Hypertext Magazine asked Agustin Maes, author of Newborn, “In discussing the fluidity of your sentences, readers use painful descriptors including ‘achingly beautiful,’ ‘drop-dead gorgeous,’ and ‘ugly and spectacular.’ Can you talk about pain and writing; how much personal pain did you suffer to complete Bitsy’s story, and how did you reconcile it?”
By Agustin Maes
Once upon a time there was a fourteen-year-old girl. She was ignorant and innocent and earnest and good. Her name was Elizabeth, but everybody called her “Bitsy.” She lived alone in a very small apartment with a mother who didn’t care for her much, if at all, and who wasn’t around very much, either. And so, Bitsy was terribly lonely. One day, Bitsy met a boy. He had a car and gave her a ride.
That’s a terribly complicated question. The thought of experiencing personal pain in the writing of Newborn never consciously occurred to me. But, of course, there was pain in the writing of the novella. And a great deal of sorrow in writing it, too. Good question.
In the beginning there wasn’t much more than the idea of a story of human beings whose lives were affected by the course of a creek in one way or another. The creek was the central idea: the main “character” so to speak, an ever-presence. With the creek as its anchor, the narrative could “flow” in a naturally circuitous way. And almost from the beginning I knew that an astonishing thing must be seen within the creek for it to have continued presence as a character. And so, a dead infant came to mind. What could be more startling and disturbing for two grade-school boys innocently going down to a creekbed to play? Kids who never expected to witness such a reality. Fascinating and horrifying all at once. And then of course there’s the story of who gave birth to the child.
Bitsy showed up.
Bitsy’s life is a bleak one: she’s poor, not very bright, neglected by her mother, yearning for some recognition of her being, longing for simple affection. She’s essentially alone with little comfort offered her. She’s given no breaks, discarded by the world. It was difficult to write about her plight because it’s so grim. But despite her dreadful circumstances—or because of them—I grew to love her very much. It’s amazing and mysterious how a fictional character can become almost tangibly real when you care deeply about them. Bitsy’s suffering and marginalization became my own. The thing is, I know nothing of what it’s like to be a teenage girl. But my compassion for Bitsy became acute and she became an actual person in the writing of the tale.
Here’s the truth: I would probably dismiss Bitsy if I were to encounter her in real life. I would judge her without knowing anything about her internal pain. That’s what humans do. But because I created her, she’s profoundly dear to me. All the characters in Newborn are. With few exceptions, every character in the novella has a chronicle of pain, no matter how young or how old. They have personal histories that can’t be known except by writing about them.
The creek just keeps on going, indifferently, unstoppable. That’s a very apophatic way of approaching creation. But it’s what rings true to me. There are always more to things than what one thinks there is. Yet they’re often distant and cold-seeming. But there are moments of genuine love when small, unexpected mercies appear at exactly the precise time. Like the baker toward the end of the tale. Her simple kindness is greater than she knows it to be.
Related Feature: Excerpt: Agustin Maes’ NEWBORN
Agustín Maes was born in New Mexico where his ancestors settled in the 1630s and grew up in northern California thirty miles north of San Francisco. In 2011, Newborn was chosen as a runner-up for the Paris Literary Prize, sponsored by Shakespeare and Company and the de Groot Foundation. His work has been published in The Gallatin Review, Blue Mesa Review, Ontario Review, Turnrow, The Other Journal, anthologized in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and cited in The Best American Mystery Stories. His work has also been translated into French, and into Arabic for Albawtaka Review, an Egyptian quarterly. Maes was the 2009-2010 Milton Fellow at Seattle Pacific University. He resides in Oakland, Californiahttps://www.hypertextmag.com/?p=22509
