Gina Nutt: What drew you to the characters we meet in “Shit and Gasoline”? What made you want to explore their relationships and sensibilities?
Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon: So in terms of this ideological and experiential divide between the two characters, it manifests itself in that they, and we as readers, know their romance is doomed. It also manifests itself in the violence-tinged eroticism that I tried to hint at between them (it shows up more in other stories). Angela Carter, deals a lot with sexuality and violence in her work. In her analysis of the Marquis de Sade, The Sadeian Woman, she writes: “to show, in art, erotic violence committed by men upon women cuts too near the bone, and will be condemned out of hand. It suggests… that male political dominance may be less a matter of moral superiority than of crude brute force and this would remove a degree of glamour from the dominance itself.” I’m not sure if I accomplished what Carter describes here, but that idea drew me to these characters, and their relationship. 

Alongside that irreparable divide that plays out erotically and violently and politically and socially, these two characters also share some kind of real, soul-level understanding, something that conflicts with, and is destroyed by, their real, material differences. These stories deal with monism, Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza’s notion of the oneness of all things. As an aside: there are distinctions between this and, say, a Buddhist sense of oneness, and I am drawing on Spinoza because what I was taught, and what I researched, in American academia, was the history of Western thought specifically, so I can speak to that as within my “research area”. At the same time, even this reference brings up the fact that American academia has serious problems of exclusion and erasure. So anyway, Crash and Suzanne share this thing, an understanding, a unity that hints at the actual unity of all things. But they can’t keep it. Their romance is doomed, and their attempt to mark it somehow – to name it, to capture it – is done with an empty beer can on a tree that would probably be hard to find again, among all the rest. What does that say about Love capital L? About the potential for real, material reconciliation across the rupture that divides these two, and our society as a whole? About the existence or non-existence of some deeper, or greater, meaning to our choices and actions? I could go on, but that would be melodramatic and probably super irritating to read. 

I was also drawn to these characters because they are losing their hold on youth, they are parents, they are people wading through the wreckage of the traditionalist worship of the nuclear family. They are people who are morally ambiguous, who are carrying burdens they can never put down, who have made choices that had irreversible consequences that they couldn’t expect. They are people struggling to accept their fates, or, perhaps, the results of their free will.

GN: I love how this story is framed by a walk on Easter Day peppered with flashbacks. Can you talk about blending past and present? How did you solidify the concrete contemporary moment alongside gauzier threads of memory?
AMWC:  First, this approach to time in narrative – the blending of past and present – interests me in relation to the concept of apocalypse. For the past decade I’ve been thinking about, and researching non-theological ways to understand, apocalypse. When it comes to apocalypse, I was drawn to  its secondary meaning, revelation, rather than the more familiar meaning, destruction, catastrophe. I like this notion of revelation as akin to a non-hokey recreation-slash-phoenix-type-possibility. Like one of the earliest psychoanalysts, Sabina Spielrein, entitled her most famous essay: “Destruction as a cause of coming into being.” When looking for a revelatory and re-creative notion of apocalypse in literature, especially around the upheavals and idealist, revolutionary dreams of 1968, I often found collapsed narrative structures and time-signatures. One example is Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren. The novel opens with a sentence fragment that seems to connect to that which ends the book, so the narrative is cyclical to begin with. And the burning-and-regenerating city blocks, or the presence of the notebook in Kid’s hands that he himself may have written, or may be writing during his blackouts, seems to suggest a collapse of time, and reality. So I’m a fan of that because it hints at, perhaps, another kind of reality or relationship to time that could emerge from  an apocalyptic-catastrophic shitstorm… in a good way. Put another way, when disaster strikes, is there a way to transform it into a total revelation or restructuring of the reality we are sharing, including our relationship to time? 

Plus, this story is a cleaned-up version of how I talk. I draw in a slew of details from the past that I think are essential to the details of the story at hand. Sometimes, however, in speaking, I irritate my friends and family with an onslaught of details, and sometimes I even lose the thread myself. I’m glad I didn’t in this case! That is due, in part, to the brilliant and patient editing of Gina Nutt. Thank you, Gina! I know earlier drafts of this story did lose the thread of the walk in the woods, and would not have found it again were it not for you.

In terms of craft, in part I also simply obsessed over the story, reading it with as much of my editorial eye as I could muster for my own work, and tried to discern if I could have followed the plot as a reader who was ready to make modest, but not herculean, efforts to get to the end of the story. Among other things, to pay the bills, I write in the semiocapitalistic space where so much language has gone to die – that is to say, I write for marketing and communications, especially in digital contexts. Writing in marketing and communications  has  taught me some interesting craft lessons especially when it comes to: clarity of sentence structure and precision of punctuation, directness of phrase, brevity, and aggressive use of the paragraph-break to enhance readability and clarity. 

So, in this story, I drew on that experience of writing for end-stage capitalism and used the paragraph-break to indicate breaks between Anne Marie’s ramblings – for example, about those things for which no apology will ever suffice, or the time Suzanne got covered in blood – and the main thread of the story, the walk through the field, and woods. I also paid extra attention to the length and clarity of sentences, using shorter sentences to increase overall readability, and to manifest, in language, the ethos of the place and culture surrounding, and within, them.

GN: The landscape has a deeply cinematic feel to it. How do you see the story’s environment intensifying a reader’s understanding of how these characters relate to each other?
AMWC: The landscape is one I have come to know well. The Red River Valley of North Western Minnesota and Eastern North Dakota, and the Lakes Region of Minnesota, including Becker and Otter Tail counties. It is a landscape that is at once harsh and modestly, incredibly beautiful. The winters are bitter. The rolling whiteness seemingly endless, the wind cruel, even lethal – an expression of the Sublime as Kant described it – overwhelming, even monstrous, proof of the grandeur of creation and existence, and our puniness. There is a kind of majestic, spare holiness to all that land and sky – it’s an exaltation. And. It is a landscape that isolates people, that takes words away – people tend to be quieter, since there is so much space in-between – so many hours spent alone in the woods, or fields, or on the jobsite. 

It’s like what lies between Crash and Suzanne. Something vast and beautiful but empty and, somehow, sorrowful. Something that isolates them from each other, and from anyone else, even their children. Something that takes their words away, since what he has within himself, what they have between them, can’t be named. Like the Sand Hill Cranes you see at a distance from the county road, but that disappear below the rise of the next hill once the truck drives by. Or like the crystalline snow illuminated for a flash by the sunlight, and blown away again, across the vast whiteness of a frozen lake. What is between Crash and Suzanne is taken by the wind, lost before they have the chance to grasp it. 

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
AMWC: Oh shit. What a question! I just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, which was the book I needed right now, in that it also deals with male-female relationships, and sexualized violence perpetrated by white men, though in the context of those living between the US and several countries in Western Africa. I have always written, I think it was a way to deal with being the only child of a couple of theorists with no cousins on the continent, living in the receding shadow of family tragedy. But that early spark for writing later turned into a desire to know, with some degree of intimacy, intellectual history – literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic. I don’t make much of a scholar, unless you take a Gramscian view, in that my other great passion, and teacher, is life. And so, I have spent the last fifteen years studying literature and intellectual history. But at the same time, I took a chance on a job that brought me around the world – in Europe, to Kosovo, to Occupied Palestine – but it also stalled out my doctoral work as I galavanted about, launching the psychoanalytic Stillpoint Magazine (which is on the cusp of a comeback btw), among other things. And then poof! The money was gone and everybody woke up from the dream, to reality. And I had meanwhile neglected the mores and traditional ladder-climbing of academia, which requires more hoop-jumping than simply holding a PhD.  

Alongside finishing my doctorate, and the dream job, I was living. Taking experiences as they came, and jumping in head-first, for better or worse. And through it all I had a string of bad luck, ill-fated encounters, “a curse,” my friends would joke. So I would tell myself: “This has to be worth something, to somebody. This can’t just be my measly little private suffering, it has to have some kind of use.” And I feel the same way about my doctoral work. It should come to some kind of use – the fact that I spent years studying shit like Spinoza’s monism; Gramsci’s belief in workers’ knowledge, drawn from their experience in the factory; Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, where a flash of truth emerges suddenly, and then disappears, in the endless cyclical march of the dialectical process. These two things – hard living, hard lessons, and study of literature and intellectual history – were tangled up together in my lived experience, and I would love to have them come together in the work I continue to share with others. 

I’d say that Vladimir Nabokov and Cormac McCarthy and Charles Dickens were the writers, in my 20s, who really brought me to fall in love with the sentence. Though now I can clearly see how much excess there is too, but still. I could go on to talk about many others, but for some reason, I’m naming those dudes here. Lately I’m reading books that (I know) lots of other people are also reading: beautiful, rich novels like Dream Count, and now The Covenant of Water, whose author, Abraham Verghese is a physician and started writing later in life. That fact inspires and reassures me. For years I have listened to music almost constantly, and have only just stopped. In recent years, I have been listening to a lot of hip-hop, which also taught me a great deal about rhythm, and the sentence, and conveying complex meaning, or engaging complex structures linguistically in a way that is still understandable. Let’s hope I can apply some of those lessons! I had a list, but I am going to replace it with one reference: R.A.P Ferreira  (milo, Scallops Hotel, Black Orpheus). The only rapper I’ve ever heard reference Jacques Lacan. 

But underneath it all are my kids. Leida and Orson. They are quite remarkable people, and they are the reason I am still here today. Now, after the hard, long road they had to travel with me, I have to prove that it is possible to live the dream you had when you were five years old. Which, for me, was to write.