Gina Nutt: “Before the Eruption” transports readers to a mountain town as characters await a volcanic eruption. What drew you to write about this particular place and geological event?
Elizabeth Wing: When I was a student at Reed, I went to a screening of Fire Of Love, the documentary about the volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, which was held at a very nice Quaker church. Most of the congregation had lived in the area for years, and they all had memories of the Mt Saint Helens eruption. I was fascinated by the stories about people living on the mountain’s flanks who refused to leave, or left only to return after a few weeks when the mountain had failed to erupt. Something about that sense of invulnerability felt relatable. It’s a kind of cognitive bias I could really imagine falling into. I was also compelled by images the Kraffts took of the ash flows. A few years prior I had worked in wildland fire, and a lot of that time was spent doing mop up operations in landscapes that looked basically lunar with ash.

GN: This story is mostly told through third-person narration, with occasional second-person nods to a character who seems to the narrator’s lover. What influenced your choice to vary the point of view throughout the story? How did you approach these fluctuations?
EW: The element of the second person address was with the story from the very beginning. My hope is for it to function as a tonal choice, to give a story that could be kind of bleak a bit more warmth and nostalgia. I was also interested in writing a story where love functioned more like setting than plot, atmosphere rather than conflict. I was curious to see if I could pull it off that kind of sweetness without feeling saccharine.

GN: The imagery and details throughout the story bounce off each other to cultivate an intriguing mysterious realism. I’m thinking of how the eruption, natural world imagery, Callie’s dream, and the arrival of volcanologists and the Skylark Congregation. What was it like pulling these pieces together, or noticing them come to the foreground? Can you tell me about bringing them into fuller relief?
EW: I think I must have re-read Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction before writing this, because I was definitely thinking about it in terms of ecology, ie, ‘who lives here, and how do they interact?’ The potluck scene was where this really came together for me, since it was where I was able to confirm that these different groups: scientists and government workers and slightly slackerish young adults and monastics, all really did exist in the same story, even if they inhabited different definitions of reality.  I also really enjoy place-based writing, especially when it’s getting down to the level of individual plant species and rock types. (I was raised by sciencey folks who always had a field guide or two lying around the backseat of the car) I start believing something is real once there’s an actual bioregion behind it.

GN:What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
EW: Ruth Ozeki, Annie Dillard, Denis Johnson, my wonderful mentor Joan Naviyuk Kane, Big Thief, Fleetwood Mac, hanging out with tradespeople who take great pride in their craft, my aging punk neighbors and their beautiful community garden, Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t, Daisies (1966), Geek Love, dubiously hot depictions of Jesus, shipwrecks. And, of course, the Pacific Northwest.