The Freedom to be Who I Am: An Interview with Constance Malloy

I’ve been a fan of Constance Malloy’s for quite some time now. I always look forward to her posts on The Burning Hearth, and her memoir Tornado Dreams speaks to trauma and the path to healing with great courage and hope. Her latest book Born of Water: A Hybrid Novelette (ELJ Editions) is a beautiful example of Malloy’s vision and versatility. It was my great pleasure to speak to her about visions, writing hybrid, and the freedoms that both provide.

Diane Gottlieb: Congratulations, Constance, on your gorgeous Born of Water: A Hybrid Novelette! I love hybrids—and this one is a masterclass in hybrid writing. I read your memoir Tornado Dreams, and while some of the events in Born of Water are lifted from the real-life experience, they are woven together with speculative, futuristic, and fictional threads.

You even get a little meta at the end of Part One:

“Believing a character’s relationship with the author is an intimate dance predicated on the need for independence, which is necessitated by the need for dependence and borrowed experience, I promise Mari to listen to her story without interfering, and to open myself freely, so that she may take from me whatever is required for its telling.

It feels like you added nonfiction elements in the service of telling Mari’s story—which is fascinating. Can you tell us how you came to that decision, about your process?

Constance Malloy: Including nonfictional elements from my life into Mari’s story was not so much a decision as much as it was an organic pulling from my experience to tell her story. Something, I believe, all writers do. As I say in the quote above, it comes from her “…need for dependence and borrowed experience….” Because of my personal history, I’m compelled to tell stories about self-abandonment, what happens when that self-abandonment continues over years, and what is required to reclaim the self. So, Mari borrows from my experience. As a character (more specifically as a character of my creation), she depends upon me to free up that experience for her and grant her the autonomy to use that experience as she sees fit.

Including the meta section in Part I was a decision I made. So often authors are asked where their characters come from. Reflecting on being asked that about Mari, I felt it was important to tell the story of her origin. I want to believe that adds depth to her story, while also giving readers something to chew on about the author/character relationship.

DG: What freedom does writing hybrid give you that writing either straight-up nonfiction or fiction can’t provide?

CM: So, way back in the mid-1980s, sitting in Jane Smiley’s creative writing classes at Iowa State, I was already beginning to do hybrid writing. I loved mashing up elements of fiction and nonfiction. I loved throwing in a poetic line here and there. I loved adding the surreal, the ethereal, and the speculative to the real. Jane suggested that I decide what kind of writer I wanted to be. But honestly, I didn’t know how to do that because my brain simply works in all of these modes. And most importantly, stories come to me in all these modes. I’m a purest when it comes to rendering stories the way they present themselves. It’s very seldom that a story comes to me as one genre. Although, I do have a fantasy trilogy in the hopper (has been for 30 years) that is 100% speculative fiction. In short, writing this way gives me the freedom to be who I am as a writer.

DG: Many of the chapters have dreamlike elements. You and I have spoken before about dreams being real. Can you share your thoughts about that? Are visions real? What is real?

CM: To me, visions are absolutely real. In fact, they are an integral part of my life. Dreams and visions have helped me; they’ve prepared me, as my dreams did in my memoir Torndado Dreams, to climb the cliff in Born of Water; and they keep me in touch with the realms that exist beyond this human, Earth-bound, experience.

DG: Nature and the natural world are prominent in this book. Mari has earned great acclaim for her work of writing obituaries for bodies of water, which according to the character Rhys Jensen, the former Lake Michigan representative for The Great Lakes Consortium, have “changed the lens upon which we absorb the myriad of uncomfortable truths we now face because of our shared failure to protect the only home we have.” What a powerful statement!

How important is it to you to speak to the real problems of our world, such as climate change, in a fictional, futuristic way?

Constance: Having been influenced by Star Trek since the age of 5, I believe it is now in my blood to talk about uncomfortable realities of the present from a place of distance. But life is like that, right? I didn’t write my memoir while in the middle of my therapy. I didn’t write climbing the cliff while I was on it. We need distance and perspective and time to understand and recognize outcomes and consequences. But I believe there are some of us who can look at systems, recognize how they are functioning, extrapolate future behaviors of people based upon their current actions, and roll all that out to a logical conclusion. A bit off topic, but my mother has often told me of her expectations she had for her future with my father, which were miles away from her reality with him. My constant refrain has been, “What about your past experience with him made you think that was possible?”

Placing things like climate change in the future allows for A plus B equaled C. The writer can show how certain actions or inactions lead to particular outcomes. You can remove the speculation through the speculative.

DG: You’ve written memoir and now hybrid. What’s next for you?

CM: I want to continue the story of Mari and Rhys from Born of Water. I have a few essays I want to pen. I’m beginning my co-author journey with Kris Roberts. (For those who’ve been following the story, she is the woman who was abducted leaving my house when we were children.) And then, there’s that trilogy that’s been in the hopper for 30 years.