CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Adam Rotstein

Rappahannock Review Fiction Editors: We were drawn to “Till the Mourning Comes” because of how it explores grief in a surprising and surreal way. What inspired you to explore this subject in your writing?

Adam Rotstein: This inspiration for this story, to take the mood down for a moment, was the death of my real-life father. He suffered the ups and downs, mostly downs, of cancer for five years before succumbing to it. During that time, especially near the end, I was in a state of sort of pre-grief, my mind and body preparing itself to erupt in doleful gloom-flows. But even though I knew it was coming, it was still a shock when it finally did. I found myself feeling all sorts of feelings, numbness, sadness, levity, umami, confusing tastebuds for emotions. I wanted an outlet to express the sentiments and thoughts I was having and so I sat down at my laptop one day and let it ooze out. I often don’t know anything, so this was one of the few examples of me attempting the ‘write what you know’ adage.

RR: There is such a sense of surrealism in this narrative. How did you develop the series of stages to convey the narrator’s disconnection?

AR: I would say most of my writing has a fantastical or surreal or sci-fi bent to it, often with humor drizzled in for good measure. It’s just how my mind works, sometimes to the chagrin of my wife and daughter. So it seemed a natural way to manifest my actual grief into a fictional account of how I was feeling rather than spewing them out in a more straightforward narrative (which I also did. There were plenty of feelings to go around). I originally thought I would concentrate mostly on sci-fi, which my dad set me up for a lifelong love affair with when I was young, but as is most often the case with best, or even mediumly, laid plans, they did not follow the route laid out for them. I sort of let the stages themselves dictate how they wanted to be shaped. How did my anger feel? I’m not usually an angry person so when I would discover a bubble of rage float up out of nowhere during this period it would also scare me a little. And that translated in my brain as a wrathful alien monster hunting the narrator in a strange land. You know, that old chestnut. It was also important for me to be cognizant that everyone grieves in different ways. My family is prone to bouts of joking and laughing where others might find that inappropriate, but it’s just our process.

RR: We’re really interested in the narrator’s experience of time in the story; what was it like imagining being outside time?

AR: I’m Jewish, so when someone dies we have a Shiva, which is just an open invitation for friends, family, acquaintances, people that like free party sandwiches, to come over and basically hang out for a predetermined amount of days (in our case three days including the day of the funeral, since my dad’s wish was for zero days, but we felt like we had to do something, so this seemed like a nice compromise). I would spend long hours at my mom’s condo, surrounded by people, and having to engage in conversations or at least feign that I was engaging in conversations. None of it felt real to me. It was like something happening to someone else. It felt like I had stepped out of time and was watching myself do these things. That was sort of the impetus for the story. I had the first line, because I was actually feeling like the first line, and then built the rest around it. 

RR: How do you balance planning and spontaneity in your creative process, and what philosophical principles guide your approach to storytelling?

AR: Most of my professional writing life has been in TV, predominantly animation, which a lot of the time has a pretty rigid order of operations. It goes premise, outline, first draft, second draft, polish (with many iterations in between). So, while there is still room for spontaneity in any of the stages, the bulk of the story is usually set out from the beginning. In my personal writing, short stories and (as of yet unpublished) novels, I prefer to let loose. To have an inkling of a story idea and just start writing and see where it goes. Sometimes it runs straight into a brick wall face first without putting its hands up to brace itself, but sometimes it grows into something I never would have imagined it could be. These are my favorite moments in writing. When I surprise myself with where a story has headed. I try to leave myself open to every possibility, taking inspiration wherever it may come from. I’ll find myself thinking about the story in the shower, or while driving, or while driving towards a shower, and have ideas pop up, specific lines, possible outcomes, directions, and then I’ll implement these thoughts and see if they work. There are infinite ways any story can go, and I don’t want to shut myself off from any of them until I find one that I like. This of course leads to crushing self-doubt after every story is finished about if I followed the best route or not, but that’s just part of being a writer, or a human. At least that’s what I tell myself.

RR: You referenced Socrates in your narrative, are you a fan?

AR: I loved Socrates in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but I wasn’t much a fan of his earlier work.

This is another favorite part of writing to me. Since my head is full of tendrils of both useful and useless knowledge, I tend to fill my stories with esoterica. I’ll have an idea, something like ‘what if this denial manifestation bested Socrates once?’ and since the sum total of my Socratic knowledge is half-remembered statements from my long-ago university philosophy class and the aforementioned Bill and Ted’s, I’ll spend the next four to seventeen hours researching Socrates and the types of arguments he used, which led me to the Socratic method and elenchus argument which led me to watching videos explaining just what an elenchus argument is which led me to other forms of arguments which led me to needing a nap. In this particular instance, none of that made it into the final version of the story, but it still helped inform where I was going and what I was doing. I can have an offhand thought about a type of coin used in a story set in ancient Egypt or wanting to use the largest known thing in the entire universe as a size reference, and then I will dig into the research on these topics. And sure, sometimes it will blow me off course for several hours at a time and I’ll forget what I was initially doing, but to me that’s all part of the process.