3 Questions with Audrey Bauman
Audrey Bauman is a PhD student at the University of Utah and Senior Books Editor at Quarterly West. She received her MFA from Northern Michigan University. Her work has appeared in CRAFT, HAD, Paper Darts, and others.
Fiction Editor Frankie Concepcion chats with Audrey about her work from Issue 72, out now!
Audrey! Thank you so much for sharing "The River" with us! As you know, the theme of Issue 72 of Hayden's Ferry Review is "Re-mix." One of the things I loved most about this story was how it came into conversation with a literary tradition of sirens, mermaids, and mythical/spectral women who are said to lure victims to their death by drowning. Recently, the re-mixing of myth has allowed writers to challenge the sexist and heteronormative tropes that can exist in your average fairy tale. Can you tell us more about the literary traditions and/or myths you drew inspiration from, and your process of queering/subverting/re-mixing these seemingly familiar concepts?
I’ve always worked in speculative or fabulist genres and admired how these genres are mixtures of familiar and strange, what Darko Suvin called “cognitive estrangement” and Karen Russell calls the “Kansas-to-Oz ratio.” I like playing with this ratio in my process; I’m most creative when responding to a trope or book or memory. I’m also bad at following rules. I started this story to learn about writing horror and from an obsession with the weirdness of water-spirits, and I like that there’s space to read this as horror, but I couldn’t make that the story—I’m just too into love.
Desire is so incredibly present in this story—I might even consider it the engine of the piece. It is the connective tissue between Cathy and Annie. It requires sacrifice and risk. It is the cause of a lot of uncertainty and self-doubt for both Cathy and Annie, with Cathy even asking: "How do you know...when what you want is too much?" Can you tell us your approach to writing desire, and how it facilitates the development of these two characters?
I think desire relates to that question about re-mix. I was interested in what happens when who you are and the story you find yourself in work against what you want. What do you do with that desire—do you resist or submit? Can queer desire help us imagine outside of constraint? Annie and Cathy both grew from there. Also the form, where the nighttime river scene represents a space of wanting and imagination, entangling with and then taking over this other thread of constraint through schools, time, shitty neighbors and dads, helped me ground the story in their desires.
Is there anything you’d like to share about "The River" that we don’t know?
The inspiration for the setting of “The River” is based on a real place on the edges of my hometown, Little Rock, AR. Check it out!
