“Bluebeard” by Mark Brazaitis appeared in Issue 40 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this tory.
When I was in elementary school, I owned a book of fairy tales, one of which was “Bluebeard.” The story of a wealthy, manipulative, and merciless nobleman and the guileless women he marries and murders terrified me. Especially horrific was the underground chamber in which Bluebeard killed and dismembered his wives. Flash forward three decades, and I am a volunteer at a federal prison thirty miles from the city where I live. The room in which the women’s book club I co-lead meets is like Bluebeard’s dungeon: dank and windowless and claustrophobic. The eight women are smart, thoughtful, and undeserving of the long sentences they’ve been punished with. I imagine a contemporary “Bluebeard” in which the villain is capitalism (and its offspring, the prison industrial complex) personified.
What was the most difficult aspect in writing this story?
I spent the most time on the final scene. It asks readers to leap into the surreal and symbolic. I wanted to make sure the leap was worth it.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Faith Shearin’s Lost Language, a collection of poems about the death of her husband, is gorgeous and heartbreaking.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I find Elizabeth Kolbert’s books and articles on climate change fascinating. A writer I know described her as “courageous.” In her writing, which is brilliant and, strange as it is to say, given the subject matter, entertaining, she gracefully examines the world’s—or at least humanity’s— imminent end. I’m curious to know how she maintains her equanimity in the face of our coming calamity.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
My mother, a complex and extraordinary woman—she ran marathons; she built a car from scratch; she had amazing acumen when it came to the stock market and real estate but underestimated the long-term economic viability of Beanie Babies—died in May of 2022, and I’ve begun writing about her life. And her afterlife. One of my essays, “My Mother’s Suitors,” is about the retirement communities that continue to bombard her with solicitations. She’ll never be yours, fellas!
Our thanks to Mark for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “The Do Better Girl” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-bluebeard.
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Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Guernica, Under the Sun, Beloit Fiction Journal, Poetry East, USA Today, and elsewhere. A former Peace Corps volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English, the director of the Creative Writing Program, and the director of the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop at West Virginia University.