Gina Nutt: “Garbage” takes place over the course of one school day, specifically an early morning disturbance in one classroom. What inspired you to explore this moment?
Irene Feleo: This story was inspired by the high school that I attended while growing up in Sydney, Australia. Our school had buildings that were made of big glass windows, and more often than not, a poor pigeon would either smash against the glass from the outside, or get trapped inside, confused and spiraling as we all squealed and ducked out of the way. The sound of a pigeon’s wings and their bodies banging against the window feels forever ingrained in my memory, and fills me with a sense of panic and pity to this day. I thought it would be interesting to revisit these memories and expand on the roles that a teacher and student might play when faced with such a commotion.

GN: How did the single-day timeline influence your writing and revising?
IF: I like the idea of the reader dropping in and watching how one moment can jolt these characters out of the mundanity of their daily life. As a freelancer in my adulthood, no day is ever the same, and I sometimes look back on the regularity of school and 9-5 corporate jobs with a nostalgic lens. The idea of showing up everyday to an ecosystem of routine and recurring characters feels so far from me now; I wanted to imagine what that would be like, and how I could shake things up.

GN: The story gradually weaves the sensibilities of Patricia and Mr. S. alongside Miss Lainard’s. How did you approach moving between the different perspectives while maintaining the distance of third person?
IF: The difference in reaction between Miss Lainard, Patricia, and Mr. S. was something that felt funny and interesting to me, how the death of a bird in a school playground could be deeply emotional for a child, and also a little bit of a nuisance for an adult. By writing this story in the third person, I was able to jump between each character and show how they were showing up to the scene, what was informing their reactions, and how they handled it. I liked imagining the backstory for Miss Lainard in particular. As a teenager, it was hard for me to imagine my school teachers as fully formed humans that had lives of their own outside our classroom walls. To think that someone my age now would have to command authority over a room full of students, while balancing the nightmares of modern dating, a hangover, and a pigeon death! I wanted to show that nobody ever really knows what they are doing, especially the people that should probably know what they are doing, and there is something tender and ridiculous about that. Life goes on.

GN: You also juggle thematic tensions between the bird’s violent death, the children’s morbid curiosity and innocence, the relationship between Miss Lainard and Mr. S. What considerations were in play as you molded these frictions?
IF: The main thing I wanted to explore was how different the children’s perspectives would be from the adults. Children are so curious and honest, and Patricia embodied that sense of righteousness and ritual in honoring the pigeon’s death, no matter the disruption to the day. Miss Lainard and Mr. S. were more wrapped up in themselves and their personal bubbles, their hangovers, their damaged egos, their flailing attempts to wrangle a situation. Having all of these different forces at play and how they interacted and affected one another was super fun to experiment with.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
IF: I have been reading feverishly this past year, which has been so lovely. Some favorites so far have included Thirst for Salt by Madeline Lucas, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman and Soft Core by Brittany Newell. I love and am inspired by the dreamy paintings of Kevin Yaun, Lorena Torres and Sydney Kleinrock. Lastly, I am forever intrigued by ghost stories, the nostalgia of personal archives (diary entries, digital photo albums, imperfect and imprecise cataloging), and the ocean, in all of her forms.