State of Wonder

Monica Drake Haunts Portland With Her New Story Collection

By April Baer (OPB) and and Joshua Justice (OPB)
May 14, 2016 3 p.m.
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Courtesy of Future Tense Books

Monica Drake is one of Portland’s better known contemporary bards. Her 2007 novel "Clown Girl" followed a young woman navigating a scene not unlike Northeast Portland’s famous Alberta St. Clown House. "The Stud Book," which followed in 2013, was a scathing, hilarious, and surprisingly tender meditation on how we create family. This week we had Drake in to tell us about her newest adventure: into the world of short stories. The book is called "The Folly of Loving Life", and it's available

at Drake's website.


Q&A with Monica Drake

April Baer: This collection of stories shares characters, so I feel like as a matter of genre, it lands at a midpoint between a novel and a collection of standalone short stories. How did you end up writing it in this way?"

Monica Drake: I have a lot of stories that I've worked on over the years. Some of them have been published in different places and some haven't. I started looking at them and there was that question of, why should these stories be next to each other? How much should stories side by side have in common and how much should they be disparate?

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When you look at somebody like Raymond Carver, there is a sameness to his stories, but it's actually very appealing to sink into that world and hit a similar note over and over with variations. When I looked at my stories side by side I didn't want them to become similar without becoming integrated into a longer narrative. So I pulled out the ones I thought didn't belong, and I looked at the characters, unified the characters and then wrote new work to take it in the direction that I wanted it to go. It really was a process between stories and crafting a novel.

AB: You introduce us to this world with a young mother. We later learn her name is Baysie, and she's a bit overwhelmed by her young daughters, and she's more than a little bit spooked by this old farmhouse that the family has just moved into. So the family moves to this place that's full of magic, but Baysie is having serious mental and emotional difficulties. We experience a couple of scenes from different people's perspectives throughout the story. What got you thinking about how people experience the same family in different ways?

MD: I am a middle child, and I think part of our job is to look backwards and forwards at older and younger siblings. I think the other part of it was I was a kid who was obsessed with different dolls and dollhouses. There's some feeling about putting a bunch of dolls in the mix and they have their own worldview. I know that sounds silly, but the older I get, the more I look back on all of those complicated lives of the dolls that I had. Now I'm doing it on the page!

AB: You've populated this book with a lot of people living on edges. There are students and burnouts and hippies and bar owners and a lot of people who's lives have gone off the rails in one way or another. Even when they're not in the middle of a crisis, there are these deep holes in them from not having enough love or enough money or enough one thing or another. Was it hard to spend time with those people? Did you feel the need to fix them once you had brought them to life?

MD: No, I love these people. I love these characters. They're reflecting people I know to a certain extent, nobody specifically, but the world I've known, I suppose. No, I don't feel the need to fix them. I feel the need to stay with their experiences and understand them. It's not meant as a story of fall and redemption. It's more of a story of the texture of lives as they accumulate.

AB: This is your third book set in Portland. Is it hard to capture what makes Portland unique without lapsing into a rather easy kind of quirkiness? A sort of "Portlandia" ethos?

MD: I never felt a terrible attraction to "Portlandia," so I didn't really watch many of them. There's a mocking quality to it. I know a lot of people love the episode with the chicken. "Where did the chicken that you're going to eat grow up" and "Did it have a good life?"

What's more interesting to me is what drives that kind of questioning. I appreciate people who ask questions about where their food came from, who their politicians are or what the value of their money actually is — not as a joke, but as an actual striving to create an alternative way of life. I enter it with that appreciation, as opposed to a mocking element, even when some of it makes me laugh.

AB: The book's not overtly about Portland. Some of the things could've unfolded anywhere that's on the edge of the rural/urban divide. But the radical changes in Nessa and Lucia's lives track pretty steadily with changes in the place where they grew up. What did you want to say about how Portland is changing?

MD: I did want to highlight just how it has gotten more crowded and slightly more impossible to live with or in, at least in my experience. It used to be a little more ragged, and I would say just an easier place to be. It has gotten overly self-conscious now, too, I think.


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