Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Night Beast
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.ruthjoffre.org/
CITY: Seattle
STATE: WA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in VA.
EDUCATION:Cornell University, B.A.; Iowa Writers’ Workshop, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Hugo House, teaches writing and literature.
AWARDS:Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize for Fiction; George Harmon Coxe Award for Creative Writing.
WRITINGS
Short story contributor to numerous periodicals, including Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, and Fiction Southeast; poetry contributor to Prairie Schooner, Journal, and Drunken Boat; nonfiction and criticism contributor to Millions, Rumpus, Kenyon Review Online, Colorado Review, and Establishment.
SIDELIGHTS
Ruth Joffre is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, criticism, and poetry. Joffre was born and raised in Northern Virginia and is of Bolivian heritage. She attended college at Cornell University, where she graduated with honors. While there, she won the Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize for Fiction and the George Harmon Coxe Award for Creative Writing. Joffre received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has lived in Ithaca, Iowa City, Seattle, and Rome and has studied under Lan Samantha Chang, Marilynne Robinson, Ayana Mathis, Benjamin Percy, Stephanie Vaughn, and Alice Fulton. She teaches writing and literature at the Hugo House in Seattle, where she lives.
Night Beast: And Other Stories is Joffre’s first collection of stories. While the stories vary in their placement in reality, the focus of each story is emotional conflict. The majority of the protagonists in the book are female. In those stories that center on men, it is female emotion that moves the story forward. Many stories in the collection are touched with tragedy just when hope seems near. In “Go West, and Grow Up,” a poverty-stricken mother and daughter have been living out of their car for a year. Just when it seems they may clime out of their difficult circumstances, their car stalls, leaving them abandoned miles from help. In “I’m Not Asking,” a hopeful mother suffers from a devastating miscarriage. When she finds solace in a made-up escape fantasy, she shares it with her wife, hoping to bring them together in healing. Instead, her partner disapproves of the fantasy and pulls away further. In “Night Beast,” the title of the book and the last in the collection, a woman grapples with the sexual encounters she has experienced with her husband’s fiancé, who comes to her in a sleepwalking state in the night.
While some stories are set in the real world, others have a strong magic realism element. In “Nitrate Nocturnes,” the opening story, everyone is born with a timer imprinted in their wrist, counting down the days until they will meet the love of their life. This process becomes complicated when the timer glitches, causing one soul mate to be ready for love before the other. In “Two Lies,” a mother has a fantasy that the mess in her children’s rooms growing into a mold, capable of thought and feeling. She imagines the children becoming infatuated with the mold, watching it day in and out, and feeding it their own flesh and blood. Ultimately the children become the mold, slimy and yet still human. This story, the shortest in the collection, explores the mother’s love for her children and simultaneous guilt at her lack of maternal instinct. In “Safekeeping,” a woman waits for her lover to return in a technologically advanced underground bomb shelter, while war rages on above. Her days are spent eating dehydrated food and reading. Locked away in the bunker, she finds peace in rationalizing her lover’s abandonment as an act of affection and love. Although the technology in the bunker starts to show glitches and the ceiling of the shelter begins to crack, it is clear that the woman is living in an illusion of love, and loneliness will be the true cause of her demise.
“Joffre’s debut collection heralds the arrival of a new, exciting voice in fiction,” wrote Lynnanne Pearson in Booklist, while a contributor to Publishers Weekly described it as “a haunting and captivating collection about love and loss.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews noted the stories “trap readers in a kind of disconcerting dream–by the time they’re over, we feel a vague sense of melancholy without being quite sure why.” Kelly Lynn Thomas on the Ploughshares website wrote: “These stories are fairy-tales for a world that doesn’t know what it is anymore.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Lynnanne Pearson, review of Night Beast: And Other Stories, p. 20.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of Night Beast.
Publishers Weekly, March 5, 2018, review of Night Beast, p. 44.
ONLINE
Ploughshares, http://blog.pshares.org/ (May 8, 2018), Kelly Lynn Thomas, review of Night Beast.
Ruth Joffre is the author of Night Beast and Other Stories. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, The Masters Review, Lightspeed, Hayden's Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, The Offing, and Fiction Southeast, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Journal, and Drunken Boat. Her nonfiction and criticism have appeared in The Millions, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review Online, Colorado Review, The Establishment, and elsewhere.
Ruth was born and raised in Northern Virginia. Her mother was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1950, and Ruth has taken her mother's maiden name to honor her. Since leaving home, Ruth has lived in Ithaca, Iowa City, Seattle, and Rome. She graduated with honors from Cornell University, where she won the Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize for Fiction and the George Harmon Coxe Award for Creative Writing. Ruth went on to earn her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has studied under many renowned writers, including Lan Samantha Chang, Marilynne Robinson, Ayana Mathis, Benjamin Percy, Stephanie Vaughn, and Alice Fulton. Ruth lives in Seattle, where she teaches writing and literature at the Hugo House.
Q&A with Ruth Joffre, author of “A Girl Turns to Stone”
Ruth Joffre’s “A Girl Turns to Stone” was published in The Offing’s Fiction department on March 5, 2018. Q&A conducted by Megan Giddings, Editor, Fiction.
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. . .
Megan Giddings: Ruth, when I think about your writing, one of the words I immediately think is “smooth.” Your sentences wind and flow together, and then suddenly: you realize you’re reading about something big, something even a little ugly despite the prose’s beauty. Who are your biggest influences on the sentence-level? Is there someone who you feel like could use more attention as a sentence-level writer?
Ruth Joffre: In high school, when I started writing in earnest, Virginia Woolf was my biggest influence on the sentence-level. I can’t tell you how many winding, page-long sentences I wrote trying to imitate her style. Eventually, I gave up on that pursuit, but I retained some of the same sensibilities, and I think that accounts for the “smoothness” you mention. I wouldn’t say that I have influences on the sentence-level (that would imply that I’m trying to emulate someone, which I never do now), but I certainly admire other writer’s sentences. Of the books I’ve read in the past six months, I’m most impressed by the sentences in André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, which I’m ashamed to say I only just read for the first time. That book has some breathtaking sentences about desire. I highly recommend.
MG: One of the things that is striking — and I think makes this story feel longer, at times — is your use of a single paragraph. How do you think a paragraph’s length influences its meaning? What about how a story, especially flash, looks on the page?
RJ: Line breaks are like bone fractures: each break results in new bone growth — new material. Every new paragraph break and indent invites the story to grow, but with flash that’s the exact opposite of what I want, so I limit the use of paragraph breaks as much as possible. It looks cleaner, and it keeps me from using dialogue as a kind of crutch to move the story along. Visually, I’ve always liked the way a single paragraph looks on the page. I know unbroken blocks of text put off some readers, but they actually draw me in and make me more invested. Many of Lydia Davis’ flashes are single paragraphs, and I think they feel more complete because of it, as if she’s completing a thought or inviting the reader to stuff a whole cookie into their mouth. I want to eat that cookie-paragraph to find out what it’s made of.
MG: I really admire the way you make the extraordinary (like a girl whose body parts turn to different kinds of stone) feel so real in your work by having it often surrounded by the ordinary (a first awkward-exhilarating romantic encounter). How do you think the ordinary can enhance a reader’s belief in the extraordinary? Are there any things that aspiring writers should be conscious of us when attempting this?
RJ: This question made me think of the film Amélie — specifically, the color palette. Much was made of the sumptuous look of the film when it premiered, and for good reason: the rich reds, yellows, and greens accentuate the film’s already lush emotional palette. But what a lot of moviegoers fail to realize is that the palette isn’t uniform. There are little spots of blue that Bruno Delbonnel, the Director of Photography, deliberately introduced to offset the reds. The idea was that the spots of blue would provide much-needed contrast so that the eyes wouldn’t get tired of the existing color palette. I think that my story functions in much the same way: by introducing blue (the ordinary) into an otherwise red (extraordinary) story, I make it easier for the reader to accept the narrative as a whole. Without that contrast, it would just be too red — too extraordinary, too removed from the realities of everyday life. I think aspiring speculative fiction writers in particular should keep that in mind. Your stories can be as fantastical as you like as long as you ground them somehow.
MG: Your short story collection, Night Beast, comes out in May! For interested readers, where’s the best place to pre-order it? Is there another story or two of yours available online for readers who can’t wait until May to read more of your work?
RJ: A full list of pre-order links is available on my website, but I imagine most people will either go to Amazon or Powell’s. You can read the title story online at The Masters Review and check out a couple pieces of flash fiction at SmokeLong Quarterly and Juked.
MG: What advice would you give a writer who’s trying to put together their first collection? (this can be general, specific, etc.)
RJ: I would tell them to start thinking about publicity well in advance. What is your audience, where can you do readings and events, how can you get your name out there? First collections are hard sells, as are short stories in general, and you have to be mindful of that going in to the process so you don’t set unreasonable expectations. That’s not to say that you should write with a particular audience in mind. Write for yourself and never compromise; but be prepared to work hard to sell your book. It’s not about having a gimmick. It’s about having a plan.
Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Nashville Review, and Copper Nickel. She lives in Seattle, where she teaches at the Hugo House.
Smoke and Mirrors: An Interview with Ruth Joffre
by Megan Giddings Read the Story December 19, 2016
Art by Dave Petraglia
One of the things that impressed me about “Softening” is the length of your paragraphs. I know, that’s such a writer thing to say, but those two big paragraphs made the story feel much longer to me. The paragraphs made me take my time while I was reading and made me remember it as something much longer and very intricate. Was the story always in this two paragraph format? And who are some writers that you think are the best paragraph writers writing today?
I’m the kind of writer who likes to sink into the story. This is especially true when I’m writing in the first person, where making the voice believable means understanding the character’s thought process. Too many writers think “voice” merely means diction, dialogue, and verve, but, for me, voice is about letting the character think at their own speed and connect things that readers might not connect. One example of this can be found early in the first paragraph of “Softening”, where the narrator says, “I open the window to let the air lap at my legs.” It would be a mistake to put a paragraph break there. That break would punch an image (the narrator’s bare legs) that isn’t really worth punching. The narrator herself would never linger on this. She would instead start thinking about the air lapping at her legs and move from one sense (touch) to another (smell). This is how her mind works. The paragraph continues until the only logical break—the revelation of the ants in the narrator’s cereal. Were it to break before then, the paragraph as a whole would lose focus. It’s not about the individual acts the narrator performs on this morning. It’s about how all of them lead up to the kiss mentioned in the first sentence.
Some of my favorite paragraph writers are: Lydia Davis, Elizabeth Strout, Elizabeth McCracken, Charles D’Ambrosio, Charles Baxter, Annie Proulx, and Alice Munro (in spite of the fact that the last two have threatened never to publish again). Lydia Davis’ paragraphs are especially brilliant when you take into account that many of her stories are only a paragraph long. This has the same effect you mentioned: of giving the story depth.
In 150 words or less, tell a very brief story about your writing life.
In middle school, all my friends had hobbies: music, dance, sports, art, or writing. I was poor, so I picked writing because it was the cheapest. I already had the paper and pencils for school, and I could practice my craft without having to buy instruments, paints, or special equipment. I kept at it through high school mostly because I was stubborn and needed an expressive outlet. In college I began to publish flash fiction and poetry in small literary magazines. Senior year, I got my first big break: I got into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and won third in a Glimmer Train contest. I’ve been publishing steadily since. 2016 has been my biggest year so far: three stories published, two more accepted, one poem accepted, and six book reviews published. On top of working full time. You could sum up my writing life in two words: endless production.
Reading past interviews, it sounds like you’re currently writing a novel, The Soft Stuff Last. How do you balance short story writing, poetry, and reviewing with the much longer work of writing a novel? What advice would you give to writers struggling to balance all the different ways to be a writer?
Ahh, I was wondering when somebody would ask about The Soft Stuff Last. This project is half-abandoned, meaning that I still pluck away at it sometimes but have no real intention of sending it out into the world. Right now, I’m writing a story collection, Nitrate Nocturnes; doing research for a novel, Viral; and periodically writing book reviews, as well as poems. Here’s how I do it:
1) Plan Ahead
I’m a very regimented writer, and I like to set schedules. I’ve been writing long enough now that I know going into a project how long it’s going to take me. Book reviews are two weeknights, give or take. Poems take about an hour for the initial draft, followed by an incalculable number of big edits. And short stories, depending on the projected word count, generally take me a month. The last one took three weeks. Many beginning writers won’t be as certain of their own numbers, but can still make a schedule by padding the dates with generous estimates. This isn’t to say that I’m always right about how long a piece will take me, but does let me: pencil in time for research and reading, carve out time for submissions, and meet deadlines for grants, contests, etc. Having this writing and submitting schedule is invaluable—and keeps me motivated.
2) Set Achievable Goals
You might’ve noticed that I don’t schedule for book-length manuscripts. Exact dates for these are too hard to predict, because you can never be sure how many stories or chapters you’ll need, how many you’ll have to cut, or how much editing you’ll have to do. Instead of saying, “I will finish a short story collection in a year,” I set myself a more reasonable and less daunting goal: finish the short story I’m working on in a month. This is an achievable goal. I can approach it without ever getting discouraged or taking my eyes off the big picture. And, as it happens, I did write most of the stories in Nitrate Nocturnes in a year.
3) Know Your Limits
It shouldn’t be a surprise that my writing schedule allows for very little free time. This fall, while wrapping up Nitrate Nocturnes, I did allow myself a number of nights out (the opera, a Tegan & Sara concert), in addition to teaching a two-day class at the Hugo House here in Seattle. Overall, though, there hasn’t been much socializing. Most writers I know would go mad if they stuck to a schedule like mine. So, even though I’m advising you to be super regimented, I don’t want you to burnout.
4) Always Be Researching
Part of knowing your limits is knowing whether you’re intellectually or emotionally prepared to write a piece, whether it be a story, a poem, or book review. For example, my novel-in-progress, Viral, is about an AIDS-like virus that spills over from the animal world and sparks an epidemic in the human population. This leads to entire neighborhoods and cities being quarantined, with a large portion of the quarantined left to die. The protagonist, a Puerto Rican drag queen, attempts to escape. Obviously, this is speculative fiction, but in order to make it believable, I’m reading a lot about viruses, diseases, AIDS, the NIH, and the processes by which cures are developed. My research isn’t always this involved, however. Sometimes “research” means staring at a town I’ve never visited on Google maps. Or trying to understand why someone would forgive their child’s murderer. My point is that pretty much anything counts as research. A terrible Thanksgiving with a family full of Trump fans can, for instance, be a fascinating study in psychosis-level delusions. So, keep your eyes peeled for something you can use in your writing.
What made you decide that “Softening” was going to be a flash story? It’s one of those stories that I think is remarkable because it’s in the shape of an anecdote that tells so much about the main character. And it’s such a big story that it’s easy to think whoa, I could read at least twenty more pages about this character and what she’s doing now.
“Softening” probably went through a dozen drafts before I settled on the size and the structure. It was inspired by a real experience I had (of finding ants in my cereal) and grew from there, using that hunger as foundation for the story. I suppose I always knew that it was going to be a piece of flash fiction. Originally, because it was based on such a small, disconnected moment, it consisted solely of the first paragraph and of the offer of food from Ms. Laura, the concerned teacher. Only after I sat with the story a while did I understand that the narrator wasn’t really craving food but intimacy—any kind of intimacy, even an inappropriate sexual advance—and once I knew that it was easy to see where the story had to go.
About the Author:
Ruth Joffre is a writer and a critic whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Nashville Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, The Millions, and The Rumpus, among others. She's a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and she lives in Seattle, where she teaches at the Hugo House.
About the Interviewer:
Megan Giddings was a former executive editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and a winner of the Kathy Fish Fellowship. Her chapbooks, Arcade Seventeen (TAR) and The Most Dangerous Game (The Lettered Streets Press) will be released Fall 2016. She has been anthologized in Best of the Net 2014 and in Best Small Fictions 2016. Her stories are forthcoming or have been recently published in Arts & Letters, Passages North, The Offing, Pleiades, and Black Warrior Review. You can learn more about her at www.megangiddings.com.
About the Artist:
A Best Small Fictions 2015 Winner, Dave Petraglia's writing and art have appeared in Bartleby Snopes, bohemianizm, Cheap Pop, Crack the Spine, Five:2:One, Gambling the Aisle, Hayden's Ferry, matchbook, Medium, McSweeney's, Necessary Fiction, North American Review, Per Contra, Points in Case, Popular Science, Razed, SmokeLong Quarterly, Up the Staircase, and others.
Author Spotlight: Ruth Joffre
by Arley Sorg
Published in Apr. 2018 (Issue 95) | 2033 words | Related Story: Nitrate Nocturnes
From the outset, Fiona is at odds with the people around her, with the expectations of her culture, and with what she sees as her future. Ironically, she doesn’t really start fitting in until she becomes something of an anomaly. Is this simply compelling fiction? Or is this also drawing on your own experiences?
Growing up, I felt at odds with society because of my sexual orientation, and though I was never ashamed of my queerness, I was certainly aware of the fact that it was frowned upon by certain members of my family. In order to be myself, I had to step back, live my own life, which meant pursuing writing instead of getting a “real job” like they expected. I think this otherness is a large part of what fuels my fiction, which is largely uninterested in the lives of the status quo. Fiona is like me, in the sense that she chafes against society’s expectations. Some of her experiences are my own: attending graduate school, critiquing student films (as an undergraduate, I studied both film and literature), and falling in love with the wrong person, someone I mistakenly believed to be “the one.” That experience fueled the story.
In terms of the writing process, where did this story start for you and how did it develop?
This was a concept-driven story. I wanted very much to write about my experience of mistakenly believing I had found “the one,” but I also knew that the essential plot of that story wasn’t new or even that interesting in and of itself. I needed to find a way to maintain the core of the love story while allowing myself to explore the themes of doubt and self-deception in a more nuanced way. Once I hit upon the idea of the timer, the story progressed from there, and, though I had no idea, when I began, where each scene would lead me, I was able to write the first draft straight through just by following the logical turns in the narrative. Once I introduced the infallible timer, I knew I had to undermine it. As soon as Fiona started to accept her completion date, I changed it. When Fiona met Marian, I withheld the happy ending. These were all decisions I made in the course of writing. Nothing was planned, and yet the story as it appears now is not much different from that first draft. One scene, the last, is a bit longer, but that’s all.
This piece takes the idea of finding “the one” to the next level, making it even more of a given (to a point), but then plays with notions around what “the one” actually is, subverting mainstream prescriptive concepts. Why, do you think, are we as enraptured as we are with the notion of a standard storybook/movie romance?
Storybook romances like those seen in Hollywood are popular for a reason: They offer a sense of certainty and security that doesn’t exist in the real world. Lovers in these stories are “destined” to be together, are “perfect” for each other, feel “completed” by their “true love.” These phrases all carry with them a sense of finality, of having reached the conclusion of the story: You have found your love, and now you’ll never have to worry again. But the reality is that you do have to worry. Relationships are messy. Divorce rates are high. A friend of mine recently told me that her ex is much better at emotional support than her husband, which is not to say that she doesn’t love her husband, just that he isn’t perfect and that sometimes she’s disappointed by that fact. Hollywood romances have given us unreasonable expectations of what a significant other should be: At once your best friend, perfect lover, and emotional rock, “the one” is supposed to be your everything. It’s a comforting idea, certainly, and I can understand why people yearn for it, but few among us can say with 100% certainty that they’re with the right person. Nor should they have to. I think if we put less pressure on ourselves to find “the one” early, we would be much more satisfied in our relationships overall.
Especially powerful, I think, is the idea that soulmates may not be pleasant at first, and that the situation can be kind of bad for a long time, but that people reshape themselves or put up with those situations because of a promise of some kind of fulfillment. Is it human instinct, a drive for community and companionship? Or are we culturally conditioned to change or control parts of ourselves in order to be part of something else?
I think the willingness to change yourself in order to become part of something else—whether it be a high school clique, a football team, a marriage—is culturally conditioned, yes, although the desire to be part of something feels more innate. We should separate the fact of a desire from the lengths someone is willing to go to in order to achieve it, because those lengths vary significantly based on various factors, particularly gender. Women are taught from an early age that they have to please their man, that in order to do that they have to look a certain way or be a certain weight or put up with all manner of misogynistic and abusive behaviors. The recent #MeToo movement has shed light on how toxic this conditioning has been for our society. I knew, when I invented the timer, that it wasn’t a panacea. It wasn’t going to fix the problem of toxic masculinity or rape culture. Instead, it just dangled a carrot at the end of it: Put up with this, and you’ll get your soul mate out of it. I’ve always found that element of the story very frightening.
I enjoyed the depictions of nontraditional relationships of various kinds, set out in nonjudgmental portrayals and normalized within the story. In the hands of another author, these representations might have looked very different, or not appeared at all. Is showing different sorts of relationships important? Also—is there a suggestion here that, in a world where an inevitable pairing could be anyone, cultures will naturally develop that are less prejudicial and more open-minded?
Most of my stories feature queer characters, and, from a political perspective, it has always been important to me to tell stories that straight white society might otherwise overlook. As a writer, I think it’s important to be able to write outside of yourself, to explore characters who are of a sex, gender, race, class, martial status, education level, or body type other than your own. This is just good practice. We can’t practice our craft honestly if we never consider any opinion or life other than our own. When we don’t, the narratives become limited, the characters repetitive. We don’t grow, and that’s death for a writer.
Though I would like to believe that a world where “the one” could be anyone (regardless of race, gender, or religion) would be more open-minded, I think the reality is that prejudice would still exist, though in a somewhat different form. People will naturally develop their own preferences. And expectations. To say nothing of scientifically inaccurate beliefs of the statistical likelihood of X, Y, or Z pairing. For example, a cishet man who earnestly believes his soul mate will be a woman will undoubtedly react poorly when it turns out his soulmate is a gay man. Homophobia and racism are still possible in the world of “Nitrate Nocturnes,” but I did not go out of my way to make room for them.
The ending was surprising but effective. Did you try out different endings or was this where you always wanted the story to go?
I always knew I wanted to end the story in that setting, with Fiona sitting in the darkened theater, but I didn’t know going in that Marian would be sitting next to her. I debated that for a long time (whether to bring them back together or keep them apart). For a while, I considered having Fiona sit off to one side and watch jealously as Marian and her boyfriend enjoyed themselves, but there could be no real resolution in that version; it would only have driven Fiona crazy and needlessly twisted the knife in her heart. Eventually, I realized that I could have it both ways: bring the two back together and keep them apart by not resolving the issue of Marian’s timer. The implication is that Marian timer’s has X amount of time left and Fiona will stay with Marian in the hope that, when Marian reaches her completion date, she’ll be on the other end of it.
Is there anything else you want readers to know about you or this piece?
This story was inspired in no small part by my time at Cornell Cinema. In college, I worked there evenings and weekends, and I attended parties much like the one in the final scene of this story—including one where I saw a strip of nitrate film burned before my very eyes. It’s rare, in the age of DVDs and digital media, to experience film in this way: to feed the projector, to watch for the circle that tells you to change the reel, to see a film decay. For all the glories of high-def, there’s something being lost in the transition from celluloid to digital. I suppose what I’m saying is this: Support your local art house theatres. You might just find the love of your life there.
You’ve been publishing for a while now and your collection Night Beast is coming out in May. You have made a study and practice of fiction, through both academics and workshops. How has your writing changed in the last few years? Are there aspects or elements of writing that are more of a struggle for you?
All through undergrad and up until my second semester in grad school, I wrote pretty exclusively literary fiction and poetry. That all changed when I took Kevin Brockmeier’s workshop at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This was a workshop devoted entirely to science fiction and fantasy, and the experience changed the way I thought about my craft. I had of course grown up on Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Ender’s Game, so I was no stranger to genre fiction—I had just never written it before. I suppose a part of me thought I wasn’t capable of it. And then, over the course of the semester, I wrote this strange, magical novelette about Buddhist monks living in a fishing village, where they make a substance known as “wax” that has extraordinary healing properties. It was so far removed from anything else that I had written that I was kind of astounded and had no idea if I could do it again. I waited a long time for my next science fiction idea to come to me. For me, the hardest part of writing is waiting for an idea to arrive fully formed. Often, I get impatient and start writing something before I’m emotionally or intellectually prepared for it. That’s always a mistake.
What are you working on now that we can look forward to?
Right now, I’m working on a novel called Blood and Sweat. It’s set in a world that is suffering from an outbreak of a deadly new single-strand RNA lentivirus. My main characters, a gay man and a transwoman, are trapped inside a massive quarantine in New York City, where they must struggle to survive as society deteriorates around them. My goal is to finish the novel and sell it this year. Fingers crossed!
Night Beast and Other Stories
Lynnanne Pearson
Booklist. 114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Alight Beast and Other Stories.
By Ruth Joffre.
May 2018. 208p. Black Cat, paper, $16 (9780802128089).
Each of the 11 short stories in this collection shares a similar lyrical, hallucinatory air. Joffre explores the lives of women: teenagers, mothers, queer women, and straight women, and the deep loneliness, pain, and vulnerability they feel. Even when the narrator is male, as in "Weekend" and "General, Minister, Horse, Cannon," the female characters form the emotional core. The most powerful story, "Two Lies,!' is also the shortest. It explores the tension between a mother's passionate love for her children and her guilt at never being maternal enough. Most of the stories are self-contained, but a throwaway line in "Weekend" makes the reader reexamine the whole conceit of "Safekeeping." Readers looking for happy endings should look elsewhere, as the author does a masterful job of showcasing the danger, both literal and figurative, that women face by loving another person. Perfect for fans of Kelly Link and of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties, Joffre's debut collection heralds the arrival of a new, exciting voice in fiction.--Lynnanne Pearson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pearson, Lynnanne. "Night Beast and Other Stories." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537268053/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d783122b. Accessed 5 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537268053
Night Beast
Publishers Weekly. 265.10 (Mar. 5, 2018): p44+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Night Beast
Ruth Joffre. Black Cat, $16 trade paper
(208p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2808-9
Most of the 11 stories in Joffre's captivating debut conclude with haunting epiphanies that crystallize the emotions their characters have been grappling with throughout their telling. In "Go West, and Grow Up," an impoverished mother and daughter who have been living out of their car for a year appear finally to escape the desperation of their lives, only to have their car stall out on the road miles from help. "Safekeeping" tells of a woman locked away in a bunker who finally rationalizes her imprisonment as an act of affection from the absent lover who placed her there. In "I'm Not Asking," a woman struggling to cope with an emotionally devastating miscarriage discovers that her increasingly estranged wife does not share her preferred escape fantasy. Joffre's characters range from everyday moms negotiating the crankiness of their kids to people imprinted with digital clocks that tick down to the time they'll meet their soulmate and, in the title story, a bride who has sex with her husband's sister during her sleepwalking spells. They all experience love and loss in a collection that amounts to a cri de coeur for sympathy and understanding. This is an auspicious debut. Agent: Ross Harris, Stuart Krkhevsky Literary Agency. (May)
Caption: Ruth Joffre's debut. Night Beast, is a haunting and captivating collection about love and loss (reviewed on this page).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Night Beast." Publishers Weekly, 5 Mar. 2018, p. 44+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530430245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7e02a227. Accessed 5 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530430245
Joffre, Ruth: NIGHT BEAST
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Joffre, Ruth NIGHT BEAST Black Cat/Grove (Adult Fiction) $16.00 5, 8 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2808-9
Young, often queer characters search unsuccessfully for solace in this debut collection of stories.
In the award-winning title story of Joffre's book, the narrator, Gemma, has fallen for her brother's bride-to-be, Sydney. The two women are carrying on a secret sexual affair--but only when Sydney is sleepwalking. Miserable on the day of the wedding, Gemma remembers their encounters: "I think part of me has always believed love should be like this--painful and hidden, only making itself known when you least expect it and are unprepared for the damage it can do." Again and again, Joffre's stories bear out this sentiment. In the collection's opener, "Nitrate Nocturnes," all people are born with timers in their wrists that count down how many years they have left before meeting their soul mates--but what happens when a glitch means one soul mate is ready for a relationship before the other? In "I'm Unarmed," an adolescent girl being molested by her male cousin, and navigating her first same-sex romance, leaves town after a violent attack on her abuser. In "Weekend," two avant-garde actors filming a long-running television show blur the lines between their real lives and those of their characters. The circumstances here are bleak: Men in the book are either oblivious or outright violent, but the women are rarely able to sustain more than fleeting comfort with each other. This hopelessness is underscored by a kind of narrative blurriness: Details in the stories get attention and then are abandoned, while seemingly crucial moments of motive or interiority are missing. The result is that the stories trap readers in a kind of disconcerting dream--by the time they're over, we feel a vague sense of melancholy without being quite sure why.
Joffre's ideas are vibrant, but a lack of development mutes the book's effect.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Joffre, Ruth: NIGHT BEAST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528960006/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8f2bfc19. Accessed 5 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528960006
Home » Book Reviews • Fiction » Night Beast and Other Stories by Ruth Joffre
Night Beast and Other Stories by Ruth Joffre
Author: Kelly Lynn Thomas |
May
08
2018
Posted In Book Reviews, Fiction
Night Beast and Other Stories book cover in a repeated patternNight Beast and Other Stories
By Ruth Joffre
Black Cat | May 8, 2018
Amazon | Powell’s
If I had only one word to describe Ruth Joffre’s debut short story collection, Night Beast and Other Stories, I would choose “fluid.” In many ways this book resembles a river, always moving, constantly changing, but with steady force sufficient to grind stone into sand. Like water, these stories dance through—not around—their subject matter, seeping into every crack and crevice, making connections in one scene and dissolving them in the next.
Reading this collection feels like looking at the world through water—the angles don’t quite match what you expect and the light is diffuse, except when a ripple catches it and momentarily robs you of vision. Joffre’s characters are wispy and insubstantial in the way ghosts of past selves feel when we look back through the haze of time. If you turn your head or look away, they will shift into something else, something new. Something dangerous.
“Two Lies” reveals one possible dangerous shape when a mother imagines her children’s dirty rooms growing intelligent slime mold. “When summer arrives the children will have no reason to go outside and will hide in their room, feeding their new mold pet, giving it swaths and patches of their flesh for it to stretch out and grow spores.”
Slowly, fluidly, the children become the mold: “I will reach my hand out to stroke them, and in their strange unicellular way the slime molds will reach back, like flowers to the sun.”
Joffre achieves this fluidity by refusing labels, marrying concrete sensory details to emotions, and using elements of fabulism and magical realism. Taken together, the effect is dreamlike, but never serene. There are mouths full of teeth in these waters, and they are hungry.
In “Nitrate Nocturnes,” the first story in the collection, Fiona waits for the timer embedded in her wrist to count down to the day she meets her soulmate. In the meanwhile, Fiona dates both men and women. Never is a label applied to her sexuality. She isn’t “queer” or “bisexual” or “pansexual.” She simply is, and she dates who she likes while she alternately rails against the timer’s tyranny and waits on edge for the moment she meets her soulmate.
In stories when the main character is only involved with women, she is never labeled. Nor are the ostensibly straight characters defined as such. This rejection of a neat, orderly sexuality creates a liminal space for the characters in which they can grow, evolve, and mutate. It creates a mood of possibility that Joffre furthers with stinging metaphors and genre elements like the mold, the soulmate timer, or the futuristic bomb shelter bunker the character in “Safekeeping” lives in alone.
Alone, this unnamed character waits deep in the earth for her lover to return while war rages above. She eats dehydrated food, reads, and watches artificial seasons pass in the pixels that make up her windows. “Everything had been provided for, except for her loneliness.”
More than the glitches that begin to infect the bomb shelter computer and the cracks that appear in the ceiling, we understand that it is the loneliness of waiting for companionship that never comes that will kill this woman.
Loneliness winds its way through the collection as Joffre explores what it means to be loved, to offer love, and to forcibly take love. Sexual abuse comes up in a number of stories, but is always alluded to more than shown. It lurks like a cancer, invisible until the tumor puts pressure on the brain and causes a seizure. We rarely see the moment of the seizure, as Joffre ends most of her stories a few sentences before we might feel satisfied with them. This habit is less a flaw and more a feature meant to unnerve us.
In many ways, the titular story synthesizes the collection’s examinations on love, loneliness, and sexuality. “Night Beast” is the last story in the collection, and one of the longest. It follows Gemma, who is often visited by her brother’s sleepwalking girlfriend Sydney. Sydney makes love to Gemma, who never refuses her advances. Gemma’s brother knows nothing of their relationship: “He held on to her there as if she were a weapon, some tiny, nimble dagger that fit perfectly into the chink in his armor, protecting him from harm.”
That is one example of the many instances Joffre uses metaphor and simile to great effect. She has a knack for describing ordinary sensory details in a way that makes them vaguely threatening and sinister. Another example, also from “Night Beast,” comes while Sydney and Gemma prepare for Sydney’s wedding to Gemma’s brother.
Then she snapped to attention, tuning in to the sounds from below, the comings and goings and discordant melodies of nothing being as you imagined it.
Ultimately, these stories are fairy-tales for a world that doesn’t know what it is anymore. They are reflections of a future that remains uncertain even as the world seems to fracture. Like water, these stories will seep into you, filling you past the point of bursting. For that, you will be grateful.