Malahat Review Creative Nonfiction Board intern Anne Hung talks with the summer issue #215 contributor about stories as memory devices, writing from the perspective of a young narrator, and how every fiction is somebody’s documentary.

AH: Told from an eleven-year-old girl’s point of view, “You Should Be There (When They Go)” grapples with mental illness, trauma, death, and compassion. What inspired you to explore these complex topics through such a young narrator? 

CB: My original plan for this story was relatively lighthearted. I wanted to write a story about a kid with a horse, because when I was a kid, I had a horse, and it was a neat time. I loved him (good old Hudson) with my whole, tumultuous pre-teen heart, and to this day I think that has been the simplest, most unselfish transaction of love I have experienced. So, I figured writing about a horse based on Hudson (the quirky and bumbling packhorse of my childhood) would be a fun exercise—an opportunity to try writing about love. I actually thought it would be a reprieve from writing more intense adult content. In hindsight, that was pretty dumb. I’ve been eleven—I should have known that going back into the brain of an eleven-year-old would be weird and sad and confusing. When I got into this narrator’s head, it came back to me just how obliterating my feelings used to be at her age. The good, bad, ugly—it makes no difference, all of them were intense. It’s the part-blessing, part-curse that afflicts every kid: the need to feel everything to the extreme because life hasn’t taught you to put up guards yet.

I wanted “You Should Be There (When They Go)” to reveal a small window of this narrator’s life, unfiltered by adult perception. And I wanted this window to be complete—difficult elements not exempt. I never set out to write a story about trauma, death, or mental illness. Even after its development, I don’t define this story, in my head, to be “about” trauma, death, or mental illness. Those elements appeared partway through development, after my narrator came to life, and I hardly feel like I made them up—it seemed rather like they were just the things she was dealing with at the moment I decided to portray her. I don’t mean that they are in the story without intention—absolutely each element in this story has been interrogated for its purpose—I just mean that these topics are not exclusively adult problems, and it became important to me that if I am going to reveal a piece of a child’s life, I recognize that hard things are just as likely to be there as they would in an adult’s life (and appropriately acknowledge them). This is when I developed the rest of her world. I became interested in this concept of a young narrator as an ill-informed documentarian. She doesn’t quite grasp the story she’s telling, because she hasn’t been exposed to trauma and death and mental illness before. But she still has to be the one to respond to her experiences, with little background knowledge. Then it becomes up to the reader to pick up the pieces of her narrative and put them together. That was such a counterintuitive way for me to write. It’s natural to create narrators who know more than the reader, not the other way around.

Read the rest of Carlee Bouillon's interview.