Rae Bryant believes in writing about the things most people would prefer to shy away from. Her newly released collection of short stories, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, which deals heavily with magic realism, surrealism, satire and postfeminism, was nominated for the Pen Hemingway award.
No stranger to writing and publishing, Rae's short stories have appeared in BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), Opium Magazine, and PANK, among others. She is also the founding editor of Moon Milk Review, a nonprofit print and online literary and arts journal.
Rae joins us on TNBBC today to discuss why she writes about sex and violence, why she enjoys experimental writing, and how being a woman, wife, and mother is affected by these choices:
No stranger to writing and publishing, Rae's short stories have appeared in BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), Opium Magazine, and PANK, among others. She is also the founding editor of Moon Milk Review, a nonprofit print and online literary and arts journal.
Rae joins us on TNBBC today to discuss why she writes about sex and violence, why she enjoys experimental writing, and how being a woman, wife, and mother is affected by these choices:
"I should state, first, that it seems sex and violence for some writers
are the bad or taboo or closeted things in other people’s narratives. It is a literary
conceit, I think, this notion that serious literary writers should disengage with
the “sex” and the “violence.”
"Imagine the words whispered like unmentionables
around the MFA workshop table. Writers who do engage directly with sex or
violence or alternative forms are often termed the “others” or sometimes the Experimentalists,
sometimes a dirty connotation in and of itself. And it is true, sex and
violence and Postmodern structures can have different voices in narratives than
say the conventional love affair as told from first person or the man walking
his dog through life in third person or a retro landscape of a US
"It is what makes the written word necessary
for me. I can engage with conventions in real time. When I immerse in a story,
I want to be taken to a place where I must engage creatively and rigorously with
the work. I want to face and question my sense of convention and morality. And
don’t get me wrong. I enjoy and seek more simplistic and realistic narratives.
It is a style I sometimes prefer writing when the story requires it, but for
me, the “other,” the edge, isn’t an optional engagement. It is ingrained, a way
of organic crafting for me.
"I must admit. I do have a twisted sense of creativity. I blame Swift,
mostly. Fell in love with “A Modest Proposal” at an early age, works by Woolf, Poe,
any mythology I could get my hands on, and so the “other” has been imprinted on
me. As a result, I often consider how normal scenarios would smell and taste
and sound in a strange land, with a bent perspective.
"My one standard is
language. I like attention to language. I want unrelenting rigor and music, and
I’m not afraid of fusions. Prose and poetry combined is a beautiful experience,
albeit reading or writing. It disappoints me when readers and/or writers limit
themselves to only one or the other to the detriment of a fuller exploration.
"And the female question? The mother, wife question? Should
it matter in the realm of creative properties?
"Chaucer, Swift, Nabokov, O’Connor, Oates, Vonnegut, Woolf, Williams,
Gaitskill, McCarthy... A small sampling of authors who pushed or push edges
with an elegance and wit beyond me, and their works stay with me each time I
sit with a book or pen in hand. Each time I return to them, I learn a little
more about the writer I want to be. "
Her book, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals , is a "visceral collection of stories that explores the wits, moralities, edges and sometimes broken realities of lovers and friends, life and death, and the mundane tragedies in a normal day. From detachable women to cow tipping, kingfishers to drive-thru sex, Bryant pushes the boundaries and creates for her readers the amusing, the heartbreaking and the magically bizarre conditions of woman and man." - Book description from Goodreads.com
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