“Amy Dav” by Ian Baaske appeared in Issue 45 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
I got the germ of an idea for this story from social media and the group photos my high school friends would post. I started thinking about how those friend groups were structured and how some people were the “main” members and would be in all the pictures and others were on the fringes and would be in only some of them. I don’t know exactly how that observation got to Amy Dav. But once it did, the story came together very easily. I think I wrote the whole thing in two or three evenings. Everything just came together. There was a serendipitous moment when I opened Facebook back up and the music I had on in the background laid perfectly over someone’s muted vacation video. This image became the tribute page in the later part of the story.
What was the most difficult part of writing this story?
The most difficult part of writing this story was just staying out of its way. Not trying to reclaim control over it–which would have smothered it–and trusting the process. This isn’t true of a lot of things I write. I just got lucky this time.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I would recommend a brief but amazing collection of six stories called Nordic Fauna by Andrea Lundgren (2018). As far as I can tell, this is her only work that’s been translated into English. You could call it slipstream, I suppose. The stories are dark in tone and tightly wound into the places where civilization intersects with the Scandinavian wilderness. Animals, both real and imaginary–the fauna–play strong parts. Some stories go disturbing places and some don’t make complete sense in literal terms. But they make tons of sense at their emotional core.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Writers meeting writers is iffy. Eudora Welty found Henry Miller “so dull,” and I can’t prove it but I think Hawthorne found Herman Melville so annoying. But, if I could, I would choose Jenny Offill, who wrote Dept. of Speculation, Weather, and other things including some children’s books that my daughter liked. The three novels that I read were peppered with extremely interesting facts and anecdotes and then observations on top of the facts and anecdotes. For example, Dept. of Speculation opens with the observation that antelopes have 10x vision which means they can see the rings of Saturn on a clear night. The whole novel’s a masterpiece. One chapter ends with the narrator’s toddler daughter getting into bed with them. She stays awake and listens to her family breathe. I think about that chapter’s last sentence all the time: “Out of dark water, this.”
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m working on a story/novelette/novella about the universe expanding and how it ties to human longing. I want it to squeeze the universe into a ball. And I want it to reference an M.I.A. song and a Deftones song. I’m struggling with it because it’s too big. But I don’t want to make it smaller either.
Our thanks to Ian for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Amy Dav” here.
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Ian Baaske’s work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, North American Review’s Open Space, Bellevue Literary Review, and Baltimore Review, and is scheduled to appear in Analog. He lives in Chicago with his family and writes at night when everyone else is asleep. Read more at tantabus.org.