In “Clay,” your story in this week’s issue, Jane lives in a small Texas town with her husband, Lindy. The narrative stays quite close to her perspective. She’s a bailiff and he works at a nearby motel. As the story opens, what is the texture of her life?
She’s alone without yet having admitted to herself that she’s alone, and unconsciously she’s turning the furniture (and the animals, tame and wild) in her home into a kind of company, and the rituals of her daily routine into quiet theatre.
Not to give anything away, but this is, in part, a crime story—and it’s not the first crime story you’ve written in the past year or so. What has sparked this interest?
I’m not entirely sure! I reached a point a few years ago where I gave up trying to tell myself what to do as a writer. It turns out that the part of me that writes fiction doesn’t follow orders very well. So if I have an impulse now, I just follow it, even if I don’t understand, and even if it seems really wrong-headed. With these new crime stories, I may have been responding in part to the darkness that was descending (at least until a few weeks ago) over the national political landscape. I’ve also struggled personally for a long time with a sense that the world is a dark place, and maybe I was just ready to try writing about that. Another possible explanation is that I’m getting a little older, and more aware that for all of us, in the end, the light does go out.
Yet what stays with me from this story are the patient details, and an attempt, I think, to write in a kind of vernacular. What kind of vernacular do you think of that as?
I lived in Texas only until I was six, and for the most part I don’t have an accent anymore, but Texan is probably still the language my operating system is written in. A certain kind of talk is highly valued in Texas. It’s hard to characterize. Intelligent without being marked as intellectual. Never losing track of the facts of how people are related to one another and to the natural world—animal, vegetable, and mineral. Often, and notoriously, politeness is deployed as a weapon in the South, but there’s a more general slyness in Texan talk, related to an awareness of language as a performance, not necessarily representing someone’s intentions—an awareness that language is something that can be played with by anyone, can be turned on anyone. It’s democratic and unsettling. I think I first saw it captured in writing in the short stories of Annette Sanford.
The title of the story comes from an activity that Jane pursues in her life after the crime. Why did “Clay” feel like the right title to encapsulate, or describe, this story?
It’s awful that violence is stupid and has so much power, while life, the source of all creation, is soft, slow, temporary, and vulnerable. I wanted to end with an activity that suggested that violence can’t win, even though it always does. ♦
