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WORK TITLE: The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.chanellebenz.com/
CITY: Houston
STATE: TX
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
She is of British-Antiguan descent and currently lives in Houston. * https://electricliterature.com/chanelle-benz-is-rewriting-history-7e16db7b132b
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in London, England.
EDUCATION:Boston University, B.F.A.; Syracuse University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:O. Henry Prize.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to publications, including Fence, American Reader, Guernica, and the Cupboard, as well as to the Granta.com Web site.
SIDELIGHTS
Chanelle Benz is a London-born writer who is based in Houston, Texas. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a master’s degree from Syracuse University. Benz has written short stories that have appeared in publications that include Fence, American Reader, Guernica, and the Cupboard, as well as on the Granta.com Web site.
In 2017 Benz released The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, a collection of short stories. The first piece in the collection is “West of the Known.” In an interview with Michael Schaub, a contributor to the Los Angeles Times Online, Benz commented on the story, stating: “It seemed like that was the most accessible story, even though people still ask me why there’s no quotation marks. … Even though it was a Western, it felt like it was emblematic of my writing, so I just felt like it was a good way to start off the other adventures. And ever since sixth grade, I had an obsession with Billy the Kid. I saw Young Guns II. I’ve never to this day seen Young Guns. I just kind of fell for the idea of being part of a posse and trying to work myself into that history.” Other stories include a medieval tale called “That We May All Be One Sheepfolde, or O Saeculum Corruptissimum,” a story borrowing from gothic style called “Adela,” and a piece about a slave-turned-poet called “The Peculiar Narrative of the Remarkable Particulars in the Life of Orrinda Thomas.” Regarding her inspiration for the collection as a whole, Benz told Mickie Meinhardt, a writer on the Rumpus Web site: “Right around the time I wrote [the story] “Adela,” I was reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and it touched back on a childhood love of reading. I feel he’s able to operate on this higher level where he’s really digging into philosophy, and playing with different literary traditions, but it’s such a joy to read, too. And so I thought, what if I did a little experiment: what if I wrote a sci-fi story, what if I wrote a Western, wrote all these different forms.” In the same interview with Schaub, Benz noted: “One of the underlying themes that emerged midway through the collection was that of violence. Usually, the protagonist is coming up against a moment where they’re invited to take on an act of violence, or to resist or to try and avoid it in some other way. Not all of [the stories] follow that to the letter, but they all have this moment. Sometimes people ask me: ‘Why violence?’ and I don’t know without therapizing myself.” Benz told Meinhardt: “There is violence and abandonment in [my stories]. Part of it comes from my life, and part from the narratives we’re drawn to in the world. One thing with the collection I did notice was that there’s a moment of violence in the stories that the characters can either participate in, resist, or sometimes there’s a third option.”
“Benz’s first short story collection, with its provocative title, dazzles readers,” asserted Shoba Viswanathan, a reviewer for Booklist. A Kirkus Reviews critic suggested: “The variety of these stories is striking.” The same critic described the volume as “an ambitious book that marks Benz as a writer to watch.” A writer in Publishers Weekly remarked: “At its best, the collection explores violence, identity, and otherness in sharply observed, fiercely eloquent prose.” Sara Cutaia, a contributor to the Chicago Review of Books Web site, commented: “Benz pulls the rug out from under you in almost every story, both in expectation bending and in her gut-wrenching narrations. There is no doubting her range and talent, and with fans like George Saunders and Helen Oyeyemi, she is sure to make a name for herself in the short-fiction world.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 15, 2016, Shoba Viswanathan, review of The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, p. 20.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2016, review of The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead.
Publishers Weekly, October 17, 2016, review of The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, p. 44.
ONLINE
Book People, http://www.bookpeople.com/ (July 31, 2017), author profile.
Chanelle Benz Home Page, http://www.chanellebenz.com (July 31, 2017).
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (January 17, 2017), Sara Cutaia, review of The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead.
Dallas Morning News Online, https://www.dallasnews.com/ (January 13, 2017), William J. Cobb, review of The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead.
Kit Frick Web log, https://kitfrick.com/ (March 26, 2013), Kit Frick, author interview.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (April 21, 2017), Michael Schaub, author interview.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (April 27, 2017), Mickie Meinhardt, author interview.*
Chanelle Benz has published short stories in The American Reader, Fence, and The Cupboard, and on Granta.com, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. She received her MFA at Syracuse University as well as a BFA in acting from Boston University. She is of British-Antiguan descent and currently lives in Houston.
Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta.com, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, The American Reader, Fence and The Cupboard, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. She received her MFA at Syracuse University as well as a BFA in Acting from Boston University. She is of British-Antiguan descent and currently lives in Houston.
QUOTED: "It seemed like that was the most accessible story, even though people still ask me why there's no quotation marks. ... Even though it was a Western, it felt like it was emblematic of my writing, so I just felt like it was a good way to start off the other adventures. And ever since sixth grade, I had an obsession with Billy the Kid. I saw Young Guns II. I've never to this day seen Young Guns. I just kind of fell for the idea of being part of a posse and trying to work myself into that history."
"One of the underlying themes that emerged midway through the collection was that of violence. Usually, the protagonist is coming up against a moment where they’re invited to take on an act of violence, or to resist or to try and avoid it in some other way. Not all of [the stories] follow that to the letter, but they all have this moment. Sometimes people ask me: 'Why violence?' and I don't know without therapizing myself."
Meet Chanelle Benz, whose debut book is 'The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead'
Chanelle Benz, author of 'The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead'. CREDIT: Christine Jean Chambers
Chanelle Benz, whose debut short story collection is "The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead," will be at the Festival of Books on Sunday. (Christine Jean Chambers / Ecco)
Michael Schaub
The stories in Chanelle Benz’s “The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead” are as disturbing and violent as the title indicates. The debut book explores rage and inhumanity in a variety of settings, including the Old West, 19th century England and contemporary Philadelphia. The collection begins with the O. Henry Prize-winning story “West of the Known,” about a young woman in 19th-century Texas rescued from abuse by her half brother, and ends with “That We May Be All One Sheepefolde,” which follows an English monk in the 16th century forced to reckon with the loss of his beloved monastery.
Benz was educated at Boston University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in acting, and at Syracuse University, where she studied with George Saunders and earned an MFA in creative writing. She spoke with The Times via telephone from her home in Houston.
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You were born in London and grew up on the American East Coast. Did those places have any influence on your fiction?
I think so. I lived in London until I was 7. I had a wonderful childhood. My mom was young, she was one of seven, and I got taken care of by my aunts and uncles and my great-aunt, who looked like an English headmistress. She taught me how to read, and we used to make books together. It was very English. So when I came to America, it was surreal to me. At first, we moved to New Jersey, and then my stepfather was stationed in Utah, in this tiny town called Sunset, which is outside of Ogden, and I just remember thinking, “This is Mars.” There was all this red dirt. We came to this person's house, and there was a baby in a highchair eating a pound bag of M&M's and Hitchcock was on the TV. [Laughs.] It was striking, but I think I always had these escape fantasies of other worlds that I could enter.
Is there a reason you decided to start the collection off with a Western story?
It just made sense to me at the time. It seemed like that was the most accessible story, even though people still ask me why there's no quotation marks. [Laughs.] I think it's a pretty easy read. Even though it was a Western, it felt like it was emblematic of my writing, so I just felt like it was a good way to start off the other adventures. And ever since sixth grade, I had an obsession with Billy the Kid. I saw "Young Guns II." I've never to this day seen "Young Guns." I just kind of fell for the idea of being part of a posse and trying to work myself into that history.
See Chanelle Benz at the Festival of Books Sunday at 1:30 p.m. on the panel Fiction: Writing Short Stories »
The collection feels cohesive, although the stories obviously vary widely in terms of genre and setting. What would you say are the underlying themes, if there are any, of this book?
One of the underlying themes that emerged midway through the collection was that of violence. Usually, the protagonist is coming up against a moment where they’re invited to take on an act of violence, or to resist or to try and avoid it in some other way. Not all of [the stories] follow that to the letter, but they all have this moment. Sometimes people ask me, "Why violence?" and I don't know without therapizing myself. I guess I've been saying, “I don't know,” but look at this current moment. It feels very resonant to me, very visible.
The English director Peter Brook was really important to me when I was an actor. I saw his “Hamlet” with Adrian Lester back in 2000. One of the things I remember [Brook] talking about in an interview is that to him, “Hamlet” is about this moral dilemma, which is, “I have to avenge my father's death out of respect for him, and because I love him, and that's my duty. But on the other hand, to avenge his death, I have to kill, which is the ultimate sin, which is the thing you can never undo.” There is redemption, but there is no undoing. I was really thinking about that during the collection. Killing is something that can happen so quickly and now so indirectly, and yet it is this thing that ripples out, this unstoppable thing that can't be taken back.
Some of the scenes of violence in the book are very graphic. Was it emotionally difficult to write that?
I was trying to think about what is surprising, the things that surprise you. I remember seeing a street fight, and the quality of the blood of the person on the ground was shocking to me because it just wasn't anything like TV. I hadn't really seen that. But some scenes were more difficult. Even just imagining, in “The Mourners,” the children’s death — when I came back around to revise that, I had just had a baby, so I was going on no sleep. But also I had much more of a sense of what that would be like, and I felt superstitious about it. Revising that story was very painful.
But it's in the Western [stories] too. A lot of those men, the outlaws, the Jesse James types, they were the sons of Confederate soldiers, but they didn't have a fight. They didn't have a real cause. When they come up to the frontier, it's these young men who are really drunk with guns, and there's not much else. So there's bound to be this kind of reckless, almost accidental bloodshed. And that's kind of what I was thinking about with Jackson [in “West of the Known”].
You're of British and Antiguan descent, and those are obviously two places with really rich literary traditions. Were you influenced at all by any particular works or authors from the U.K. or Antigua and Barbuda?
Growing up, I read a lot of English literature, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl. I learned how to read at a young age because I was an only child, so there wasn't much else to do. I was obsessed with this series called “The Famous Five” [by Enid Blyton]. But I continue to keep reading a lot of English writers. I love David Mitchell and “The Blue Flower” by Penelope Fitzgerald. When I was in theater school, I really loved Jeanette Winterson. We did an adaptation of her book “Gut Symmetries,” which was a seminal artistic experience for me.
It wasn't until grad school that I took a course called Cultural Formations in the West Indies. It was about post-colonial theory, but it was also looking at older texts from the 17th and 18th centuries and kind of looking at how this idea of race has formed, looking at how time moves differently in the Caribbean, and how it's kind of a gyre of cultures. I hadn't been that familiar with Antigua because I grew up with my mother, who's English and Irish. That's where “Adela” came from, reading a lot of the texts — some of the scholarship is great, and some of it is ridiculous. [The footnotes in the story are] kind of making fun of some of the overly sexualized texts there. But there is a book I do mention that's real by Roxann Wheeler [“The Complexion of Race”], where she makes the argument that until the 18th century, the concept of race wasn't really fixed. People would think that if an Englishman spent 10 years in Africa, he would turn brown, and if he came back, he would turn white again. People just didn't know what to think. They had all kinds of ideas about what caused people to be different colors. It's fascinating, and not something we really think about now, or know about now.
You're trained as an actor, of course. Do you still act at all?
I do not. I really love acting; I can't say that I'll never, ever do it again, but I'm definitely a better writer. When I was acting, I always got yelled at for having a third eye, kind of watching myself, which is a good attribute for a writer, not so good for an actor. You really have to let go and be an emotional athlete. I always had trouble tricking myself into doing that. But I have directed one [play] since, and that was great, because I felt like, “OK, I still remember all the things I was taught in conservatory, and it still feels good and relevant,” and also it was just nice to do something collaborative.
Did your experience acting give you a sense of how to write dialogue?
I think it definitely did. When you're performing dialogue all the time, you're always thinking about things like status. Moments of communion are about equal status, but most of the time, somebody's on the bottom, somebody's on the top, and they're kind of wrestling and flipping back and forth. I don't think so much of that overtly, but I think it's probably something I think about subconsciously, and also the idea that each dialogue should have an arc to it, just like any other movement in the story. So I think I am aware that by the time I get to the end of a piece of dialogue, we should be somewhere completely different than we just ended.
Do acting and writing use the same creative muscles for you? Does it come from the same part of your brain?
I think there's overlap. Acting is such a naked, immediate thing. It's ephemeral, so once you've done it, it's over, and each time it's different. It's definitely a different physical process, and it's very much to me like a muscle. I had to work really hard to be decent. [Laughs] Whereas [with] writing, I also had to work very hard, but it felt more natural. To me, writing is like breathing. It's necessary and I must do it, whereas acting is sort of like a first love, something I chose to pursue. Ben Kingsley said something about this, like, "You're just taking a splinter of yourself, and even if it's down at the bottom of your foot, you're just enlarging it." Everything is within us. There are definitely some [characters] I obviously gravitate toward and others that I definitely think, "It's all within me. I just have to find that part of myself, or imagine myself into those circumstances," and that, I think, is the same as acting.
Is there anything you're working on now that you can talk about?
I'm working on a novel right now called "The Gone Dead." It's set in Mississippi, and it's about a woman who returns to a small Delta town where her father died, and she starts to uncover different things about the circumstances of his death. So I've been doing a lot of research on Mississippi and the Delta and the civil rights era, and what came before, and what came after. It just happens to feel quite resonant right now.
Schaub, a writer in Texas, is a member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
QUOTED: "Right around the time I wrote [the story] “Adela,” I was reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and it touched back on a childhood love of reading. I feel he’s able to operate on this higher level where he’s really digging into philosophy, and playing with different literary traditions, but it’s such a joy to read, too. And so I thought, what if I did a little experiment: what if I wrote a sci-fi story, what if I wrote a Western, wrote all these different forms."
"There is violence and abandonment in [my stories]. Part of it comes from my life, and part from the narratives we’re drawn to in the world. One thing with the collection I did notice was that there’s a moment of violence in the stories that the characters can either participate in, resist, or sometimes there’s a third option."
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #81: Chanelle Benz
By Mickie Meinhardt
April 27th, 2017
Chanelle Benz’s debut collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, is filled with characters often facing a moral crossroads. The stories contain the unexpected, like a classic Western complete with local brothel as well as a gothic tale. Benz’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, The American Reader, and Granta.
***
The Rumpus: I was so fascinated by this debut because there are so many different voices, and I’m always awed by someone who can take something so disparate and make a whole of it. What pushed you into trying these new voices, and how did you do it?
Chanelle Benz: Right around the time I wrote [the story] “Adela,” I was reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and it touched back on a childhood love of reading. I feel he’s able to operate on this higher level where he’s really digging into philosophy, and playing with different literary traditions, but it’s such a joy to read, too. And so I thought, what if I did a little experiment: what if I wrote a sci-fi story, what if I wrote a Western, wrote all these different forms.
When I was working with George Saunders [at Syracuse University], we were in our final year, he said, ‘We all know now what our first strength is, what we do well. What is the thing in our right hand, but also what’s the thing in our left hand? What is our other strength? He talked about being able to flip sides between your strengths and your weaknesses, to take the weak side and flip it over, and to be aware of that in your work. My first strength is voice; the other thing is form. Once I have the voice and a clear entry into a world, I think, what’s the container? What are the rules that I can sort of push against? Sometimes they’re not even necessarily rules. So with “Adela,” I said, I’m going to write this in a choral children’s voice. Sometimes it’s something else: second person as POV, or I’m gonna write this backwards.
Once I’ve got that, I feel like I can just write out a whole sketch, which I always push myself to do, to draft really quickly. Because I like to have it all out there, and I think I like to go a little faster than my critical mind can catch up with. The license to make bad decisions and let them be unfixable. A lot of time I have an idea of the ending or the turning point, which is always melodramatic in my first iteration. And usually it turns away from that. So knowing that about myself, I just let myself go. I think that’s really important if a story has any chance at greatness.
Rumpus: The suspension of the critical mind is essential for anything that’s a really moving piece of fiction because if you’re second-guessing yourself constantly, one, you don’t get very far in the writing process at all, and two, I think you end up with something that’s a hollow of whatever you were inspired by and lacks the you in it. Because you’re subconsciously pushing back with all the things you “know” to be “right” or “true.” The necessary thing for a writer is to just go and let the story run itself.
Benz: Absolutely. I think you should be a little afraid of what you put out there. A little nervous that people are going to see through it and they’re going to see you. Nobody likes the idea of this, but I like it: That there needs to be blood on the page. I think there should be some piece of you left on the page so when you put it out there you’re a little nervous. And the funny thing is, no one ever sees it! No one ever sees the concession of this preoccupation that you have.
When I first put the novel out I was really nervous; when I published “The Diplomat’s Daughter” in Granta, I was really worried that I would get hate mail. Also because right around that time that it was published, there was a bombing in Beirut, and there’s a bombing in Beirut in the story. I was nervous that somebody would call me out: ‘It wouldn’t happen that way.’ But of course, we’re never as important as we think we are.
Rumpus: Short stories tend to be linked by character and setting. But yours is linked by tone and atmosphere. There’s a sense of the down-and-out, a wild desperation, a semi-managed fear. Each of these characters feels a little feral, too. And I wonder if that was something you felt intimately, where that comes from.
Benz: I think it’s an accident. Well, it isn’t an accident; I have become semi-conscious of it. But it goes back to the idea of the Zen target—you’re not trying to write about yourself or your preoccupations or your fears or the kind of emotional landscape you’re trying to excavate. But sometimes you reveal yourself.
There is violence and abandonment in [my stories]. Part of it comes from my life, and part from the narratives we’re drawn to in the world. One thing with the collection I did notice was that there’s a moment of violence in the stories that the characters can either participate in, resist, or sometimes there’s a third option. I like to think about the turning point in the story—and this comes from my theatre background—in terms of something that the character wants. You ask, did they get X, did X happen? The answer is either, yes, no, or yes but not in the way they thought. My teachers in acting school always said the best option is usually the third one. Because there’s usually some kind of turning of the knife. That’s one thing I was going for.
And then, part of what I’m interested in is hearing from voices we haven’t heard before, that are outside, marginalized voices. Partly from being a brown woman myself—you don’t see yourself in stories very often, you don’t see yourself in literature or in film, at least not growing up. So I kind of had to invent a way. If I didn’t want to be a prostitute or a washer woman then I’d have to find a way to inject myself in history. I guess the slave narrative is part of that too.
Rumpus: A lot of these characters are loners. They feel very much on their own against the world. You take these strong characters and box them in, and then see how they fight their way out and how they move through the world after.
Benz: That’s interesting. I think when tragedy befalls us, when we’re depressed, or oppressed, a lot of times we feel alone in that. So you do have to fight your way to any connection. In general, yes, these characters are outsiders, marginalized, but they have to fight or they’ll drown. I’m also interested in the ways we betray what we love. The body betrays us. The way fear makes us betray ourselves. We do things that before we would never do.
Rumpus: Yes. There’s also a great sense of foreboding in this book. After you get through two, certainly by the third story, you come to recognize that violent moment is coming. I find it interesting the way fear and love are balanced in this book and that so often, I won’t say fear wins over love, but the survival impulses that fear brings out trumps love often. I think stories that do that tend to be far more interesting than those that look toward the perpetual good, because life is not perpetually good.
Benz: Yes. I think too often people say, “Your parents love you,” or, “I love you,” and that’s supposed to be some kind of definitive answer. And it’s like, yes, but does your family love you well? There’s good love and there’s not good love. It doesn’t mean the not good love isn’t passion, isn’t devotion, isn’t deep feeling. But there’s also that it’s not necessarily good for you. And I think especially with Lavinia, it’s sort of out of the frying pan and into the fire. I’d infinitely prefer the fire. Wouldn’t we all? I don’t know. I’m easier on death than everybody else. But I do think you have to love your characters, at least, more than other people might.
Rumpus: Of course. Is there one you love most?
Benz: No. I go through cycles where you forget about a story and then remember it again. A lot of people say, “Your characters are your children.” But I say your characters are your mom, your sister, your best friend, your child. They’re all these different relationships. Sometimes I move closer to a character and then further away. Right now I’m probably feeling the most loving towards James. Because when “James III” was published in Guernica I reread it a few times and remembered what I loved about writing that story and the challenges of it. I felt for him and enjoyed him again.
The story I could keep working on is “The Diplomat’s Daughter.” I feel it’s sort of like a deck of cards, there are so many themes I could go through, so many different pathways in that story. I have like six different versions; that’s just the one we ended up publishing. I find it very fun to work on.
Rumpus: You get the sense of reading it that there’s so much more, but there’s not an dissatisfaction in that. You just feel there are so many levels and angles and pathways in it, and I think that and also in Orrinda Thomas’s story, those two sparked a deeper understanding that carried into the rest of the stories.
Benz: I revised Orrinda for the book. I did a little more research. There’s a plantation called The Whitney, the only one that’s a museum about slavery. It only opened in 2014, which says something. But it was interesting. There’s a map with all these plantations along River Road along the Mississippi, hundreds of plantations, landlocked. And I realized, if you’re in a plantation in the middle of that, even if you escape, where can you go? You’re just running through plantation after plantation. It’s almost impossible to get out. You’re doomed. When I thought about her, I thought about how when you’re locked into a pretty impossible situation, there’s no way for you to get out but still you have to keep going. And she knows that more than the slaves do.
Rumpus: More than anyone! She understands the peril of going in there.
Benz: It’s literally riding into hell and being like, “I probably won’t be able to climb my way out of here.”
The thing about working on “The Diplomat’s Daughter” and inhabiting Natalia is it’s a very dark story and a dark place to be. It’s hard to inhabit for a long time. Hard to think about how you live with yourself after seeing certain things and doing certain things. Once you take a life you can’t put it back. It’s the mark, this shame, this burden, on your soul. I thought about “The Diplomat’s Daughter” in that way—if she does the thing they want her to do, if she does the thing she’s trained to do, she will always be marked by it.
Rumpus: Revision is tough, but it’s so good, too.
Benz: As much as I like to write messy drafts and really sketch badly, I think revision is also very fun. Because that’s when you’re asking yourself: “What am I saying about the human condition” or “what is this actual narrative” or what is actually on the page or what ways can I cut and recast that will change the trajectory of it. I think that sometimes, I don’t know why, we’re taught that coming to the end of a short story is enough and revision is this onerous thing. But I enjoy it, even on the sentence level. Little words you can hack away, and working at the sentence to make it really muscular until each is this finely cut jewel. It’s definitely a lot of work, and makes you realize the strangeness of the direction the story might be going in.
Rumpus: One-hundred percent. It’s also the place where you get to see what you did when you were in the frenzy and the thick of it, and you come back after a breather and think: “Oh! I didn’t know I was going there, but I see it now.” There’s a pleasure in that.
Benz: I really enjoy cutting, probably too much. I slash and burn. There’s a perverse relief in that. You know it’s a good sentence but no, it has to go. It’s not necessary.
Drafting is potential. But revision is power. You made your story into something powerful, something bright and glittering and sharp and colorful.
Rumpus: In so many ways, it’s where the real strength of a writer lies. I think a lot of people can get lost in a story and putting the bones onto the page, but do you have the wherewithal and the time to make it into something, as you say, like a finely cut jewel.
Benz: Writers always talk about getting to that mindset of writing like a reader, which is so hard because not all of us are Zen masters! But that’s what we’re all going for. What we’re all trying to do.
Mickie Meinhardt is a Creative Writing Fellow at The New School. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Billfold, Seventh Wave, Wax, Handwritten, NYLON, and others. She writes a weekly email newsletter, The Interwebs Weekly, and is working on her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn. More from this author →
Chanelle Benz has published short stories in The American Reader, Fence, The Cupboard and Granta.com, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. She received her MFA at Syracuse University as well as a BFA in Acting from Boston University. She is of British-Antiguan descent and currently lives in Houston.
Chanelle Benz is The Next Big Thing
Published on March 26, 2013
I’m so happy to play host to this Next Big Thing interview with Chanelle Benz here on my blog! Here we go…
What is/was the working title of the book?
“The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead.”
Where did the idea come from for the book?
First I wrote “Adela” (a 19th century found object piece narrated by a collective We in a baroque, Gothic style,) which came partly from an English class I’d taken called “Cultural Formations in the West Indies,” partly from my own predilection for theatrics, and partly out of the ether with this sentence by the creepy child narrators: “We did not understand how she came to be alone.”
Around the same time as I was writing “Adela,” I was starting David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and I came up with an experiment for myself: what if I wrote a collection of spy, post-apocalyptic, nineteenth-century, western, etc. stories? How many could I do, if any? I’ve ended up with 9 stories ranging from a monk during the 16th century dissolution of the monasteries to a pudgy ninth grader grappling with violence, privilege and Quakerism in modern-day Philly.
What genre does your book fall under?
Literary Fiction. Short story.
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Ha ha. You have NO idea how much I love this question. I’ll reveal just a few of my castings. I’d love to see either Ralph Fiennes, Richard Armitage or Alan Rickman in the embittered monk story “That We May Be One Sheepfolde.” Chad Coleman (Cutty in The Wire) as the father in “James III.” Benedict Cumberbatch as Frederick Crawford in the slave narrative “The Peculiar Narrative of the Remarkable Particulars in the Life of Orrinda Thomas.” Amber Gray as Adela. I could go on…
What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?
“The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead” is comprised of mostly voice-driven stories that experiment in genre and form, but are thematically connected through the issues of history, gender and race.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
3 years.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I was a theater actor before this so I feel like I have a lot to learn, to read, to see if I can do. I wanted to understand and master the mechanics of the short story—a lofty aim inspired by George Saunders. I also wanted to see how many worlds/vocal performances I could build like David Mitchell. But the stories themselves came from all over the place—ex-slave narratives, Sir Thomas More’s letters, wandering the graveyards of the Deep South, my childhood obsession with Billy the Kid.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
My story “West of the Known” is in the brilliant, new lit mag The American Reader.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
The latter.
Who are the NEXT Next Big Things?
Christopher Brunt, Martin De Leon, and Rachel Abelson.
…and a big thank you to Kit Frick for tagging me–looking forward to reading her chapbook!
QUOTED: "Benz's first short story collection, with its provocative title, dazzles readers."
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead
Shoba Viswanathan
113.8 (Dec. 15, 2016): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead.
By Chanelle Benz.
Jan. 2017. 240p. Ecco, $24.99 (9780062490759).
Benz's first short story collection, with its provocative title, dazzles readers with its many different writing styles. Benz's range of narrative techniques is just one of the ways she uses fiction to revisit the past in tales set in present-day America and sixteenth-century England. Strongly preoccupied with history and memory, Benz swings between the personal and the political as she laces gender roles, race relations, and the politics of them into her divergent stories. The plots can be weak, but the diverse characters are compelling, from a girl forced to become an outlaw to a former novice priest with blood on his hands. As Benz's adventurers and dreamers attempt to remake their worlds in small and big ways, there are no easy happy endings here. Yet these lyrical stories capture the urgency of lives lived with daring and concern for others. --Shoba Viswanathan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Viswanathan, Shoba. "The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2016, p. 20. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476563446&it=r&asid=dd182ef945f9de2187f908548a11d24b. Accessed 22 June 2017.
QUOTED: "The variety of these stories is striking."
"an ambitious book that marks Benz as a writer to watch."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476563446
Benz, Chanelle: THE MAN WHO SHOT OUT MY EYE IS DEAD
(Nov. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Benz, Chanelle THE MAN WHO SHOT OUT MY EYE IS DEAD Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $24.99 1, 17 ISBN: 978-0-06-249075-9
A wide-ranging debut collection that spans time, genre, and place.It isn't often that readers open a book of literary short stories and find themselves launched from the very first page into a Western, complete with a brothel, saloon, bank robbery, and a narrator who says things like, "Alone, jest us two, in what I had by then guessed was her actual room, tho it had none of the marks of the individual, the whore put the whiskey between my fingers." The story, "West of the Known," is one of two Western-style tales in Benz's book, and it exemplifies what she's best at: trying on voices and settings like costumes and using them as a lens through which to view contemporary life. The variety of these stories is striking. "The Peculiar Narrative of the Remarkable Particulars in the Life of Orrinda Thomas" is an epistolary tale in the voice of a slave who finds notoriety as a poet; "Adela" takes the form of a 19th-century gothic tale with scholarly annotations. This kitchen-sink approach is not without risk. As in any ambitious performance, readers may sometimes feel Benz straining to embody, say, the voice of a 16th-century monk. But when the author finds a fit, she soars, as in "James III," the story of a young boy running away from an abusive stepfather. Perhaps as impressive is Benz's ability to connect historical experiences of race and gender to the present day with subtlety. As the book ends, its final sentence, set in the 1500s, resonates outward: "Make me a clean heart. Renew a right spirit within me...O God, in the most corrupt of centuries, hear my prayer." An ambitious book that marks Benz as a writer to watch.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Benz, Chanelle: THE MAN WHO SHOT OUT MY EYE IS DEAD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468388928&it=r&asid=ff280685a5ab3ebb80147ed42bbdfba9. Accessed 22 June 2017.
QUOTED: "At its best, the collection explores violence, identity, and otherness in sharply observed, fiercely eloquent prose."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468388928
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead
263.42 (Oct. 17, 2016): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead
Chanelle Benz. Ecco, $24.99 (240p) ISBN 978-0-06-249075-9
Evoking eras from the medieval to the postapocalyptic and built around various forms including slave narratives, found documents, and gothic tales complete with sly scholarly notes, Benz's debut collection of 10 stories is impressive but uneven. The opening story, "West of the Known," is a 2014 O. Henry Prize winner and one of book's strongest. Vividly refashioning a Western outlaw tale with a female narrator and taut, inventive language, its chain of violation and retribution is emotionally compelling and historically vivid. Another high point is "Accidental," in which a woman guilty of vehicular manslaughter sets out on a quest driven by family loss, distance, and fallibility. Set in the present and uncomplicated by the tricky strategies that mark much of the rest of the book, it is powerfully nuanced. In contrast, the labored medievalism of "That We May All Be One Sheepfolde, or O Saeculum Corruptissimum," with its surfeit of phrasing such as "So cumbrous was mine horror upon the gore that wast my father's face," never moves beyond pastiche. At its best, the collection explores violence, identity, and otherness in sharply observed, fiercely eloquent prose. Benz's bold experiments with voice and genre sometimes fail to make an authentic emotional connection, but she nevertheless displays her daring and gift for language. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead." Publishers Weekly, 17 Oct. 2016, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468699999&it=r&asid=2dad28b994e73e96359309683ab955f2. Accessed 22 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468699999
QUOTED: "Benz pulls the rug out from under you in almost every story, both in expectation bending and in her gut-wrenching narrations. There is no doubting her range and talent, and with fans like George Saunders and Helen Oyeyemi, she is sure to make a name for herself in the short-fiction world."
by Sara Cutaia
January 25, 2017
Comments 0
9780062490759_5cc48Chanelle Benz’s debut collection of stories The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead is hard to define due to its impressive range in theme and tone. Debuts are always journeys through an author’s voice and style, but Benz pushes that envelope even further with these experimental stories and forms. Though her characters and plots stretch centuries and settings, they all share an elevated and microscopic study of race, history, and gender.
The opening story is the 2014 O. Henry Award winning “West of the Known.” Told in the old-fashioned voice belonging to Westerns, Lavenia joins her brother Jackson as an outlaw, gambling in saloons and robbing banks. The siblings met only recently, having been separated and raised by other relatives. Their relationship shows the sprawling gap in identities, as Jackson is reckless and bold, while Lavenia is naïve and doe-eyed. Parallel to the rough and wild shoot-em-up atmosphere is the intricately woven expectations of family loyalty vs. morality, which brings a deeply human aspect to an otherwise unsurprising storyline.
An example of Benz’s experimental story structure is “Adela, Primarily Known as The Black Voyage, Later Reprinted as Red Casket of the Heart by Anon. 1829.” If the title isn’t enough indication that this is an unconventional tale, the fact that it is a found text, complete with footnotes, should convince you. The story is told in the “we” chorus of a small-town gang of children who adore the town-outcast Adela. There is a sinister tone to their meddling schemes, made even more chilling by their innocent black-and-white view of society. In both structure and plot, the story is told in a baroque, Gothic style, though occasionally there is humor and modern-day progressive views that all add to the innovative way Benz has crafted her story.
Jumping narrative ships yet again, “The Peculiar Narrative of the Remarkable Particulars in the Life of Orrinda Thomas” is an 18th-century slave-narrative in diary form. A freed-poet, Orrinda finds herself traveling to the still-enslaved-Louisiana for a poetry reading with her benefactor. With touching passages and sad observations, Orrinda tells the harrowing events that she faces that are somehow unique to her while simultaneously being universal to many.
Showing off her range, Benz takes us to the 21st-century with “The Diplomat’s Daughter.” Natalia is kidnapped while on a mission trip in Kangwa, and she soon falls prey to Stockholm Syndrome, becoming ensnared in various terrorist and violent plots in the name of love. There are threads of family, identity, abuse, patriotism, and love woven throughout this one story, all told in a voice heavy with trauma and grim determination. The timeline jumps around, following no chronological order, but I found the way the pieces all fell into place as the story progressed to be fascinating and impactful to the plot as a whole.
The other stories in this collection keep with the pattern of surprising narration. “The Mourners” is a faith-filled, spiritual story with hints of Poe that follows a widow as she struggles to escape a 19th-century doctrine of mourning while also dealing with disappointing her family in her duty as a daughter. A sickly monk living in 16th-century Britain narrates his injustices in life in “That We May Be One Sheefolde.” And “James III” is set in modern-day Philadelphia, following quiet and good-hearted James as he grapples with a violent home-life and figuring out high school all at once.
Benz pulls the rug out from under you in almost every story, both in expectation bending and in her gut-wrenching narrations. There is no doubting her range and talent, and with fans like George Saunders and Helen Oyeyemi, she is sure to make a name for herself in the short-fiction world.
FICTION – SHORT STORIES
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead by Chanelle Benz
Ecco
Published January 17, 2017
ISBN 9780062490759
Chanelle Benz has published short stories in The American Reader, Fence, The Cupboard and Granta.com, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. She received her MFA at Syracuse University as well as a BFA in Acting from Boston University. She is of British-Antiguan descent and currently lives in Houston.
'The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead': Stories worthy of that great title
A good title can make a book, and Houston author Chanelle Benz's debut collection of short stories, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, succeeds in part on the bravado of its gritty title.
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, by Chanelle Benz
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, by Chanelle Benz
A mixture of semi-Gothic tales told in wide-ranging time and place, it presents a vision of a world stained and haunted by the past. To some extent it seems a book-length recapitulation of William Faulkner's famous quote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." One can easily argue the accuracy of that claim, but it's more a statement of cultural faith than reality, and Benz pulls the reader into this vortex of past/present with brutal skill and grace.
"West of the Known," for instance, unfolds in a brutish Texas landscape in some indeterminate time of the 19th century. The first-person narrator is a young woman who suffers from being an orphan and whose closest relative is a ne'er-do-well half-brother, Jackson. His reappearance in her life leads to both of their deaths.
This opening story in the collection sets the tone for lyrical presentiments, rhetorical questions and sudden mayhem: "There is nothing to forgive. For in the high violence of joy, is there not often a desire to swear devotion?" Jackson kills her aunt, uncle and cousin, ostensibly for abusing her. All of this unfolds in a landscape evoked from earthy details such as, "The dark of the Texas plain was a solid thing, surrounding, collecting on my face like blued dust."
"The Diplomat's Daughter," on the other hand, is set in a wide-ranging contemporary landscape, with its here-and-now specified in particulars, such as, "Beirut 2011," and "Lynchburg, Virginia, 1997." Reading the story is like playing a game of Clue, the goal being to figure out who exactly is who and what is what. One could argue that it's a postmodern experience, like trying to decipher a fallen stack of postcards retrieved from an airport wastebasket.
Other stories depend on historical tropes. "The Peculiar Narrative of the Remarkable Particulars in the Life of Orrinda Thomas" is a fictional slave-narrative. Orrinda is an African-American slave poet brought to Louisiana in 1840 who comes to a cruel fate, in part for her talent at writing: "Yet as I am but a toy, a jade in a cage, a darling spectacle, I went." It almost seems a poem itself, a miniature, relying upon and riffing off much longer historical slave-narratives, such as the acclaimed 2013 film Twelve Years a Slave.
"That We May Be All One Sheepfolde" is essentially a murder-revenge tale that unfolds in an imagined England that seems cobbled together from literary antecedents and a lively imagination. It's not realism, but rather an amalgam of styles and literary tropes that resembles historical life, as if a contemporary artist copied a Vermeer (or John Donne), the language antiquated and stylized: "After the fire at St. Paul's Cathedral, I moved the bookstore hither. Twas not long after that when the city met with plague, and this orphan boy, then a beggarly pickthank, began haunting my pages, though he knew not how to read. It is to me an irony that I should now sell that for which men have burned."
Chanelle Benz, author of The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead(
Christine Jean Chambers
)
Chanelle Benz, author of The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead
(
Christine Jean Chambers
)
Contrast that style to the opening of "James III," a title which does not refer to the renowned king of England during Shakespeare's later years, but rather a ninth-grade African-American kid attending a Quaker school some time roughly in the present. He's a young poet who may well be "the next Terrance Hayes," according to one of his teachers, and who opens the story with this scene: "I hustled left at the car dealership, picking my way over the loose gravel in the road, hopping up on the concrete bridge to the safety of the smooth. I stopped running when I got to the top of the station steps and took advantage of my inhalerless wheezing and checked out the platform situation. No one but a dude in a black baseball cap, tattoos up his neck."
That eclectic mixture of language and historical era defines Benz's curious fiction, and The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead is an ambitious debut.
William J. Cobb is the author of "The Bird Saviors" and "Goodnight, Texas," and posts at williamjcobb.com/blog/.
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead
Chanelle Benz
(HarperCollins, $24.99)
Available Jan. 17