Gina Nutt: The language and sentences are infused with lyrical swing and repetition. The characters’ obsessions with nature and religion exist in the same place that they’re getting intimate and, in the narrator’s case, threatening to fight a priest. Can you talk about merging the sacred and the profane?
Jake Maynard: I think I wrote this story very fast, so I doubt I thought too much about it as I was writing. Maybe I didn’t have to because the characters were pretty clear to me from the jump and because, when you have two opposing characters, they find a way of reflecting opposing ideas, whether or not you want them to.

As far as the repetition goes, I found that was just a natural (and easy) way for me to get at our narrator’s neurosis. Plus repeating a joke sometimes makes it funnier, and I knew this story had to be kind of funny.

GN: The narrator and his girlfriend wrestle feelings of desire and love for each other amid individual existential reckonings. How do you manage these shifts? For you, what’s the effect of braiding these distinct experiences?
JM: I’m gonna sound woo-woo, but really trying to be in the moment as I was  writing was key. If you track your own feelings in times like that—a breakup, grief, life crisis, whatever—you see how quickly your feelings shift, and how each new feeling seems to erase the last one. Every feeling seems like the ONLY feeling in real-time, so that’s what I was going for.

GN: I’m also curious about the moment when the narrator is caught between his interest in nature, death, desire, and deep fear. It’s vulnerable and clarifying. What was on your mind as you honed his solitude on the streambank? 
JM: Well, I had a moment in my life almost exactly like this. I was standing on a streambank in the Yukon, looking at a partially eaten beaver, and I felt (or knew?) that I was being watched. For a second, I felt like prey. And maybe I was. My hairs all stood on end, and I was violently aware of everything around me for a few seconds. It was the opposite of trippy. Just brutal clarity. Apparently prey animals get a sensation like that, a sort of hyper-alertness, and all their sensory data basically creates an image of themselves from impossible vantage points. 

In my case, it was kind of like an “observer memory” where you remember something from your childhood from a third person POV. But this was in real-time. Anyway, that feeling has always stuck with me, probably because it challenged my world view. I’m a pretty straightforward, materialist sort of thinker, so reckoning with something impossible—like having an out of body experience—felt like something worth writing about. (That explains why I also immediately jumped to a scientific explanation, like prey behavior, instead of a spiritual one.)

That’s all to say I knew our narrator had to come up against the unexplainable. But what was important in the scene was for all his pretense and irony to drop away, and for his language to reflect the clarity of his vision and the impossibility of making sense of it.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
JM: Honeybees, Paul Bowles, Pittsburgh, Halldór Laxness, Gillian Welch, Nels Cline’s Consentik Quartet, gardening, Swedish Fish (it’s a problem), actual fish, Spain, chainsaw carvings, cool leather jackets, bringing my dog to work, writing Notesapp poems at work, the sound of rain from inside a greenhouse, two glasses of wine, and collecting old postcards from my hometown in rural Northern PA. One I found on eBay says: “Well, Laura, poor Bertha is gone. She suffered terribly I guess. How is your mother?”