10 Questions for Erin Fortenberry

- By Danielle Brown and Amal Zaman

“Oren loves the supply closet. He loves to go in and close the door behind him, to breathe deep the Christmas scent of adhesive, to run his fingers over the open boxes of Onyx micro-tips, G-2 refill cylinders, and unsharpened No. 2 pencils. He loves to choose these things and, finally, to steal.” — from “Dollmaker, Inventory, Child.” which appears in our Summer 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 2).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.

When I was really young, I used to write tiny plays and make my parents watch me perform them with puppets made out of lunch bags. I don’t remember what they were about but I do remember that I passed around an equally tiny Hello Kitty “comment” book at the end for my parents to review my “work.”

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?

H. G. Carillo, Yoko Ogawa, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lars Gustaffson’s story “Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases,” Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark, James Baldwin, Bruno Schulz, Anthony Doerr, John D’Agata, Joy Williams’s 99 Stories of God, Teju Cole, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Melville, Steve Roggenbuck, Fritz Scholder (painter), Judy Pfaff (sculptor—I love her idea of the nemesis as a kind of anti-muse), Toni Morisson’s Beloved, Tania James’s The Tusk That Did the Damage.

Side note on Tania James—when I was pregnant I flew to Texas from Wyoming and brought Philip Roth’s American Pastoral along to read. I’d never read any Roth before, and found the book incredibly boring. I’ve always had this belief—or tic, really—that I have to finish books I start. So having chosen this Roth book for my flight felt like a literary death sentence. Perhaps the fact that I was due soon with my first child helped put the preciousness of time into perspective, because for the first time in my life I decided that I did not have to continue reading a book I disliked. So I recycled it with glee and bought Tania James’s The Tusk That Did the Damage in an airport bookstore. I’ve never felt the need to continue reading something I’m disinterested in again! Life is, indeed, much too short.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

One of those people who take therapy animals into nursing homes/rehabilitation centers. A social entrepreneur. A diplomat. Creator and director of a place for women and children who are homeless or low-income that has nothing to do with utility and everything to do with beauty, which I believe everyone is deserving of (amenities to include movies, fresh flowers in every room, a spa, a museum, gardens, concerts, excellent on-site day care and school, art classes and studios, every kind of media, luxurious suites, great food by great chefs, and whatever else residents say they want).

What inspired you to write “Dollmaker, Inventory, Child”?

Everything I hate about the ways in which we make people and art into things to be codified and consumed. I wanted to write something mean about people who consume other people. I guess hate inspired it, though I didn’t end up hating Oren. I actually became kind of fond of him, in the way that Faustina is.

Are you particular about your workspace or can you write anywhere?

I’ve got to have a clean area, a clean desk. Fresh flowers help. I also have to use Internet-blocking software or I will live my life doing “research” rather than actually producing anything. I like the Freedom app for that. My glasses can’t be blurry. These are more conditions, I think, than space requirements, though they do involve a kind of psychic space, which is often the most cluttered for me.

What other professions have you worked in?

One of my first jobs was working a booth for the county fair. I wore a red visor and spun cotton candy and drank copious amounts of soda. Later I worked for a take-and-bake pizza place. One day, one of the shift leads said he’d been told by management that I was a “bad seed,” and to fire me, which he said he wouldn’t do. Not long after, money from the safe was stolen, and coincidentally the nice shift manager who wasn’t going to fire me took off right after the robbery, because he said his mom was going to kill him. I’ve always had a fondness for that man, and I hope his mom never caught up with him. More recently, I’ve worked for some non-profits and taught at university.

What is a city or place that influences your writing?

For some reason, even though I haven’t lived there since I was young, Texas (specifically Houston and parts east like Beaumont, Port Arthur, etc.) is a common influence on and setting for my writing. Though I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of my life, I’ve never set a story there. There is something about the place where I formed my earliest memories (brown flood water, tadpoles, weird zoning laws resulting in there being a factory at the end of our street, the fried plantains from the Cuban restaurant we frequented, being broken into multiple times)—Houston, for better or worse, is seared into my consciousness.

Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?

If I’m feeling uninspired, sometimes I’ll watch a movie or show to see if it triggers anything in me. I have a bit of an aversion to watching shows or movies with other people, as I often find myself pausing what I’m watching in order to write. Lately, the TV show “Chef’s Table,” on Netflix, has been generative for me. A recent Steve Jobs biopic (Fassbender, not Kutcher) may have inspired me to finish the novel I’ve been working on for years. Whether or not this is a good thing, I don’t know.

What is your favorite food and/or drink to have while writing?

Coffee! Especially cheap coffee that has an excess amount of caffeine in it. The kind of coffee that has given me panic attacks while watching Oprah broadcast DVD players to a manic audience. If it’s getting late for coffee, PG Tips black tea steeped for five minutes in a nice tea pot, poured over cream into nice tea cups and attended to by raw sugar and cream. I line a tray with a tea towel and set the teapot, teacups, an old silver sugar pot, and a teeny carafe of half and half on it and place it next to my computer. My mom is Scottish and Brits are extremely particular about their tea. (George Orwell wrote an essay on the correct way to have tea—spoiler alert: he’s in the anti-sugar camp.) If it’s nighttime, Sleepytime tea or some other kind of tisane with cream and honey.

Who typically gets the first read of your work?

My husband, the writer Adam Boucher, who is also a fine editor (you can find his story “Leon’s Fire” at the Virginia Quarterly Review). He has no time for bloviating and/or bullshit of any sort, and he’s good at gently calling me out on meaningless sentences I’ve become attached to, or writing that’s trying to be clever. One of his weird rubrics for writing is, “If lava were fast approaching, would any of what I’m reading/writing matter?” I find this to be a good litmus test—the things I write under the duress of the jabbering and robust team of critics in my head burn up quickly in the hypothetical lava.

Erin Fortenberry’s work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel about a biologist. She recently graduated from the University of Wyoming’s MFA program, and lives in Wyoming with her husband, daughter, and cat.