Photo credit: Rob Skuja
Interview by Kate Finegan
Paola Ferrante is a powerful Toronto-based writer whose work consistently unsettles and inspires me. We first connected through Twitter and then became climbing partners. Grappling with difficult routes turned out to be the perfect foundation for grappling with difficult craft questions. We met regularly to go over each other’s drafts, swapping weird and wonderful animal facts while asking probing questions to clarify the worlds that we were building in our stories. She excels across literary forms. Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (Mansfield Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and her short fiction was featured in The Journey Prize Anthology 32 (McClelland & Stewart, 2020). Her newest book is the short story collection Her Body Among Animals (Book*hug, 2023).
As I now live in Edmonton, this conversation took place over Zoom, but its content echoes discussions that we had in our face-to-face and virtual critique sessions over the years.
Kate Finegan: What inspired you to bring fairy tales and horror together for this collection?
Paola Ferrante: They’re very much the same thing. If we go back to fairy tales—I’m not talking about Disney, but the Brothers Grimm—they end badly. There’s no happy ending in fairy tales. “Hansel and Gretel” is about child abuse, and in “Cinderella,” the sisters cut off their feet. It’s really horror-movie stuff, so it felt very natural for those two things to be together.
And then sci-fi, which is also in the collection, is kind of like horror. For example, the old Star Trek was very much the hopeful version of the future, but still, elements of horror were in there. One of the big influences for “When Foxes Die Electric” was Star Trek: Voyager with Seven of Nine and the Borg Collective. The idea of having this hive mind take away all your individuality inspired me to write that story as well as [the story,] “So What If It’s Supposed to Rain” with the Mother hive mind.
To me, all those three things were a very natural fit together because they all were sort of variants on the same theme, which is exposing the darker, scarier side as a warning.
KF: Your stories are grounded in facts—often biological—from our real world. Was that element there from the beginning, or did you find your way to that while building this collection?
PF: I think the animal element started as an accident. I was leaning on those facts, and they became recurring. I remember taking some early stories to my writing group, and they were like, “Oh, more animals.” I decided to make this a deliberate device.
I’m fascinated by the more brutal side of nature, like defensive thanatosis, where an animal plays dead so it doesn’t get killed. There’s also the most metal bird ever: the shrike, which is this horrifying little bird that, as a mating display, takes its kills and sticks them on the branches of trees like grotesque Christmas tree ornaments.
The fact that this exists already in our real world, and then you overlay it with the genre conventions of horror or fairy tale or sci-fi, can make the stories more real for people. They also become a little more disturbing because you can’t distance yourself from their reality by saying, “It’s just a story. It’s okay.” We often do that with fairy tales, horror films, and science fiction. This grounding in facts adds a layer of “No, this really exists.” I think it makes people pause a little more. So I would say it started as an accident, but it became intentional.
KF: How do you turn a habit into a deliberate device?
PF: It’s about committing to the fact that this is how your brain is going to think for this particular story, and you can’t think outside of that zone because that’s the zone you’re inhabiting.
So, for example, in “Mermaid Girls,” I decided that everything is filtered through Emma’s love of astronomy because her mother was an astronomer, and she is dealing with the grief of not having her mother as she goes through adolescence. And in “The Silent Grave of Birds,” everything was filtered through the absent father and Gavin’s obsession with birds, which brought him closer to his absent father.
In creating the voice of a character, I would focus on conveying the emotion of what they’re saying, but I would also ask myself, “How can I say this in a way that is related to astronomy or birds or in the voice of a robot?”
So, the narrator of “When Foxes Die Electric” is not going to describe herself as beautiful, but she’s going to talk about her waist-to-hip proportions and how her body temperature matches a woman’s when in ovulation because that is more attractive to human males.
KF: A lot of your stories deal with climate anxiety and grief, even as you’re highlighting the brutal side of nature. How do you understand the process of grieving something that may be quite violent and grotesque, without romanticizing it?
PF: Nature is not always beautiful. Nature is not always kind. That’s ridiculous. But just because it isn’t those things doesn’t mean we shouldn’t grieve it for all the wonderful things it also is.
I think this goes to the nature of grief for anything, even a person. In order to really grieve something, you need to come to terms with what it actually is, because otherwise, the grief doesn’t feel real. It’s an idealization of a thing. That’s why it was important to me to have factual things that were sometimes grotesque in the book—about nature and about characters too. The parents who are grieved in these stories weren’t necessarily good parents, but their children still grieve them.
KF: You establish several different worlds in this collection. How do you find your way to the rules of a particular story and figure out how that world is going to function?
PF: I really like world-building, and I think that’s a symptom of watching too much sci-fi and horror. I think the rules often revolve around the main character and their emotional concern. In “So What If It’s Supposed to Rain,” Evie’s mother is terrified of having another baby because she feels like she didn’t do it right the first time, and she’s under heavy scrutiny from other mothers in The Nest, who are all attached to the Mother to form a hive mind about everything a perfect mother should know.
So, The Nest and the Mother came as a result of Lil’s anxiety about having another baby, just like the magic mirror is symbolic of Emma’s and Dee’s desires in “Mermaid Girls.” The dolls and bird feathers in “The Silent Grave of Birds” are symbolic of Gavin’s guilt, and toxic masculinity is the sludge from the harbour. It infiltrates their lives and the natural environment.
Part of the world-building too is a little bit of an exercise in “what if,” like “What if we can’t clean up the air?” Well, the rich might end up living in a closed community, and people will have to put on respirators and masks to go outside.
KF: “Everyday Horror Show” includes movie sound effects throughout. Do you see those as connected to the fears or anxieties of the main character?
PF: They’re definitely connected to those fears. Obviously, she’s suffering from postpartum anxiety. The sound effects are something that isn’t what it seems to be. On the surface, this mother is functioning as she should—she’s taking care of her baby while her husband is on film shoots—but she’s not really functioning. There’s a layer of this is what this is supposed to be, and this is what it really is. The sound of frying bacon is not really rain, but it sounds like it.
The movie effects were inspired by a friend of mine who used to work as a grip and told me about a shoot they did once where they used pig fat for snow, so I had to put that detail in there. That generated the idea of using effects, and sound effects turned out to be easier to mimic on paper.
KF: Why do you think sounds are easier to convey on paper?
PF: I have a background in poetry, so I’m constantly trying to hear the line and how it mirrors what I’m trying to say. So, if I’m trying to convey a heartbeat, I’ll use words with a certain beat.
KF: At what point in the process does sound on the page come into your mind?
PF: It’s always there. When I’m writing a story, I can go through garbage draft after garbage draft. Then at some point, I have to nail down the first third of it. That pretty much needs to be in its final form. There can be editing here and there, but I need to be able to read it and like how it sounds and what’s happening on the page. Then I can write the rest of it. The last two-thirds is a joy.
But yeah, I think the sound comes in immediately, and I definitely am one of those people who reads drafts and pages out loud to make sure the rhythm is where I want it to be and the beats are in the right place.
KF: What are you working on now?
PF: I’m working on a speculative literary novel called Completables. It takes place in a semi-distant future in the South Padre luxury hotel, where Earth’s climate is completely shot, and billionaires are waiting there to get to Mars. The bartenders in that hotel are in competition with robots called the Anyneeds Neurologically Accurate Automatons, and the bartenders and service staff are all taking these very high-end drugs called Completables that can do things like lift your mood and even erase your memory. There’s a class of women in the hotel called Social Escorts, and they are companions to these billionaire men. They simultaneously live a life of luxury, while also giving up all personal autonomy, including seeing their children. They even have to give up the memory of their children.
The novel starts when one of the bartenders takes some of these drugs for her child who is suffering from depression. She gets fired, and her choice is to become a Social or live a destitute life in the beach camps. Through her journey, the novel explores what really living your best life is and what happiness really is. I have a third of a draft, so it’s going somewhere.
Paola Ferrante is a writer living with depression. Her debut fiction collection, Her Body Among Animals (Book*hug Press, 2023), contains stories that won Room Magazine’s Fiction Prize and The New Quarterly’s Peter Hinchcliffe Award. She was longlisted for the Journey Prize, and her poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (Mansfield Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology 32 (McClelland & Stewart, 2020), After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st Century, Ed. André Forget (Vehicule Press, 2022), Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (Biblioasis, 2021), PRISM International, and elsewhere. She lives in Toronto with her partner Mat, and their son.
Kate Finegan is a writer living on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton. She serves as novel/novella editor for Split/Lip Press. You can learn more at katefinegan.ink or tinyletter.com/katefinegan.