Originally from the Chicagoland area, A.A. Balaskovits has lived all across the American
Midwest but currently calls South Carolina her home. She received her B.A. from Loras College, her MFA from Bowling Green State University and her Ph.D. from The University of Missouri. She has served as an Assistant Fiction Editor for The Mid American Review and the Social Media Editor for The Missouri Review, where she launched two series for the blog: the Working Writers Series which interviewed writers without major publications and Literature on Lockdown, which curated essays by currently or former incarcerated writers as well as the people who teach them. Currently, she is the Social Media Editor for Cartridge Lit, an online journal of video game.
Your debut collection is deliciously dark and terrifying in the way that brilliant fiction tends to be. Congratulations! In equal measure the collection is thought provoking, groundbreaking in its depiction and range of female characters within the stories, and entertaining. I noticed too that in your acknowledgments you thank Angela Carter—another writer whose work changed and added to the landscape of feminist and fairy tale/magical realism literature—so I wondered whether there are particular stories in the collection that you think are natural heirs to the kind of stories Carter was telling. If yes, how so? And whether there are particular stories that break from the tradition in Carter’s work and push to become a Balaskovits original story?
Thank you so much for your kind words. Absolutely, Angela Carter has been a big influence on my work and writing. Many of the stories in Magic for Unlucky Girls were directly influenced by The Bloody Chamber, most especially “Beasts” and “Food My Father Feeds Me, Love My Husband Shows Me”. My reading of Carter is that she was reclaiming these tales for women: centering their experiences in these traditional tales and fleshing out their characters, so they were not an abstract, flat thing that gets pushed around the narrative. I try to do the same, because it is necessary to do that kind of writing today. My work differs from Carter’s in that she, at least in my reading, had a very positive outlook about the fates of women. Their mothers save them from their beastly husbands or they take the wolf into their own bed with a delight that is pure and salacious. Most of the tales she tells has a hopefulness that borders on liberation for the fates of those women: they take control in a narrative that allows them space to do so. I am much more pessimistic about my view of women’s lives as they currently stand. While there are moments when they do triumph in my stories, it is always at the expense of either someone else, or they have to lose something. I question whether an oppressed group can really struggle against what brings them low into the earth and get out unscathed. I don’t think so, not without causing some pain and scars to ourselves or others.
The fourteen stories in the collection are largely either retellings of fairytales/stories a reader may have encountered before like “Eden,” which is loosely based on the Garden of Eden, or operate in an alternate universe like that wonderful first story in which Superman is fragile and weeps because of his inability to communicate with other people, but the collection also has three startlingly original stories—“The Ibex Girl of Qumran,” “The Romantic Agony of Lemon head,” and “All Who Tremble”—and I wanted to know where the inspiration for these narratives came from? When you were writing this collection did you have a plan to include original work? I found that the “The Ibex Girl of Qumran,” was the more traditional story of the three where as the other two, especially “The Romantic Agony of Lemon head,” go into very interesting places; talk to me a little bit about what these stories are in conversation with?
When I started this collection, it was going to be straight re-tellings of classic fairy tales (and most of the ones that are those are earlier works – except “Juniper”, which was fairly recent). That changed over time because there were some things I wanted to explore that I felt I was not able to with the constraints of the fairy tale as a tradition. For example, “The Romantic Agony of Lemonhead” was incredibly loosely inspired from reading Reviving Ophelia, which inexplicably was in the bathroom of my parent’s household while I was growing up (not sure what the implications are there) and, while it isn’t a terrible book by any means, I am always a bit wary of catch-all’s for how to raise up good girls, as if their experience is limited to their central girlness. I did try to match that to a fairy tale, and Baba Yaga makes an appearance, but ultimately decided I could just write my own. “The Ibex Girl of Qumran” is, in its own way, about family folklore and the tales we pass down to one another, so I was still exploring fairy tales as narrative in that way, but it isn’t based on any actual story (that I am aware of).
I’ve mentioned earlier that in the collection there are a variety of female characters, almost all of them strong, independent, and often just plain vicious. Both “Bloody Mary” and “Beasts” took my breath away. What attracts you to write such type female characters? Why do violence and mutilation make up the backbone of your work?
Fairy tales are pretty violent! The Grimms brothers actually had two versions of the tales when they originally collected them from the women who told them: the first, for scholars, were very sexual and kind of violent. When they realized there was a market for children, they toned down the sex but increased the violence to the point of absurdity. Beyond that, the world is a violent place, and I don’t see a reason to not write what is a reflection of reality, even in a fantastical way. For many women, violence is a part of our lives, even in small unconscious ways, and I think fairy tales allow us to tap into that in a safe way, because the violence is usually over the top.
Women don’t often get to be violent themselves. We are taught from a young age to suppress those feelings and desires. When we read about ourselves in fiction, especially older works that form the canon, we don’t see ourselves acting out much, we are usually acted upon. I remember this one novel, which I cannot remember the name of but it came from the Modernist tradition, about a painter who on a date with a woman he fancied, and from his point of view she was so delicate she could not even tear a piece of hard bread in half because her wrist might break. That made me laugh, but also made me angry. We are as violent, or as hard, as men, even if we are trained very well not to act on it. We are born into a violent world and we understand it very well. It takes root. Part of the drive of this collection was to explore women as monsters in some fashion, either by birth or by effect of simply living longer than a few moments in the world. The idea of womanness is often portrayed as a kind of othere’d, monstrous, incomprehensible thing – why not embrace that which terrifies others?
Absolutely. I completely agree with that. Keeping that in mind, I was looking at the way the stories in the book are curated and realized that we begin with a long short story which features Superman (big-ass symbol of patriarchy) but as the stories progress, and although men play an important role in them they are mostly flat characters/are the supporting cast, the narrative of the women and their interactions is where the meat within the collection is with it ending with a young girl deciding on a course of action that may or may not end well in “All Who Tremble,” so I wondered what kind of female-female relationships were you interested in exploring as you were writing this collection?
That was the reversal: even in fairy tales which has flat characters as a rule, the men, for the most part, get to do things. They follow their dreams and are not always simply reacting to something bad happening to them, like encountering a wolf in the woods or getting kicked out of the home and forced to kill a witch they encounter. Of course, there are stories where women do do these things in traditional narratives, but we don’t tell them as often as we tell the passive-princess story. And there’s a sinister reason for that. So, in turn, I made the men flat characters (with the exception of “Eden” and “Suburban Alchemy”, which feature male protagonists). A few of the stories do feature lesbian relationships, which are not in fairy tales at all (unless you really squint at Rapunzel or just read Anne Sexton as canon). I’m bisexual, so I wanted to feature that part of my own identity, which is lacking in these stories. I can’t think of any that are particularly queer unless you read between the lines. So these stories need to be queer’d. I also explore the mother/daughter relationship in these tales quite often, because one of the trends of fairy tales, and actually a lot of fiction regardless, is that the mother is dead from the beginning. Why is the mother always dead? It’s like she does her duty to the narrative by birthing the protagonist and then, having nothing left to contribute, fades from existence. So I have to have mothers. Bad mothers, good mothers, and mothers who are good but do bad things.
Makes sense. Which bring me to (in a round about way but through a story about a dead mother) to Britney! I have to ask. I literally screeched when I read the words “Britney woman,” in “Suburban Alchemy” and realized that Solanum was obsessed with Britney Spears! I totally was at one time, so was my baby brother who had on one wall a poster of Christina Aguilera and on the other Britney Spears in a sort of face-off. I’m going to assume that your own obsession with Britney made it into the story but talk to me about it. Tell me also, how you came to include this classic pop culture icon in your work?
I. Love. Britney. Spears. I mean this with utter seriousness. That’s so funny about your brother: he had to choose one or the other. You couldn’t love both of them in that manufactured reality of the 1990s. It was pop star war. Pick a side.
Britney Spears is sort of a fairy tale unto herself to me: the most American fairy tale of all. A beautiful, white, blond girl who gets everything you could possibly imagine one would want at a young age and is still unhappy. She is, from all accounts, somewhat of a flat character in her own narrative. From a young age, she was pushed into various roles and marketed as an object: a thing to desire, a thing to pity, a thing to curse at, a thing to make you feel better about yourself. When she had that breakdown and shaved her head and attacked the car with an umbrella, it felt like we were seeing some sort of internalized reaction to having no control over your own life boil over, or a human being coming into consciousness. This is, of course, conjecture, becau