Chelsea Bieker Interview

Chelsea Bieker’s Heartbroke is both a gritty and heartfelt exploration into understanding motherhood, sexuality, and abuse. Bieker grappled with the absence of her own mother in her personal essays, and this theme surfaces in Heartbroke and Bieker’s debut novel, Godshot. Heartbroke and Godshot are sister-works, sharing not only themes, but venues and characters, like the Diviners, a phone sex operation, and cult-leader Pastor Vern, who shaves part of his head in the hopes of accessing heaven. In Heartbroke, we meet a daughter who sacrifices her own mother so that she can escape a cult marriage, a mother who lives with her son by the sea as gypsy artists, and a homeless woman who rescues an infant from a horrible fate at the women’s shelter. Despite the serious content, Heartbroke sparkles with humor. Between Spider Dick, the violent BF who has a black widow inked on his—you guessed it—and Golda, who hoards a collection of her own poop, the pages of Heartbroke radiate unique and spirited characters.

In our phone convo, Bieker was an open book. Despite the time difference—it was Bieker’s 6pm and my 9pm A.K.A. my bedtime—Bieker and I had a lively discussion. We talked about Bieker’s writing process, our love for the character Golda, and Bieker’s favorite authors. Bieker let out a chortle at my mention of Golda’s misadventure with a lingerie mannequin, and she shared some of her insights, including the medicine of laughter and tears. After the interview, Bieker and I communicated a little by text, and she generously offered me writing advice and was supportive of my own literary pursuits. Bieker, empathetic, brilliant, and open-minded, shines as brightly as her new collection.

First, I want to talk about how your stories tend to focus on different types of abuse, whether it’s an abusive boyfriend or neglect by an alcoholic mother, and I wanted to see what you had to say on that and why you chose those themes?

I don’t set out initially with themes in mind for what I’m going to write about, and they emerge as I’m going. Definitely that’s a theme that recurs in my work again and again and I can certainly see that, especially having it published and looking at it with more distance I see that I was really circling those themes for myself, I think to try to understand them. I grew up in a really abusive environment and witnessed so much domestic violence that it’s just a big part of me and where I came from and I think because of that it finds its way into my writing. I’m really curious about the effects of abuse on people, and not so much about the resolution of it, I’m more curious about why it happened, what generational situations are at play that create the environment in which it happened. In these stories, we’re seeing the characters in the worst of it or at the choice before it gets really bad. We’re with them in that desperate place where they’re being asked to decide something about their lives or if they’re going to succumb to what they know or if they’re going to choose something different.

Growing up with that curiosity—I remember as a kid feeling like there’s no logic to it, there’s no logic to abuse, so your brain is trying to find it, you’re trying to figure out how can these people I’m supposed to trust or how can these people that I love be acting this way? Especially to a child, I think it’s really mysterious and disorienting. We see that in “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Miners,” where this young woman has grown up watching her mother be abused by her father yet she’s about to find herself in that same situation again, but even she’s befuddled, like how am I in this same situation again? So, I think it’s just more a curiosity around that, the effects of it, the energy of it, and in hindsight I see that I continue on the path to look at those themes, but I don’t really think about it too much setting out.

That makes a lot of sense. I liked what you said about how Alma, she saw her mom go through that, but she can’t let go of her abusive boyfriend. Something else you were talking about was these choices we make in these desperate situations, and I found it really interesting how in “Women and Children First” the main character Lisa, she had her own child taken away by social services, and she actually mothers and rescues the child of a meth addict. I was wondering about your process around giving that multidimensional look at the addicted mother figure and how that illustrates different approaches of motherhood?

I love stories where we’re forced to ask ourselves what we would do in that moment. Especially in “Women and Children First” we have a character who’s not very self-aware, and we find out through other means what happened with her own daughter. And she, in order to survive, has to minimize her failures as a mother, and she also feels a lot of anger, she feels under-resourced. She has an addiction and the things set up for her to overcome that and regain custody are a high order for the resources that she has. Her desire to be a mother is there and she talks a lot about her real self coming in and her real desires coming in, the real self that exists underneath the addicted self, and those are two different people. And so, we see her in this moment trying to reclaim the motherhood, and in her mind she’s not as bad as some other people, so she feels there’s been a great injustice done, and I think as a reader we don’t really know, like has a great injustice been done, did she deserve to have her child taken away? It’s not totally clear, but it happened, so we see the fallout of it, the ways that with the resources she has, she’s grasping at something else, she’s grasping at someone to love her, someone to love, to redo what she did wrong before. It really triggers her when she sees this mom that she decides is worse off than her and still has her baby. It triggers this quite desperate act when she takes the baby out of the shelter.

I was just fascinated with the ways in which when something that fracturing in our lives happens like losing a child, what happens next—the story isn’t necessarily about the fact that her daughter was taken away, it’s about what happens to that life next, how is she going to continue on, that’s sort of where I began there. For a mother it’s that indescribable fear of what could happen, the worst-case scenario. Your child is taken away and then when it does happen, I was curious what’s next, what happens to your identity, your life, and in that case she’s in a pretty desperate position.

I can’t imagine, I don’t have children of my own, but I’m sure if I did and they were taken away because of an addiction I couldn’t control, I’m sure I would be so shattered. I’m curious, I was reading your essay, “Motherloss, That Thing you Cannot Escape,” and you discuss how you write about motherloss “to exorcize it.” I was curious about your process regarding your specific experiences with motherloss?

All my writing seems to find its way back to that in some way. Your first question, going back to that a little bit, where’s the logic in a child losing its mother or where’s the logic in a mother abandoning a child, and for a child to try and figure that out, like why is this happening to me, there’s really no good answers, and so you’re left with this sort of grief, that for most of my life I had no idea that I was grieving the loss of my mother. I thought of grief in terms of death and I think many of us do, and she was still alive, she’s not dead, she’s just not available to me, she’s in another state, she’s not here anymore. That was just so I think it was maddening for me growing up, how is it that you’re still around, you’re just not around for me, there’s no logic when it comes to the rules of addiction, there’s no logic when it comes to the rules of poverty, and so I know some of my writing is trying to find a way for my brain to have a logic around it, my own logic around it, to kind of see it from different angles. I think with this book, I can see again from that distance.

I was trying to get myself in a position from all those different angles, from the mother, from the child, from different age groups, to kind of examine this hard-to-describe loss. I think though that I am able to cultivate a bigger compassion for my mother than I would have otherwise. I think growing up I remember people really simplifying her and really simplifying our situation into like, well, she’s just a bad mom, she’s an alcoholic, you’re better off without her. I think people were trying to make me feel better by saying that, but it always made me feel worse and full of shame, because a mother and a child are really connected, so you feel that cloak of shame when someone says your mom is a bad mom and it affects your identity and your self-esteem.

It was just important to me to add some complexity to the narrative we have around addiction and poverty and domestic violence and to show that they’re not simple, they’re so layered. They often involve a lot of generational abuse, they’re not just coming out of nowhere, and it doesn’t change how painful the result is, and that’s my own separate issue for a therapist to deal with anger I have, or other things, but in my writing, it really is important to me to find that space where the reader is able to look at things from a different point of view or asking themselves, well what would I do if this is my life? I think that’s important. I think finding a humanity in these darker places is my goal.

I think our society needs to look at people with disabilities and addiction not as one-sided, like they’re bad or they’re deficient, but as whole people, because they’re actual people that are struggling with this. I was interested in your approach to disability with the characters of Pearl and Golda. Pearl, she can’t speak, and has these seizures, but she’s an amazing artist and draws these hauntingly beautiful birds. And Golda, she’s described as having this mystical sort of insight. So, I was wondering how you developed your aesthetic around disability?

When I write fiction, I’m really interested in incorporating everything into the picture. I do draw a lot from personal experience in my fiction. I would never say these stories all happened to me by any stretch, but certain characters are inspired by people I knew and people I was around. Especially in the case of Golda, you know Golda was based on a family member, and was always a fascinating person to me, because people underestimated her all the time. They underestimated her because she was a very small person in size, they underestimated her because she was really childlike, and it was also in a time when there just wasn’t the resources or diagnoses, there just wasn’t that awareness especially in rural areas around anyone who wasn’t neurotypical.

Anyone who was not neurotypical was grouped into the same category of you’re not normal so go sit over there. It was seen as a shameful thing or a flaw, and the parents in these situations, especially in “Raisin Man,” they have no one to help them, no way to frame their daughter’s experience, no way to understand her really, and you know, even if they did have a way to, they’re not going to access it, because they might be interested, but it feels insurmountable with the money they have or with how far away they would have to go to find specialized help.

I really love that story because Golda kind of wins, she’s outsmarting everyone, and they don’t really see it. I love characters who aren’t really tuned in to themselves, they’re not really self-aware, because there is this veil over their eyes. In the case of Baby and the other ex-wife, they’re not seeing themselves clearly, they’re kind of drunk and high all day, they’re very mired in the past. A lot of these characters are really steeped in the past, they’re not able to be present. They can’t get out of their past miseries and regrets and meanwhile they’re caretaking for this woman who kind of has their number. She sees them for who they are, and she sees them for their flaws, and she is smart in her own way in a way that they are not. She’s intuitive in a way that they’re not and that was always fascinating to me. I think it can be a difficult thing to write about and to do it right and I hope that I did, I don’t know, but I don’t think that the answer would be to avoid a difficult topic just because I might get it wrong.

That’s always my impetus—how can I see the situation with enough complexity, how can I draw from my experience and other resources, how can I put myself in the shoes of what it would be like to be a parent or caregiver with someone with needs that I do not understand? And that’s what’s happening in these stories—these caregivers of these particular people just don’t have the tools and it adds to their own dysfunction really, but I think in “Keep Her Down,” Baby is trying to reclaim some of her lost motherhood in caring for Golda—she sees that it’s a way to redeem herself. I’m curious about the interplay between the two of them.

Well, you don’t have to worry about doing a bad job because that was my favorite story, I loved it and I love Golda.

Oh good! [chuckles] What’s funny is the real-life Golda outlives almost all of her siblings, she was much older than everyone else in her family and everyone thought that she would die first, that was their understanding, but she lived to mid-eighties or something, and she was funny, she had a great sense of humor and you could tell she could look at a person and immediately size them up, there was really no fooling her. I also love characters who have no qualms about seeing the truth. There has to be a truth-teller in the mix or else everyone is just crazy. Golda is the one who sees things more accurately in that story.

I love Golda, and I love that she’s the one that sees the truth but she’s the one that’s seen as having this disability, but I think that speaks to her strength that she’s able to call BS on the other characters.

It’s interesting how they define her disability too. Her sister doesn’t think she can hear very well, but she can hear very well, and it’s like why does she think she can’t? There’re all these assumptions around what Golda can and can’t do and can and can’t understand. I would wager to say that they’re a little bit wrong about all of them.

My favorite scene was when they took her out to the mall and she pulled down the mannequin’s lingerie and said, “Where’s the puss?” I thought that this was the best scene ever.

[Chelsea laughs] I’m really glad you appreciated that.

I was like this is great, I laughed so hard. I was curious though, it’s so serious what you’re talking about with elder abuse, so how did you put the humor in with the serious and manage that balance?

I think for me I always seem to see, especially growing up, in a lot of situations there would always be a recognition of the absurdity. Someone would recognize how absurd the situation was and there would almost be a surreal moment of laughter. I think laughter is this huge emotive response, it’s similar to crying, you’re getting something out through it. There has to be some relief in the moment, it’s so tense and so intense, and often laughter was at least this thing that I could rely on and also when I read, I want some relief to the darkness too, and I think the reader deserves it if they’re going to hang in there with a story like that that is more difficult and is looking at something that is really nuanced and hard to understand.

I tend to have a pretty dark sense of humor, and so these characters will say things that can be perceived as kind of funny or a little offbeat. I think we have to take our medicine with a spoonful of sugar. That’s always been in my mind and how to write situations that are pretty absurd and humanize them. I think we are all connected by things that are funny, things that are sad and things that are funny, and often they can really go together. I remember even when my dad died, it was the worst day of my life, my sister and I were cleaning out his storage later that week and there were plenty of moments where we were doubled over laughing really hard, and it’s like even in that horrendous grief, there’s still a memory of the person that isn’t sad, there’s still going to be a funny thing they did, there’s still going to be something weird that you can’t help but let that tension go through a laugh. I guess it’s just also what I like to read too.

I like what you said about laughter and crying being kind of like these releases, they’re like these bodily releases, they seem like opposites, but they’re kind of from the same origin.

Absolutely.

So, let’s talk a little bit about Spider Dick, my favorite name.

[Both laugh]

So, I kind of noticed a pattern, I’m not sure if it was intentional. In “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Miners,” Spider Dick, there’s so much attention on his name and Alma’s name we don’t know until later in the story, and he’s the one that says it. “Cowboys and Angels” has a similar theme with the bad man and the woman that’s chasing or attached to the bad man, yet the bad cowboy doesn’t have a name. So, I was curious if there was a process around naming characters regarding how much power they wield or how you want them to be perceived?

I think definitely in the case of Spider Dick, that whole story is about a separate language, like the separate language of mining. How Alma is learning it through being Spider Dick’s girlfriend, she’s immersed in this community of miners who truly do have their own language for things, and they all have these sort of pet names for each other. So, she meets him, and we know his name right away, and it’s this moment where her radar goes up. This is something different, this is not a normal interaction with this person, this is something special—she perceives it as special and almost like a mystery that she perhaps feels uniquely in this position to untangle. In that sense his name does seem to wield heavier over that story, because he blames all of his actions, his sadness, his anger, his abuse at her because he’s a miner, his job is so hard, because there’s so much tragedy in that job and she should understand that, so I think it’s more of a subconscious move on my part, probably, but I say that it’s clear that he is wielding more power within that specific community. And in the case of, what was the other one you mentioned?

Oh, it was the cowboy, who was completely nameless.

Right, right. I like when characters are just kind of named what they are, like she wants a cowboy to kind of walk onto the scene and rescue her and so to her a cowboy appears. I don’t know that he is a cowboy [laughs], he’s not really. WE can see as readers, like the literal definition of cowboy, that’s not what he’s doing, he’s like this traveling robber, he’s a criminal, but she defines him this way, based on maybe the way he’s dressed and some sense of glamor that she’s kind of imparted on that word, so in that sense the cowboy represents this person who’s going to save her from this existence, from this town. Even when we can tell this isn’t the cowboy of her dreams, she’s really stuck on it, she doesn’t really need to know his name, he’s the cowboy and always will be. I think it’s a lot more about her ideas of who he might be or could be or who she wants him to be. As for other names, I really love naming characters, sometimes they just come to me, and sometimes I am drawing from familial names that have kind of a ring to it. I always loved the name Jackie Herd, that was a real person in my family, so I kind of use them when I can or when it seems appropriate, and others are tweaked, or changed or something. Sometimes when you hear a good name you can’t let it go.

Was the character of Jackie Herd similar to the person in your family?

Well, Jackie Herd was always known to me through the stories of others, so I have no real memories of meeting Jackie Herd himself, but he was such a distinct character, this legend in the broader family history that would come up so much and my dad had stories about his cousin Jackie Herd and so my interpretation was probably not super similar to the actual man, but he was what materialized in my brain after hearing about Jackie Herd after all these years. And I think even the story of Jackie may have taken on grander proportions as time went on. To locate the actual truth would be incredibly difficult now. So many people are dead, and aged, but it was more this impression that the stories made on me. So yeah, the stories are based on that impression, probably pretty far removed from reality.

I really enjoyed the story, “Cadillac Flats,” which has Jackie in there, and he plays a guiding role to Pretty, and I found it interesting, because Pretty, we learn about him in “Keeping Her Down,” how he’s not a good husband to Jan and Baby, his two ex-wives. And in “Cadillac Flats” we meet Pretty in his younger years and learn that he’s gay. You were talking earlier about how things like disability, there may not be as many resources in Central Valley, and maybe if you had a disability you were ostracized, so I was wondering what the attitudes were like towards homosexuality in Central Valley and how that impacted your writing in “Cadillac Flats?”

I wouldn’t want to pretend to speak for the whole Central Valley, but certainly especially in the story “Cadillac Flats,” it took place in the 60s, and there was not a lot of awareness around anything but a typical vision of masculinity and what was expected of boys was following a very straight and narrow road. You go to war. You man up. Pretty’s father is really obsessed with the younger generation being soft, not being as tough as his generation, to him his generation is the best generation, and when his son isn’t really following that he’s really threatened by that. He doesn’t know what that could mean. From teenage Pretty’s perspective, he knows he would be so rejected if he were to ever express who he really is, and we learn later that his mother does see him for who he is, but that’s never going to be really communicated when he’s a younger person, and by the time she’s ready to say something it’s far too late.

So, the story for him is again the story is about the true self and the self we become because of our surroundings and how to survive. To me, Pretty is trying to survive, and, in that survival, he hurts a lot of people, which is typically how it goes, but often we’re very focused on the end result, and kind of tracking him was my way to get curious like how does someone like Pretty end up where he ends up, all the turns his life takes tries to chase this idea of hetero-masculinity that our society really honors. I want to feel we’ve come far. It’s easy to feel like we’ve come a long way living in a place like Portland, but I can’t say the same thing when I go home to Fresno. I don’t see that same education. I don’t see that same freedom. Again, I don’t want to speak for the Central Valley, but I imagine it’s still difficult to be yourself if you are not fitting the mold of hetero expectations, and many other places in the world of course. It’s just a conservative place, and there’s a lot of fear there, there’s a lot of fear of what being different could be, even though the outcome of not living up to your identity is catastrophic, that’s what we see for Pretty. It’s like his method of survival, he didn’t really survive. It ultimately led to a life of a lot of pain, a lot of regret, and a lot of hurt.

Yeah, I like what you said about the characters finding their true selves, and the self that’s sort of imposed upon them by society. In terms of coming into one’s true self, a lot of female characters have these really strong spirits, but they may not be accepted by higher society, although they have a lot of wisdom. The protagonist, Nevaeh, in “Lyra,” and Alma in “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Miners,” have a lot of spunk and interest, whereas someone with academic credentials may not have as much of. I think Nevaeh, she does what she has to do, and it may not be morally accepted, but she has wisdom. How did you become interested in such strong female narrators who march to their own drum, who don’t necessarily fit in with academic society, but are more magnetic and have great spirit?

I love that question. I think that there can be a certain wisdom, and a certain intuition, and maybe a certain candor or frankness that comes to living the life that these women have lived. The way they might think can be seen as problematic if you’re looking at it from a more academic standpoint or a more woke standpoint. I think, again, when you’re in survival mode, you’re having to rely on a sixth sense about other people, about what will keep you safe, you’re continually making choices that are pretty “do or die.”

Particularly in the story, “Lyra,” Merriam watches all this true crime and really wants to immerse herself in tragedy, which she’s not experienced firsthand. There’s a desire to connect, there’s a desire to understand it, but she’s still coming at it from a different place, and she’s going to have a language around it. Even when she introduces why she’s there, she says “I’m here to write a dissertation on unspeakable acts of violence against rural women.” And it’s like Nevaeh, she gets what she’s saying, but it’s not how she would ever describe in her own words what happened. That’s more of an elevated definition, but Nevaeh has a totally different skill set about how to read people, and she’s very resilient.

I think sometimes we want to think of resiliency in the sense of you got out. For Nevaeh to be truly resilient she would have gotten the hell out of there and gone to college and picked herself up and done the right thing, and I don’t think that’s always what resiliency means. I think sometimes there’s a few choices, they may all be bad, but you’re trying to pick the best one. We probably don’t think it’s great to be a madam at a cathouse, but she feels she’s actually doing a public service by protecting the girls in the way that she can. We may have different ideas about what protection means, but with the skills she has this is the best choice out of a host of other bad choices. Again, it’s this exercise in compassion where we can understand why she’s taken up this post, because maybe this is all that’s available. Someone had this funny way of saying it, like do you want a shit sandwich, or do you want a shit sandwich? In a choice between two shit sandwiches, choose the less gross one. From a really privileged standpoint, we may turn our nose up at it, but she didn’t have that choice. There’s a specialized wisdom, a specialized resiliency that comes from that. Those places are really interesting to me and can be beautiful in their own way.

I like what you said about how Nevaeh is operating from the place of trying to protect these women even though from an outside privileged standpoint it seems unacceptable that she’s a madam at a ranch brothel, but she’s really doing the best she can in the moment. I think that in “Fact of Body” and “Women and Children First” there’s also the theme of women doing the best they can to live. The women prostitute themselves, but they don’t have any money. You write with a lot of empathy for the mothers and children. Were you trying to raise awareness for mother and children and show empathy for both?

I definitely think that my goal is empathy. It’s not necessarily that it’s a desire to raise awareness, I think it’s more about what’s the worst thing you could imagine your mother asking you to do. And to me, that’s one of them, so then that happens, and then what. Once you get past the idea that these things happen all the time, which is still shocking and awful, I think it’s the last house on the block in terms of survival. That isn’t what anyone wants but that is what’s going to have to happen occasionally. The parts where it’s happening to the children, I see it more as a fear I had growing up, in terms of what would my mother do for her addiction, what would she sacrifice to get what she needed and as I got older, I knew that the answer was anything, that anything would be done to get what she needed. I think I lived with a subconscious fear that soon there would be a moment where she would sacrifice me, and she already had in various ways. It was a big fear that she would become so desperate that something like that would happen. I see the way that in this story collection, with these mothers and children, it’s so clear to me, that was my attempt to examine that fear I had lived with as a child, that feels really psychological. That’s only something I could say with a lot of distance.

I started writing stories ten years ago. I’ve been in a lot of therapy since then. I think when they first started coming out, I didn’t know where these ideas were really coming from, they would just come, and I’d write the story and I wouldn’t question anything. It’s only many years later and reading this book last year when I did final edits, seeing all these connections, and seeing all these recurring themes and knowing it was really my subconscious way of trying to understand some of the fears I had and trying to make sense of them. I think that’s how we write. I think our subconscious plays such a huge role in what comes out when we’re in that creative flow state that we cannot predict if we’re truly in that state of flow, and these stories were written in that state 100 percent, and I would never want to give the impression that the things that happened in this book happened to me, but the seed of the ideas, the seeds of the emotion often are circling some big fears that I had—I can see that now from my therapist’s arm chair. I think that’s been an interesting part of publishing this book is seeing all those connections that I wouldn’t have thought in the beginning.

It’s interesting what you said about being in the subconscious and when you’re in the state of flow what just comes out, comes out. In my own writing, it’s true that what’s meant to come out will come out.

Absolutely, yeah if you open the channel it’ll probably find its way. I know a lot of writers map their plots and even when you’re doing that, I think you’re still accessing things and tapping into that regardless of how you approach your work.

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the topic of religion. I was reading your essay, “Fathers Sway Above It All,” and you talk about how you became immersed in religion when you lived with your grandparents and that you would mail your parents bibles to help them get saved. I was curious how your own attitudes of religion influenced the exploration of religion in your writing?

I think it’s really evident in Godshot, especially, but I was always so attracted to religion. When you grow up in chaos, religion looks really amazing. It’s structured, it’s based on this idea of unconditional love, it’s based on healing, all these things that I was so hungry for. This idea of the rebirth, a clean slate, it’s so evocative, especially to someone coming from a difficult circumstance. Well, I’d give anything to start over, give anything to have a father in the sky that loves me forever. Imagine how good that sounds. And so, I just took to it quickly. I longed for that structure to live by, and what I saw then was potential for my parents to change. I couldn’t change them myself, but here’s a god that can supposedly heal anything. I mean, I could really fix their lives. It’s that child’s logic. The idea of God is so powerful to a child. Children especially are really open to spirituality. They haven’t been so conditioned by the world yet to not want to believe in things.

Later in life, with my own journey, with my own spirituality, I’ve always been a seeker of something, of a higher meaning. I think it was important for me to feel like there was some higher purpose to things I was feeling. Why did I have to go through all this if it doesn’t mean anything? It feels so much better if it can mean something, something bigger than you, and that’s kind of what religion promises. It’s also what any form of spirituality promises whether you’re practicing any religion or if you’re more esoteric and you’re doing tarot cards, it’s all in a similar family in terms of what you’re desiring out of it, and desiring a greater meaning to your life, and a greater understanding of yourself. All those desires, I still have, and I predict I’ll have those forever.

With Godshot, it was all about what it looks like to wake up one day and see that the religion you had bought into isn’t quite what you thought. To me it was never black and white, it was never like one day I just stopped believing. I think a lot of narratives about religion or coming out of a religion or a cult it’s about this sudden transformation, a sudden turning your back to it and moving forward in another direction and for me it wasn’t so simple. It was always a long process. You can’t have this true belief and let it go so easily. I was curious about what it looks like to maybe separate from a church or separate from an idea of religion but continue down a spiritual path, and how do you align it with other belief systems in your life.

For Heartbroke, we see religion come in again and again and this way that characters are like please reveal a higher truth to me because I’m really out of ideas. With “Raisin Man,” for instance, we also have God playing the punisher. I think that God and the land, especially for people who depend on the land and its resources, and maybe they’re also religious, there is a real connection there. It’s like if the land is providing, like we’ve pleased God, and if it’s not, if the weather is not complying, God is mad at us. We’ve done something wrong, and that interplay has always fascinated me. It’s very much a presence in a place like the Central Valley, which is a very religious place and it’s a very agricultural place, and those things are really braided together.

You talked a bit about Godshot, which was amazing by the way. Pastor Vern shows up in Godshot, he plays a big role, and he shows up in “Lyra.” Why did you choose to put him in both of these stories? There were some other elements that were in both Godshot and Heartbroke, like the Diviners, so I’m interested in how you made that decision.

I wrote the books at the same time. I started Heartbroke before Godshot actually, and then I started writing Godshot when I realized a story I was writing was actually a novel. They were finished at the same time. A review called them the sister-wives, and I think that was a good way to put it. For me they’re both in the same world, of this off-centered California that I’ve taken a lot of fictional liberties to create, but I love when books speak to each other. I like the idea that they’re of the same fabric, and that there would be little nods to each other. Obviously, the nods are pretty subtle, I don’t think they’re extremely plot-heavy necessarily. I was curious how that would work, to have one book winking at the other book. I just liked that, I thought it was an interesting way to approach these two separate works that were existing in the same world and the characters occasionally were characters that didn’t get their due in the novel. Maybe they were cut out for some reason, maybe it just didn’t work for that story, there could be this short story about them instead. I found that to be really satisfying. Godshot was so much longer when I first wrote it, and it had to be trimmed and so some of that trimming wound up as a story or maybe a character I couldn’t let go of wound up with their own story. It felt satisfying for me as a writer to still see the characters have some life.

Godshot and Heartbroke, they both deal issues related to the #MeToo movement. I was wondering how you saw your two works relating to the #MeToo movement and fitting in with that movement?

The #MeToo movement started I guess midway between me writing these books. I’m trying to remember the moment I honed in on it…It felt like this moment of potential redemption and a moment of recognition. I think I felt pretty empowered to write even deeper into some of the ideas I was entertaining, because suddenly it felt like it was being done elsewhere in a different way, not that it wasn’t before, but it suddenly had this platform.

I wrote an essay in 2017 about my aunt, which kind of coincided with that timing a bit, and that was really interesting, because so many people read it and related to it, and it really opened up something in me to really excavate my own truth. I think for so many of us that time was this moment to reflect back and call some justice into the arena where before there had been none and even just a sharing of the burden of what we had experienced. I didn’t think to myself consciously, I’m going to write the #MeToo story. It’s really the same reason we would share any story, to connect with others, to normalize something, to feel seen and heard, perhaps trying to do that through writing, perhaps trying to answer questions from my own life or the life of the women in my family, or the stories I was told growing up.

The novel I’m writing now actually is a bit more centered around the #MeToo moment. For one of the characters, it’s a springboard for her too. She’s in prison. It’s a springboard for her as she’s watching the TV, she’s watching all these stories come out. It’s a way for her to finally have a step to stand on, that’s kind of what the book entertains, like is the time finally right for the truth to matter. I was more aware of that in that narrative than doing that in these books.

That sounds really interesting. So, you’re writing a novel and she’s in prison?

Yeah, the mother character is in prison for the murder of her abusive husband.

Oh wow.

Yeah, but at the time in which it happened there wasn’t the #MeToo movement, really no justice to her, no nuance with the case at all, because she couldn’t really prove that he was abusive, she couldn’t really prove that it was self-defense. And then when she sees this movement starting, she feels the first hope that she felt, yeah so it sort of inspires her to get some attention around her own case and open things back up a bit.

That sounds really interesting. Yeah, I mean it’s a hard line when someone is abusive, and you kill them in self-defense. I’m not promoting murder! But you know what I mean?

Right. [Chelsea laughs] I do, I do! I think all these shows, Snapped, and profiles of women who just go crazy and shoot their husbands, 99.9 percent of those women are probably responding to years of violence inflicted on them. Emotional and physical. And I think there’s many historical cases where that doesn’t get taken into consideration. Now there have been some that I’ve researched that have, and maybe there’s more of that today, but I’ve seen plenty of things that make me lose hope for it, but every now and then there’s something that rises up where that is taken into consideration.

It should be, a lot of women aren’t taken as seriously as they should be, especially in situations that really matter. So, my final question. You kind of remind me of Denis Johnson, because you don’t shy away from the difficult issues, and it’s fascinating, you quote him at the beginning of your collection. How did he influence your work and who are some other authors you admire?

I encountered Denis Johnson, and like so many, he’s beloved for a reason. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and I really hadn’t read much at that point. I wasn’t very well read at all, but that book [Jesus’ Son] felt like just a total permission to write about the things I wanted to write about. It feels so comforting to see this book that so many people love that’s really dwelling in those dark places, that’s really not looking away, like you said, and that was so inspiring to me. And also, just on a pure line level, what he does is so impressive and so difficult, and so I think our focus sometimes is too much on the content and what is happening in these stories, and to me it’s like let’s look at those sentences, those are incredible sentences. It was just working on so many levels for me. I’ll always think about that book as really formative, especially for Heartbroke, because I started writing those stories around that same time.

I remember feeling the same way encountering Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty. Again, it’s when you find the story you need to find it’s like you’re hit behind the eyes, like woah you can do that, was my response to that story, the music in the voice of that narrator, I mean it really changed the way I was writing voice, because I didn’t know, I just didn’t know you could do that, and once you know that you can do something, it’s so freeing, and I’ll never forget finding that story.

Gosh, there’s a lot. For this book specifically, Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx. I think that was a writer who was writing about place that felt like a character, there was just this haunting presence of place in her work, especially in “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water.” That was a huge story for me, it was an interesting form. What I love about that book, you leave the story feeling like you’ve read an epic novel, it doesn’t feel shallow in any sense, it feels like you’ve read 300–400 pages. I love to feel like I’ve gone on this epic journey in a short amount of time. That was also my goal in writing some of these, we would entertain a lot in a short space. I wanted the reader to feel like they’d gone through that journey with the narrator, seeing the generations unfold. In twenty pages, Annie Proulx does that masterfully.

I would say, “You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down” by Alice Walker, just the titles of the stories alone, they’re stories in themselves, I just love that, and the way she writes about sex, the way she writes about politics, it’s very unapologetic, it’s stunning, that book feels like it’s on my forever list. Then there’s many more contemporary ones that I could point to.

I do feel like the writer, Melanie Rae Thon does not get enough coverage. She’s amazing. I love the collection, In this Light. I highly recommend her. Right now, I’m reading Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. I loved Animals by Lisa Taddeo.

Me too! I love Lisa Taddeo.

Yeah, she’s someone that really doesn’t turn away. I love when a writer is doing whatever they want. It feels so alive, it feels so exciting. She’s a writer that I feel that way about.

Yeah, just baldly writing about whatever she wants to write about, there’s no social graces in the prose. It’s amazing.

Well, Chelsea, I’ve gone through all my questions. Is there anything you want to talk about that we haven’t talked about?

I just want to thank you for such a thoughtful interview and for such a close read and I just really value the time we spent on this. I hope I wasn’t too long-winded in my answers. I’m really so grateful to talk to you tonight and to hear your thoughts about the book.

You definitely weren’t too long-winded, you gave me so much material, you were super nice, and I really enjoyed talking with you.

Likewise, I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Bye Chelsea!

Bye!

Chelsea Bieker is the author of the novel GODSHOT which was a finalist for both the Oregon and California Book Award, longlisted for The Center For Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and named a Barnes and Noble Pick of the Month. Her story collection, HEARTBROKE, is out April 2022, and was named a best book of April by Nylon Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Cut, McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and others. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, as well as residencies from MacDowell and Tin House Books. Originally from California’s Central Valley, she lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children where she is writing her third book, a novel about motherhood and madness.