On Writing into Danger

My second novel, Pigs, came out this past October, sixteen and a half years after my first novel, City of Ghosts, was published. It follows the lives of four parentless children who live on an island that serves as the repository for the entire world’s trash. Ships pass by and drop garbage in the water. The garbage washes to shore. Then the children gather it up and feed it to a herd of giant, magical pigs. The pigs are capable of making vanish anything the larger world doesn’t want to see. 

Pigs asks questions about the environment and about the ways in which the world neglects that which it should rightly love, about the ways in which the world turns its back on the most vulnerable within it. It’s a novel for adults that makes use of narratives and settings often found in children’s books. It’s driven by danger, but it took me a long time to let that danger in.

I’m more than a little self-conscious about the sixteen year gap between books, and even more embarrassed that I have to blame it on my kids: my son was born just six weeks after that first novel was published. It’s his fault that I couldn’t write!

But the blame doesn’t exactly fall in the place one might expect. Yes, life became very crowded once babies entered the picture. Yes, free time was hard to come by, my brain was confused by lack of sleep, and the pressures of doing my part to support our family caused a lot of anxiety that got in the way of the creative process. That might explain one or two lost years—but not sixteen of them. 

Instead, I place the blame on the way motherhood changed my ability to deal with danger.

What is it that makes us keep reading? For me, and I think for many of us, it’s a sense of danger. Without the possibility of something going wrong, and without the occasion to watch characters as they handle themselves when the inevitable does go wrong, there’s little that keeps us in a book. Art without danger is boring. Art without danger is maybe not even art at all.

Once my babies were born—first my son, and then, a year and a half later, my daughter—all I could think about was keeping them safe. I padded the sharp corners of the coffee table so they wouldn’t hit their heads. I bundled them up when we went outside so they wouldn’t catch a cold. I changed moments in stories I read aloud so they wouldn’t be scary. I pretended that death did not exist. And the more I forced and forced the world to be safe for them, the more the life drained out of my writing.

Pigs is not the only novel I drafted in those sixteen years. I wrote and discarded a novel that followed a teenage boy. Somehow the narrative swerved toward safety every time he got himself into a risky situation: a late night drive on an icy road? The car ends up nestled in a soft snow bank. I wrote and discarded another novel in which wildfire threatens a small town: ash coming precipitously close to the town’s water supply? The winds miraculously change. The characters didn’t have to face the fire’s hot breath on their skin. Everyone was safe, but both novels were boring.

Finally, I realized I had a problem—I was conflating the impulses of motherhood, for whom the prime imperative is safety, with the impulses of a novelist, for whom the ability to let risk enter is a foundational skill.

And so, I decided, I needed to deal with the issue as directly as I could.

It’s no accident that the protagonists of Pigs are children. It’s no accident that they live in a world that pressures them with danger from all directions—the garbage-eating pigs, who act against the children without maliciousness but also without compassion; the island’s reckless adults, who don’t care who they harm in the quest to further their own pleasure; the ocean surrounding the island, toxic and moody and conveyer of trash; the larger, unseen world, disposing of the vulnerable without a second thought.

The danger is so overwhelming, the possibility of rescue so slender, that the children have no choice but to rely upon themselves. There is no mother to step in and save them. The idea of a comforting mother only enters their lives as a ridiculous dream.

Once I started writing danger, I suddenly couldn’t remember why I’d run away from it for so long. 

And my children? It turns out they’re my biggest supporters and the novel’s biggest fans. They loved the idea of menacing pigs. They loved the idea of a toxic ocean. They loved the idea of a fairy tale for adults. They wanted to know what the children would do, and they had plenty of ideas for how they might best escape. 

My children are teenagers now, older than the children in the novel, but part of the generations that will be affected by the dangers the novel asks readers to think about. They are aware of risk, and aware of the necessity of acting in the face of risk, and the last thing they would want is for the world to pretend that danger doesn’t exist.

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Johanna Stoberock is the author of the novels Pigs (Red Hen Press) and City of Ghosts (W.W. Norton). The 2019 recipient of the Artist Trust/Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, 2016 Runner Up for the Italo Calvino Prize for Fiction, and a 2012 Jack Straw Fellow, Johanna has received residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Review of Books, Lit Hub, the Best of the Net Anthology, and elsewhere. She lives in Walla Walla, where she teaches in the Composition and First Year programs at Whitman College. Read more about her at www.johannastoberock.com

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PIGS

Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a herd of insatiable pigs: a perfect system.

But when a barrel washes to shore with a boy inside, the children must decide whether he is more of the world’s detritus, meant to be fed to the pigs, or whether he is one of them.

Written in exquisitely wrought prose and suffused with darkly absurd humor, Pigs asks questions about community, environmental responsibility, and the possibility of innocence. https://www.amazon.com/Pigs-Johanna-Stoberock/dp/1597090441

 

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