SmokeLong Quarterly

This is a very tightly controlled yet evocative story. Did you find it difficult to keep the word count so low, or does it come more easily to you?

Actually, it comes easily to me as I’m primarily a poet.

What gave you the inspiration for the two horses, one alive and one not? Did you know you wanted them to be a part of the story from the beginning, or did they come to you during the writing process?

I took part in a fairy tale workshop led by Michael Jeffrey Lee this year, and one of the stories we read was Leonora Carrington’s Down Below. It inspired me to revisit her paintings and I was struck by Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), which features two white horses: a rocking horse in the room, and a horse in the garden that can be seen through a window-like structure. The rocking horse is suspended in space, and the horse outside one can’t be sure. There is also a hyena, which at first glance I mistook for a dog because of the body language of the human figure in relation to it. My text originated as a free-association response to that painting, but I went off on my own tangents from there.

Within the story there are conflicting elements of both loneliness and togetherness, contentment and restlessness, being free and feeling trapped. How do these tie into the overall theme?

I didn’t think about specific elements, or a specific theme. Leonora Carrington’s creation affected me and I translated that effect into language. I was as surprised by my text as I was by Carrington’s painting. I still am.

The piece features several instances of repetition with the color white and certain things being superimposed. Why did you pick these particular details to draw attention to? Do they have special significance?

The horses in the painting are both white and their whiteness weirdly stands out in the otherwise colorful scene. Everything in the painting has a superimposed feel to it: the beings, the objects, inside as well as outside of the room. They seem to be intimately connected while being utterly estranged at the same time. When I look at them, they seem to pop out of the painting towards me and simultaneously suck me into it until I disappear in the scene. Leonora, or the spirit that I sense in her, captures how being in the world often feels to me.

What does this story mean to you? What do you hope readers will take away from it? 

I really don’t know what the story means. It draws me in, takes me to a mysterious place, like the painting. But I can’t name that place.

I hope that readers are enlivened by the story as much as I am.