Gina Nutt: History is woven throughout the village and the homes where “Navarre” takes place. Can you tell us about your earliest inspiration for this setting? What drew you to this place?
Cameron Darc: I was inspired by a real village in the French countryside I was staying in when I wrote this story. The village is near the line of German occupation during the Second World War. I noticed how the war felt closer at hand and seemed to impregnate a lot of conversations. Like many French rural villages, it’s a deeply nostalgic place. It was once an important commercial and agricultural hub, but since the arrival of more automobiles and the shuttering of the train station, and lots of other economic and cultural changes in France, many of the farmers have left along with the businesses that once served a vibrant, living and working community. Now the center is a ghost town of shuttered shops. It’s quiet and dark by seven o’clock. What often happens with these villages when people try to revive them is they end up resembling postcards or Disneylands of Medieval France, but that hasn’t happened there yet. I was drawn to the abandoned grand houses in various stages of decay and disrepair, the different economic strata coexisting there, the dilapidated former wealth and shabby grandeur of some of the older inhabitants. I like houses that are jungle or forest-like, in that it’s hard to tell whether something is rotting or dead or about bloom, where life and death seem so intermingled it’s impossible to separate them.

I was also motivated by my slight discomfort being a guest in someone else’s home, an old house filled with their family history and haunted by events I was only cursorily aware of. I’d been thinking about the tension of host/guest relationships in different permutations—parasite, care, stranger, enemy, friend, invader. The uncanny energetic potential of that dynamic, how it requires care and a kind of mutual investment or sacrifice, and how it can go haywire. I was also interested in how people’s stories can contaminate each other’s in a small village.

GN: If the village holds history, the characters are stewards of various pasts, personal as well as historical. Was there a specific character who pulled you into the story, or a particular dynamic you felt moved to explore? Did you encounter any surprising reveals as you braided their experiences?
CD: I was first interested in how it could come to be that Chantal’s character lived in such terrible circumstances, after she had perhaps lived like a princess during her youth, with a wealthy dreamer father. That someone could grow old yet remain completely stranger to some of life’s more ordinary demands, and how that could make someone very vulnerable and helpless in a world they couldn’t recognize. Chantal closes her shutters to the outside world when the real danger is lurking inside the house.

I think I discovered while writing the story that Chantal and Derek’s relationship is kind of a trick mirror to the narrator’s relationship to her host, in which one member of the pair is the elder owner of the house, and the other a guest, whether a caring or parasitic one. Both parties of the relationship must be getting something out of it, even if it’s mysterious and frightening for the narrator to imagine how Chantal benefits from Derek’s presence. I discovered Chantal’s innocence as host could become more complicated—and that also, while she was vulnerable and trapped, she was trapping an even more vulnerable creature, her dog.

As far as characters being stewards of various pasts, I think that comes into the burning and the fire theme, which came into the story kind of organically and surprisingly. During my stay in the village, one night I stayed up late watching a movie by the Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan on my laptop. It was about one a.m., and the owner of the house was asleep when I heard someone outside shouting his name from the garden. I thought at first it was maybe the owner’s lover or a drug dealer or something, because of the bizarre hour. I went down to the garden and there was a guy wearing a mask and carrying a blowtorch. I had forgotten that someone was coming to burn a wasp’s nest. Apparently, you had to do it at night. I led him to the wall where the nest was and watched him burn it. It was a really weird, almost archaic sacrificial experience, hearing the torch burn and watching the flames in the dark, previously silent night, the sky covered in stars, seeing the smoke and the completely devastated nest afterward, knowing the wasps had all been killed in their sleep. It was even more uncanny because the movie I’d been watching that night, The Adjuster, had a bunch of house fires in it. I was inspired by how in the movie, trauma and fire are related. How the past can be burned yet remains living, though silenced, in people. And the next day I wrote the house fires and the wasp’s nest-burning into the story.

GN: The language and syntax here have fantastic lyrical pull. Could you share a bit about how you approach and fine-tune your sentences? 
CD: My former teacher David Ryan taught me a lot about recursive imagery, how you can make the images in your story repeat and contradict themselves and change over time, so that the images or the objects themselves can become active, gather heat or force and propel narrative, almost becoming characters. Lyricism and imagery often come more naturally to me than other aspects of writing, and recently I’ve decided to lean into that, hoping maybe the sentences themselves will lead me to the story if I keep looking back at them. A lot of the writers who were students of Gordon Lish inspire me—Amy Hempel, Christine Schutt, Noy Holland, Garielle Lutz. I love that Garielle Lutz piece “The Sentence is a Lonely Place.” I also love reading Amina Cain and other writers published by Dorothy Press for sentence-level inspiration.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
CD: I like Ursula K. Le Guin’s bag-book idea, writing through accumulation, books that have stories within stories. Anaïs Nin’s erotic stories really inspired this story. I am inspired by how erotic literature and fairy tales share this way of making things happen as if by magic, events unfolding without the usual cause-and-effect explanation, almost in a dream logic. I love Marie-Louise von Franz’s writing about fairy tales. I recently discovered the writer Ariana Harwicz and am really inspired by her book Tender which takes place in rural France. I loved Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin. I’m also inspired by the forest, and by my new experience of planting trees in a small wood. Thinking about time in terms of tree growth makes you think about time spans of twenty-five or fifty years in a material way, which has been helping me to take a break from the sort of timeless yet rushed world of virtual interactions and my own stresses about work and writing. Also, so much is mystifyingly out of your control when you plant anything. You can try to find the perfect place in terms of sunlight, soil, etc., and yet it won’t survive based on something totally mysterious and out of your control, but then some other sapling that you were sure was a goner will grow into a giant.