NER staff reader Dana Lynch talks with writer Lindsay Ahl about tracking place like a ghost, objective versus subjective reality, and rendering the 1970s in her story “Green Wall, Red China” from issue 46.2.
Dana Lynch: We just talked about how you lived in NYC for ten years. Where are you in the world (and in your professional life) now and how has place played a role in your writing?
Lindsay Ahl: I guess I mentioned David Abrams when you first mentioned place because he discusses in The Spell of the Sensuous the way in which an oral culture interacts with the places they inhabit. Here is a quote: “A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.”
In this culture, we tend to go through the world thinking that we are the ones directing and using our own agency. Perhaps that is often or sometimes the case. But to some degree, I think everyone and everything around us is something we have to process . . . and how we process that is part of our agency. So, place isn’t just a “setting” that a writer decides on or that we find ourselves in, place is determined by a state of mind, an idea, our stance toward reality. Your New York City will be different from my New York City and in that way New York City, as real as it is, is also an idea, a myth, a personal dream that we move through using our own systems of interaction.
Specifically, inside of my writing, I think of place as a type of character. It’s part of what is interacting with the characters in the story. I don’t use it the way writers used to use place, like, rain is a stand in for a character crying . . . nothing like that. But I do feel it as a presence, as something that is impinging on the character’s daily life, and therefore something the character has to interact with.
Since place is a big subject for writing in general, maybe I’ll just stick to my story “Green Wall, Red China.” Interestingly, part of place involves time. One reason your New York City will be different than my New York City, among many reasons, is that I was there a long time ago. And I remember talking to people who had first arrived twenty years before I arrived, and how different the city was for them. “Red China” was called Red China primarily under Maoist rule, which ended in 1976. So, we know this story takes place either in 1976 or earlier. And this place we are calling “Red China” no longer exists as it did. I know that is incredibly obvious, but I can’t tell you how astounding it is, as you get older, to be a witness to how a place literally disappears and/or transforms beyond recognition. This happened a lot during World War II, but it also happens every day. When they take a lake and turn it into a subdivision, etc. In that way, place is a ghost I like to track. Earth/place/city acts as a palimpsest that we experience but it’s also hard to see except in glimpses.
As for where I am physically, I tend to move around a lot, especially in my mind. But I’m living in the Southwest at the moment.
DL: On the topic of “Green Wall, Red China,” how did you approach the characters in this story? Allison’s interactions with her family her felt incredibly unique. The most obvious examples are with Grandma Jewel, but Allison’s “real father” left the biggest impact on me. Did you have these characters in mind for a while or did they come naturally as you developed Allison?
LA: Something about your phrasing makes me think about how characters are developed in relation to point of view. We tend to think about characters in relation to specifics: their look, their motives, what they want, or how they interact with or develop the plot. These are all important things, but I tend to think of characters as part of an ensemble that includes the reader and place/time/setting. This story is told in third-person limited, so we know nothing about what is really going on in anyone’s point of view besides Allison’s, and yet we don’t have the first-person perks of immediacy, her personal language, or the pacing of her interiority. There is that step-back from the first person. All we have is this child and her kind of muted, veiled perceptions about reality.
When writing, I usually know a lot about each character and I work out the details in my mind before I even really begin. But depending on the point of view, which in turn might be dependent on the plot, a lot of what develops the character changes. If this story was in first-person, it would maybe feel more immediate and we’d have the authentic language of a young girl, but not the umbrella of an “objective” reality as she’s experiencing it. It would be a subjective reality. I love first-person, but it traps the reader in a single mind and you usually can’t see a way out. Omniscience, which might have been interesting, would have allowed for the development of all the characters and could have illuminated Allison’s lack of knowledge, but for me that wasn’t the point. The core of this story is that odd time in late childhood when you are developing yourself in relation to the outside world, but have no real reference points to where you want to go or who you might become. In some ways, the “real” father is the one who pushes her to enter that alternative state—the protection of an imaginary place.
DL: Your novel Desire is also set in the 1970s. Why did you choose the 1970s? How does this period play a role in your writing exploration?
LA: For a long time, I wasn’t interested in anything remotely historical. I never read historical novels and the only history I enjoyed when I was in school was studying the ancient Greeks or Egyptians. For some reason now, I’m practically obsessed with the past. I’ve spent the last ten years writing such a long book that it turned into six books. They begin in 1933 and end in approximately 1992. I had to do a lot of research, but I was interested in how each generation alters history such that we end up here. So many small, incremental changes end up having huge consequences.
In fiction, we think a lot about causality. We might think about conflict, crisis, and resolution, which involves identifying a cause, the A that led to B that led to C. But often A isn’t really the first cause. The whole pattern started long before. We also think about causality when we think about a character arc—either the character changes or the plot diverts into something because of an action taken, etc. There is a lot of set-up “causality” in fiction that may or may not represent life. If you open up that causality lens, you have causality in history. What happened in the 1930s to create World War II? As it turns out, to understand World War II you have to go back to before World War I. So also, the 1970s were the distillation and enactment of a lot of the ideas that trickled down from the 1960s, and in a lot of ways, the 1980s were a rebellion against the sentiments of the 1970s. These pulsations of actions/reactions became interesting to me—how these mechanisms of history affect individuals. In some ways, the study of an individual life can embody the study of a particular time and place. With that, we are back to that idea of place—a place is always that place at that time, as opposed to thirty years earlier or later (unless it’s an imaginary place; everything is an imaginary place . . . but that is a different tangent).
A large character arc might be from when we are born to when we die, but really a character arc starts long before we are born—with our ancestors—and ends after we die. In stories, one can make a character arc happen in a minute, if desired, but I started to get interested in longer and longer arcs, extending out to the human arc of history in general.
DL: I have one last question for you: What are you currently reading? Any recommendations that you’d like to share?
LA: I have a waist-high pile of books that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. At the beginning of this year, I decided I should read writers on Substack and that I should write something on Substack. I thought I’d start with something easy: I wanted to write about reading. I ended up writing about ten pages on What Reading Is and How It Works, which is enormously complicated and I never got to the bottom of it. I’ll tell you what reading reminds me of: When my son was four, I took him to a movie premiere where the director was answering questions after the film. People in the audience asked a few questions, then my son raised his hand. “I understand that the people in the movie are actors,” he said. “But how did you get the cops to be in the movie?”
I love that disconnect—trying to grapple with something that feels real. Which part is real? Yes, this is made up, but it feels real and to a child, and even the child within us, that which we watch or read is real. We’re having a real experience. Some of my favorite people are either characters in books or the writers who write them. This is a long way of asking: What are we talking about when we’re talking about reading? When it’s good, when it’s deeply meaningful, to me, it feels like we’re exchanging souls or entering each other’s souls. That kind of reading creates and changes you. I hope people still write for that and read for that.
I rarely read for entertainment. If I want an easy experience I stream TV. I did a lot of research for my novel that takes place during World War II. For that, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes was excellent. So was the essay collection Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge by Niels Bohr. With a friend who speaks German, I’m going through all the translations we can find of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. She’s hilarious; she fixates on particular words in German and how there is no English equivalent, so we debate on which phrase gets us closer.
Lindsay Ahl is the author of Desire (Coffee House Press, 2004). She has work published in The Georgia Review, Hotel America, BOMB Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Fiction Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Global City Review, The Offing, and many others.
Dana Lynch is a first-year MFA writing candidate at Columbia University. She is an avid writer of both nonfiction and fiction, focusing on her biracial Korean American identity. Alongside her studies, she is a staff reader for NER. For now, you can find her buried underneath writing submissions at a NYC local coffee shop near you.