related to animals in your novel. Do you have any concrete allegory in mind when it comes to these animals, for example, the birds?
However people want to interpret the story on their own, that’s fine. I wanted to create a world that wasn’t quite dystopian: not the world ending, but on the edge of it ending. Things are starting to go haywire. And then it becomes a question of, what do people want to do when they’re seeing the effects of this planet falling apart? It hasn’t reached the point yet where things have totally blown up. The presence of the birds, the seagulls themselves, has a clearcut connection to my personal life. One of my core memories was going to the San Francisco Zoo with my aunt, who is terrified of birds because she saw The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock when she was probably too young to see that movie and it scared the shit out of her. We were eating hot dogs at the zoo, and we were the only people there. We literally got attacked by a horde of angry, aggressive, huge city seagulls. I was around eight, and I saw my aunt who was a grown woman scream, get on the ground, and cover her head, so I thought that something really bad was happening. Even though it wasn’t. The birds were super vicious and did end up tearing the hot dog from my hand and making me bleed. This is something that I wrote about in the beginning of the novel. I also was attacked by seagulls when I was living in the South of England for a while. City seagulls are actually really intense, and they scare the shit out of me.
Filling in what the symbols mean is such a critical part of the experience of reading the book. I’m hesitant to define anything in one way because I don’t want people to read it and think that since I wrote it, I get to decide what that means. I’m very discussion-based professor myself. I like to discuss literature and curate interesting discussions. I really wanted this book to be talked about, and I wrote it with that in mind. And what I really wanted people to think about is their own apathy in relationship to the negative things that are going on, and their own inaction or mental freeze. I was thinking quite a bit about my own when I was writing it. It’s interesting to think about what our country [the United States] was like when I was beginning to write the novel and what it’s like now.
What was the context when you were beginning to write the novel?
I started writing in the summer of 2015, so that was Pre-Trump. I spent two summers working in London, first as an au pair, and then in a hostel. The second time I went to London was in 2016, the summer before the election. That’s when everyone was asking me about Trump. So even if he was around in 2015, I don’t think that he had entered my psychology in the same way, when I started writing it. Our country has changed a lot. It’s been nine years since I started writing this book. A lot of foundational changes have happened, especially with the pandemic, so it’s actually crazy to think about how much the world has changed since I started writing it.
In this novel, feminist activists are blamed for the death of the seagulls, an event which lands the protagonist’s mother in jail. What is the relationship between gender and activism? Is there a necessary connection between those identities?
I was thinking about the connection between gender and blame. Regardless of who you think is responsible for the death of the seagulls, it is a woman in the end who is being held responsible for it. When I teach feminist literature-based classes, I speak a lot about how male privilege can insulate men from being held responsible or from taking responsibility. It is sometimes more comfortable to blame a woman or hold her responsible. While I was reading some fairytales this week—Bluebeard and Juniper Tree—for a class that I’m teaching, I started thinking about the villainization of the women. In Bluebeard, it’s the case of the young bride going into the forbidden room, or in the case of Juniper Tree, it’s the stepmother who is villainous and communicating with the “evil one,” which can be interpreted to mean the devil. The villainization of women goes back in time to the seventeenth century, and then some of the retellings of Bluebeard have positioned that story in front of a tableau or portrait of Adam and Eve. So then thinking about that story as one where the woman is impure, and she’s the one who’s falling for temptation and eating the forbidden fruit, it’s interesting to think about how this is something I wanted to write about in a contemporary context. A lot of problematic messages around identity that we still have today, these things have roots very far back in the past. And we’re still dealing with those.
How do the acts of reading and teaching fairytales inform your writing?
I knew that The Flat Woman had a relationship to fairytales, but it took me years to understand what it was. Finally, after I finished it, I understood the connection: the female character, from the beginning, is supposed to be a narrative void. She has a little more development now in the later drafts, but for so long she was this totally flat character, just like a lot of the young female characters in fairy tales. She is a reflection of the stories I was told about women growing up. The story is operating at the level of parable, or on the meanings behind the story, as well as the literal story that’s being told. The Flat Woman should hopefully work on multiple levels.
Can you speak about the significance of the leaky boundaries? The boundaries between the real and surreal are starting to break down. How do they function narratively or symbolically?
This question actually has a very specific answer. Honestly, originally, this character was a character who was just inexplicably tied to the natural earth, almost a Mother Earth cliché. That’s probably why the book got rejected when I initially started sending it out. My thesis advisor at the time told me, don’t do this, this is cliché. And she gave me advice on how to fix it. She said, you should just have all types of stuff leaking into her. She might not have used the term “leaking.” I couldn’t figure out how to make that work, so I didn’t take her advice for years. But then, one thing that changed in my life was that I was dealing with long-haul Covid in the beginning of the pandemic. It was really bad at first and then it slowly got better to the point that I basically don’t deal with it at all anymore. It really wasn’t a situation after seven or eight months. But I started having weird, bizarre allergic reactions to different foods, and it took me a while to figure out what they were. The experience of having that very negative, super weird illness made me feel like my body was a porous thing and things were just leaking into it that shouldn’t be there. It was having reactions that resulted in a lot of anxiety. Once I realized it was reactions to certain foods, it went away. Having that experience gave me the inspiration for the leaky boundaries, going back to what my thesis advisor said, which was, don’t make it flat, don’t make it cliché, mix it up. This allowed me to reinvent her whole character, thinking about how she would be dealing with this situation and how it would impact her mentally, impact her relationships, and her relationship with herself. So I used my experience as a stepping stone, but obviously her and I are super different, so I don’t want anyone to think I’m just writing myself here.
Is this why the novel is called The Flat Woman?
The Flat Woman was the title from the start. The flatness was coming out of the idea of being flattened by grief, and by overstimulation in a world that’s moving way too quickly. And that is conveyed in the voice and style of the pace, which is moving very fast.
The protagonist has a fraught relationship with her boyfriend, who works as an Elvis impersonator. What does the Elvis impersonation symbolize?
Their relationship is kind of meant to serve as a foil. He’s the activist, and she’s working at the corporation that’s responsible for imprisoning her mother.
I do just love strangeness as a narrative engine. That’s my thing. Specifically, the Elvis impersonators came from an experience when I worked at this pizza shop in the Bay Area, where there was an Elvis impersonator. He was a regular guy, but he dressed as Elvis– the jumpsuit, the hair, and he walked around town every day like this. I saw him outside the pizza shop, through the window, many times over the five years I worked there, so maybe it just got etched into my consciousness. There was never any explanation of why he was dressed as Elvis most days of the year.
Being young in San Francisco, one time a friend and I were just walking around, trying to get some coffee, and we ended up going into Café Florez. This iconic café, but it was pretty close to the Castro, the gay neighborhood, so anyway it was like midnight and we’re going in to grab a bite to eat, and there was a drag queen on stage under a single spotlight singing Whitney Houston, I Will Always Love You, and throwing piles of white powder into the air, so basically it was a love song to presumably cocaine. It was so delightfully bizarre. I thought we were just going to grab a bite to eat. The background of San Franisco and the bay during that time (the early to mid 2000s) ended up fusing its way into the fun quirkiness of the book.
What about her relationship with her aunt?
I guess the aunt is an interesting character. Her emotional instability makes her quite dynamic. She’s trying to do the right thing, but she isn’t really capable. The whole book is me thinking through these ideas of good and evil, and different ways that these things, especially evil, can manifest. And she’s not trying to be bad. But she just is so unreliable. This isn’t her child, so it’s really not her job, but she’s been put in this bad situation and you can see her being really harmful even though you know at the same time she’s not trying to be. She is a victim of herself.
In terms of narrative, what inspired you in terms of the layout and sequence of chapters whose titles are written as headlines?
Firstly, I wanted it to be different. When you’re 25, which is the age that I was when I began writing this book, you’re more idealistic and less aware of certain difficulties you may have when trying to publish a book that is really in-your-face about being different. One big book that helped influence the style was Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. That was a book that I read and thought, this is exactly the book what I was trying to picture in my mind and couldn’t. Bhanu Kapil, Vi Khi Nao, Dionne Brand all helped me figure out the hybrid form. Hybridity—and I would call this a hybrid novel—is more common in the lyric essay form than the novel-in-verse form. You don’t have too many people trying to fuse fiction and poetry, which did result in problems later, finding a publisher. The options were really limited. The poetry people don’t want it, the fiction people don’t want it, and it’s really only the people that are okay with the in-between are going to be interested. When it finally got accepted, I felt like that was my last round. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. I might have had to rewrite it as a normal novel.
The Flat Woman will be available from the University of Alabama Press and FC2 on November 15th, 2024.
Vanessa Saunders is a professor of practice at Loyola University New Orleans. Her feminist, experimental novel, The Flat Woman, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize with Fiction Collective 2 and was published by University of Alabama Press. Her hybrid work, fiction, and poetry has appeared in Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Passages North, and [PANK] among others. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she received her MFA from Louisiana State University. Her website is vanessacsaunders.com. Join her upcoming launch events: NOLA Launch on Friday November 12th on Vino Fine Wines and Spirits; SF Panel on Climate Change Activism in Writing; MARIN COUNTY Launch on Tuesday November 19th; BERKELEY CA Launch on Wednesday November 20th.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter: @monalisavitti.
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