3 Questions with Emily Giangiulio
Emily Giangiulio is a writer from Philadelphia currently living in Seattle as a second-year MFA candidate in prose and predoctoral instructor of writing at the University of Washington. In 2020, she graduated from Bard College with a dual B.A. in Cultural Anthropology and Written Arts. Her short fiction has appeared in Bennington Review. She is currently writing a speculative eco-fiction novel. You can find her at www.emilygiangiulio.com.
Fiction Editor Frankie Concepcion chats with Emily about her work from Issue 71, out now. Emily will also be reading at our launch party on January 26th! Register here.
Emily—thank you again so much for sharing "natura morta / still life" with us. Every time I read it, one of the things that I am continuously struck and awed by are the ways in which you use your knowledge of nature—from natural history, to shark anatomy, to tomato gardening. You render each with authority, vivid imagery, and such captivating prose. Can you tell us a little more about the process of balancing facts and imagery, prose and research, to create this piece and incorporate the natural world into its narrative?
Thank you so much for your thoughtful reading of my piece. I find that entrenching myself in the language of science and natural history provides much-needed scaffolding without which I would feel totally adrift. But after the initial research process, it helps to find ways to dismantle the scaffolding, to effectively “forget” some of the knowledge, so that a story with a human pulse can emerge. I like to look at writing fiction as Ursula K. Le Guin describes in her “carrier bag theory of fiction,” which is a method that connects theories on the origination of tools to the structure of fiction as a ‘“feminine” form wherein the natural shape of fiction might be that of “a medicine bundle, holding things in particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” The making-with and becoming-with of fiction allows me as the writer to fill those in-between spaces and load up my “carrier bag.” In this story, the young narrator initially understands the natural world through the lens of what her father has taught her. The collective shark-consciousness sections allowed me to push past her frame-of-reference, to have some fun incorporating knowledge on biological evolution, but through a seemingly nonhuman perspective.
The relationships in "natura morta / still life," at least in my experience, were the beating heart of the story. Yes, there is the relationship between the protagonist and "the boy," but also the relationship between mother and father, the protagonist's relationship with each of her parents, her relationship to the sea and her surroundings. Can you tell us a little more about how you conceived of these relationships, and whether or not they evolved as the piece progressed?
My initial hope was that this would be a piece centering a nuclear family that doesn’t know how to communicate. The narrator considers herself “fluent” in her father’s silences and, in many ways, sees herself as similar to her father in the way he relates to the natural world and expresses himself through fishing and gardening. In an early draft of this piece, the mother was all but absent from the page. I was questioned about why this was during a workshop with David Nikki Crouse last spring. I realized, then, that the mother’s relegation to domesticity in the backdrop of this story was a symptom of a patriarchal home in which she was being subjected to their silences. This causes the daughter to (mistakenly) believe that her mother is rejecting the natural world she shares with her father. When in reality, by the end of the piece, we see that the mother is the one striving for connection and communication with her daughter.
Is there anything you’d like to share about "natura morta / still life" that we don’t know?
This was one of those pieces that came together magically. I had just finished going down an internet rabbit hole looking through 17th century still life paintings of fish, sharks, and dead game (don’t ask me why) when my own father called me up to tell me about the leftovers from his bluefish dinner that he had just buried in his garden. And while he is by no means one in the same with the father character in this story, I have him to thank for my knowledge of gutting a fish and cooking tomato sauce.