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Katrina Marty Interviews Toni Mirosevich

Toni Mirosevich grew up in a Croatian-American fishing family in Everett, Washington. Her new book of linked short stories, Spell Heaven, is out now from from Counterpoint Press. Previous books include Pink Harvest (MidList Press, First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award, Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and five books of poetry. She is an alumna of MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center, among others. Her cross-genre writings have been anthologized in Best Women’s Travel Writing, Best American Travel Writing, AutoBioDiversity: True Stories from Zyzzyva, Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, and received Notable Mention in Best American Essays. After early years working in various labor jobs she began teaching creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1991. She is a professor emeritus at SFSU and lives with her wife in California.

Purchase a copy of Spell Heaven here.  

From Intern Katrina Marty:  Spell Heaven is an intertwining collection of creative nonfiction stories that explores time, memory, and isolation. When the narrator and her wife move to a small town on the coast of California, she starts to question her career and the people around her. After jumping from one job to the next the narrator lands in the academia world, but still doesn’t feel like she belongs. Not only does she feel this way at her job, but in her new neighborhood as well. Born from a Croatian American fishing family, the narrator’s past and present revolve around the sea. These stories dive deep into self-growth and discovery, while also trying to find a sense of community. Toni Mirosevich examines the redirection of one's life, as well as what it means to find a human connection in a world full of strangers. Throughout this collection the narrator’s journey ebbs and flows, and each story resides with the ever-changing sea. 

KM: Have you always associated time and memory with the sea, and if so, were you always conscious of it?

Toni Mirosevich: Growing up in a fishing family, spending all my time on the docks whenever my father was in from the sea, always living by the water, first in Everett, Washington, then San Pedro, CA, Monterey, CA and now in Pacifica, there’s no way to separate or escape the themes of time and memory and the sea. There are so many memories of standing on the edge of the sea and looking out towards the horizon. And these days that’s where you’ll find me too. There’s a great quote from W.G. Sebald in Rings of Saturn about fishing people on a pier. “They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them and before them nothing but emptiness.” That’s where I most love to be, looking out, with land locked worries and concerns behind me. In the same chapter, W.G. Sebald, wrote, “I was standing on perforated ground as it were which might have given way at any moment.” That’s what it’s like at the sea’s edge. The sight of a boat on the horizon or storm clouds coming in off the ocean causes the present or the “ground” to give way. It’s then that I’m on the precipice of memory and fall in.

The photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, took an incredible series of photographs of the ancient seas and once wrote, “Memory is a mysterious thing: you don’t remember what happened yesterday, yet you can recall moments from childhood with perfect clarity.” And it’s true. All those early experiences and images continue to show up in the writing; light on the water, winds off the sea, the smell of salt air. What it felt like being around larger than life people, who knew how to tell a good story, who knew the art of bullshit. Time and memory have always been all over the work; in my book of nonfiction stories, Pink Harvest, or in my books of poetry. My grandparents, from Croatia and the Dalmatian Islands, were fishing people too so the sea is not only in my memory bank but was in theirs too, memories of fishing in the old country that they handed down to me. You could say the sea is in my DNA.

KM: Were there any themes you found throughout your collection that you didn’t notice until they were all together that surprised you?

TM: Once I saw a hand-written sign on a telephone pole that read: I’ve lost something. I don’t know what it is. If you find it please call…At the beginning of the book, the narrator starts out not knowing what she’s looking for, but has an inkling she’s searching for something: meaning, community, release from daily cares, and from the constraints of her job in academia. She’s looking for something and fleeing something. As the stories build she lucks upon a community she wants to be a part of, a community of outsiders who hang out by the sea. Feeling very much like an outsider in academia she realizes she’d rather be in with this newly found out crowd. To do that she has to get closer to the people she’s meeting, has to leave behind her assumptions about others, about strangers. Assumptions are what stops the narrator or any of us from going deeper to find out that each person is complex, fallible, human. In Toni Morrison’s extraordinary essay, “Strangers,” she wrote “…the resources available to us for benign access to each other, for vaulting the mere blue air that separates us, are few but powerful; language, image and experience…” I’ve always loved that line and the idea, of vaulting the mere blue air. So that’s a theme throughout, the need to leave behind the ivory tower of academia or any scripted role that keeps us separated from each other and vault the mere blue air, in this book, between the narrator and the people she sees each day. Learning or remembering the art of bullshit (language), returning to the sea (image), and joining with a community at the sea’s edge (experience) help her get there, help her make that vaulting leap.

KM: Which of your stories found in Spell Heaven is your favorite and why?

TM: Two stories come to mind, the first story in the book and one near the end. In a way they serve as bookends. In “Devil Wind,” which opens the book, the narrator is on the precipice of a search. She doesn’t know that yet but when a fisherwoman tells her a story of a storm at sea that triggers a memory in the narrator, who remembers that very storm in the Northwest when she was a child. The fisherwoman goes on to reveal that what she really wants to be is a writer. The narrator, who is a writer, wants to be on the sea. By the end of the story she realizes memory is the catch she is looking for. Her Croatian grandmother always suggested she go out and dig in the garden if she was depressed, “malo po malo, little by little.” So she sets out to find a world she remembers and malo po malo, the stories begin.

The other story that holds a place in my heart is “Who I Used To Be,” where the narrator comes to realize that we all carry what I’ll call these “past lives” in us, that are still a part of who we are. The narrator used to be a woman who worked physical labor jobs and then years later became a university professor. A man who sits on the bench by the sea and drinks the day away used to be a checker at Safeway, owned a house, before his luck turned. And it’s not just the jobs we held but who we were earlier in our lives, how we viewed the world before other experiences changed us. But it’s as if we still carry all those other selves inside. Who knows what lives others have led underneath their current iterations?

KM: Out of all the stories, why did you pick Spell Heaven to be the title of the whole collection?

TM: I was walking on a pier one day and looked down to see a scribbled note on the pier walkway. It looked like some kid was trying to write a letter to God and was trying to spell “heaven.” But they keep misspelling the word. From there a story emerges of a narrator who begins to wonder about all the ways people try to define or spell heaven in their lives. For some buying a new car is heaven. Or making more money or some increase in status. Or finding a new love. But what if heaven doesn’t always have something to do with acquisitions? The people who fish on the pier and look out at the sea each day, who aren’t tied to the clock or the computer, isn’t that heavenly too? Or watching your child sleep at night? Or looking across the room at your loved one and realizing you’re so lucky to be loved and love someone in return? Aren’t there a million ways to spell heaven?

KM: Is there anything you’d like to share about Spell Heaven that we don’t know?

TM: Back to malo po malo. I didn’t plan the book, didn’t have an organized structure in mind, a set trajectory or a specific narrative arc. I didn’t even think book. It really evolved, was built, malo po malo, little by little. In fact, at one stage of the book “Little By Little,” was a proposed title. Somehow, by each encounter with each new person, the narrator learns something, is taught by these strangers. She discovers what’s important and finds what she’s looking for, gets closer and closer to finding what she’s been missing in her life. There’s this freedom and loss of loneliness and happiness in being with others that surprises her. In essence, she starts out feeling isolated and apart from others, and then finds her crew, her gang, her people. You could say she finds a kind of home where she is welcomed and through the stories welcome others in. 

KM: You mentioned in the first story, “Devil Wind”, that a memory drives the narrator to write. Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process? Does memory encourage you to write as well?

TM: Whenever a friend tells me a story or I see some stranger on a walk—let’s say someone who looks vaguely familiar, like an echo of someone I once knew—there’s an internal leap that happens and links what or whom I’ve just seen or heard to a memory. Immediately I’m reminded of something similar that once happened to me or a loved one, or that person I once knew, and a memory blossoms up. That recognition brings me closer to the moment. As in, “Oh, I have some idea of what that experience must be like.” In a way that triggering is a type of search for connection and understanding. Memories, imaginings, all start to link up with the moment as do what comes next.

This happens in the writing all the time. In the story “A Year of Mercy,” a mother I notice in a parking lot looks like she’s on drugs. Her mannerisms, her obvious altered state brings to mind a memory of seeing a young woman on a bus ride in another city, who was so out of it she couldn’t stand up. In writing the story that leap is included, is folded in. So memory not only encourages me to write but to link like things up, to welcome them into the story. You could call it an involuntary associative process.

KM: You stated earlier that you didn’t have an organized structure in mind with this collection. All of these stories flow into the next and although you said there was never a specific narrative arc, we can see it as we watch the narrator. Do you think the narrator’s journey is over? Do you think she found what she set out to find?

TM: “Once the search is in progress, something will be found.” This is one of my favorite cards from Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies card game. The deck contains over 100 cards and you select a card at random and apply it to whatever creative working dilemma you’re facing. I love that card and the narrator of the stories would love this card too. Though she doesn’t know what she’s looking for, every time she takes a walk she finds something. As long as she keeps searching and finding the unexpected, why stop? I can’t imagine this narrator or myself thinking the journey is ever over. Yes, in Spell Heaven she finds something, an unexpected community, a gang to hang with, but what comes next?

In creative writing classes I taught at San Francisco State University, I created exercises and prompts based on the idea of writing “findings.” Each prompt was intended to trigger something in the imagination or memory and when it worked the students would be off and running. Without the overlay of how to plot their story or what structure had to be employed, the most amazing writing happened.

KM: Besides getting ready for Spell Heaven’s release, what are you currently working on right now?

TM: I’m working on a memoir that could be called a search and rescue mission. It centers around the family fishing boat which we had to sell after my father’s early death. After the boat was sold it changed hands a number of times and was lost to us for over 30 years. We’d imagine and wonder where it ended up but never knew. Someone had seen it in Astoria, Oregon or up in Alaska. Years later I found out that in the course of its life the boat sank three times and each time was raised to sail the sea again. The family’s fortunes—or lack of fortunes—and our health and hopes sank and rose as well. The boat turns out to be a metaphor for what can buoy us through turbulent seas; literal or emotional. The rescue of the boat from its unknown trajectory over time causes memory to be rescued as well. Again, “once the search is in progress something will be found.” I don’t know yet what new findings are out there to come upon. But I know they’ll be there. 

Katrina Marty is currently an intern at Hayden’s Ferry Review for Spring 2022 and is majoring in Creative Writing with a minor in Business. While also on the ASU swim team, she enjoys exploring Arizona with her family and friends, and will be graduating next Spring. 

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