This Week in Fiction: Karen Russell

In “The Bad Graft,” your story in this week’s issue, a young couple on a road trip stops in Joshua Tree National Park, where something freaky happens—the woman is infected by the spirit or consciousness of one of the Joshua trees. What is it about Joshua trees that made them seem like the right botanical conduit for this story?

Well, I love stories of transformation, reading them and, now, writing them. When I was a kid one of the old myths that haunted me was Daphne’s flight from Apollo. Her prayer for help is answered in the most spectacular way—via an act of spontaneous arboreal combustion. In a single verse paragraph, she goes from woman to laurel tree. Even as a child, I found this means of escape to feel shockingly sad: forfeiting one’s life as a woman in order to continue, in some form, to live. The Greek witness protection program. It’s hilarious and melancholy and frightening and surprising and, in ways I couldn’t articulate as a child, deeply and frighteningly familiar. Who doesn’t know someone who has responded to danger or crisis by becoming a tree? (I mean figuratively, but, who knows, maybe those sequoias have something they’re not telling us.)

Here is the moment of transformation, from the Stanley Lombardo translation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”:

She had just finished her prayer
when a heavy numbness invaded her body
And a sheathe of bark enclosed her soft breast
Her hair turned into fluttering leaves, her arms
Into branches; her feet, once so swift
became mired in roots, and her face was lost
In the canopy. Only her beauty’s sheen remained.
Apollo still loved her, and placing his hand
Against her trunk he felt her heart quivering
Under the new bark. He embraced her limbs
With his own arms, and he kissed the wood.

Now when I read this, I am so moved by that image of Apollo feeling her still-beating heart under the new bark. And still loving her, although she’s been altered beyond recognition, into some completely new creature.

So for a while, I had this idea that I was going to write a story from the point of view of a tree that leaps into a woman—you know, a tree spirit that seeks to escape death by making an Ovid-like leap, at Ovid-like existential prices. But I was thinking more along the lines of oaks, cypress.

And then last October I visited Joshua Tree National Park, my first time in the desert. I fell in love with the Joshua tree. These guys are nothing like the Eastern deciduous trees, with their even arpeggios of branches. I felt like I was hallucinating the first time I saw one. They look like the world’s first draft of a tree. Tonally, they are a species with a lot of range—they are so beautiful, so alien, so grotesquely and comically proportioned, so stubbornly themselves. They’ve been growing in California since before the Ice Age; some mature Joshuas are a thousand years old. So already, they have a mythic quality, and a fairy-tale look, as if they are only holding those poses, seconds from uprooting themselves and strolling through the desert. I thought Florida had prepared me for dinosaur foliage, but the Joshua seems to be an emissary from another planet entirely. And a good candidate for a hitchhiking spirit that might leap into a human.

Metaphorically, for all sorts of reasons, I was attracted to the Joshua as an ideal conduit for telling a survival story, and a love story. No two trees are alike. Each is a living map of its own history; when a Joshua flowers, its branch splits, and when those branches flower, they split again. But its growth doesn’t follow any predictable or regular pattern. Each tree represents endlessly brachiating possibilities, and those vast roots are sprawling quietly on either side of the California highway system.

Without boring everybody further, I was thrilled to learn about the ancient evolutionary love story between the Joshua tree and the yucca moth, its exclusive pollinator. Charles Darwin pointed to these two species as being one of the most incredible examples of coëvolution and mutual symbiosis in nature—they have evolved to where their futures are inextricably linked. So, you know, another lens through which to consider how, for our species, the kind of love that braids two people’s fates together can both sustain them and makes them vulnerable.

What does the Joshua tree want from this girl, and are its intentions malign, do you think?

Oh, I think to the extent that it “wants” anything, it wants to go home, and to be a living tree again. It wants to reverse its misguided leap into the inhospitable ecosystem represented by this human woman’s interior, which is in continuous flux, but also so small and so finite, nauseatingly fleet and ephemeral (or so I imagine, compared to a thousand-year-old Joshua). Just as various other human ghosts in literature wish to return to their bodies.

I guess it also wants to sprawl throughout the girl’s consciousness and overtake the host environment. To turn her into something resembling it; to dominate this new ecosystem. Its non-human operations are instinctual “acts” of self-preservation. For me, for example, when the Joshua dismantles Angie’s memories, this is occurring in the same neutral, “natural,” and unstoppable way that any seedling that sprouts in a sidewalk crack will start to push up and push out, its roots cracking and raising the pavement.

For me, part of the weird fun of this story was trying to imagine what a plant might articulate to itself, if it were suddenly folded into a human consciousness, and could translate certain programmed inclinations, like phototropism and gravitropism, into the language of thought. You know, exploit the host consciousness’s acoustics.

One of the things I really like about your stories is their pairing of fantastical elements with recognizable situations. Which part comes first, and how do you make sure that you have a proper balance of the two?

Oh, thank you, Willing. I still have a lot to learn in the balance department, I’m sure. But my favorite stories tend to be what Marianne Moore called “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Or I’m always quoting Flannery O’Connor, who said in a single line what takes me paragraphs of raving: “The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.” So I’ve learned that no matter how excited I am by a particular setting or idea or image, unless it functions as a means to get at truth, to be honest about something that feels emotionally true to me, some genuinely mysterious and interesting aspect of our natures, then the story ultimately will never take off, or take on dimensions. For whatever reason, it seems I can write more honestly about people if they are the daughters of werewolves, or alligator wrestlers. It gives me access to an expanded alphabet to talk about the real strangeness of our dealings on this planet, or that’s what I tell myself whenever yet another psychic adolescent or talking seahorse shows up and asks to be in a story.

I think that tone is everything, that tone is the substrate; if you can find the right tone in which to make this request, many readers will generously accept as true your alterations to nature. As a model for developing that authority, the storyteller’s authority and joy that underwrites an alternate reality, we’ve got folks like Franz Kafka and Mary Shelley and Italo Calvino, contemporary authors like Kelly Link and Kevin Brockmeier and George Saunders. I also think, you know, you’ve got to double-down on your commitment to your own weird premise. And to fully imagine its consequences in a visceral way.

This story felt a little closer to another story we worked on together, “The Dredgeman’s Revelation,” in terms of its narrative distance from the canvas, and its setting, which is a real place where something fantastical occurs. Other stories I’ve written, particularly those told from children’s points of view in landscapes that announce themselves immediately as otherworldly, differ I guess in their ratio of the natural to the supernatural. But in every case it’s my hope that the story, no matter how superficially bizarre or whacked-out it may seem, occurs in a world that feels real to the reader, as real as the one we share together off the page; and that the story is grounded in emotional realism.

You have real range—in the past couple years you’ve published short stories, a novel—”Swamplandia!”—and even a novella—”Sleep Donation.” What do the various lengths allow you to do differently?

I was joking to a friend that every time I try to finish a first draft, I feel like I’m playing the accordion very badly—you know, stretching the thing out, and then contracting it again. It often takes me a long time to figure out the natural length of something I’m working on, and I cut so much, pages and pages. When I was writing my first collection, most of my stories fell somewhere in the seven-thousand-word range, I think because that was for whatever reason my mental template for “short story length.” In “Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” there’s more variety, with some of the lighter stories being the shortest, and a few of the others pushing ten thousand words. Stories are maybe my favorite; they are a corral for the imagination, a frame that can contain spontaneity and improvisation. Certain premises and situations seem perfectly suited to the snow globe universe of a short story. Nobody needs an eight-hundred-page novel about this Joshua tree, I’m pretty certain. But, in a short story, you can deeply explore certain questions or preoccupations. And you don’t have the same pressures as a novel, where you’d have to sustain the energy of a fantastic premise for pages and pages.

I love that paradox, the “long short story,” because you get to build out the world of the story while still maintaining a tight focus on a single drama, or (usually) a relatively small cast of characters. Although it was a real challenge for me, I loved writing my novel, “Swamplandia!,” which grew out of the acorn of a twelve-page short story, because I got to spend so much time with the characters, and to juggle multiple worlds within one work. I do miss that, working on shorter pieces, the opportunity to live and breathe in the atmosphere of an imaginary world, with a consistent cast of characters that you come to really know and care for, over time. The novella seemed like a wonderful hybrid—I really enjoyed writing to that length, focussing on a small set of questions and a single plotline and narrow cast while also developing the world of the story, having more fun riffing than a short story sometimes permits, having that spaciousness.