New England Review

Behind the Byline

Rebecca van Laer

Photo courtesy of Rebecca van Laer

Staff reader Megan Howell talks with contributor Rebecca van Laer about irony, the transitive properties of unconditional love, and the emergence of a “feline” story structure in her piece “Les Chats” (NER 44.1).

Megan Howell: The title, “Les Chats,” means “the cats” in French, but the only references to the French language appear in the opening when the nameless protagonist is getting to know the French cat-sitter. I interpreted its placement to mean that the piece is really a commentary on human interaction, especially considering that some of the most quotable lines all deal with communication and miscommunication. The protagonist’s cats act as a medium through which she interacts with other humans. But are they effective at this? Or do they make it harder for her to relate to people? 

Rebecca van Laer: With this story, I wanted to explore how pets can become a lens that filters all of our interactions. Rather than helping or damaging her general skills at relationality, I think the cats teach her that communication is never transparent: there’s always a degree of projection, conjecture, and untranslatability. The French in the title is a way of gesturing at that.

How that plays out in the animal vs. human relationships in the story is definitely different. In the cat/human relationship, there is of course no language to translate—only guesswork. And I think you’re right that there’s irony that the narrator has boundless love and attention for beings whom she cannot directly communicate with, whereas moments of frustration and judgment with people abound. This is something that I wanted to explore: can we carry the unconditional love learned from our pets into human interaction? Or can it only inspire us to examine the boundaries and limits of our empathy (as it does in this story)?

MH: The protagonist’s anthropomorphisation of her cats combined with her indifference to certain human characters makes her come across as a much, much tamer version of a certain type of misanthropic pet-owner I’ve seen a lot of online and irl. The latter will brag about how they’d save their pet over a human child if given the chance, often ironically stating that the reason for their dislike of people is their antipathy.

Should we interpret this revenge-love for animals as a response to the stresses of being a human surrounded by other, equally messy humans? Or is the relationship between man and pet more than just a respite from other people? 

RVL: I think the love for animals offers more than a respite from other people. One thing I wanted to get at in this story is the way that the narrator, her partner, and the two cats, Toby and Gus, form a family unit with its own family culture. This relates a lot to your previous question: the two humans’ relationship is enriched by the cats and is in many ways unimaginable without it. 

Since the story is told in fragments, a lot hovers at the edges: there’s the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced the characters into closer relationship with their cats while keeping them distant from humans. There’s also the fact of their childlessness; while the reasons aren’t detailed and it’s open to interpretation, I tried to convey a sense of longing for more. In the penultimate section, “The Third Cat,” the narrator says, “We wish Toby and Gus could have kittens together. But we’ve learned our lesson: we can’t have everything we want. We have to preserve what we’ve got.” With this, I’m hoping to gesture to the idea that we don’t always choose the kinds of intimacies (human vs. animal) that arise in our life. Instead, we have to find value in what makes itself available.

MH: Making up the story are individually titled vignettes that all revolve around some aspect of the cats: their backstories, temperaments, quirks, etc. Instead of time driving the story, the cats do, taking us everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Why tell their story in this fashion? Why not trace their lives linearly from life until death? 

RVL: I often struggle with the compression of a short story—it’s quite challenging to introduce complex characters, establish a conflict, and achieve resolution and change in under 5,000 words! In a story about a cat, that might be even more challenging: should the cat get lost? Attack its owner or another person? Fail to get along with another cat? While some of these kinds of dramatic events are referred to in the story, I’m afraid they’d fail to create sufficiently compelling stakes if explored in a linear manner, unless the story was much much more centrally about the people and their conflict.

To put the cats at the center of “Les Chats,” it felt like the story had to be more cat-like. Hopping from anecdote to anecdote felt like a more feline approach. The life of a cat is full of repetition: moving from sunny spot to sunny spot throughout the house, napping, and then occasionally getting up for a ritual cuddle or a bout of the zoomies. Yet while my cats do more-or-less the same thing every day, so much meaning emerges from it (or, I should say, I construct so much meaning on top of it). I wanted the story to function like that.

MH: The protagonist’s love for her cats feels contradictory. She values them for being purer than humans. At the same time, she projects human characteristics onto them, comparing them to TV characters and imagining their tastes in music and film. Which aspect of them does she value more: the humanlike attributes that she imagines them having? Or their foreignness as members of a different species? 

RVL: I think this contradiction is the very heart of what I wanted to write about! I saw this quote on Twitter or otherwise floating on the internet: “The difference between dog people and cat people: dog people wish their dogs were people. Cat people wish they were cats.” I think that’s right. Although she can’t help but project, it’s their difference that delights her.

MH: Readers learn very little about the protagonist and her partner. The story revolves primarily around their cats until the ending: “Other times, I say that I want to follow [my cats] into the earth when they go. I know this is in poor taste. But when I think of their death, that is the level of despair I feel. I would never say this about my partner. Perhaps, most of all, it is because I fear that without them there would be no us.”

Why wait until the final line to reveal such a dramatic revelation about her partner?

RVL: This relates so much to all of your questions. Putting this any earlier in the story would demand more explanation of it; it would necessitate that the story become more and more about the people and the other reasons why the narrator may feel this way. Readers would have wanted to know much, much more about the partner, and whether he shared those feelings. The line would become not just Chekov’s gun, but a shot fired, a wound: something that had to be further examined in every aspect of the story.

Instead, in organizing it in this way, my hope is that the final line helps reveal everything in retrospect, underlining the melancholy of the story. All the love detailed here—human and animal, funny and sweet, simple and fraught—is also fragile. That does not mean that it is doomed; it just makes it more essential to savor while it exists in its current form. 

Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review, and The Establishment among other publications.

Rebecca van Laer is the author of a novella, How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022). She holds a PhD in English from Brown University, where she studied queer and feminist autobiography. Her work appears in Joyland, The Florida Review, Salamander, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her partner and two cats.

Carrie R. Moore

Photo by Matt Valentine

NER fiction reader Megan Howell talks to Carrie R. Moore about illustrating disassociation through the second person, alluding to racially charged histories, and her story “In the Swirl,” from issue 43.4.

Megan Howell: In “In the Swirl,” readers follow an unnamed art-student-slash-lifeguard over the course of a summer. A narrator tells her story in the second person, directly addressing readers—the “you” of the story—and making us and the main character one in the same. Reading the piece, I was reminded of The Mothers, a novel whose narrators include a Greek chorus of older Black women gossiping about a Black girl.

I was wondering if you had in mind an identity for your narrator when you were writing your story. Who is this person? And why do they know so much about “us”? Or are “they” a narrative device without a self? 

Carrie R. Moore: Regardless of the point of view I select for a story, I’m deeply committed to characterization, what my protagonists desire or fear and how they navigate inner conflicts. The heroine of this story is a teenager, then a twenty-something girl, then a thirty-something woman trying to hold onto her earlier earnestness, despite the world telling her that it is more appropriate—read, safer­—to get over those emotions and plow ahead with mature adulthood. “Opal,” as she was named in an earlier draft, is constantly looking back on the events of her life in an attempt to understand them. What were her father’s motivations? Her mother’s? Jacob’s? Her other friends’? What was anyone feeling at any given time?

I’d been thinking about the functions of the second person and what opportunities it might afford writers. Of course, Lorrie Moore, N. K. Jemisin, and Junot Díaz come to mind, and I wondered how point of view might aid my own storytelling. If other short stories have used the second person to provide a set of instructions or illustrate the limits of such instructions—as in “How to Be an Other Woman”—I wondered if that device could emphasize the new understandings of events that we have as we age. In “In the Swirl,” the older narrator conceives of her younger self as entirely separate from her adult self, and the second person is an indication of that disassociation. In other words, the “you” in the story is a younger version of the older narrator, though by the last paragraph she merges with the older version. The protagonist knows so much about herself because so much time has passed, and she can look back with clarity.

MH: What is “the swirl”? Is it just the vortex that animals get trapped in? Or is it larger than that?

CRM: The word “vortex” is so apt here. Certainly, the animals and creatures get trapped in the manufactured cyclones of the swimming pool. But the narrator is also trapped in the swirl of her emotions. She has such high-highs when falling in love, and such low-lows when things don’t work out the way she’d hoped. I’ve often sensed that adults are reluctant to validate the emotions of young people, as if somehow their intensity indicates a lack of control and therefore a lack of significance. I was very interested in that disorienting period of adolescence and wanted to write a story set within it. And there’s also the swirl of time, the nonlinear structure that encompasses the heroine’s adult life.

MH: I feel like as fiction writers, we often look to other forms of artistic expression when trying to convey our reflections on creative development. A ton of Künstlerroman—tales of artists coming of age—deal with plastic arts and music, not writing. I personally believe we do this out of a need for privacy: we don’t want readers thinking that we’re secretly writing our life stories when we’re not. I was wondering if your perspective was different. Why did you decide to make the main character a painter? Why not a writer? 

CRM: This is so interesting! I’m certainly a fiction writer for a reason, and I need my privacy. However, when it comes to my characters’ occupations, I try to think of how their passions and careers connect to how they see the world. “In the Swirl” is a very imagistic story, and that’s largely because Opal (I still call her that in my mind) is an artist who interprets her world visually. For instance, when she’s in the car with Jacob, she’s looking at his face in the streetlight, despite what he’s saying aloud. Or when she’s encountering some roach or mouse, she’s really fixated on how they move. If she were a writer, I suspect she’d be more preoccupied with language.

MH: The story fixes itself around a seemingly unimportant memory: fishing out a dead mouse from a pool filter and screaming. The mouse becomes a key metaphor. It redefines the main character, triggering a years-long flash forward to her picking up a dead pigeon without much hesitation. Her relationship with nature is the only subplot that has a conclusive ending (“Where has she gone, the girl who screamed at any and everything? You clutched the hands of your sister’s children, remembering how easy it had been for you once, to release whatever you felt”). We see how it’s evolved whereas her relationships with her dad and Jacob stay up in the air. Even the trajectory of her art career remains up to interpretation: we know that she goes to art school, interns at a gallery, and finds moderate success as a painter, but we can only guess how she makes it from point A to point C. 

Why tell the story of the main character’s development primarily through animals? Why not people? Or art?

CRM: At their core, people are animals, especially when they’re not practicing at being otherwise. Given the story’s interest in unmasked earnestness, I wanted to tell the heroine’s story without affect, and one of the ways that shows up is in her reactions to creatures that frighten her. If I told that narrative through people or art, there’d be an element of control there, since she learns to mute her emotions after her experience with Jacob.

Further, the animals and insects in the story contrast the protagonist with the other characters, most of whom have very strong emotions that lurk under the polish they try so carefully to maintain. Her father’s fear. Jacob’s desire. Renee’s unwillingness to think too deeply about her traumatic car accident.

MH: One of the most startling scenes happens when a random man gropes the main character. The setup is tragic: she’s at the mall, minding her own business, looking at clothing and planning out future art she wants to make—and then a stranger assaults her. She keeps the attack a secret, not wanting her overprotective dad to limit her freedom, which he does anyway. The passage reminds me of what author Emma Cline wrote on her experience being sexually assaulted at a professional literary event: “… [he] put his hand on my back, then dropped it lower to grab my ass; how swiftly I was returned to my body, to the fact of my youth and gender.” As artists, being objectified like that means being denied the opportunity to self-actualize. We become just our bodies, muses at best, subjects of abuse at worst. In a way, the main character is reduced to the dead animals she fishes out of pool filters.  

I feel as though Black women have an extra, often unspoken burden to contend with when writing about sexual trauma, which is racism. Racist media often portrays men of marginalized groups as predators and the women as unrape-able. Consequently, breaking the silence can get pretty complicated for those who don’t have white privilege. What was your thought process like when writing about the main character’s sexual trauma? Your story takes place in the Deep South, which has its own history of racially charged sexual violence.

CRM: All of this is so true and was at the forefront of my mind throughout every stage of the writing and editing process. The heroine of “In the Swirl” is so emotionally vulnerable, so willing to put herself on the line for the causes and people she believes in—yet I felt like I couldn’t write this story without acknowledging the reality of her physical vulnerability. “In the Swirl” takes place in the early 2010s, which is around the same time that Zeba Blay coined the term “carefree black girl,” to describe a way of being a Black Woman who embraces her full-complexity, who can shape her identity outside of the usual parameters of suffering, injustice, and trauma. The phrase became an aesthetic, and you began to see images of Black women in flower crowns or billowing dresses, curations of Corinne Bailey Rae and Erykah Badu playlists, and affirmations about joy and dreaminess and being open to the world. And yet, as the heroine in my story is opening herself up to heterosexual love, the fact of sexual violence remains. Even when she’s standing outside of a Forever 21 and thinking about her own future, it sneaks up on her.

The story is also one of many of mine that take place in the Deep South. In particular this one deals with swimming pools, which have their own racially charged histories. Though I didn’t allow my heroine to have a carefree existence when it came to her interactions with men, I did play with how she had a job that her ancestors could not have held, that there could be all these Black people enjoying the pool with the history of that remaining subtextual. (For instance, the high rates of drowning among Black children are certainly a presence in this story, as indicated by the swim test the campers take. Yet the story doesn’t directly articulate this reality.) As a writer, I’m interested in how the past muscles its way onto the present. But at the same time, I believe fiction might allow us brief, temporary relief.  

Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review, and The Establishment among other publications.

Behind the Byline

Angelique Stevens

Photo by Jasna Bogdanovska

Staff reader Megan Howell talks with Angelique Stevens about systemic inequities, her memoir-in-progress, and the lived experiences that inspired her essay “Care Credit” from NER 43.3.

Megan Howell: Two prominent motifs in your essay are teeth and cockroaches. At first, they seem diametrically opposed: you’re able to escape the roach-infested houses of your youth while continuing to deal with dental issues. However, you also hunt for roaches as an adult. Reflecting on your childhood, you write, “I don’t know what made me think that just moving from one place to the next would alter [my family’s and my] situation, but that was my first lesson on the nature of change. In my child’s way, I learned that evolution is layered and multifaceted and takes years to actualize.”

Do you think that any part of you, physical or mental, has managed to escape the effects of childhood poverty? 

Angelique Stevens: Yes and no.

Yes. Last night, I came back in from walking the dog; and from my backyard, the moon rose under a gorgeous velvet blue sky outlining beautifully my modest early century mint-green four-square; and I thought how lucky I am to own this city house with a fenced-in yard and three floors and a kitchen that needs upgrading and a furnace as old as me. It’s astounding to me that all of this is mine considering where I came from. In many ways I have indeed left poverty far behind. I turned 52 this year. I’m healthy. I’m a full professor at a community college considering retirement in a few years. I have travelled all over the world. I am an extraordinarily grateful and highly privileged member of the middle class in the United States and of a small percentage of people worldwide who can not only sustain their lives but do other things like travel, take time off to write a book, spend two months in South Sudan.

No. And there’s not enough room for this answer, because when you start to peel back the layers of poverty in this country, you realize that those effects run very deep. When I wrote that line about the nature of change, that “life doesn’t just flip like a quarter when the situation improves…,” I understood that to be not just representative of my own life but also of the ways in which our country processes change. The quarter flips, the situation improves, but so much remains the same. So much of our American ideals are dependent on this “bootstrap” ideology, that people, like me, who “make it out” are pegged as an example of a meritocracy at work: those who work hard and make good choices can single-handedly change their lives. But so much of that philosophy disregards the overwhelming systemic inequities that contribute to poverty, those embedded in our healthcare industry, our educational institutions, our governmental policies, federal housing regulations, our prison industrial complex, and most importantly in our history: one rooted in genocide, slavery, and white supremacy.

A few months before my sister died of a suicide overdose, she told me that she had been picked up for marijuana, said she wasn’t going back to jail no matter what. I believe it contributed to her final spiral into deep depression and psychosis. None of us knew growing up that marijuana had been decriminalized in New York since the 70’s, yet Gina had gone to jail for it and none of us had the money to pay the fine. And now I see that the people who suffered the most from this are disproportionately poor and black and brown. I saw the news yesterday that Biden flipped a quarter, pardoned everyone convicted of marijuana possession under federal law, and it completely destroyed me. I was on the floor heaving sobs. Those are the kind of effects that I’ll continue to live with and in until I die.

MH: What made you decide to name this piece “Care Credit”? Why not “Roaches”? Or “Teeth”? Or “Teeth and Roaches”? 

AS: I love this question and mostly because I didn’t come up with the title. I had been calling it my cockroaches and cavities essay for a long time and considered just naming it cockroaches and cavities. I originally named it “Formations” because of the nature of change I’m trying to highlight here. Then it became “Patterns” because of the ways in which we repeat patterns in our own lives and down through generations and in our larger history. Then someone suggested “Care Credit” and I thought that was the best fit because it takes the focus off the individual and puts it on the health care system, on economics, on the larger ideas this essay is speaking to. But there’s also the irony in the use of “care” in the title as if this industry is more about care than profit.

MH: One thing that I noticed in both your essay and in life is that the body is the closest thing we have to natural, objective truth. We can’t argue our way out of illness or death. Insurance, however, is completely made-up, though our political system often treats it as natural and thus inalterable. How do you process this distinction when both your teeth and lack of good insurance have done so much real damage to you? Does it matter? 

AS: Except for the few years I was in foster care, I didn’t have health insurance growing up and right up into my thirties. There’s a scene in my memoir in progress where I was hospitalized with a broken femur after a car accident. I was around eight and my parents didn’t have insurance either, but hospitals can’t refuse treatment to people with medical emergencies. On the morning they were supposed to set my leg by drilling a screw through my thigh, they gave me anesthesia; but, because of another hospital emergency, the doctor didn’t get to me before I woke up in the late afternoon. They did the surgery anyway with me wide awake. They injected a local anesthesia above my knee. A little while later, a bevy of nurses trailed the doctor into my room, each to hold one of my limbs while he drilled a seven-inch screw through my knee. The sight of that drill going through my leg and the pressure and blood and skin horrified me. I resisted them with every fiber of my being, but my tiny body was no match for them I screamed and wiggled and finally reached over and bit one of the nurse’s hands as hard as I could. Later, I was admonished for my actions.

I don’t imagine this kind of thing happens normally and I don’t imagine it happens for people with means. These kinds of stories are everywhere but you hear them mostly from marginalized bodies who, too often, experience the inequities of our health care system in violent and inhumane ways. Add to that the lack of insurance and those inhumanities are compounded, because we’re essentially saying to our people, that only those with means deserve good health care.

MH: You also challenge the idea that the body, teeth specifically, can tell a person’s whole life-story. You show how deft medicine is at revealing the traumas of poverty (e.g. lack of healthcare, unhealthy eating habits) while ignoring the personhood of its victims. Of your day-to-day life as a student and daughter, you state, “I wonder how that […] would conflict with the evidence of poverty plaguing my mouth in the form of missing teeth and cavities” (58). 

To what do you attribute medicine’s blind-spots towards your experiences? Classism? Racism? The indifference of the natural world and decay?

AS: I’ve been obsessed with being healthy lately, listening to podcasts, reading journal articles, following longevity doctors and scientists on the socials. I’ve mostly cut out sugar, refined carbs, and alcohol from my diet. I drink a shake full of greens and protein and collagen every day, I prioritize more time outdoors, less time doing menial things. Each week I strength train three times and try to cycle a hundred miles. For a long time, I believed that this is all part of the natural aging process, of reaching and passing that half century mark, of wanting to live a long and healthy life. I’ve learned that many of the diseases most likely to kill us, like atherosclerotic disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and foundational diseases like insulin resistance and type two diabetes are preventable. Not surprisingly many of those diseases are especially common for those without access to healthcare and preventative education; specifically black and brown people and those in poverty.

But lately, because I’m knee deep in finishing my memoir about my sister’s suicide overdose, I’ve come to realize that my obsession is deeply rooted in survivor’s guilt. It has more to do with the loss of my entire family than with the aging process. They all died prematurely and violently from these types of diseases. It wasn’t just our teeth, our lives were riddled with health issues like diabetes, which is so common in Natives, heart disease, asthma, arthritis. Add to that, lifelong mental health issues and addiction and the problem is compounded exponentially. Layer over that the systemic racism, classism, the perceptions of poverty so deeply embedded in our country’s psyche, and the stranglehold both insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry has on doctors. After a while, it becomes extremely hard to pinpoint any specific reason for the blind spots embedded in the whole structure of health care.

MH: Our culture has recently taken up the cause of mental-health awareness. When discussing our mental-health crisis, well-funded campaigns and lauded write-ups often skirt around class. (“Inside the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis” from The Times is one example that comes to mind. Zero mention of childhood poverty.) In a way, powerful interests (e.g., billionaires, think tanks, etc.) are trying to escape inequality like so many poor people, beating back its widespread consequences (i.e., more depressed kids) while failing to address it directly. Only, they have the resources to eradicate poverty entirely. 

Do you think that their class-related shame is similar to yours growing up? Or does their power make it different? 

AS: Power changes everything.

Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review, and The Establishment,  among other publications.

Behind the Byline

Hanh Hoang

Hanh Hoang, whose essay “Bedtime Stories from Vietnam” appears in NER 42.4, talks with NER staff reader Megan Howell about obsession, resisting certainty, and the ghosts we leave behind.

Megan Howell: In “Bedtime Stories from Vietnam,” you write about how your childhood in wartime Saigon influenced your continued “excitement of billowy smoke and flame.” At the same time, you were less exposed to the war than those who lived in the countryside, stating, “When the earth rumbled, when the house swayed, I was lulled to sleep, safe, with no knowledge of what was going on outside Saigon.” When you heard the soldier’s last words, you were in bed, technically “safe” but also aware of the suffering of others.

Your relationship to death seems to lie between two extremes: not far enough to ignore it or be voyeuristic, not close enough to become debilitatingly traumatized. Do you think that such a distance from death was what allowed you to overcome your fear of dying/living? Do you think it would’ve been harder to heal from your divorce had you grown up in America or the Vietnamese countryside?

Hanh Hoang: It’s true that I didn’t become debilitatingly traumatized thanks to the distance from death, a distance which allowed me to indulge in my obsession. Death started out as something fascinating because of my mother’s stories and her medical encyclopedia, which had pictures of diseased parts and dying people. We had few books at home, especially books with illustrations, so I was drawn to this encyclopedia. Later, thinking about death was an intellectual, philosophical exercise. Like Montaigne, I thought you needed to think about death constantly to learn how to live. Unfortunately, I didn’t, and haven’t, overcome my fear of dying.

As for divorce, I think it would have been hard to heal whether I had grown up in America or the Vietnamese countryside. There is no social support in either place for single parents. I know of a few women from the Vietnamese countryside who separated from their husbands. They led extremely hard lives and had to make difficult choices. One woman had to leave her son with her emotionally abusive husband and his second wife so she could find work in another city.

MH: On your son, you write, “I couldn’t relate to the violence in his world, and he couldn’t relate to the violence of mine.” While he experienced violence through the media as a child, you lived through war. I relate to your relationship as someone who’s also around your son’s age (I’m a millennial who came of age during the Minecraft, Ultimate Showdown crazes). Like your son, my understanding of violence is different from that of my parents, who dealt with segregation. However, I feel as though the pandemic has shortened this gap in comprehension between my parents and me as it has for my friends. That, and also growing older.

Do you think that you and your son still don’t see violence the same way? Or has your relationship also changed?

HH: My son has given up on trying to involve me in his video games, and he has stopped making fun of my belief in the spirit world. Maybe he still doesn’t believe in ghosts, though ghost stories have always scared him. Recently, when I told my son I wanted to conjure up my mother’s spirit, he suggested that I not do that. He probably thought that on a slim chance, a very slim chance, ghosts do exist, it’s best not to invite them to our world, or we might open the door to evil spirits.

MH: I’m curious about your decision to use italics in lieu of quotation marks for dialogue. Typically, when I see italicized dialogue, I think of Pecola Breedlove’s imaginary friend or inner-dialogue—something less than human, basically. Both the present and the past timeline make use of this technique, giving off an immaterial, almost ghostly feeling, which feels appropriate given the references to Vietnamese ghost-stories.

Why not use quotation marks? Why does every character, both the living and the dead, speak like a ghost?

HH: Quotation marks would have given more reality and certainty and energy to the dialogue, when what I have are reconstructed conversations from a past that is no longer a reality to me, especially my past in Vietnam. I don’t have any connection to it anymore.

MH: Did the Montaigne epigraph have any influence over how you wrote “Bedtime Stories in Vietnam”? Or did you find it after you’d finished drafting the piece?

HH: We spent a whole year studying Montaigne in our French class in high school. Probably our teacher had only limited authority over the choice of reading materials, but it was odd to have sixteen-year-old students analyzing Montaigne’s essay “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die” in the midst of a civil war. Our teacher, a Frenchman, also had a violent past. One day he rambled about his life and told us that, from his experience in Algeria during the country’s war of independence against the French, no one could withstand torture.

MH: What inspired you to write a story about death?

HH: Montaigne’s essay provided me with a rationale to think obsessively of death. It was probably Montaigne that inspired me to write the essay.

Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review, and The Establishment,  among other publications.

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