My last Lit Hub conversation with Karen E. Bender was in 2018, just before her collection The New Order was published. She mentioned that she read John Cheever’s short stories in graduate school: “Cheever’s sentences just made my brain light up. He packs more into a paragraph—about love, longing, loss, mortality—than most writers can fit into an entire story or novel. From him, I learned how tenderness and darkness can exist side by side, about the strangeness in the ordinary, the way every object and gesture can be a door into something miraculous.”
The exquisite stories in her new collection, The Words of Dr. L and Other Stories, are on a par with Cheever’s best (“The Swimmer,” “The Enormous Radio”). When I reconnected with Bender in April by email I asked her how the years since 2018—a time of pandemic, disruption and conflict—affected her life and work, and the writing of the stories in her new collection. And, has she also been working on a novel?
“I started these stories around 2018 and turned in the completed manuscript in 2023,” she explained. “Yes, these were definitely years of upheaval—with Covid, and our kids leaving home, and helping aging parents, and moving back to New York. There was a lot of stopping and starting, a novel that I began and paused, and avoided by writing short stories. Stories are a place where I feel most at home, and free, and the form allows me to try different approaches and topics. In 2021, I sent several of them to my agent, Maria Massie, and she said, yes this is a book.”
*
Jane Ciabattari: What triggered the stories and themes in The Words of Dr. L? Which story did you write first? Which story did you write last? And how did you set up the order?
I liked the idea of hypnosis as a metaphor for the love one has for a parent—or, in a way, anyone.
Karen Bender: My process follows whatever interests me at the moment, both internally and externally. It’s kind of messy—I tell my students to trust their subconscious, as it will take you to what you want to say. I was grappling with immense anger and frustration at our government and wondering how fiction could shout against that in ways that were different from nonfiction. And I was also looking at the shifts in family in midlife. The first story was “The Shame Exchange,” which I wrote in 2018, and I think the last one was “The Courtroom of the Invisible.” My editor, Dan Smetanka, always helps me set up the order. Late in the process, I read through and saw that a lot of the stories dealt with the issue of parents and children separating at different points of life, and then I thought—yes! This was the main emotional theme I wanted to examine.
JC: Your title story opens with great sensual detail: “The sky turned to night as I walked through the city, and the streets emptied in the blue dusk. I imagined the way the other women might walk as they headed toward this pharmacy, a casual, but brisk stride, and I tried to walk as they did, but with care; I did not want anyone to notice me. I was joining the great crowds of women in the country who needed the words.” At the pharmacy, she learns how to meet with Dr. L, who knows “the words—a series of words in a particular order that would end a pregnancy.” Just as the narrator imagines the other women, we can imagine the narrator’s experience as the story unfolds. It’s an empathetic story, built around a fascinating concept. How did it evolve?
KB: I wrote “The Words of Dr. L” as Amy Comey Barrett was being confirmed to SCOTUS and I felt a terrible helplessness at the certainty of reproductive rights vanishing in this country. Sometimes stories have a role of wish fulfillment, and I thought—what would it be like if there were words that could cause an abortion? Would that be empowering? What if women just had that power? And then I thought—what if the opposite were true—a pregnant person could think these words and then lose the pregnancy? I thought about maternal ambivalence and how that could be connected to abortion restriction and then wondered about the characters’ relationships with their own mothers. The story became a rabbit hole that helped me grapple with the issue.
JC: “He hypnotized me, and I loved him,” the opening lines, set up “The Hypnotist,” which tells in heartbreaking scenes the narrator’s theory of how her love for her father, a psychoanalyst, keeps them connected from her childhood (“I wanted a theory to explain the helpless force of love I had for my father”) into her middle years. You frame the story with COVID lockdown scenes in which she is waiting outside her parents’ home in a regular visit. Separation from a parent is a universal theme, driven in this story by an unusual explanation for the power a father has over a daughter. How did you come up with that concept?
KB: This was one of the last stories I wrote in the collection, and I wrote it over a year and a half when my father was dying. My father was a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and one day, when I was a child, he did mention that he had hypnotized a patient. Was it true? Was it a joke? I don’t know, but that fact stuck with me. I was (and still am, really, after his passing) very close to my father, and as he declined, I wrote about him as a way of trying to hold onto him, though, in all my fiction, the reality is better when I started exaggerating and pushing it. I liked the idea of hypnosis as a metaphor for the love one has for a parent—or, in a way, anyone.
JC: Following “The Hypnotist” with “Separation” is one of the many moments of exquisite crafting in this collection. Your narrator is in high school in “the last American city,” where most of the nation’s population lives, near “enormous, precious lakes, which had everything necessary to live.” She and her best friend Dawn both can smell the world burning. Everyone anticipates the Separation, when rocket ships carrying explorers to Mars take off, and then, after they establish a base, rockets will take the rest of the population into space. She lives in the city, and Dawn has a privileged home near the lakes. Dawn’s family, who have priority seating, can take one extra person, and she is Dawn’s choice. This story feels intriguingly close to “reality,” with a twist. What sort of research was involved in working on it?
KB: As a writer, I take note of my unease, and the rocket launching and space travel promoted by the oligarchs was making me uneasy. What is the goal? And what is the point of this enterprise when the earth is being ravaged by climate change? I was uneasy because I read articles about the hyper-wealthy creating bunkers to avoid various catastrophes, trying to make themselves exempt from the effects of catastrophe. Then I thought—of course, they want to leave. And they want to leave most of us behind.
I was curious about how we could actually live on Mars, and I did some googling about that. My friend Margaret Mittelbach, who runs a great lecture series called Secret Science Club, sent me the book, The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds by Christopher E. Mason, a scientist who was a principal investigator on the NASA Twins study and studies genomics and space travel. It’s a wild, fascinating book, with details about how bodies change in space, and how to engineer human bodies for life on other planets. (He has many fabulous ideas, including one about a “cholorohuman;” these humans would be genetically engineered to have a huge epidermis that would create nutrients from the sun.) As a fiction writer, I wanted to explore the psychological/moral elements of this sort of space travel/colonization, and it seemed to me that the economic and social dynamics present today would lead to a few of the very wealthy going. And how would that affect personal relationships, like between the two girls in the story? The Separation is also supposed to be a metaphor for growing up—how leaving your parents is a way of going into outer space.
JC: “The Shame Exchange” is about a government mandated transfer from citizens overburdened with shame (detected by ultrasound, it “was, on average, the size of a large pillow and resembled a raw steak”) to government officials who have none. The intention: to make the government more responsive to the needs of its citizens. When did you start this story?
KB: I wrote “The Shame Exchange” in 2018. I was struck by the absence of shame in the Trump administration, both in the first one and now even more starkly in the second. Thematically, I wanted to write the story because I was interested in shame and the peculiar divide there is among humans. How can some people be so weighted by shame and guilt while others truly have none? This story is just a fantasy I had, an easy fix to an ongoing catastrophic moment, but the concept of shame is key to our culture right now, and one I think about a lot.
The most interesting fiction, to me, contains this element of strangeness, whether it’s set in the real world or an alternative one.
JC: “Data” captures the anxieties of COVID lockdown, in parallel with a writer losing all her data, venturing out to the computer repair shop multiple times. And also worrying about her restless teenage daughter, who has tested positive and is quarantined in her room. The pandemic, the “reality” of the narrator’s life preserved in her computer, potentially erased; being shut off from the sweetness and surprise of life, being separated from her daughter, all capture a time we’ve experienced. I wonder how you kept track of all the details, did you keep a diary? Write the story while during lockdown? Draw from memories?
How complicated is it to write so close to “real time” situations—wildfires, COVID lockdown, political turmoil?
KB: I think I wrote “Data” during or shortly after Omicron, when there were some shifts in dealing with COVID—some, particularly younger people, were returning to their regular lives, but many people were still very cautious. I wanted to approach writing about this period from a dreamlike perspective, because it did feel very surreal. I do have a journal where I take notes, but most of this was written both at the time and from memory.
I know that some believe that distance is important when writing about certain events—that can be true, but I get annoyed at any rules related to writing fiction. Everyone’s process varies! There can be value to immersion in an experience and then writing about it while you are in it or recently in it. The rawness and strangeness is still alive inside of you. If a writer is engaged with the material, I’d say, try it!
JC: How do you think speculative fiction is evolving year to year in this century? Which pioneers in the form are most relevant now?
KB: The effects of Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Atwood, are deep and lasting. And Kafka’s influence on the range of what fiction can do is also profound—so many writers today are writing in conversation with him. Some of the best writers today in the speculative realm are my sister Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Kelly Link, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Carmen Maria Machado. And personally, I like seeing how speculative fiction interacts with realistic work on a spectrum of strangeness. The most interesting fiction, to me, contains this element of strangeness, whether it’s set in the real world or an alternative one. I taught a class on this, starting with realistic work that has a wonderful uneasy quality, like John Cheever’s “The Cure” moving through surreal works like Haruki Murakami’s “The Second Bakery Attack” to purely speculative stories like Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds.” Recently speculative works I’ve been reading that are amazing are “The Emissary” by Yoko Tawada, collections like Mouthful of Birds by Samantha Schweblin, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura Van Den Berg, Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin, and Catastrophe (published in 1965) by Dino Buzzati.
JC: What are you working on now/next?
KB: Whenever I answer this, I’m wrong, so the honest answer is I’m not sure. But something!
__________________________________
The Words of Dr. L.and Other Stories by Karen E. Bender is available from Counterpoint Press.