The Brooklyn Rail

Soraya Palmer published her debut novel, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, a week before her former professor, Matthew Vollmer, published his sixth book, and first book-length essay: All of Us Together in the End. Both books, as the above title asserts, are about ghosts. To be more specific, they are also about mothers. Even more specifically: mothers who die before their time. And what happens next to everyone they love. 

For now, though, let’s leave that stuff behind. Let’s talk about how, once upon a time, Palmer, as a student in Virginia Tech’s MFA program, enrolled in a course titled “Form and Theory of Fiction,” a class taught by Vollmer that required students, after reading a number of convention-defying novels, to produce as their final project an artist’s manifesto. 

Soraya provocatively titled her manifesto “S. Meets Her Imagination: A Manifesto? *by S’s Truest Self.” 

Let’s read the beginning, shall we?  

Dear Self-Conscious Part of Self That Wishes to be better writer (the imaginary audience), 

My dilemma in all of this is that having to explain myself to you is like being colonized all over again. My dilemma in all of this is that writing is never as fun when you want to be good at it. Oh, so what’s my favorite memory of being a writer? Off the top of my head I would have to say it happened before I learned how to write. Same with reading. In my mind, a title like Rapunzel could be like a sophisticated puzzle that the people, tables, pots, and pans in the images could be a part of solving—rather than some stupid girl that can’t figure out how to get out of a tower. Illustrators like Zelinsky and Pederson would hint at ideas and emotions in the expressions of the scheming but quiet women who were aged by domineering hypermasculine men. These ideas would be omitted from the words of the illustrated adult tales I was reading, but I would catch them in the faces of the women drawn—like I was being clued in on a secret I wasn’t supposed to be a part of yet. 

If you are a reader who loves, as Vollmer did, the conversational tone of this but also the sense of improvisation and play that so often attends close and critical attention to life and to language, then you would read on. And Vollmer did. And he kept the manifesto saved in a folder of his Dropbox and even shared it, after gaining Palmer’s permission, with other students who he forced to write manifestos. Who could possibly have predicted that after all of these years and Vollmer typing “soraya manifesto” into his computer’s finder window and re-discovering that what he’d assigned her so many years ago feels as fresh as it did then, and strangely prescient: her debut novel would explore many of the preoccupations and themes that she touches on at the beginning of a statement about what inspires and perplexes her. When Vollmer’s students read The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts in his most recent Form & Theory course, a decade after Palmer had turned in her manifesto, the class discussed the storytelling techniques deployed by the characters in the book, which included direct address and inhabiting epistolary forms. It was all weird and wonderful and quite satisfying to acknowledge the power of a narrative Vollmer’s current class was reading and which had been penned by a former student who’d been in the class ten years before. And it was especially satisfying to imagine that Palmer herself would have been pleased that the class enjoyed invigorating conversations about the importance in fiction of interpreting, recording, surviving, disguising, rationalizing, and disrupting conventions, all while acknowledging that mythologizing is a deeply important act because, in the end, “all stories are real.”  

Teachers learn from their students, and what Vollmer learned from Palmer was the value of deploying, questioning, and affirming the above modes, as well as the significance within the artistic process of playfulness, authenticity, and unabashedly being your most inquisitive and thoughtful and imaginative self. Let’s begin then now, by scrolling backwards to a time when Soraya Palmer was Vollmer’s student—and he was hers. 

Soraya Palmer: So maybe we can start by talking about how we met when you were my professor and I was your student in my MFA program. Your role as a writing teacher comes up a lot in your book. You talk about how your students have helped you in your “magical lights” journey throughout this book writing process. Many of your students are even mentioned in your acknowledgements! As one of your former students I'm curious about how you view the relationship between writing and teaching. How did your teaching inform the writing of this book (and vice versa)? How would this book be different if you weren't a teacher?

Matthew Vollmer (Rail): I’m always looking for inspiration, which means I’m always looking for change, ways of changing, and how to evolve and feel surprised. Luckily, my job, which I see less as “teaching” than curating spaces for people to surprise themselves, creates those all the time. I’m always astonished, every time, when, after a discussion of somebody’s writing—a passage from Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, or Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, or Otessah Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World—I provide students with a series of writing prompts and their pens start moving. It always feels like magic. And then to read what they’ve put down, to decipher the spells they’ve cast, is always exciting. It turns out that I like interacting with other brains. Seeing what they can do when called upon. 

It’s funny that you ask this question because I’m always thinking about the relationship between writing and teaching. How do I revise X in my work—and my classes? And there’s this scene in the book—I think it’s in the book—where I’m sitting in the living room of my parents’ house on the day that my mom died, and my dad is snoring next to her body, and I’ve been trying to find something to read that some famous person wrote for her burial the next day, and I realize that I needed to be the person that wrote whatever I would say, and I did, and it came out in a relentless unleashing. It felt so raw and real that I knew immediately after I’d written it that I would have to revise the eulogy I’d written weeks before—how could I not? How could I have known what it would’ve felt like for my mom to die before she actually did? I ended up sharing that revision with my Creative Nonfiction class I’d been teaching at the time and even considered writing an entire book about the relationship between teaching and writing—and who knows, maybe someday I will—but then the lights appeared. And changed everything.

Palmer: I remember being in your very first Fiction and Creative Nonfiction workshop and realizing that many of my previous experiences in workshops felt like a lot of pressure as we were usually asked to bring something polished to workshop, which definitely stifled my writing process at times. Your classes always felt so freeing and definitely gave me opportunities to surprise myself.  Your first fiction assignment was to have us write a story from the point of view of an inanimate object and I wrote about someone who was stuck inside a book, trying to get out. This story ended up being the first draft of what is now the prologue of my novel and the beginning of the voice of the omniscient narrator who shows up throughout. 

Have your thoughts on teaching and writing changed since then? What were your impressions of me as a student? 

Rail: Well, first of all, I would say that although I think my teaching has evolved a lot over the last decade—instead of deploying traditional workshops where writers are silenced and we look at one piece at a time, now I allow writers to choose whether they want to lead or participate in a discussion of their work, which is also always more than a single piece, and more like a constellation of works that they’ve produced and a spectrum of artistic influences that have exerted pressure on them—I’ve always been excited by the idea of change. I don’t ever want to be bored. I don’t ever want to do the same old thing just because I know and understand it and it’s easier. I always want students to feel empowered and excited. And the truth is, if we frontload critique in creative writing courses, we end up making more of an investment in the sullen and downtrodden. I want energy and life and creativity and curiosity. And that’s what was so exciting about working with you: if I created a limitation and forced it upon you, you’d end up joyfully making something. And what I was discovering just around the time that I met you was that writers could really flourish if A. given limitations, and B. given a lot of them. So I made your class write. A LOT. And we didn’t have much time for self-reflection, or fear, or critique. As soon as we were finished making one thing, we made another. And I remember you, as someone who was insanely imaginative and playful and energetic and fun, having felt stifled and confused and even to some degree “boxed in” during your previous workshops. And also maybe a little sad? I think you just needed someone to say, “trust your instincts” and “be yourself.” Which you certainly did.

Palmer: Do you ever think about your time as a student? Does that time period still influence your writing at all?

Rail: I do think about my time as a student. And what I often end up acknowledging is how frustrated I was listening to other students describe their visions for my work. At Iowa, where each week secretaries made loads of copies of every story for every workshop that was being taught, I felt intense pressure to write something “good,” something that would impress my fellow students, something that other people would talk about. I wanted to “win” workshop. But I never did. My most talked about story, the only thing I wrote during my two years that caused people I didn’t even know to approach me and say how much they enjoyed it—coincidentally, it was a ghost story, about a dentist whose wife had died on his honeymoon and when he takes his assistant/lover to the same resort, he’s surprised by his dead wife, who seduces him—still got raked over the coals in workshop. At Iowa—and really, at any workshop where the point is to read a single story by one writer at a time, while that writer inhabits what I always referred to as “the cone of silence” and isn’t permitted to talk until the end—I always thought of “feedback” as a kind of static that takes up residence in one’s head; I can’t remember any response—no matter how beautifully and persuasively articulated, and believe me, there were an incredible number of highly intelligent, Ivy-League-educated folks there who could deliver way more articulate responses than I—that ended up changing anything I wrote. So I guess when I think about my time as a student, I’m grateful for the attention of my peers and instructors, but I also can’t help but wonder what kind of writer I would have been if any attention whatsoever had been given to re-imagining that traditional workshop model: the one that privileges the critique and whose content ends up being formed by (mostly) amateur writers. This is why I’ve come to embrace a completely different method, one that hopefully foregrounds curiosity, wonder, and care.

Palmer: Structurally, your book is interesting because it seems to sit somewhere between memoir and essay collection. How did you come up with the structure of the book? Relatedly, how do you think your love for pushing against genre conventions informed the way you decided to write about your parents, ghost lights, Adventism, and grief? What drew you towards genre pushing (i.e: pushing against traditional conventions of narrative or storytelling, writing things in form—or in this case—as a sort of stream of consciousness) in the first place?

Rail: Well, I had written a version of the book before my mom died. I’d been wanting to write about growing up Adventist in rural southwestern North Carolina for a long time. That book, like this one, was digressive and associatively constructed. What it lacked, I think, was form. And urgency. Why tell this now? What’s at stake? I don’t think it was clear—or as clear—as the final version of this book. The titles were even the same! But it wasn’t until the lights appeared—a local mystery—and then COVID happened—a global mystery—and then my dad reconnected with an old flame, that I found the story structure that I could hang everything else upon.

Palmer: Speaking of COVID, what made you decide to include COVID and the pandemic into this book? How does it relate for you with the lights and your mother?

Rail: The book is a chain of events and perceptions. In writing it, I kept thinking—well, if I say this, what else do readers need to know? I couldn’t write about wondering about the origin of the lights without writing about Adventist beliefs about the dead, and I couldn’t write about my mom without writing about her relationship to Adventism, and I couldn’t write about the lights without writing about COVID, and if I wrote about COVID, I’d have to write about my father reconnecting with a woman from his past. All this stuff was related—and connected, at least in my mind, and I wanted to create a place where my mind could be as much of my mind as possible. 

What about you? Can you talk a little about the origins and processes of writing The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts? 

Palmer: Officially, I began working on my novel as part of my MFA thesis with you and the rest of the faculty at Virginia Tech. Unofficially, I had been working on this for years. In undergrad with one of my very first writing mentors, the incredible and brilliant Blanche Boyd, I began writing stories about a family that told stories in order to survive. Chapters one and five were first written in her classes. Chapter five was part of my MFA application to VT. In the original story there was a flash forward to the mother getting sick, which ends up being pretty central to the novel as a whole. These stories continued for years without me necessarily knowing what to do with them. Many of them started out as free-writes that I later came back to and expanded on. 

When I went to Trinidad in 2010, I intended to write a very different book about a Caribbean-American family—one that would have been much more traditional in structure with much less magical realism. But instead I wound up freewriting all the time and never finishing that novel. I had no idea where these freewrites would end up at the time, but that same year I decided to apply to MFA programs and many of those freewrites turned into stories that I had workshopped in your class along with other workshops I took at VT. Those stories in turn wound up in the novel I have now. I think this process really worked for me because it allowed me to incorporate all the many styles and voices I developed over the years to create a novel within stories within stories.

 

Rail: How did you learn to write a novel and how would you suggest others embark on book-length narratives? Did you have any rules for yourself as you wrote? 

Palmer: I wouldn’t say I have rules per se, though Lynda Barry’s method of setting a timer and writing or drawing till the timer goes off was hugely important to my writing process. In a way I kind of tricked myself into writing a novel by telling myself I was just writing stories with the same themes and characters. Had I known I was writing a novel from the beginning I might have gotten too overwhelmed and not finished it. Or if I had finished it, I might have been too stuck on what I thought a novel should be to create what I ended up with. My final product might not have had so many narrators or time jumps, for instance. But I’m so glad that it did! 

I want to tell writers not to overthink the final product and just start writing! If something starts to feel compelling enough to continue in a longer form, follow that instinct whether it be a voice that compels you or a mystery you want to uncover through writing. 

I will also say that my agent, Laura Usselman (who also went to VT!) and my editor—who is also a successful writer, Megha Majumdar—taught me a lot about what it means to write a novel versus a short story. When I started I was definitely more comfortable writing short stories and there were many times when both Laura and Megha would point out ways that this showed. For instance, in the initial draft not every character had a complete arc and not every chapter felt like it was propelling the overall tension of the novel forward. So there ended up being sections and characters that I cut even though I loved them because I realized they didn’t further the plot or character development.

Rail: When I taught this book in the spring of 2023, my graduate students were very taken with the narrator, who inspired a lot of lively discussions. Could you talk a little bit about the narrator of this book, how they function, and what inspired their creation? Was this narrator difficult to work with?  

Palmer: Working with my narrator was some of the most fun I had in writing this book, so I wouldn’t call it difficult, no. I spoke about how my narrator took its form partly through your class, though the first lines of my prologue were actually taken from a story I wrote in my very first MFA workshop with Lucinda Roy. In the beginning this was a dystopian story about cannibals that turn out to be vampires. This was a story that, like many of my stories at the time, wasn’t working. I remember Lucinda telling me that a strength of my cannibal-vampire story was the narrator’s voice and that I should follow that voice through. My initial idea for the voice came from my obsession with fairytales and folklore generally. The stories always had an omniscient narrator who would say things like “Once upon a time…” and “They lived happily ever after” and I wondered, who is this narrator? Why are they telling this story? What is their story? In your workshop, I created the central conflict for my voice, which is that the narrator is stuck in the book that the audience is reading and that they may be telling readers these stories against their own will. This allowed me to have the narrator be more active in the storytelling than they often are in traditional fairy tales. I wanted my narrator to be opinionated, to get angry with its readers, and with the decisions the characters were making in the story. 

Rail: I know that your own family has been a big inspiration in writing this book. Could you talk a little bit about how this is and isn’t an autobiographical novel? 

Palmer: First, I have to say that I have noticed a trend in folks “trying to pin down the truth” of fictional novels. I have noticed this especially in women’s novels. I remember when the “unmasking” of Elena Ferrante came about due to a male journalist’s investigation in which readers began to pick apart how much of Ferrante’s life was similar or different to her novels. I found myself thinking, why do we need to know? Not only was this a violation of her privacy, but it also seemed to miss the point of writing fiction. When I get immersed in a novel, I’m aware that it often feels true, which does not necessarily mean that it is. 

Having said that, I do also believe that most, if not all great novels, connect to something alive in a writer’s core that speaks to the reader’s core. Whether that translates to the intimate details of a writer’s life or to a deeper truth the reader sees embedded within a writer’s consciousness, I think that most fictional stories are a part of that writer’s identity and must be in some way informed by their childhood or worldview whether we can see the connecting threads or not.

In writing my novel, I wanted to honor the tradition of storytelling in my family. I also wanted to highlight the beauty of my neighborhood, particularly pre-gentrification. I wanted to understand where I came from not by interviewing my family about their childhoods but by imagining it. My trip to Trinidad also helped me to make my own connections to my heritage by living in Trinidad without my parents for a year. I think it’s especially important for women of color to feel held up rather than haunted by our collective histories in a way that makes us feel like we must represent our family’s stories as fact.

But what about you? How do you see the connections between fiction and nonfiction? Do you think you could write this same book as a novel? How would it be different?

Rail: I don’t think I could. Few people, it seems, truly care about “the unexplained.” Wasn’t it just a month ago that we had that congressional hearing about aliens and the fact that these dudes who had once been higher-ups in the government testified that they’d actually witnessed UFO spacecraft firsthand? I remember seeing some videos on TikTok and then going to the New York Times thinking surely this will be front page news, and I felt like I had to scroll for thirty seconds to find whatever they’d buried three-quarters of the way down the front page. What I mean to say is that I think if I wrote a fictionalized account of someone seeing unexplained lights in the woods that it would somehow feel less urgent than having seen them “for real.” That, and the fact that my mom was real and just as magical in person, and that my dad was real, and that his new wife was real, and that COVID was real—I happen to think that those facts and their immediacy require the approach that I took. 

That said, I’m trying to write a tragi-comic novel set in 1991–one that’s about a group of teenagers from a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school who have a New Year’s Party that ends up going horribly awry—and finding that I’m infusing it with a good deal of autobiographical strands, and that it’s fun to be using the stuff of life to make up a story that actually never happened. 

Palmer: For a book about grief and your mother, I was struck by the whimsical and often optimistic tone of the book. Was there a feeling you wanted your readers to have after reading your book?

Rail: My mother, as you well know from having read the book, was the kind of person who could “light up” a room. She was literally the happiest and most joyful person I’ve ever known. Her early passing was tragic. So the feeling I’m going for, I suppose, is a mixture of the two. I want readers to laugh and to cry. I hope the experience of reading this book is one that will affect people emotionally. 

Palmer: So because we both wrote books based in ghost-lore (one fiction and one not) I think one thing our readers will want to know is, do you believe in ghosts? And how do you define “ghost”?

Rail: I think the best answer to this question would be that a ghost is a present absence in the absence of a presence. When someone you love dies—especially the someone whose body brought you into the world, and who subsequently cared for and loved you more than anyone else ever could—you wonder, at least at first, where did they go? But then you keep finding them wherever you go. Wherever you look. It turns out that, if you live long enough, your body will become a haunted house. Except it’s not scary. It’s kind of a beautiful paradox: your loved ones will leave you, but you get to carry them with you for the rest of your life. 

But what about you? Do you believe in ghosts? 

Palmer: I grew up listening to the ghost stories my parents used to tell. Only they were never described as stories. My dad, aunts, and sister all had a story about a time they encountered a rolling calf or duppy in Jamaica. My mom used to tell me about the lagahoos that lived in Trinidad. So for me ghosts and spirits were just a part of life. I also grew up in a house that was built in the late 1800s where there were constant unexplained noises—where a neighbor told me that someone once died in my bed so I grew up never questioning the existence of ghosts as a part of my heritage and identity.

Rail: If someone asked you, “how do you write a ghost story,” what would you say? What do you think is “essential” in writing a ghost-driven story?

Palmer: What was fun for me in writing this book was exploring all the different ways of telling ghost stories. I actually wrote something for Electric Lit about the different kinds of ghost stories that Black women tell. There are ghost stories about being haunted by generational trauma, sexism, and racism—like in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Or how Tracey Baptiste’s The Jumbies tells the story of our ancestors that try to get us to remember who we are through the haunting of folklore and untold histories. In my novel I tried to play around with the many ways that Black women have told ghost stories throughout history. I have one chapter in my book about the character Nigel’s childhood haunting where he faces the Rolling Calf. That chapter was one where I tried to stick closely to the traditional ghost story formula. For me that meant playing on the fear my characters were already feeling and trying to show that fear everywhere in the story. So I added a wind that “eats people” during hurricanes and slithering link chains in the butcher shop scene. But I was also interested in the why of it all. Why does the Rolling Calf haunt people? Why is Nigel still haunted by this story? This element allowed me to add more conflict and empathy for each character. The Rolling Calf and Nigel are both haunted by guilt in their own ways. The chapter itself is haunted by the rolling calf but also by homophobia, colonialism, religious oppression, and the patriarchy. The human and ghostly elements are equally essential to me in writing a ghost story. 

In your ghost-memoir, you talk about how the idea of ghosts speaking through lights challenges some of the Adventist beliefs you grew up with. How has your spiritual practice and relationship to Adventism shifted since writing and publishing this book?

Rail: I actually feel as though I’ve made peace with Adventism. I’m not saying I endorse it but I appreciate the ways that it ended up shaping and challenging me. In the end, I’m happy to have had an experience with religion that deprived me of certain things and in other ways held me hostage. It gave me a thirst for the real world and created a disposition in me that allowed me to be grateful once I felt as though I was free to wander outside of the confines of the church I’d grown up in. 

Palmer: Relatedly, despite your dad’s beliefs (that prevent him from believing in ghosts) it seems the lights have brought you and your father closer in some ways. How have your conversations with your dad been regarding the book since it came out? Has he read it? Has it changed his views on ghosts/unexplained phenomena, if so? Has it changed yours? How about with other Adventists in your life?

Rail: I’m sure that he doesn’t agree with everything in the book and I’m also sure that he found some inconsistencies—my father loves to “win” on a technicality—but I do know that he was moved by reading it. One of my goals with this book was to pay tribute to family, especially my mother and father, and that my father expressed his admiration for what I did was incredibly satisfying for me.

I don’t know that my views about ghosts or unexplained phenomena have “changed”—I’m still waiting for the US government to  release photos of aliens and their spacecraft. I feel like any “decisions” I would make about such things would be a kind of closure and I try to avoid closure at all costs. I want to remain open, like the open window in the book that finally lets the light in.  

I know that in your novel, myths and storytelling are an essential part of how your characters interact and relate to each other, and how they interpret what is real and what isn’t. Can you talk about the significance of myth-making in your life and your fiction? In what ways is myth essential to living? 

Palmer: I know I mentioned before that my parent’s stories were a huge influence on me growing up—particularly the ways they weren’t told as stories, but as truth. So much of Caribbean folklore can be read as a way to re-tell or subvert the history that’s been given to us. For instance, the Anansi stories I grew up with often told the story that Anansi as a spider, though smaller, found ways to overpower its predators through wit and storytelling. I’ve always read this as an analogy for overthrowing slavery and colonialism. 

I tried to use this idea to show the way my characters used stories to change things in their lives that seemed hopeless—to regain strength, and to heal. 

Rail:   How important is “magic” in storytelling—and how do you define “magic”? 

Palmer: Magic is essential to stories! In writing that means the feeling you get when you surprise or amaze yourself—the way your pen reaches back to the imagination you had before you started criticizing yourself. Without it, writing can end up being just rules and formulas. I see magic as our lifeforce—the things that keep us moving that we can’t always explain.