In this issue of Grimoire, we feature Mar Romasco-Moore interviewing Alisa Alering. Romasco-Moore’s books are hilarious and haunting. I Am the Ghost in Your House is about an invisible girl who travels the country with her invisible mother. They are able to live safely alongside visible people by avoiding all touch. Alering’s debut novel, Smothermoss, is forthcoming in July 2024, and tells the story of two sisters whose lives are upended when a murderer strikes their rural community. Each chapter takes its title from a deck of Tarot cards hand-drawn by Angie, the younger sister. We are delighted to welcome these two writers to our pages. –BW
Mar: Have you ever read a book and then been incredibly jealous that you weren’t the one who wrote it? That’s definitely how I felt reading Smothermoss. It was so wonderfully weird and twisty.
Alisa: All the time. Sometimes it’s because I’m blown away by how amazing and how right the book is: Milkman by Anna Burns, Mariana Enriquez’s incredibly creepy stories in Things We Lost in the Fire, Happiness by Aminatta Forna (urban foxes, migration, loneliness), Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, anything by Sarah Waters. They’re doing all the right things with elements I’m interested in. So while I’m reading, I’m thinking “why didn’t I do that?” or “maybe I should do that.”
But it happens a lot with another category of book, ones that I really enjoy but know I could never write in a million years: tightly-plotted, page-turning mysteries or anything with a large cast of characters and lots of witty dialogue and social observation, like Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie mysteries, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. Or fun books like CL Polk’s Even Though I Knew the End. And Murderbot. I mean, why didn’t I write Murderbot?
Honestly, I’m probably never going to write a fun book. But as a reader, I value them so much.
Mar: I think Smothermoss is fun in its own, very dark way!
So I feel like when talking about the book, we’ve really got to start with the cards—a thick stack of hand-drawn monsters which Angie, the younger of the two sisters in the book, carries with her everywhere and uses like sentient tarot cards. Where did they come from?
Alisa: I actually did this when I was a kid. I was younger than Angie is, but I had one of those cheap packets of multicolor felt-tip markers that dry up as soon as you take the caps off and I drew all these freaky monsters on index cards (Why index cards? Who knows? Maybe my mom gave me a stack of them to keep me busy). I liked to mix and match features from different animals: antlers and beaks and spines and tails. I can only remember one specifically, a kind of upright bird creature with chicken feet and a sharp beak but also big monster fangs dripping blood. I was not actually a morbid kid (not yet anyways) but they were just so fascinating and cool to me. Of course, my monsters never told me what to do, but I wished they did.
Mar: That’s delightful. Do you still have any of those old drawings?
Alisa: Sadly, no. Although, I wonder—would they be as cool as artifacts as they are in my memory? Maybe it’s better not to have any documentary evidence. Then they can be whatever I want them to be.
Mar: I definitely saw my younger self reflected in the way Angie’s imaginary world often overpowered reality. Though I also related a lot to Sheila’s self-recrimination and repressed queerness. Are there other elements of the book that came directly or indirectly from your own life?
Alisa: Oh, that’s interesting that you connected most with Angie! When I was first developing the book I was always aligned with Sheila, thinking about the story world almost 100 percent from her perspective, but having gone through multiple revisions and read-throughs since then, I’m almost embarrassed at how much Angie is also me—or at least my younger self. She’s so courageous and physically tough (that’s not and never has been how I think of myself) but her ability to fully inhabit an imaginary world, to bend the facts of the existing world to fit her preferred narrative, that was definitely me—though I was imagining myself into a world with more pirates and unicorns and fewer Russian soldiers. Sheila, on the other hand, is so pushed down, so tightly controlled, so resigned to the bleak facts of her existence that she has given up on having an imagination. It hurts her to imagine anything better. (And yet, when it comes to her feelings for Juanita, she can’t seem to help herself.) I certainly identify with Sheila’s feelings of being on the outside looking in and her inability to want the things she’s supposed to want. In junior high, I used to pretend to have crushes on boys just because that’s all my friends seemed to want to talk about. It felt like the price of admission to continued female friendship.
Mar: Ha, I did the same thing!
So, jumping off that notion of female friendships, perhaps you could talk about the thorniness of gendered expectations and how that affects your writing (it’s definitely something I’m often grappling with in my work). You’ve got three generations of fierce and complicated women in your story. What do you think it means to write a “strong female character”?
Alisa: How much time do you have? The phrase “strong female character” is one of my pet peeves. No, that’s too mild. It’s one of my rage points. I feel like in current popular usage—particularly in regard to visual media like film and TV but books are guilty of this too—“strong female character” means “regular female character but she punches someone.” She is conventionally attractive, she is compliant with the male gaze, she might talk tough or swear a lot, but she is essentially a traditional female character with some fighting skillz. It drives me completely nuts that so-called strong female characters go on the run or go into hiding or are locked in a cell for months and somehow come out of these conditions of extreme deprivation without a single body hair (Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta, I’m looking at you). Their captors beat them and starved them and wouldn’t let them bathe, but they gave them a Gillette Venus and some shaving cream?
But that’s just physical appearance, and I’m letting myself be distracted by it. It’s too easy to equate character strength with physical power. So what is strength? What does it mean to be truly tough? Is suffering what makes you strong? Is continuing to persist, to exist on your terms in the face of overwhelming opposition or little hope of change—is that strength? (Recently, reading K.X. Song’s novel An Echo In the City about the 2019 Hong Kong protests I was impressed with the characters’ repeated acknowledgment that they knew they couldn’t win and yet that was no reason to stop fighting). Is strength merely preserving some core kernel of your true self deep down when all the world tells you that what you are, what you believe, what you feel is not right, not okay, not even real? Does that internal personal act of truth and private rebellion equate with strength? Is real strength the ability to ask for what you want and keep asking? Is it the ability to make hard choices in the face of disappointment or compromise?
The girl characters in the stories of yours I’ve read feel very strong to me. Jo, in Some Kind of Animal, is physically tough, in the way Angie is in Smothermoss. Jo runs for miles through the woods at night. She exults in her physicality—to me, her night runs read as a kind of escape from all the expectations about the way she should behave as a teenage girl and eventual woman in her small town. She is brave and strong. No one believes her when she tells them that her sister lives in the woods, but she believes her own evidence and lives according to that belief. But the teen girl characters in your time-traveling Greyhound bus story I think are even stronger. They’re not so physical but they’re willing to be selfish. That’s a kind of strength women are rarely allowed, especially not in fiction, where it instantly makes them the dreaded “unlikable protagonist”—code, in my view for “woman who doesn’t apologize for what she wants.”
Mar: Ah, thank you. I like your definition a lot. Lately I’ve been more and more interested in writing that kind of character.
You talked earlier about first developing the book—I’d love to hear where it started for you. Was it with one of the powerful images—the cards, the invisible rope, the devouring mountain—or with something else?
Alisa: Unusually for me, it started with the characters: with Sheila and Angie. It’s interesting that you mention strong images, though, because those two were images for me. I didn’t have the usual character stuff like what they wanted or needed, or strengths and weaknesses, favorite songs, whatever. I didn’t really know anything about them internally other than that they were sisters. But I knew what they looked like: Sheila tall, dark-haired, thin and pale, with this mysterious mark around her neck (which turned out to be caused by the rope). Angie compact and tough and sun-tanned with her boy’s clothes and chopped DIY haircut. And so by concentrating on the images of them, I could sort of move them through the fictional landscape and divine what they would do or feel in each situation.
It took me a long time to figure out, but I do primarily write from image. I’ve had the extreme good fortune to work with Lynda Barry twice, and I completely subscribe to her philosophy that an image is a container or location for an experience (I’m paraphrasing). A really good image has a special feel about it that I’ve trained myself to recognize. I know when I find one of those, zinging with electricity, I have a story. In this case, I had two.
Mar: I am also someone who usually starts with image (sometimes quite literally) though I’ve never had characters jump fully visualized into my mind quite like that!
Alisa: I’m fascinated that you start from image too—I feel like it’s one of the least common ways to begin a story among writers I’ve met. We should talk more about that sometime! I should say, though, that Sheila and Angie, the sisters of Smothermoss, didn’t jump into my mind fully visualized—I’d actually been living with them in the back of my head for years. It just took me a long time to realize that they were probably characters in a story—and even longer to realize that the story should be a novel.
Mar: So the real question is, can you do the opposite? If you were to create an image that captured the feeling of your book now that you’ve written it, what would that look like?
Alisa: Truthfully, the cover that Beth Steidle designed for Smothermoss captures the feeling of the book really well. Tin House consulted with me about the cover in advance, and I got to give them a wish list of elements I liked—and I swear I think they included almost everything I asked for—but did it in such a way that it’s a hundred times better than anything I could have come up with myself.
That said, like you mentioned before, Angie’s grotesque monster cards play a pretty big role in the story and I had so much fun mentally designing them. I really wish I could draw well enough to make them come to life. But there is one of them in the beginning—I think it’s actually the first card you see in any detail—called “The Tangle of Rabbits”: “On the card, the Tangle of Rabbits are knotted together. Rabbits stand on rabbits, half-devoured by other rabbits. Rabbit legs thrusting in all directions—a foot into a face into a stomach into a tail. The rabbit made of rabbits crouches in the briars, hiding from its enemies, quivering and trying to survive without being seen. The briars weave around it, snaring its hind legs and tangling around its neck. Thorns tear its tender ears.” I didn’t come up with that image until I’d been through a couple of drafts—it was an attempt to sum up the characters’ situation visually. Some of the other cards are more sinister or more powerful, but that one holds the whole story.
Mar: Tell me more about the role magic plays in the book. What do you think the role of magic is in fiction—or in life, for that matter.
Alisa: The role of magic in fiction is way broader than I’m competent to talk about. I can tell you what I *like* about magic in fiction, though! I like magic that doesn’t make sense. I think not fully understanding how it works is what makes something magic and not science. This is the opposite of what you will be told in classes and workshops about writing fantasy. They will say, “You have to work out the rules of your magic system.” And I get where they’re coming from—sort of. I think effective fictional magic does have a sort of logic. But it’s closer to dream logic than anything that’s going to solve a mathematical proof or fill out a spreadsheet. If I can explain it fully, it’s not my preferred kind of magic. Let me relate it to poetry: you can analyze a poem, but you probably shouldn’t. (Just ask Billy Collins).
The magic in Smothermoss is trying to say something about the natural world and the feelings I have for the mountain territory where I grew up that I can’t say in any more direct way because what I’m trying to express doesn’t make sense in the light of day, in the light of logic and what’s “real.” But it might make a whole lot of sense if you just give yourself over to it. If you were to lie down on a big slab of Pre-Cambrian gneiss that’s more than 500 million years old and feel the earth hum through your bones.
Alisa Alering is the author of Smothermoss, forthcoming from Tin House Books in July 2024. Alisa grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania and now lives in Arizona. After attending Clarion West, their short fiction has been published in Fireside, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Podcastle, and Cast of Wonders, among others, and been recognized by the Calvino Prize. A former librarian and science/technology reporter, they teach fiction workshops at the Highlights Foundation.
Mar Romasco-Moore is the author of the novels I Am the Ghost in Your House, Krazyland,and Some Kind of Animal, as well as Ghostographs, an interconnected collection of flash fiction inspired by vintage photographs. Their stories have appeared in places such as Lightspeed, Fireside, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and the anthology Women Destroy Science Fiction. They currently teach writing at Columbus College of Art and Design. https://marromascomoore.com/
