February 1, 2022

__________

You are writing a story about a pandemic–during a pandemic. How do you feel real-world events have influenced your writing, and what inspired you to explore a fictional pandemic?

Real-world events absolutely influenced this piece. I think it’s clear that what we’re doing right now—socially, politically, and even individually—isn’t working. And that definitely seeps into the story.  While it departs from the COVID pandemic in a lot of ways, hints of recent events are sprinkled throughout—namely the infrastructure deterioration, ineffectual governments, social upheaval, and the mental health effects of social distancing.

This story actually started as a few paragraphs describing a tiny town I drove through on my way to Jersey Shore with my husband. It was the first time we’d really left our apartment after that initial lockdown period. The town’s streets were empty and all the little local businesses, which I was sure wouldn’t survive the shutdowns, had these “We’re far apart but close together at heart” signs that were popular at the time.

I’d been driving through this town ever since I was a kid and seeing it like that just punched me in the gut. All I could think was “This is how we’re handling the political and social disarray right now? Slogans? We can’t even agree on if this pandemic is real or not.” I felt so scared and, honestly, irrationally angry. It was like “Oh god, we’re so screwed if we think the only thing standing between us and chaos is cute signage.”

On a personal level, I think this story was an outlet for my own pessimism and feelings that maybe humanity isn’t cut out for this whole civilization thing.

Not only are people drowning themselves in marshes and oceans, aquatic imagery makes other appearances, too: the “ocean” of the narrator’s Go Fish cards, the “conch” of her ear. At the end of the story the narrator realizes she can drown herself in the river. What do you feel is the role of water in your story? 

Part of water’s role in the story was to reflect the setting. It takes place in a tiny town in rural South Jersey close to the Delaware River and not far from the Jersey shore. Water is a big part of life there.

Water also serves as a symbolic parallel to the Drift. Water is the most primal thing on earth. Human beings come from water and fluids—the primordial soup, the womb, our bodies. Swimming makes you feel weightless and free. Yet water is also one of the most dangerous and terrifying things on earth. The ocean is one of our last frontiers—over 10 million species we still haven’t identified. Even on an individual level, there’s always some discomfort with water. When you get into water that’s murky and you can’t see the bottom, there’s the nagging anxiety about what lies beneath.

In that way, water really does reflect the Drift itself. It can give you a primal connection to the world or it can kill you.

“The Drift” is a story about connection and disconnection, loneliness and searching. It’s devastating when the narrator finds—not to give too much away—the photos in the neighbor boy’s mailbox. It’s interesting that in a world quite literally falling apart, this is where the narrator begins to feel the drift herself. What do you hope readers take away from the story’s end?

If I had to distill it down to a key takeaway: A healthy dose of delusion has its place–especially during times of trauma—but it can also hold you back from actually confronting your problems and making true change.     

The narrator spends most of this story clinging to her last bastion of normalcy: a connection with a boy that she, in reality, doesn’t know much at all. She spends a lot of time filling in the gaps of their relationship with fantasies about who he is, what their relationship is, and what they mean to each other. When she’s confronted with the truth about their relationship, it opens pandora’s box. It becomes a cascade of truths about the world she’s living in and what the future really looks like for her and everyone she knows.

Instead of hiding from it—which is what everyone in this story is doing, really—she’s forced to sit with the pain and, ultimately, decide if she’d rather kill herself or enter into this new, more animalistic mode of being.

Read “The Drift” HERE. 

Extra Content

When I’m writing, I get stuck on some songs and I’ll just play them on repeat. It’s a bit obsessive, but it helps keep a cohesive vision and tone in mind. This playlist contains all of the songs I couldn’t shake when writing “The Drift.” Listening to them together, they do create a pretty solid soundtrack.