“Remnants” by Charlotte d’Huart appeared in Issue 28 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
A whale washed up near where I live, on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. It was sad and strange, and morbidly alluring, and I couldn’t get the image out of my head. The feelings and thoughts I had about it shifted and warped and settled and eventually turned into this story.
What was the most difficult part of this piece?
Leaving myself out of it! The character isn’t me, but there were times when she was in danger of becoming me. The strong reaction I’d had to the whale and the details I borrowed from my own life to flesh out the story kept nudging the character closer to a version of myself, and while I embrace filtering pieces of me into my writing, I had a different vision for who was telling the story that I wanted to explore.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Rachel Cusk’s Outline had a huge impact on me. She’s brilliantly insightful and shrugs off literary conventions in a way that feels completely assured and not at all contrived.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Patricia Lockwood. Her writing is lively, sensitive, and hilarious, and she seems like she’d be a blast to hang out with.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
Just working on becoming a better writer! I’m trying to be more rigorous in my writing habits, holding myself accountable and committing to a piece when I start—one of my biggest issues is losing confidence in first drafts and abandoning ship. Reading the perspectives of literary giants on their own bad first drafts has been a necessary reminder to view underdeveloped writing as raw material you can later shape into something beautiful, rather than be discouraged by the messiness.
Our thanks to Charlotte for taking the time to answer a few questions and share her work. Read Charlotte’s story, “Remnants,” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-remnants.
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Charlotte grew up in France and England and lived as a teacher in Hanoi and Buenos Aires before settling in San Francisco, where she works as an editor, writes, and is constantly preoccupied with what to cook next.