“Maya is considered an illusion”: A Conversation with Patricia Bidar on Wild Plums

by Erin Vachon

In Patricia Bidar’s debut novelette Wild Plums [ELJ Editions, 2024], Maya moves to Oregon with an older partner, an English professor at a liberal arts school for women. She’s adapting to a slower life, trying to be useful in a new environment. Above all, she’s navigating relationships with other women like a person reborn, approaching the world with skeptical eyes, often floundering. Her partner’s daughter could be family, but when she wanders through their house “prim-mouthed,” Maya only sees a rival. Her colleagues at work might be sisters in work-life solidarity, until the reality of the bottom line hits. And the women’s locker room at the YWCA is an absolute minefield. While Maya wants to connect, she admits all the ways she locks herself down, trained by a prickly history. She confesses, “Even all alone at home, I lock the bathroom door behind me when I pee.” Bidar gifts us with a narrator who bristles at competition, but on the cusp of transition. I had the joy of chatting with Bidar about her novelette, using inspiration from her writing. In Wild Plums, Maya pokes fun at her mother’s choices after divorce, “the palm reading circle, the metaphysics classes, the Christian sect that used Tarot cards to interpret the Bible and made her a minister for fifty dollars.” In the spirit of Bidar’s narrator, I pulled Tarot to frame our conversation.

Erin Vachon: Hi, Patricia! I feel like this bodes well for our conversation: the first card I’ve pulled from the Tarot is the Sun. This card famously boasts a field of sunflowers, reminding me of Maya’s perception of another woman she perceives as a rival. She says, “Hannah is solvent, educated, a board member of several organizations. And when she realizes she is really truly free, she will unfold and open herself to life like a sunflower.” What does a free life look like to Maya? Has she attained freedom?

Patricia Q. Bidar: I think she tells herself this about Hannah to assuage her own guilt. But in fact, Hannah has things that Maya wants and doesn’t know how to build. The man is the easy part! She may think she is free from her mother, whom she didn’t respect. But she hasn’t processed her mother’s death. As trauma coach and survivor Nate Postlewait says, “While some are building social skills, these kids [in survival mode] are building defenses. As adults, some are building families, while child survivors are building what they never had to begin with.” I don’t think Maya knows yet what freedom means.

EV: If you can believe it, the Sun popped out a second time. I’m not sure we’re done with this line of questioning yet. Maya has a moment of total clarity at the end of Wild Plums about her relationship with other women. Without spoiling too much, I will say that Maya’s path takes a sharp turn, and the reader must wonder where she will go from there. Can you talk a little bit about Maya and her journey?

PQB: The final image is a metaphor for the world of women and of connection, but it is the reader who sees that. Maya does not. She has not grieved for her mother. She has not become closer to Isaac. He has invited his daughter to visit, but Maya willfully ignores this, even though it might be seen as an invitation to a new layer of closeness. She has not connected with women, either in her new sphere, or in Isaac’s. She leaves her new home in a shambles, with the unprepared-for visit from Isaac’s daughter having arrived. In Buddhism, Maya refers to the limited, purely mental, and physical reality in which our everyday consciousness is entangled. Maya is considered an illusion.

EV: As Maya goes on her soul searching journey – signified by the Eight of Cups – what does she leave behind on her path?

PQB: I believe Maya’s inability to feel compassion or warmth for others means she leaves nothing behind on her path, that she still carries the burden of unfelt grief, loneliness, and a fundamental emptiness. But I like to think we leave Maya at the beginning of a new path, or at least the possibility of it. That sunflower field is there for Maya.

EV: The Nine of Pentacles often refers to someone who found material comfort, but does so in a solitary way. Maya wants to get “steady and permanent” possessions for her new home, like a gigantic couch and a dining room table that will center a new group of friends. Still, she holds others at a distance. Can you speak about how your women characters navigate between independence and self-isolation?

PQB: Maya is bright but completely unmoored. This “turnkey” new life in another state with a new man shows Maya believes Isaac will help her break down the walls of her isolation. Instead, he sees her as genuinely independent and leaves her to her own devices. Maya comes to understand their relationship is surface-level. That she spends her emotional energy attending to being interesting to him. So she is both isolated and entirely dependent.

EV: Ah, the Ace of Cups. Maya falls in love with a professor, and she contrasts this relationship to other men who passed through her life, some in brutal ways. What love lessons does Wild Plums offer, whether romantic, platonic, or familial?

PQB: She sees Isaac as an opportunity. Like the heavy couch and table, the new friends. He is kind to her. Isaac is one of a series of men who might provide a shortcut to life. All these years later, I wonder about Isaac’s motivation. Whereas, Maya’s mother was a seeker, albeit one who died before her time. Maya witnessed her vulnerability, the chaotic life, and rejected it. Maybe the lesson is that we must first come to terms with our family of origin, then begin to love ourselves, and then become ready for a solid partnership. Sure! That’s a lesson! In fact, it’s far, far messier for most of us.

EV: The Four of Pentacles. Sometimes this card feels like a miser sitting on their hill. It feels like Maya physically walls herself off, almost protectively, even while she studies other women. Can you talk about how you wrote bodies and embodiment in Wild Plums?

PQB: The female body stands at the center of this narrative. When Isaac and Maya first arrive at their new house, the neighbor boy crows, “It’s a woman!” in response to his mother and sister’s question. So the reader is seeing from the outside that Maya is not a clear member of the gender, so to speak. Later, the same boy spies Maya naked in the house, and she is terrified. Both of the women she works with are pregnant–an extremely bodily state–but being from different classes are not really friends with each other. Instead, they both confide in Maya. At the gym, Maya is surrounded by women in various states of undress; she is also there at the end. Hopefully, the reader has a more layered understanding of her by then.

EV: I think of the Seven of Pentacles as the harvest card, seeing what your effort has sprouted. I would love to know about the practical experience of writing Wild Plums. I think of you as a flash writer, so could you tell me about the process of writing a longer manuscript?

PQB: I first wrote this story more than 25 years ago. After grad school, then a stint in central Oregon, and after having our daughter and returning to the Bay Area and having our son. The whole time we were raising our kids, I wrote almost nothing. Immersed in them and struggling financially, while working a lot. But I’d dabble in Amherst Writing Method classes and later in a model called Round Robin, where participants write briefly every day and exchange pieces with an assigned partner. Once I had the headspace and time to write, I sought out a teacher for flash fiction and that was fabulous Meg Pokrass. Back to the longer works, my master’s thesis comprises seven very long short stories. Just one of them, Going Public, was published in Fall 2023 by Cowboy Jamboree’s Justin Townes Earle tribute issue. I am working on readying another.

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Patricia Quintana Bidar is a Western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. She is the author of  Wild Plums, a novella published by ELJ Editions. Her collection of short fiction, Pardon Me For Moonwalking, is coming from Unsolicited Press in 2025.

Bidar is an alum of the U.C. Davis Graduate writing program, where she taught creative writing and earned a M.A. in English. She also holds a B.A. in Filmmaking. Her writing has appeared in Waxwing, The Pinch, SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, Wigleaf, and Pithead Chapel, among many other journals. Her stories have been widely anthologized, including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton, 2023), Best Microfiction 2023 (Pelekinesis Press), and Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024 (Alternating Current Press).

Patricia serves as a Submissions Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and is on staff for Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She lives with her family and unusual dog outside of Oakland, CA.