Karen Russell Issue #30

Strewn with plane crashes, alligators, an d nuns, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves surveys the lonesome no man's land between childhood and adolescence.

By Ling Ma
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 12:00am

Karen Russell and I are comparing books we read as kids. There’s Hatchet by Gary Paulsen and novels by Jack London. There’s Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls, which Russell dubs “the saddest story ever written.” In general, we used to read the same stuff, stories in which child characters brave the natural world alone with their wits and a handful of Twizzlers.

Russell’s debut short-story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which she wrote most of while in the MFA program at Columbia University, is a bit reminiscent of that grizzled niche in the canon of children’s fiction. A Venus Zine Hottt List winner for the Best Book of 2006 category, it’s a gently moody and sonorous work starring mostly child protagonists who stumble into predicaments in the Florida Everglades, the American West, and arctic glaciers. In short, if you were to fall asleep after reading all your favorite children’s books at night, these stories are what your dreams would probably feel like — comfortingly familiar but strangely rearranged by the weird, melancholy dictates of your subconscious.

On a Sunday afternoon at her boyfriend’s apartment in New York, with dogs barking and ambulances whizzing by in the background, Russell takes a break from her part-time job at the vet’s office and work on her novel Swamplandia! to riff on living in Miami, old jobs, and Grover Cleveland, all delivered with infectious glee.

A lot of your stories are set in natural places that have been tampered with by some manmade artifice.

I grew up in Miami. You really feel that a lot. You’ve got Parrot Jungle, this wonderfully tacky, exaggerated park where some prehistoric bird will sit on your head for five dollars while your parents take a picture while you fake a terrified smile or whatever. And they have all these gloriously tacky alligator pits or bored-looking catfish in some manmade pond. Or there’s the aquarium, and you’ve got Lolita, the world’s largest killer whale. I mean, I can’t even tell you how many field trips we went to places like this. Miami is like the nucleus of many different artificial jungles full of bizarre creatures.

But then right next to the aquarium is the actual ocean, with all kinds of invisible, equally bizarre creatures. I think geographically it’s the most beautiful place in the country down there, with real swamps and real oceans, and then you have this oddball simulacrum that we made, this hyper-real artificial world. They really rub shoulders all the time in Miami. I think that had a big influence on me when I was growing up.

Most of your narrators seem to be about 10- to 12-year-olds. Do you think it’s a special period of childhood?

Yeah, I do. It’s before real sharp gender divisions and sex come into play. It’s more of a neutral kid time. But you’re on the cusp of all that stuff. That’s an age where it’s easy to partition your brain and believe in fairy tales and Santa Claus, but at the same time, you’re just waking up to all sorts of adult truths. I think it’s a time when kids know a lot of things but don’t yet have the words to put to what they know, or the perspective to understand it. But you certainly know something’s wrong in your family or something’s wrong with the situation.

There’s one story, “Out to Sea,” that’s from an adult point of view.

That one was interesting. I used to work at this place where I would visit elderly people and ask really uncomfortable questions in a Spanish that was not equipped to handle huge life-or-death questions. I would ask people who their emergency contact would be if they died. Then many people would say “Jesus” because I wasn’t explaining it right in Spanish. It was like, “Um, let me try again. I need someone whose number we can get on file.” It was a really sad job in a lot of ways, because these were people who were totally invisible. They had just fallen out of the loop of time. They just didn’t have visitors. I was in workshop, and I’d been writing these giant stories. My professor said I should just write a simple story. So that was my simple story.

What’s your writing process like?

Oh, I’m terrible. When I was in the program, I would fret and agonize for weeks, then I would just go on some bender where I would spend 24 hours a day at the computer lab. And I’d love that, getting all cracked out on coffee, and sugar, and cereal, and writing a lot.

Now that I don’t have the workshop format — this artificial sense that people care, that it matters to get stuff done — it’s a little harder. I like to write at night a lot, but I’ve been less disciplined now that I don’t have artificial deadlines.

Can you give me a glimpse of some stories that weren’t included
in the collection?

There was one that was about a bunch of vestal virgins in ancient Rome. That didn’t really feel like it fit [laughs]. There was one that wasn’t finished enough about this Kentucky-farm afterlife where most of the American presidents had reincarnated as horses.

That sounds great, actually. I’m just imagining the dialogue.

Yeah, I was excited about it! Grover Cleveland was the big fat pony. I have to work on that one some more.