Communal Narratives and the Danger of Imagination: Pedro Ponce Discusses His Award-Winning Story Collection
Author Pedro Ponce discusses his new short story collection, The Devil and the Dairy Princess. (Credit: Nicole Roche)
Recently Weave contributor Nicole Roche spoke with author Pedro Ponce about his new short story collection, The Devil and The Dairy Princess, winner of the 2020 Don Belton Fiction Prize. In this collection, published on Oct. 5 by Indiana University Press, Ponce deftly employs dark humor, unreliable narration, and misdirection as he explores themes related to knowledge, authority, identity, and communal narratives.
Prize judge Charles Yu said of the collection, “Each piece is distinctive, innovative, and full of fresh surprises. Yet the collection as a whole is cohesive in tone and voice, evocative, playful, haunting spaces, both dreamy and nightmarish.”
The full audio recording of Ponce’s interview can be found here as part of our Interweaving podcast series.
[NR] So many of your stories dance that line between realism, magical realism, and sometimes outright absurdity, which feels right given you’re exploring these often dystopian worlds or situations rife with bureaucratic nonsense.
One example that jumps out at me is the “Progressive Ideation” project in the “The Presentation” story where out-of-work actors “perform” construction for the good of the city. You have a knack for making the familiar unfamiliar and uncanny and therefore very unsettling. But you're also very funny in a wry, darkly funny way, which is personally my favorite form of humor.
Could you speak to your interest in that tone? I know you teach some Kafka, and I definitely saw some of that in there. Have you always incorporated elements of dark humor in your work?
[PP] I think so. A lot of my work is voice-driven. You know, my first writing teacher was Amy Hempel at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore many, many years ago. And she talked about the integrity of the sentence and basically how all stories for her begin with—you know, the sentences have to be strong.
For me, when I am imagining or getting into a story, oftentimes it's really about the voice. My voice tends to be more in that kind of wry, sardonic tone. In some ways I think that it's a way to create distance from things. It's sort of a mask or a frame. It's a way to frame things that are not particularly great to think about.
As far as “The Presentation” is concerned, I don't know exactly where that story comes from. It's such a very different kind of story than I've written. But I think that a lot of that is about anxiety. It's kind of like my—I wouldn't call it a midlife crisis because I've already had all of my midlife crises multiple times before this—but it was more just having a moment where it's like, what am I doing with everything?
The protagonist in that story is kind of caught between this early career and the possibility of advancing in a career that doesn't seem particularly fulfilling. It was a way for me to dramatize that in a way that's at first really kind of humorous, but then it becomes much more existential the further he goes into it. The line between who is the performer and who is the actual person becomes blurrier and blurrier.
And so he kind of falls into the cracks of that distinction. I'm a big fan of misdirection as well. I like sort of settling people into something. They think they know what's going on. And then by the end of it, they're like, what's going on?
Audio Extra: Listen to the author
[NR] Misdirection is a great word for it. I felt, as I said, maybe not uneasy, but definitely, where am I in this story? And that's part of it, right? You’re looking for that moment where you're settling into a story and you’re like, okay, I know what the story is about, and then it switches on you. I think that really keeps your interest and keeps you guessing, at least for me as a reader.
I'm going to switch gears a little bit here. I was definitely drawn to this description I’ve read: “What happens when the stories we've been told fail us? In this new collection, Ponce grapples with the human instinct to create a narrative out of disparate experiences.” It goes on to talk about how the stories “interrogate the power of stories to impact us for good or ill.” I was wondering if you could talk more about that. Why was this an important theme for you? Was it something you were intentionally exploring in these stories written over many years or was it more of a pattern you saw emerge in the finished works?
[PP] I think it was a combination of both. Like I said earlier, I'm very much voice- and language-driven. So it felt very natural to call the story collection The Devil and the Dairy Princess because it's a striking title.
But when I thought more about it, especially what happens in that story, it's really about stories that kind of fall apart. And that was when I suddenly saw this group of stories seem to be all about stories that kind of fall apart. And it goes beyond that.
Everybody talks about how we have to get away from the larger narratives and we have to interrogate the old narratives. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think that's good. But I think that people think that getting away from the old narratives is easier than it is.
I really wanted to explore the difficulty of walking away from older narratives, whether those narratives are personal or whether they are national or historical. It's really hard to get away from them because narratives help us make sense of things. And so there is kind of a liberation, but I definitely wanted that liberation to be complicated. Because once you leave that narrative, what is it that you're left with?
In some cases, we have a situation where people are like, okay, maybe this is the beginning of something new that we can experience. And we've finally opened our eyes to something beyond it. But I also wanted to dramatize the fear and anxiety that comes from letting those narratives go or seeing beyond it.
I wrote these stories a while ago. I don't know how to feel about it, but I feel that these stories connect in some ways with what we're going through now on many levels. A lot of the anxiety that I see out in the culture is really about letting old stories go or the threat of letting old stories go. And some people don't want to let go of those old stories. They don't want to let go of the way that they have shaped their experiences, and they'll do whatever they want. I think the collection covers both sides of that in a way that’s gratifying. It's not gratifying how relevant it is. But it is gratifying that there is something true even with all of the misdirection that you're talking about, that there's something very truthful that kind of emerges from that ambivalence.
[NR] Absolutely. Reading that description and hearing you talk now has really got me thinking about storytelling and its connection to power—who's telling the story, who's allowed to tell the story, who has access to the information?
That was something that I found really fascinating reading these stories. I was thinking, why this narrator? For instance, in the story about Dr. James Osborne Beckett, he's meeting with this unrequited college love, and he has this discovery as she's rejecting him. All of a sudden we're getting this plural third-person narrator that kind of jumps in and it's like, we felt that omniscience in the story, but it wasn't exactly clear where it was coming from and who had the authority.
That was an example of misdirection that was so fascinating because it was like, what is going on here? And it begs the question, how does the narrator know about this? In a funny way, it makes us complicit because we now have access to this information that ostensibly no one or very few people know about.
Is that something you were consciously thinking about—the reader's role in that—as your narrator is divulging these facts, this information?
[PP] I think so. And I think the other side of it, too, going back to what you were saying earlier about voice and narration, it's an unreliable omniscience. Which is impossible, but I kind of like it. I like the playfulness of it. I think it's really intended to make you question what omniscience is. I like creating these voices that seem to have a lot of authority and then eventually, the authority breaks down around them.
I appreciate your comments because you're the implied reader I've been looking for. And this is not something new. A lot of my favorite authors do this all the time, where they play with omniscience, although they do it in a very different way.
Toni Morrison is a great example of that. One of the things I find fascinating about her work is the way that she plays with omniscience, which is not surprising because she wants to kind of open the historical narrative up to these voices and perspectives that have been erased. She does that by producing these omniscient narratives, but also interrogating what omniscience is. She's doing it at a very high level. I'm very fascinated by that, the disconnect between omniscience and access because we hear these voices in our speaking narratives, you know, in the culture creating these narratives, but we sort of take that authority for granted.
I think that in a lot of these stories that kind of false omniscience or unreliable omniscience is really getting the reader to think about, where is the story coming from? What am I getting? And what am I missing?
[Roberto] Bolaño is fantastic with this because the scariest things about Bolaño is not what's in the stories. It's what he leaves out. Nazi Literature is a great example of that. There are these places where he'll just skip from one moment to another in these fictional biographies. And the gaps are just terrifying. You're seeing like the surface of this body of water. And at any point, something is about to emerge and you don't know what that is, but you're just kind of waiting there and it's just really eerie and unsettling and haunting.
That's kind of the way I think about authority and narrative. I want the reader to really question where the story is coming from and how the story’s told. That is something that I'm very fascinated with.
[NR] I hadn't thought of unreliable omniscience as a term, but that's absolutely what's going on. And there's this feeling, too, of not only withholding, but also there are gaps in the record. And that’s something you definitely do here. You'll say, “The name has been lost to the record,” and it's like, what record? And then we won't know the name of the main character, but then there's this passing reference to this sealed package that was lost, that if only they looked in it, it would have changed everything. And it's like, how do you know that? How did you come by this information?
Reading The Devil and the Dairy Princess really got me thinking about authority, truth, knowledge, assumed knowledge. Especially with that titular story, I started thinking about the collective wisdom of small towns and the information and misinformation that travels and just becomes known. It's just this shared pool of knowledge. And I was wondering if you could talk about that.
I know you've lived here in the north country of Northern New York. It's a very rural, post-industrial place--remote, cold, beautiful. All the things. And we have our dairy princess competition here. I’m just wondering how that story came to be? And maybe the role you see information and misinformation playing in the collective understanding of a place?
[PP] Well, fun fact, I started writing that story, I think, in 2009. And I think I actually started it the weekend of that Dairy Princess Parade. It was actually the first Dairy Princess Festival I attended. But also another disclaimer about “The Devil and the Dairy Princess.” Readers can react, obviously, however they want. It's not intended as a slight to the dairy industry.
Reflecting back on the process of writing it, I think what I was really responding to was the way any community has narratives that are built around it, or how narrative works within the community and how that kind of shapes a sense of identity and this kind of communal identity. I am also really interested in how complicated communities really are because communities depend on their identity. They depend on a sense of enclosure and intimacy, but they don't really think about the fact that in order for there to be an inside, you need to have an outside. And what happens when the boundary between those two things starts to blur and warp? That's something that's always fascinated me.
I grew up in San Diego. I've been here [in northern New York] for a while, but I have not always lived in a rural community. But I definitely have thought about how communities work in multiple different contexts. And so I'm really interested in the way that communities construct and defend their identities and sort of maintain their identities.
A lot of that is based on the stories that they tell about each other. And I wanted to create a situation where that communal narrative becomes vulnerable and open to question. The dairy princess stuff was more of a metaphor. It was just kind of something that was in front of me at the time, but eventually it sort of evolved and became part of this larger thinking about narratives. Not at the personal level, but more of the communal level and also the national level.
There's the moment in “The Devil and the Dairy Princess” where they're going off into the woods and somebody says, “We need to pray for the nation.” I was thinking about that and there's some resonance there too with national discourses of patriotism and American life, specifically within this larger community.
[NR] Reading your story “The Devil and the Dairy Princess” I couldn't help but think about Shirley Jackson and “The Lottery.” I find her very darkly funny and, you know, she lived in Vermont, not too far from here, in a rural setting.
I thought it was so interesting because I noticed last year The New Yorker, who originally published “The Lottery,” the story, republished it. And I thought, what an interesting time to republish that.
I’m thinking about your collection and when it's coming out. The stories themselves have been around for a while. But then it takes a while to submit to the contest, and the whole publication process.
I’m wondering what your feeling is about the time that this collection is coming out and how it's relating to our current COVID-weary world, our current political landscape. How do you see this collection emerging at this time and place?
[PP] There are a couple of ways to answer it. I was a member of a writer's group many years ago here in the North Country. We would workshop our stories, and I submitted a draft of “The Devil and the Dairy Princess” to the workshop. And it didn't go well. This had to have been 2010 or 2011, like 10 years ago. One of the comments I got on the story was, “Why do you have to write it in this style? Why can't you just relax and tell the story?”
One of my responses at the time was if I could relax, I wouldn't be telling you the story. I would be doing anything but writing the story because I don't write stories to chill, you know? So for whatever reason, in 2020, I have to admit that, I was teaching online and just dealing with a lot, as everyone was, you know, just dealing with this new reality.
I started looking at these stories and I was like, you know, it was a finalist at a few places. And I hadn't looked at it in a while. I was looking at the stories again last year. And I was like, you know, some of this kind of holds up. Maybe I should send it out again.
I have to admit, part of me was like, if this book is going to come out, I think people might be ready now. And I don't mean to sound glib or dismissive of anyone's anxiety or anything. It's just that these stories require a kind of attention. For better or for worse, I think you have to be in a certain frame of mind to think about the world as these stories are asking you to. And I think now might make sense for that, you know, being in a situation where things that you do every day become dangerous and where you kind of know how things work, but not really, and your knowledge is evolving, your sense of story is evolving…
And so part of me thought, well, if people weren't ready for these stories in 2010, maybe they're ready for them now.
[NR] Our absurd world caught up with you.
[PP] I guess so. Yeah. I mean, it's weird. It's weird thinking that way. I didn't intend to do this.
I was having a conversation with someone about this, about sending it out last year, and they were saying, “What are you doing? How are you passing the time in the pandemic?”
And I said, “Well, I'm sending out a collection of stories.” And I felt like, what am I doing? You know? Cause it was one of those things. What am I doing? Like the world seems to be falling apart and this is what I'm focusing on? But then I was like, you know what? Even people in dystopia need to be distracted sometimes.
So yeah. If I can give you a little bit of a break from worrying, or I want you to worry about something fictional instead of worrying about something real. And if that is how you would like to spend some time in this new world, hey, great. I'll take it.
[NR] Earlier you were talking about your implied reader. Ultimately what is the experience you would like your reader to have with this collection of stories?
[PP] I would just like them to look at the world differently. But it's hard. I have to be careful here because, that's the thing about stories and how addictive they can be. Like, I would usually answer a question like this, again, ten years ago and sort of say, I want their perception of reality to be altered. I want them to think about and question things like the next time they hear a voice of authority. I want them to question and interrogate it and maybe satirize it, or I want them to think about how stories make us and stories unmake us.
And I still kind of feel that way, but at the same time, I also know that the breakdown of narrative cannot be good. Let's say, oh, how about scientific narratives for instance? And again, I defer to my colleagues in the sciences because to call science a narrative in and of itself is problematic. But when you start to interrogate narrative so much that any narrative is plausible or open, that's a problem.
It's hard being a fiction writer right now because I feel sometimes like I'm enabling this mess, you know? I feel like—I'm not saying that I'm abandoning it, but I think about these things sometimes. I still think imagination is great, but sometimes when I look at reality, I'm like, imagination is terrible. Imagination is awful. We should just stop imagining. We should just kill imagination. Let's not make up stories anymore. And so again, I have mixed feelings. Obviously these are the stories, this is the kind of thing that I want to write. I wrote these stories because people say that you write the book that isn't there. So I wanted to write the kind of book that I would want to read and I stand by it. But then at the same time, it's just like, imagination's not looking good these days. And I worry about that.
I also worry about the backlash of imagination as well, which is that because we are in this environment of fakeness or whatever you want to call it, that there's going to be a backlash against fiction and that it's going to be all about, you know, we do have to use cold, logical reasoning. We do have to back things up, and I'm not crazy about what this is going to do to imagination. And I don't know what to do about it. I'm not going to pretend to have any answers. I think it was John Gardner who talked about how the only obligation of the fiction writer is to dramatize the question, but not the answer.
And I kind of agree with that. But, yeah. It's just a weird world. Like, I don't know whether I'm helping or enabling or what.
[NR] And then who does have the answer, and how do we get there?
[PP] Yeah.
Ponce is also the author of Stories after Goya, Alien Autopsy, and Superstitions of Apartment Life. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gigantic, PANK, Copper Nickel, and more. Ponce was a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing. He is associate professor of English at St. Lawrence University, where he teaches fiction writing and literary theory.