Contributor Spotlight: Claudia Putnam

“Flicker” by Claudia Putnam appeared in Issue 42 and can be found here.

We’d love to hear more about this story.

This has always been a voice-driven project—initially an experiment to see if voice could carry a story that was almost entirely exposition. (One EIC printed it out and sent it back to me with an aggrieved note: This is ALL exposition! But, I thought, it was sent up the chain to you, the EIC of a famous magazine, and you read—and marked up—the whole thing. So, I’d say it worked, even if he didn’t want to publish it. I did revise it, though.) It’s part of a larger body of work following two women, Sarah and Fay, from their impoverished childhoods in a New England village to their late-middle ages in Colorado. Basically, I figured no one would ever believe it if I assigned all the shit I’d been through to one character, so I divided it up between them and turned it into a resilience study, partly, to see which fared better with which mix of traumas. This piece was originally much longer and was inspired by learning that my psychiatrist had been best friends and roommates in college with the man I maybe should have married. In hindsight. Among others. 

Also, the thought about the plants. That was a very real thing I felt during menopause. Stop needing me! It has passed and I now own more plants than I ever did. I’ll probably end up the little old lady down the street with a house full of plants and cats. Like my mom. I get it now. 

What was the most difficult part of this particular story?

Bringing myself to relent a little on the original purpose, letting go of the idea of keeping it entirely expository, and trying to balance the interiority with parts that felt more in-scene. I also had to keep my confidence up. I took it out of circulation and put it “on the shelf” (in the cloud?) several times, for longish periods. It really hasn’t been submitted that many times. 

Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.

A book? Haha. How about something translated in past decade: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of Dead, Olga Tokarczuk. Published in, I dunno. Try anything by Nunez, or McCarthy’s Stella Maris, which transfixed me and made me go read a lot about math and physics. Sorry for cheating. 

If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?

Alice Munro. I don’t drink much, don’t know if she does. Any living author could have me under the table in one glass of wine, which is why I’m not mentioning any of my Irish favorites. Anyway, it would be fun to trade stories about our neighbors and/or family members. 

Note upon publication of this Q&A: I see this answer hasn’t aged well, especially the part regarding gossiping about family members. I remain grateful to Munro for all that her work has taught me about storytelling, dealing with elapsed time, and various other inspirations I regularly draw from in my writing. I feel writers should use their life in their work – in any and every way they can. Her apparently conscious dismissal of her daughter’s experience is something I wish I could talk with her about, as well. I do not endorse that, of course, and it’s fair to judge her as a person if you believe you know enough, but I also don’t think her work should be tossed out. Her literary legacy is unlike anything else.

What are you working on now? What’s next?

Still trying to finish this f*cking novel, which I am calling for the moment, Colonizer. Which is why I recommended the Tokarczuk. This woman homesteader I’m writing about, no matter how much she loves the land and feels called by it, cannot help but be farming blood and bones here in America. Sometimes I get Very Stern with myself and only allow work on other projects after I reach certain targets (section breaks, usually) in the novel, but lately my life has been so disturbed (divorce, the move from Colorado to the Puget Sound), I grasp at any creative straw I can. So, I feel I have one story to complete for the Fay and Sarah work mentioned above, to make that gel. And as you may know, I write poetry as well. I may soon have enough for at least one more collection. I don’t know when I’ll pull that together, but I belong to an accountability group where we send something—raw or revised—to each other every single day, poetry or prose. There’s no comment/critique, just do it, send it. Like many people, and not only people who are not young, I feel that time is short. I have traditionally been a slow writer and don’t feel I can afford that any longer. I’m grateful for forward motion in any direction.

Our thanks to Claudia for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Flicker” here.

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Claudia Putnam lives in a remote area of the Puget Sound. Her work appears in Confrontation, Variant Lit, Ghost Parachute, Cimarron Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. A novella, Seconds, came out in 2023 from Neutral Zones Press. A brief memoir, Double Negative, won the Split/Lip Press CNF chapbook prize. Her debut collection, The Land of Stone and River, won the Moon City Press poetry prize. She has been awarded several residencies, including the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and a stint at Kimmel Nelson Harding.