CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Andrea Avery

Rappahannock Review Nonfiction Editors: While reading “You Build It, We Burn It,” we were intrigued by the distinctive point of view of the abuser. What made you choose to write from this perspective? 

Andrea Avery: I wanted to adopt this point of view for several reasons. Mainly, this essay is about three men (the ex-boyfriend/narrator, the arsonist, the gunman) who can be plotted on a continuum of male rage that veers into destruction and violence. There’s no space for other people in that kind of anger, anger that shouts you down, burns your home, shoots you dead. That’s a first-person sort of anger.

RR: There is a prominent theme of fire and burning; what does that motif mean to you in the context of this work? 

AA: It’s clichéd to say it, but: Many of the biggest fires start small. A tiny flash, a benign spark, can become a ruinous blaze if it’s not stopped. This is true of violence, particularly of intimate partner violence. The National Domestic Violence Hotline says that “over the course of an abusive relationship, it is common for abuse to escalate, and oftentimes survivors find themselves experiencing something they never thought their partner would, or even could, do.” The ex-wife of the gunman in the essay has described twenty years of escalating torture from her ex-husband before it finally culminated in the deaths of several people. For a long time, I felt sheepish about claiming the relationship with my grad-school boyfriend as abusive or even pre-abusive (He was just angry! And he apologized! I was kind of a bitch to him, TBH! He never actually hit me! The thing about throwing my cat into traffic—a joke! And it could have been a random stranger who threw a brick through my car window and stole only my three favorite CDs, leaving the others!) Until that DM exchange fifteen years later when I clocked that he was pulling the exact same moves: make nice, find a boundary, cross it, apologize. So in addition to the fire-like idea of escalation, I wanted to capture with this essay that a person like this is always using his targets as fuel. The man I was writing about gets off on violating boundaries, on causing fear. It makes him feel big and hot and alive to roar through a woman’s life, or her DMs, and leave her in pieces. He didn’t destroy me. But he taught me that some men are fire, and that women are made of wood.

RR: The stylistic elements, such as stream of consciousness and lack of punctuation, really stood out to us. What made you choose that formatting? Did anything in particular inspire you? 

AA: The places where I have omitted punctuation are the places where fear and anger are the most acute. There was no punctuation when he screamed a blue streak at me in the oyster house, just booming words and a red face and spittle. There’s no phrasing, no prosody, no choices in an utterance like don’t come near me ever again. There is just the desperate scraping of a stick in sand: Don’t cross. A stylistic influence was setting: The events take place in the context of an MFA program that was dominated by cult-of-personality male teachers. The literary preferences of those teachers became the curriculum, the ambition, the very personalities of their most ardent student disciples (like the narrator), who all seemed to want to write like (be?) Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, with their heavy use of both alcohol and first-person POV. I didn’t, and don’t, write like that. But I wanted to try it on, to see if it made me feel swaggery and smoky and soused and sullen. I had some fun with this. The line Will you please leave me alone please is a hat-tip to Raymond Carver’s “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” Mr. Glasses is my nod to “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit.” Where I referred to “water under the bridge,” I tossed in a couple of words to allude to “So Much Water So Close to Home.” Like I said, I enjoyed playing in this way, and it’s probably self-indulgent. Then again, it’s not nearly as self-indulgent as abusive fury.

RR: Did you find that writing this piece proved to be more challenging or empowering given the subject of the narrative? 

AA: I’m at a place as a writer where I’m really enjoying talking back to teachers I never talked back to in the classroom. I’m really interested in pushing back, in my writing, on the rules and prohibitions and preferences and tastes that were passed off like gospel, especially in that MFA program. If there hadn’t been a wholesale sneering disregard of all genres other than 1977-1997 literary fiction, the strict edict against cleverness from a teacher whose class lectures were seventy-five-minute festivals of his own cleverness would have required my classmates to workshop my Raymond Carver winks right out of this piece while I sat there gagged. Another professor repeated his admonition that we were only ready to write about something if we were certain we were purged of down-and-dirty, unholy motivations like spite and rage and revenge and ready to focus on the work. It feels great to throw all that off, throw it away. I am increasingly furious not only that a man so humiliated and frightened me, but that worse abuses happen far too often to too many people, and I’m going to write about that outrage however I want. If we’d read any Claire Messud in my MFA program, we would have seen: one can be furious and focused on the work.

RR: Do you have any advice or resources for readers who might be stuck in a similar situation like yours? 

AA: For the situation of a partner who makes you frightened, who verbally abuses you (in public or in private), who “jokes” about destroying things you love, who seems to be … everywhere you go, glowering or showering you with grand apologies, my advice is that you should visit loveisrespect.org or thehotline.org to learn about why these are red flags and how you can get and stay safe.