CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
INTERVIEW WITH CARLING RAMSDELL
Rappahannock Review Fiction Editors: We love the enchanting, mystical quality of “Whistling Woodwinds” and its images such as the ivy or venus fly traps, which feel highly evocative. How did you approach including seemingly magical elements in the story?
Carling Ramsdell: Thank you! The first part of “Whistling Woodwinds” that came to me was Missa’s character and emotions—she’s a very emotional person, though she internalizes everything, so I wanted to find a way to externalize it. The dilapidation of Missa’s house is “magical” and “metaphorical” in that it’s the way her emotions are externalized. When I first workshopped this piece, my classmates really wanted to know if what was happening was real or all in her head, but I’m not quite sure why that matters—it’s both! I didn’t want to write “she was sad and lonely,” so I described a house and a life that was sad and lonely instead, and hopefully that image appropriately reflects everything that’s going on inside Missa too.
RR: We’re intrigued by the use of plants around Missa’s house as symbolic of her mental state, and we felt the relief of the weeds disappearing and her family welcoming her home. How did the strangulatory imagery of crawling ivy, snakes, and weeds make it into the story as symbolic of Missa’s muteness?
CR: Wow strangulatory is such a great word! I wasn’t even aware of how choking and appropriate those images are until now! It was the fear scene that developed Missa’s character—what’s someone who’s not afraid of snakes look like? What is she afraid of? Quite honestly, when I was a high schooler, I was very much like Missa (really shy, afraid of raising my hand in class, and I was a marching band kid!), so I created images to make speaking a more tangible threat and illustrate Missa’s fear in a way that she literally and metaphorically sees it. I really did have a history teacher who mentioned to my class one day that she was afraid of snakes, so I just kind of ran with connecting the fear of speaking with snakes.
RR: The descriptions in this story are very vivid with sound and image. When you sit down to write, how does a scene unfold for you and how did you learn or develop your style?
CR: This is such a good question! I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, so it maybe comes a little too naturally at this point to explain any sort of process in a way that makes sense. When I first begin a story, I like to identify its layers. For example, I work a lot with adapting fairy tales and myths. In “Whistling Woodwinds,” I think the layers are Missa’s silence and resulting mental state—the decay of her home—and the introduction of Pippa at school. There’s the story’s metaphor and the top action that keeps some sort of plot moving, and they have to connect and affect each other in some way. For “Whistling Woodwinds” I definitely had a lot of images in my head, so I’d start with those and ask myself what it meant for the characters and how they would react to that.
RR: As we understand it, you’re most well known for your children’s books. Compared to that work, “Whistling Woodwinds” seems darker in tone. Was this an experiment or something you’ve been working on for a while?
CR: It’s so interesting that you ask this as I had a professor once read “Whistling Woodwinds” and tell me that it was a Young Adult story! I don’t know if I personally agree with her on that, but I don’t think she’s wrong either. The lines between children’s lit/Young Adult/Adult are so blurry. Kid lit can definitely be dark, but I never went into “Whistling Woodwinds” as a children’s story. Most of what I’ve worked on in the past has been for museums or other freelance jobs, which is AMAZING, but so much more restrictive. “Whistling Woodwinds, Unfurling Flowers” is a story entirely for me—maybe Young Adult, maybe not, but very much my version of a fabulist fairy tale. I think by the end, Missa “comes of age” in the sense that she begins to redefine and find herself again, so maybe that’s where I was inspired by working with kid lit.
RR: “Whistling Woodwinds” feels like a modern fairy tale. What were your favorite fairy tales growing up and do they still resonate with you today?
CR: I am absolutely always and forever a fairy-tale person. I joke with my friends that King Arthur is my only personality trait, which I hope is not entirely true, but I’m fascinated by how ingrained Arthurian legend is in western society whether we are intentionally attuned to it or not. Growing up, I loved “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and stories about changelings—the children taken away by the fairies and replaced with fairy children—stories that are very much about transformation and crossing the boundaries between worlds. What I love most about fairy tales now is their unique way of world-building. Fairy tales are very clearly strange and fantastical and completely out of the ordinary, yet the characters accept what is happening without questions (“They have turned into snakes, but I still know them”!). I would consider myself a fabulist writer, and, for me, what that means is that characters accept the strange as their normal. The strange is what is true for my characters and for fairy-tale characters. Fairy tales get at emotional truths in a way that no other genre of story does.
Carling Ramsdell’s work in Issue 8.3: