Heather Fowler: A Primal Cry against the Monotony of Everyday Living

If you’ve spent any amount of time reading on the web, you’ve no doubt stumbled across Heather Fowler’s writing somewhere. She has been published in such magazines as Keyhole, PANK, JMWW, Night Train, Storyglossia, decomP, Prick of the Spindle, and many, many others. She has taught composition, literature, and writing-related courses at UCSD, California State University at Stanislaus, and Modesto Junior College. Her fabulist fiction has been published online and in print in the US, England, Australia, and India, as well as recently nominated for both the storySouth Million Writers Award and Sundress Publications Best of the Net.  She was Guest Editor for Zoetrope All-Story Extra in March and April of 2000. Fowler’s story, “Slut,” won third prize at the 2000 California Writer’s Conference in Monterey. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, was recently featured at The Nervous Breakdown,  poeticdiversity, and The Medulla Review, and has been selected for a joint first place in the 2007 Faringdon Online Poetry Competition.  Recently, Heather has made waves with the debut of her short story collection, Suspended Heart. I sit down (virtually) with Heather to find out how she does it all.

CR:  You are a very prolific writer. You are also a mom, and you teach. Could you talk about your work-life balance in terms of your approach to writing?

HF: Work-life balance? What’s that?

In all seriousness, I think of my life as a fairly grueling tumbling run of repetition in which the working and daily details are the training cycles done for necessity and the writing is when I can truly fly above ground. It’s my three-quarter twist double-flip outlet for momentum into the earthless sky– my primal cry against the monotony of everyday living.

Of course, the time with the children is precious and special to me. But I think my position about working and child-rearing and writing is most clearly iterated in the final story published in Suspended Heart entitled “The Time Broker”–writing and working and care-taking: It’s difficult. There’s a selfish part of the self that feels it’s sometimes heartbreaking to be unable to do solely what your art wants you to do, especially when you are both an artist and a breadwinner. At the same time, I feel each part of a person’s life, regarding their use of time and construct of time, is a choice that involves sacrifice and a continuous re-evaluation of the question of wanted versus needed, in my case resulting in the same practical question for me day to day and week to week, which is: What writing can I get done–while at the same time not sacrificing being a good parent who both provides for her children and helps them to feel loved, attended to, and thrive? The best answer I have to that question, therefore, is that when I know someone else writes and is also a mother and also works–I feel a solidarity. You too accomplish monthly miracles with the stretching of minutes? You too work terribly hard and deserve some kind of soft-landing? I salute you and wish for you all the strength and endurance you can receive. I am not trying to be sexist here, but I feel more sympathy for the women in this type of situation, frankly. I think being a woman and a writer–on top of these other aspects–is like being a warrior in the land of What Can I Do With Three Pebbles and A Charm–and quite often leads to a sense of more extreme self-deprivation than I see illustrated in the time-structured allotments of male counterparts.

CR: You have written stories on so many different subjects, and with so many differing approaches–magical realism, literary fiction, and horror, to name a few. Where do your ideas and inspiration come from?

HF: This is a fascinating question to me. Just imagine my head spinning with twelve faces rotating as I answer. Many times, I am inspired by a poetic turn of phrase I’ve read in another author’s work and feel energized to speak to that theme before I lose the pulse of my reaction, as if there were a sudden need to weigh in or to weigh in as eloquently–but with my own difference. Other times, I have a friend or a person dear to me who struggles with an issue and I’ll write them a poem or a story, like a love letter to them, for them, to say: I have heard you. Sometimes, I write to re-write a continuously evolving understanding of self-history or self-projected future, many times as a reclamation effort against a sadness or anticipated loss. Lately, for the last six years or so, I feel like I’ll do something to grease the wheel–read a little, view images, listen to music–and then I’ll write whatever my mind wants me to say. Often, the story I think I’m writing as I begin is not the story I finish, but a hybrid monster of the difference between known desire and subconscious intent. The stories and poems have become my window into my subconscious, like dreams might be for some. I write them and then I say: “Oh, well. We have work to do. We are afraid.” Or, “Wow, we are mad about A, B, and C–but D also has affected our desire for G.”

It’s exciting that I work in many genres because it gives a lot of places for the symbols and clues to live–characters, settings, style of language, dialogue–and sometimes makes deciphering my deepest impulses into a game. I enjoy that, though I don’t always enjoy what my stories are telling me. They can be harsh task-mistresses of demanding that I evolve somehow–usually in a hurry.

CR: What fuels your drive to write–why do you do it?

HF: I write because it is something I cannot stop doing. I do it because when I don’t do it, I die inside. I feel my world turning gray. My words have no out. I lose my sense of purpose and meaning. I wish this answer were more beautiful, but in a sense, my free creative speech is connected to my will for survival. And the truth has its own hideous beauty, does it not?

CR: Could you talk about any new projects you have going right now, or anything under development?

HF: Oh, I’m neck-deep in editing about four more manuscripts of stories. My current favorites are LOVESHOCK, which is a collection of edgy literary stories about unusual love and sex in modern times–I’d rate this R+ if it were a movie for review–and PEOPLE WITH HOLES, which is my next collection of magical realism stories that I have a certain measure of new baby love for. Also, this summer, I plan to finish the novel I’ve been tinkering with for some time, which is entitled BEAUTIFUL APE GIRL BABY, and hope to make a finished draft to shop to publishers by late August. As well as those things, I have about four hundred poems to organize and I’m deliberating on how best to do that in my spare-time.

Can you see the girl at the corner of the platform take off, hear her feet thudding on the mat, watch her arms swinging in a syncopated rhythm and her toes connecting just before she jumps into the sky, twists, flips, and catapults again into the air below her in a serious effort to keep touching the high-above or maybe just to rest there for a while? She’s smiling in that moment of lift-off, in each moment of lift-off. I can tell you that for sure. Thanks for having me here.

Find more information about Heather Fowler’s debut short story collection, Suspended Heart, on the Aqueous Books website at http://www.aqueousbooks.com/author_pages/04_fowler.htm. Please visit her website at www.heatherfowlerwrites.com.

Check out this clip of Heather reading from her story, “The Time Broker”: