Staff reader Elizabeth Sutton talks with NER author Morgan Hargrave about funerary rituals, living á la carte, and chasing beauty in his story “Arrangements,” from issue 46.1.
Elizabeth Sutton: “Arrangements” centers on the tragic death of a young newlywed biologist in a plane crash near Fairbanks, Alaska. It is up to his widow, whose thoughts narrate the story, to figure out how to handle his remains and honor his memory. You describe in wonderfully succinct and evocative prose a kind of anthropology of death. We learn how different cultures from the Yanomami to the Massai dispose of earthly remains and honor their dead. I’m not religious but I admit to being fascinated by elaborate rituals following Pope Francis’s death. I wonder if you could describe what inspired you to write about what some might call a macabre subject?
Morgan Hargrave: Those types of rituals were at the heart of a question I had. Laying someone to rest is one of the difficult parts of life where we actually do have a ton of guidance and precedent, from across cultures and throughout history. And yet it is easy to imagine—or to relate to—feeling lost in that moment. That disconnect is what I was interested in.
So, if I could write a story that moved between those two things—the richness of human knowledge and practice on one hand, and the isolation and ignorance of an individual human on the other—maybe I could understand a little bit more about that gap and how to close it. It could also maybe be beautiful.
ES: You note in the story that “there have been heavy expectations placed upon the widow in the aftermath of her husband’s death” and that she is subject to “the weight of her community’s pity, scrutiny, and often unconsciously but still discernible disgust.” You also quote Sylvia Plath who wrote, “Widow. The word consumes itself.” In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion is described derisively as “a pretty cool customer” by hospital social workers because she seems so in control after hearing of her husband’s death. Can you talk a little bit about Mariana, the widow in your story, and how you think she holds up under this weight?
MH: The original idea in my head was going to be much harsher on Mariana. She was going to crumble under the pressure of widowhood and we would watch that happen. As I wrote, though, I found that I had no appetite for passing judgement on her. And it seemed much more interesting to set aside the question of her fitness for the role of widow and instead relate to her as someone whose connection to family, culture, tradition, and community feels familiar to me.
ES: “Arrangements” describes the need of most cultures to establish a clear distinction between the physical body and the “essence of the person,” or what we call the soul. It’s this essence that needs to be hurried along to the “next plane,” or afterlife. “In most instances it is urgent and imperative that the soul should find its way to the next phase [….] Otherwise things could get ugly.” Mariana’s sachets are a unique solution to this problem. It’s a lovely ending, and ending a story well is hard work. How did you arrive at the ending?
MH: The ending wasn’t the ending originally! Shoutout to NER editor Carolyn Kuebler, who said something like, “We love this story but are you sure it ends there?” So I went back and read it and realized that, yeah, it just kind of stopped. I returned to the themes I mentioned before and tried to write an ending that was true to those.
There’s an admonishment I remember hearing when I was younger that the Bible is not á la carte. You can’t just pick and choose the parts you like. But I have lived my life very much in opposition to that idea. I think most of us do. We take pieces from the stories and teachings and cultures and people that we interact with in our lives, incorporate what works for us, and leave aside the things that don’t. I wanted that for Mariana, too.
I wanted to tell her that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But also, if you want to, you can.
ES: The stand-alone paragraphs in “Arrangements” are a powerful and effective means of rendering the story. How did you land on this form? How did your writing evolve?
MH: This was really where the story started for me. I came up with the format—a back-and-forth rhythm between fiction and nonfiction—before any of the content of the story itself.
Throughout human existence, there is such an incredible history of strange, fraught, logical, creative, spiritual, gross, and beautiful ways of marking the end of someone’s life. And yet Mariana, given that she lives a kind of secular and individualistic life that is typical in the contemporary United States, is quite disconnected from all that. Bouncing between those two facts seemed useful for understanding both. For me, setting her unenviable circumstances alongside the richness of human funerary practices really put her loneliness and lack of answers in context. That was the aim, at least.
ES: Your bio describes you as working in human rights and international development. I imagine this kind of work is a great source of material for your fiction. Am I correct?
MH: It must be an influence, right? But it’s hard to say. So far, none of my stories deal directly with human rights work. And beyond that I’m still new to writing and don’t really know how it functions. In fact, I’m hesitant to think about it too much because I worry that my process might be fragile. I don’t want to open the mechanism up and start poking around in there, because what if I break something?
One thing is that my work is global in nature and often interacts with the world as it is and with an idea of what the world should be. That’s all fertile ground for thinking about stories worth telling. And it brings to mind another question: Does writing fiction make me better at my work? I think the answer to that is probably “yes.” Someday I’ll better understand how it all works.
ES: Just one more question: who are some of the writers, living or dead, that you admire? How has reading them helped you develop as a writer?
MH: Borges is something like a god to me. Beckett, Mishima, Cortázar, and Márquez aren’t far behind. Vonnegut was the first writer that grabbed my attention, back when I was fifteen, and Camus took me through the rest of my adolescence. I read a Virginia Woolf book once and it wasn’t for me, but the other day I read The Waves, and now I think she was a genius. I seem to have only listed dead people so let me add Percival Everett to the list.
What I take from all of them is beauty. Plain and simple. And that’s what I aspire to when I write.
Morgan Hargrave works in human rights and international development. He lives in the US with his wife and son.
Elizabeth Sutton is a former staff member of NER and has been a volunteer fiction reader for the magazine for many years. She is retired and lives in Middlebury with her husband and more than enough cats!