PENELOPE CRAY, IN CONVERSATION ABOUT MIRACLES COME ON MONDAYS
Tatiana Duvanova: Penelope Cray’s debut short prose collection Miracles Come on Mondays is the winner of the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. Cray’s short pieces resist easy categorization. Some of them resemble prose poems. Others can pass for narrative short fiction. Most of them can only be described using Kazim Ali’s definition as “dark fractured fables.” Cray’s writing blurs the lines between literal and metaphorical, questions metonymic and synecdochic relationships, and haunts the reader with unsettling images: a braid in a drawer in a hotel room, self-sowing genitals, an infant mouse on one’s tongue.
In Cray’s pieces, objects are sentient, and abstract concepts are given concrete embodiments. People who are long gone find ways to linger, and those alive and present find ways to disappear. Occasionally Cray’s characters get disassembled, one body part after another. Sometimes body tissues come to life and rebel. Cray is not trying to distill, correlate, or disentangle. She questions, complicates, and unsettles. Cray writes about permanent losses, the irreconcilable in marriage, gender and power dynamics, with feminist critique carefully intertwined throughout her collection.
In April 2020, Penelope Cray visited our Graduate Seminar in Literary Nonfiction for a reading and a brief discussion of her work. Rachel Rothenberg and I extended the dialogue online in the aftermath of her visit.
Rachel Rothenberg: Penelope, I’m so glad you were able to join us remotely to continue our discussion of your brilliant new work. The title of your collection—Miracles Come on Mondays—is as extraordinary as it is quotidian, and as specific as it is arbitrary. It’s such an excellent title, and excellent titles are hard to come by even in the best of times. But in times of plague, your choice seems prescient, impossibly of its era of publication, as Mondays hold even less meaning than they did a year ago. Could you talk a bit about your title?
Penelope Cray: Thank you so much, Rachel and Tatiana, for inviting me to talk about Miracles Come on Mondays and for your keen characterization of the book’s project. Visiting with your class remotely in April was a true pleasure, especially when so many book-related events were being canceled or indefinitely postponed.
“Miracle” is a weighty word in the best of times and perhaps never weightier than in, as you say, times of plague. I was raised in the Catholic Church, and so, in a way, I was raised on miracles. I don’t consider myself a member of the church anymore, and the miracles of the book’s title are more mundane than those attributed to an interventional miracle-wielding god. But I do like the idea of interruptive, interventional events, miraculous events, that keep us awake to our circumstances and require both our surrender and our participation. These are quotidian, minor miracles, then, that move a life along—the mundane Monday miracle, the labor required to start another (a new) week. Merriam-Webster lists “caution” as a synonym for “miracle,” and our current circumstances certainly require that. When I chose the title, I could not have imagined anything so interventional and interruptive as a global pandemic.
As you suggest, these days we are living feel temporally unique; one blurs into the next, from overwork, from underemployment, from the simultaneity of work and parenting, from worry over precarity, from grief that cannot be shared in typical ways. Mondays do seem to hold less meaning now that work unfolds at home, at all hours and across all days, alongside the school day (now summer vacation) and parenting. There is no break, no start, and no end. Even the mundane feels up for grabs, with much of “normal” life unfolding at a distance, on screens, and behind masks. How can we productively intervene in or interrupt our own lives now?
TD: It was great having you join one of our online seminar sessions with Mary Cappello. Earlier in the semester—before the pandemic was even a remote possibility—we discussed (auto)biography as a genre. Some life events are chosen to be included, and some are omitted. How do we decide what is important and what is not? The first line of your bio on the back of Miracles Come on Mondays tells us that you were born in Australia and were naturalized as a US citizen in 2018. In “Neither Here nor There,” you write “I am not from here, but I no longer live where I am from… If I stay here for many years, will I one year be from here? No, I am far from where I am from and the years of being here only make there farther away” (52). Can you talk about why the fact that you were born in Australia and later naturalized as a US citizen was important for you to include in your book bio? How do you think it informed your writing?
PC: I moved a lot as a child. I was born in Western Australia, and by the time I was ten, I’d lived in nine houses and three countries: Australia, Germany, and the United States. When I moved back to Australia when I was twelve, I sounded like an American. When I moved back to America when I was eighteen, I sounded like an Australian. My sense of allegiance to either country contains gaps and areas of overlap; trying to parse out what belongs to what feels less interesting than writing from those gaps and overlaps and out of the contradictions and excesses they produce. I’m excited by how language can be self-interruptive and self-intervening (miraculous).
An interrupted life begs the question of what remains constant across the inconstancy. For me, what has become important is what has remained insistent. Many of these are feelings and impressions that persist from childhood and in my thinking and behavior. I write to understand them and myself, sometimes using characters or objects to embody particular traits or dynamics. Anything that cannot easily be “talked down” brings with it a host of questions, which necessarily bump up against both personal and public present events, like the pandemic and our national and increasingly global protests for equity. Once a story begins, language, too, becomes a subject, and what I thought I might be writing about gets shifted by what and how I’ve already written about it. I try not to be too willful once I see that language is inviting a new direction. I try to listen and follow what is there.
RR: You mentioned during your recent reading that while you were educated as a poet, you do not tend to write to the line. Yet as I reread the book, I’m struck by the ways in which the blocks of text in some pieces, “Fishmonger” for example, unfold with surgical precision into perfect symmetries. How would you describe your formal sensibilities? Might you agree that you write to the stanza rather than the line?
PC: It’s a good question and I’ve thought about it as I’ve moved pieces out of lineated verse into prose. The process of lineation—deciding where to break a line of poetry—is a helpful revision strategy for me, as it allows me to unearth units of meaning within a sentence that I can then expand on via repetition or some other ramifying logic. Moving my works in progress between prose and lineated verse helps me understand logical turns and how to compress my thinking. Several of the pieces in Miracles either began as poems in verse or spent some time in verse during the revision process.
As I’ve written more in prose, I’ve come to see the sentence as my unit. One sentence drives the next. I like a sentence to hang, to feel suspended. I like to feel contained by it, buoyed by it and guided along with it, even as it leaves me hanging. I avoid summation because life does not sum, at least not while we’re living it.
To the extent that stanzas, like paragraphs, set off one collection of connected thoughts from another, I do write with the stanza in mind. I think about “Introvert” here, where each stanza is just a sentence or a few short sentences long, across which the speaker tries to clarify or reiterate the difference between water and salt. This distinction is important to the speaker and she wants to get it right! The piece proceeds as a series of reiterations and clarifications, and the stanza breaks signal the speaker’s effort to reclarify her position.
Traditionally, the language of speaker and stanza belongs to poetry, and I’m getting used to thinking of my work as prose, with narrators and paragraphs. That said, the speaker of poetry feels more flexible than the narrator of prose, who must narrate a story while the speaker has only to speak, albeit persuasively.
TD: The notion that your narrator wants to “get it right” really resonates with me. In one of your pieces, “The Red Painter,” you write about a painter who used to paint in red, but one day starts painting in blue. The problem is that no one wants his blue paintings: he is known as the red painter, after all. According to his audience, he is not getting it right. Do you ever feel like the red painter now that you have published this collection of very distinct pieces? Do you feel like that is what everyone expects from you?
PC: Well, I’m flattered by this question because I tend to think not many people know about what I do. But maybe you are about to change that for me! Possibly if I write ten more “red” books like this one, then no one will want my “blue” books. For now, the limiting agent is my own sensibilities, and my most recent work is unfolding in ways that overlap with this collection. I find I’m writing from the I a bit more, rather than as a character, which possibly speaks to how a crisis centers each of us in our own story. I’ve also been working on a project about my relationship with my father, much of which has unfolded since his suicide when I was five, and I hope to apply the kinds of questioning and figuring I do in Miracles to that project, which is an effort, at base, to make my father both familial (as my father) and familiar (as a man) across significant distances, including death and his own desire to die.
RR: I’m also interested in your use of color, colors being both provisionally divisible and “primary.” How do you think color (a quality) differs in its distinctions from the way you divide and shrink materials (at times in quantity)?
PC: I’m married to a painter, Steve Budington, and my mother, Robin Grace, is also a painter, so the atmosphere of color, in particular how the same color can appear quite different as a function of the colors that surround it, is standard fare in our home. I’m interested, by way of language, in how we describe three particular colors as “primary,” and from there I start to imagine various scenarios of origin. A “primary” color would seem to preexist us, even enjoy a kind of autonomy that most things do not. And, unlike anything alive, color is not subject to death (I think). But is yellow, even an immortal yellow, yellow all the way through? Can I ever get to the bottom of yellow? Is yellow divisible? There are beliefs built into the idea of “primary” that suggest color might be different from other materials, but is this true or is it just language making it so? I say “just language,” but we know language has the power to order and transform absolutely. I write to figure out what language is doing.
RR: In both “Death Devours More Than Nadine” and “Introvert,” you are working with the idea of the impossible or uncommon denominator. That is, these texts trouble the divisibility of both the material and the ontological. How small a part may still refer back to the whole, and at what point does essence, identity, or “knowing” dilute? Does the “rapture” at the end of Nadine coincide with a point of dilution from which there is no return to form? An unknowing from which there is no recovery? How much can anything be shrunk (“Pillar”) before it ceases to exist? Where and how do we locate our tiniest freckle, drop, crumb, and where is the line between “vaporized” and still her (“The Widower”)?
PC: When I think about the examples you mention from the book—the crumbs, the freckle, the vapor—tiny fragmentary parts are, in each case, saturated with the beingness of what they are. I didn’t plan this, but I’m happy to discover it, because it feels to me very optimistic. The crumbs (in “Bakers”) are still the true bread, the freckle (in “Freckle”) is a portal to the self, and the vapor (in “The Widower”) is the same shape-shifting wife she’s always been, even, I feel, after she is inhaled by her husband. There are elements in us, these examples seem to argue, that are irreducible. That’s not to say we can’t or don’t change or that we aren’t complicated, in that some parts of ourselves can seem bent on canceling out other parts. But I suppose the willingness to name ourselves all the way down to the atom is also a willingness to experience ourselves in potentially contradictory ways—as both whole and part. In “Death Devours More than Nadine,” Nadine, via her many grotesque portraits, comes to exceed herself; even the inanimate paintings of Nadine’s eyes become animated with the essence of Nadine. It may be that Nadine so exceeds herself that even death must increase its appetite if it is to devour all of her.
TD: Speaking of “Death Devours More than Nadine,” I could not help but notice that bodies in your pieces, especially women’s bodies are frequently disassembled. We were wondering about the way a feminist critique may be glimpsed in your work. For example, you often blur the lines between bodies and objects. In “No Stuff,” the protagonist’s children become one more thing she throws away out of her commitment to radical decluttering. Finally, in “Pucker Up” body parts dissociate from their host and begin to speak for themselves. Can you talk about why you were interested in exploring the bounds of the body in this way?
PC: A body is a strange thing. We spend all our time inside it, and yet we don’t get to pick the one we live in. Often, we look at our body as if from the outside. As a young woman, I spent a lot of time wishing my body was other than it was, and I tried eating and not-eating my way into another size. I became extremely thin at one point, but I recall vividly that I did not feel thin, that I started to think instead about the size of my bones. Antagonism toward the body, then, expresses materially what is immaterial. And maybe that is the structuring conundrum—to be immaterial is to both not consist of matter and to not matter. How do we bring our feelings to matter in our bodies? We say our heart aches or we say we wear our feelings on our sleeves. I’d like to know what this kind of casual language is getting at and where it’s getting us.
Ideally, the material (body) and immaterial (emotion) would be companionable. Our physical and emotional health is a massively collaborative process among all our body parts that nevertheless, under the best of circumstances, carries us toward our death. To the extent that we associate increasingly with machines—and during the pandemic, increasingly via machines—this collaboration also includes non-human, non-animate, elements. Sometimes, in an effort to optimize—via, say, decluttering—we might become too enamored of our chosen logic and make equivalent that which is not equivalent, for example, our children’s toys and our actual children. We could spend half our lives acquiring one set of things and the other half throwing away another set of things. We could be quite busy with this.
TD: In Miracles Come on Mondays, you center some of your pieces around things, objects, and concepts. Body parts, balloons, and colors become the protagonists of your work, pushing the Homo Sapiens aside. What made you interested in the perspective of bubbles? What were you trying to achieve by challenging the human and humanity as the almost inevitable focal point of literary writing?
PC: The bubbles story came about because at the time of its writing I was just a year or so into motherhood and was quite literally spending a lot of time with bubbles. I’d blow them with my son and we’d watch them rise into the air and admire the ones that endured the longest and rose the highest and the ones that landed on a surface and somehow didn’t pop right away. And we’d call out ridiculous things about them, about their glistening, and their size, and their popping. So it was a fairly rational shift in perspective to start observing myself expending all this excited energy with my son about the bubbles, and I began to sense how ridiculous we might appear to the bubbles.
I think the other informing logic of this story is loneliness. The loneliness of early motherhood and also the loneliness of being human, cut off from the inanimate and from the animals. Bubbles, neither animal nor inanimate, seem to occupy a gray area, as it is our breath, in the case of blowing bubbles, that calls them into being. They carry our breath high into the air. So maybe this story doesn’t de-center the human after all. The bubbles, though, dream of a world in which they do not rely on the human for anything, because they find us deeply embarrassing.
RR: The slow incessant decay of not only bodies but domestic materials, attachments, and conventions, seems incredibly timely. I’m thinking of the couch and marriage, but also “Single Story,” “No Stuff,” “Movie of the Day,” and others. Has this long virulent season intensified your instinct to meditate on the ways that suburban constructs and enclosures may break open under scrutiny and pressure?
PC: I’m interested in unseen forces, in underlying stories that possibly aren’t being told, out of a concern for privacy or out of shame, for example. Many of the characters in the book are enduring forms of isolation or loneliness, sometimes further complicated by self-injury, as with poor Dave, in “Don’t You Start,” whose own home and body almost entirely collude against him. But even brutal Dave has his sympathizers: his plush rug, which intervenes in his backward fall, and his shoulder, which whimpers with feeling for him. I wonder how well many of these characters would do in this pandemic, which has only intensified our isolation, for some to an intolerable, deeply risky degree. We also can take less for granted—the safety of the air we share with friends, family, and neighbors we are used to feeling safe around. The feeling of safety is up for grabs and we react differently in the face of it—with bravado, with denial, with fear, with curiosity. And to a new degree, we must make our comfort levels explicit to others. I’ve found myself backing away from a neighbor, saying, “Oh, I’m social distancing.” Here in Vermont, where case counts are low, we have relaxed somewhat, but there is the feeling, in the parlance of GoT, that “winter is coming.”
The word “decay” is interesting as it relates to “decadence.” The loud cake-all-day aspects of our culture can cover over the broken aspects that in fact concern all of us. I’m thinking about how Disney World in Florida reopened the day before the state beat our national record for the number of new Covid-19 cases in a single day, far exceeding what many other countries have reported across the entire pandemic. “It’s a small world, after all.”
RR: I too am contemplating the intensified oppositions of pandemic life: safety and risk, comfort and anxiety, isolation and openness. I believe your work takes up the task of weighing difference and unlikeness, amplifying the dissonances that should or could be harmonious: “A woman cannot speak but by comparison. What I’m feeling is not what she is feeling. What she has is not mine” (from “Mountain”). Do you agree that the discordances inherent to comparison mark your work? And, as you indicate in the first line, how exactly do you think that comparison is gendered?
PC: “Mountain” takes up a generational tendency toward comparison on my maternal side. My grandmother compared my mother endlessly to other people’s daughters, as well as to various daughterly ideals, as I’m certain my grandmother was by her own mother. There was a distinctly punitive aspect to the comparing, much of which was focused on physical or conventionally feminine traits—clothing, natural beauty, helpfulness, musical and artistic talents. This grandmother, who as a child I loved dearly, told me that “children should be seen and not heard” and that if I cried I would lose all the blue color in my eyes and that I risked my face freezing in its contorted misery should the wind change during my upset. The woman in the story has borne such comparison and, relatedly, objectification, and feels unable to escape it, and yet she uses comparison to offset comparison’s damaging effects in her own life. I was thinking about generational pain and habits and how we might interrupt something that often seems as primordial as the big bang that first set matter into motion.
I was a theology major for a while, and when I returned to Australia during my college years, I found myself, at twenty, the only woman in a class of men much older than me who were studying to be priests and pastors. I did a lot of listening. Many of my classmates were really trying to figure god out, and I remember my professor cautioning in one instance, “The moment you think you have god figured out is the moment you’re farthest away from god.” God, in other words, is a mystery beyond human reckoning. While this approach is not wholly useful when trying to advance social change—we can’t just decide that social inequity is a mystery that we’ll never understand—it has schooled me as a writer in the benefits of keeping things open, of avoiding conclusion in favor of a reflective ongoingness. On the other hand, being unable to conclude might reflect an anxious relation to the world, a desire not to be wrong, not to overlook or miss anything, as the speaker in “A Woman of No Opinion” enacts. Is this a desirable position to occupy? Possibly, sometimes, in some cases.
RR: In “God of Moderation” you seem to be raging against the binary by choosing to dwell in, and privilege, middlings, medians—not the short or tall, the hot or cold, but the mid-size, tepid, average. And yet at the end of the text, God condemns “all else” to “Heaven or Hell,” the midpoints all erased. Do you think, as this narrative implies, that no matter how we reject the binary we are always and ever organized and reorganized by these balanced extremes, these easy dichotomies? How do you think we all end up coded in binary, in light of the fact that the book’s last line ends with yes’s and no’s, “trillions of 1s and 0s”?
PC: In “God of Moderation,” I was thinking about extremes in general as varieties of hell. Even heaven, then, in this model, would be a variety of hell, which, for me, might be a heaven where everyone is pushing yoga or meditation on me. “Get the Hell out of here,” I might say if I went to this Heaven. But it is also true that if you lop off both ends of a spectrum, the extremes, then you have a middle section that now has two new ends, two new, albeit for a time more moderate, ends that soon might/will be interpreted as the extremes of that more moderate condition. As far as the book’s ending goes—with those “trillions of 1s and 0s, chanting along their wires their obsession with us”—the vision is of the entire world, even the computational world, in love with humans and all our constant weighing of what we’ve lost and what we’ve gained, what we got this year and what we didn’t. It is binary—yes, no—but also endless and responsive to our human wishes and so always potentially productive of something new.
TD: More generally speaking, could you talk about your literary influences? I kept thinking about who I could compare your work to and could not quite put my finger on it.
PC: I’m drawn to the short form, across genres. I admire everything Lydia Davis writes and the work of many other contemporary practitioners of the short: Sarah Manguso, Jenny Offill, Maggie Nelson, Amy Fusselman. I learn from Franz Kafka’s very short stories, Gertrude Stein’s experiments in repetition, Russell Edson’s prose poems, Abigail Thomas’s memoir, Shirley Jackson’s horror. I remain influenced by the literary and cultural theorists I studied as an undergrad in the English Department at URI, and I continue to be energized by such theorizing in the scholarly titles I read as a freelance copy editor and proofreader (I also copy edit and proofread middle grade and YA fiction, which also now are influences). I’m sustained by the wild song-stories of Kate Bush, the associative leaps of Virginia Woolf, the fables of Italo Calvino, the conundrums and funny/not-funny despair of Samuel Beckett. There’s an overlap between influence and inspiration, and I find that a story starts when I observe something that won’t easily lie flat in my mind, something that buckles up and trips my thinking enough to get me going. The scholarly work I edit often proceeds by way of fine distinctions, and these distinctions will inspire a corollary in story. I also write in reaction to the daily news.
TD: A bit of a selfish question on my part, but I wanted to ask you about the publication process. Your writing is anything but easily categorizable. In your opinion, did it create obstacles for you or was it something that made your work more noticeable for editors and potential publishers?
PC: I’ll admit to a lot of angst in sending out the manuscript. I had a shorter version that I sent to poetry competitions, hoping it would read as prose poetry, and I did get a few finalist selections. Many of the fiction contests had page counts that were more than twice the length of Miracles, so that was also an obstacle. I sent out versions of the manuscript, which I continued to revise, pretty far and wide for about three years before it found a home at Pleiades Press. It was rejected many times over. By that point, I was looking for contests that welcomed more hybrid manuscripts. When I read about Pleiades’s Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, I felt that possibly I had a chance, and its guidelines prompted me to build a new manuscript that included all the “prose poetry” along with other longer pieces I’d been writing that definitely weren’t poems, including the title story “Miracles Come on Mondays.” I was very lucky to be read by Kazim Ali, who is committed to hybridity in his work as well as to the short form. Before the book was taken, I had accepted the very real possibility that it would never be published and decided to write toward my own idiosyncrasies, come what may. I was lucky that a book came.
TD: I’m glad it did! Finally, if you do not mind, can you tell us about the writing projects you are working on presently. How are they different from your writing in Miracles Come on Mondays?
PC: The exceptionality of this time has me thinking in all kinds of directions and so far has been productive for me as a writer. That said, it is productive only because I am used to writing in the cracks of the day, between work and parenting and all the other aspects of life. I start all of my writing in the Notes app on my iPhone and just write down anything storylike that starts in my mind. I have to catch it right when it starts, otherwise it evaporates like a dream does when you change position in bed. Once I have it down, I can visit with it and add and revise.
Since the pandemic began, I’ve been participating in several daily/weekly exchanges of new or revised work, which also keeps me writing. Most of the new pieces address the events of recent months—the pandemic, national narratives about and responses to the pandemic, the protests and calls for long overdue equity in America—and are similar in form and tone to those in Miracles. I can imagine them becoming another collection of short prose.
TD: Well, I hope they will. Rachel and I want to thank you for this stimulating discussion and for your generous and brilliant responses. I hope you will continue to write and create during these turbulent times. We hope to see more of your work!
Check out more news and work at Penelope Cray’s site: https://www.penelopecray.com/
Tatiana Duvanova is a writer and Fulbright alumna. She was born and raised in Voronezh, Russia. She holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of New Mexico and is currently working toward her PhD in English at the University of Rhode Island. Her writing can be found in Litro, Southword, Notre Dame Review, Invisible City, and Necessary Fiction. Her stories have placed, been highly commended or included in long- and short-lists in the Val Woods Fiction Prize, the Badal Short Fiction Prize, The Manchester Fiction Prize, the Sean O’Failain International Short Story Prize, and the Fish Publishing Competition.
Rachel Rothenberg is a third year PhD candidate in English at the University of Rhode Island. Working on a dissertation in creative nonfiction and poetry, she teaches literature and writing and acts as a contributing editor at Barrow Street Press. She holds a MA in Portuguese and Brazilian Literature from Brown University, and a BA from Tufts University where she was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize. A New Jersey native and former Lisbon expat, Rachel lives in Wakefield, RI with her family.