by Ty Phelps
Mary Terrier (MFA: Johns Hopkins University) is the 2018-2019 Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at UW Madison. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Pleiades, and The Austin Chronicle. She is a native of Austin, Texas, and is at work on a novel. She will be at ALL on February 16th as part of the Cross Genre Reading for the Watershed Reading Series.
Mary sat down with Ty Phelps of the ALLReview to talk about her writing history, her role at UW, and the intersection of grief and desire.
ALL: Do you have an origin story? What drew you into writing?
MT: I had a weird, lonely childhood (is this every writer’s origin story??) I grew up in a crowded, chaotic household, and I was lucky to have parents who loved me well—but they were often preoccupied by trying to make ends meet, trying to care for my grandparents, etc. The house was always under construction. My dad was a carpenter, and worked multiple jobs. My mom was working full time and going to school. My grandparents lived with us—but they weren’t able to care for themselves: my grandfather was bed-bound and my grandmother had advanced Alzheimer's disease. I promise [not to go] on at length about childhood isolation!—but it was a weird space to grow up in. There was this constant physical closeness that wasn’t driven by love or intimacy but unfortunate circumstance.
I had good friends, but I felt like there was this enormous part of my life—and myself—that I had to keep hidden.
All that’s to say, when I started writing, some of this hidden stuff came out: my grandmother walking around the house topless, filling her shoes with potato chips, calling me a bitch. And when people read what I’d written and they said it was beautiful, more than the pleasure of being told I was good at something, I felt like I was being seen, accepted, and loved for sharing the ugliest and most difficult parts of my life and myself. It felt like a magic trick; now you’re alone, now you aren’t—now you don’t see me, now you do.
ALL: What is your role as the current Carl Djerassi Fellow at the UW?
MT: As a fellow, I teach a creative writing workshop at UW each semester. I’ve had the last five weeks or so off, and classes start back up soon, and I’m actually really looking forward to it. Teaching allows me to read and discuss—with smart, interesting, driven people—many of the things that I want to be reading and discussing anyway. It also gives a shape to my weeks; it ensures that I don’t drown in my own head. At least once a week, I have to come up for air to meet with my students.
I’m also tagging along to fellow Fellow Emily Shetler’s narrative comics class at Oak Hill Correctional Institute. Getting to work in another creative form—getting to draw!—has been such an unexpected and transformative pleasure of this fellowship year. Having another form to work in that’s completely low-stakes is such a great antidote to writer’s block.
Other than that, pretty soon, I think, I’ll have the job of reading fellowship applications and helping to choose my replacement.
ALL: Tell me a little about your current project.
MT: I’m moving back and forth between working on a novel and working on stories. Both have to do with grief, and the way that grief feels in the body. The poet Donald Hall wrote this beautiful poem about his late wife Jane Kenyon, in which he says, “Lust is grief / that has turned over in bed / to look the other way.” My current writing is consumed with/by this idea. It makes so much sense to me: of course grief feels like desire—what is grief but a kind of longing in which the object isn’t accessible or isn’t physically on this planet? What happens to desire when its object is absent or invisible?
ALL: Do you have a defined writing process, or a set of rituals to get you going?
MT: Anything that can scare back fear and ego! Those are the two things that most often get in the way of my writing. In the past it has helped me to write as close to sleep as possible—to wake up preternaturally early, like 4:00 a.m.—when I’m closer to a sort of dream logic, before my critical mind is awake enough to interfere. Right now, I’m doing a lot of writing in motion—walking and running and driving. I’ve been getting stuck a lot recently, particularly with novel writing, and I’ve found that physical movement helps to stimulate intellectual/emotional movement. As soon as I start walking or driving, a line pops into my head!
ALL: What do you think is the role of a fiction writer in society today? Why does fiction matter?
MT: Reading and writing—about widely different experiences of the world, different ways of engaging with language, living in different bodies and in different places—can be wonderful antidotes to isolation. I’m always thinking about how my own writing can be as honest and as compassionate as possible. Those are things I’m always trying to get closer to as a writer, and things that I want to model for my students.
ALL: Where can we find your work?
MT: I’m a slow writer and slow to publish. I have a story in Kenyon Review (an excerpt of which you can find online) and another in Pleiades. I’ll also have a story in an upcoming issue of The Paris Review! This summer, I think.
Ty Phelps is a writer, teacher, and musician. He won The Gravity of the Thing’s 2016 Six Word Story Contest, was a finalist for Gigantic Sequins flash fiction contest, and has published work in Writespace and the 1001 Journal. Ty enjoys loud music, pine trees, decaf coffee, and playing drums of all sorts. He's back in Madison, his hometown, after a decade in Portland, Oregon.