“Marsoupiel” by Susann Cokal appeared in Issue 40 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
The setting is a mashup of a few of the best places I’ve lived, places that mostly don’t exist anymore. I’m old enough to remember adobe ranch buildings crumbling away in cow pastures around San Diego County; now they’re plowed under for developments like Osos Valley Estates (which is fictional and located among the beach towns near San Luis Obispo). I once visited a friend from college in one of those big developments, and it took me a while to realize that I used to know the area as chaparral and a falling-down stagecoach stable. That development was the ghostliest town I’d ever visited.
What was the most difficult aspect in writing this story?
I have a hard time inflicting bad fates on my characters. I make these people up, and then I feel like a monster for hurting them. So it was hard to write about Lizzie Behren. And about all the people who feel hopeful for her and are going to be disappointed, and even worse—the people who are just drawn to the big event in town. Paloma is at first a bit callous, resentful that Lizzie’s disappearance is ruining her vacation; she isn’t really likable until she lets herself get involved, start to hope at the same time as she becomes afraid.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
The Madman’s Library: The Greatest Curiosities of Literature, by Edward Brooke-Hitching, is a paean to the beauty and invention and sometimes grisliness of book culture. It covers everything you love about holding a physical object that encloses an abstract world.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I’m not sure we should unleash me on a living author. I have a tendency to fangirl a bit too hard and embarrass myself. Or I try to restrain my fangirling and become too shy even to say hello.
So maybe there are a dozen people I’d like to gather for a few drinks, and then I might slip in and quietly open a bottle of fizzy water while they talk.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
A ghost story set in the 1920s. I’m tiptoeing along a tightrope toward a scary-heartwarming-lingeringly-creepy end. I hope I surprise myself.
Our thanks to Susann for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Marsoupiel” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-marsoupiel.
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Susann Cokal’s novels are Mirabilis, Breath and Bones, Mermaid Moon, and The Kingdom of Little Wounds, which won a few national awards and also a spot on the American Library Association’s list of books most often banned and challenged during the past decade. Her shorter work has appeared in publications such as Cincinnati Review, Electric Lit, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, Writers on the Job, and The New York TImes Book Review. She lives in a crumbling farmhouse in Richmond, Virginia, and on the web at susanncokal.net.