Interview
What do you write?
Twenty nine years ago when I graduated with a B.A. in English Lit, I thought my ability to write academic papers qualified me to write fiction, though I had zero creative writing experience. I smugly typed out twenty-five pages that I believed was the beginning of a novel, and sent it off to my alma mater’s MFA program. I wasn’t accepted. But I kept writing and learning. I wrote short stories for years, and several essays and articles. Only in the last ten years or so, did I realize that most of what I wrote was based on real life stories, and then I turned to memoir. But I still have an idea for a novel I’m kicking around.
Is there an author or artist who has most profoundly influenced your work?
John Steinbeck and Marge Piercy were my biggest influences as a young writer. Steinbeck’s East of Eden is the one book I’d choose to have with me in the age old question about being stranded on a desert island. Anything by Steinbeck, really. More recently, I’ve fallen in love with Mary Karr. I can read her books over and over and every single word is perfect. Other favorite influences are Barbara Kingsolver, Terry Tempest Williams, and E.B. White.
Why did you choose Stonecoast?
When I began researching programs, I knew Stonecoast residencies were held only twenty minutes away from my front door, but I looked at programs as far away as California. Determined to make a decision not based on proximity, I sought a program with a sense of community in addition to high standards of writing instruction. In the end, regardless of location, everything pointed me back to Stonecoast. Now if I were to climb a tall enough tree, I could almost see the Harraseeket from my house…
What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?
As a first semester student, I’ve only attended one residency so far, and I was in a sort of blissful and overwhelmed fog through much of it. There are so many answers to this question, but the one that stands out was the Open Mic night where first semester student Amy Dempsey performed her list essay on dating in the twenty-first century. It was hilarious and so accurate. It brought the house down.
What do you hope to accomplish in the future?
Well there’s that novel swimming around in my head. But also I’d like to finish the memoir I’ve been working on for years now. And I’d like to get better at essays and figure out poetry. I love poetry, but I feel totally ignorant about it, like being able to write it requires entrance into an exclusive club and nobody will show me the secret handshake.
If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?
Mary Karr’s Lit or Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Tie for first.
Featured Work
The Screaming Thing
The following is an excerpt from Paulla’s upcoming memoir exclusively for Stonecoast Review.
I fidgeted on loud, crinkly tissue paper wrapped slick over an exam table and I smelled something clean and sharp. Soap maybe. Or alcohol from the clear, round canister where Dr. Shea kept tools that looked like silverware. In the chair opposite, Mom crossed her slim, stockinged legs. Her shiny black sandal jiggled to a tune playing in her head that only she could hear.
“Will I have to get a shot?” Shivering in my panties and undershirt, I cocked an ear for the thump of Dorothy’s shoes outside the door. Her grandmotherly smile and white nurse cap, didn’t fool me. Too often she came in with a hand behind her back until she, Dr. Shea, and Mom could hog-tie me face down on that table, yank down my panties, and stab my skinny butt with a long, sharp needle.
“I don’t know.” Mom didn’t look at me. Curling back her lips so as not to mess up her lipstick, she licked the tip of her finger and flipped the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal she’d brought in from the waiting room. “But either way,” she said, “Dorothy will give you a sucker when we leave.”
That was the payback. No matter what they did to me in that exam room, when Mom ushered me out the door, dressed and sniffling, Dorothy sang out that it was time to open the “treasure chest.” The prize was always a Dum-Dums sucker, usually pineapple or some other gross flavor. Never cherry or grape. Much like when I craned out of my boredom on the hot leather backseat to see the lady in the drive-in window at the bank; if we made eye contact, she sent me a sucker in the cylindrical box with Mom’s cash. Also pineapple.
The injections were heavy doses of penicillin for the ear and throat infections I was prone to. But rather than shoot me up with more antibiotics, Dr. Shea arranged to take out my tonsils when Kindergarten let out for the summer.
“But I don’t see them,” I told Mom the next morning. Mouth stretched open, elbows propping me up on her bathroom counter, I strained to peer down my throat in the mirror over the sink.
“They’re hard to see, but they’re in there.” Mom sat nearly naked on a cushioned swivel chair at what she had dubbed her dressing table. There, Mom had set up a table with a gold-framed mirror on the wall behind it. On the table was a smaller, magnified mirror, and lots of jars, tubes, pots, compacts, and atomizers with which she transformed herself each day. She Scotch taped handwritten notes to herself on the wall mirror with messages like, “Hello Fatso,” or “Stop Stuffing Your Face.” Mom was tall and slim and regarded by others as a beauty, so I never understood the notes.
I poked my head around the corner from the bathroom and scratched a smudge of minty toothpaste that had smeared on my arm from the edge of the sink. “Will it hurt?”
“No, you’ll be asleep.”
“But what if I wake up?”
“They’ll give you medicine to make sure you stay asleep until they’re finished.” Mom’s words garbled from the pinched frown she wore whenever she combed mascara onto her eyelashes. I watched, mesmerized. Then, she stood up wearing only a pair of panties, breasts jutting out over my head like two bulbous eyes as she walked into the closet to get dressed.
“And I won’t have to get any more shots?” I sat on the chair that was still warm from Mom’s bottom and peered at my own magnified face.
“I don’t think so.”
When I woke from surgery, I saw glittery orange snakes slithering over the walls of my hospital room. When I cried out, Mom and Dad appeared, unfazed by the snakes.
“There’s nothing there,” Mom said, holding my hand and brushing the hair off my forehead with her fingers. But I could see them behind her, wriggling across the walls as thick as maggots I’d once inspected on a cat that had been run over. When I closed my eyes, I still saw them. A nurse came in and offered me red jello, but my throat hurt too much to think about swallowing.
“I thought it was supposed to be ice cream,” I whispered. Keith Little from school said when he got his tonsils out, they gave him all the ice cream he could eat.
“Do you want some ice cream?” asked the nurse.
I shook my head. I just wanted the snakes to go away.
The following week I recuperated on our family room sofa where Mom covered me up with the black and red afghan an aunt had crocheted for us. Mom hovered, offering me a continual smorgasbord of soup, jello, ice cream, and other soft foods I refused to let past my lips. Just swallowing my own dry spit felt as though I was throwing back a whole handful of thumbtacks like the one that once buried into my bare heel from the carpet near Dad’s desk.
When I went back to sleeping in my pink painted bedroom, I peeked over the quilt at the dark brown closet doors. Sometimes Mom forgot to slide them shut after she kissed me good night. Usually I just closed my eyes and pulled the sheet up over my nose, breathing in the flowery smell of fabric softener. But if I summoned up the courage to fix my eyes on the closet, it stretched away from me, my whole room growing longer and the ceiling higher, until I could see the closet far off at the other end of the house. It felt like something or someone was in the room with me, making me smaller as the room grew. I opened my mouth to call out for Mom but my voice wouldn’t make any sound above a whisper. Sometimes I glimpsed the same orange snakes from the hospital out of the corner of an eye, but when I turned my head, they were gone. I told Mom about the snakes and my room stretching all out of whack, but she said it was only a bad dream. When I assured her I was awake, she said I couldn’t have been because the things I saw weren’t real. It only felt like they were real.
One night I woke up in my thin pajamas and barefoot on our cold, covered front porch. The yellow porch light was on so I could see the front door I was leaning against, as well as the white wrought iron bench and chairs off to one side. But the inky night with the north end of Colorado Springs and the fields and the mountains in the distance hovered just beyond the edge of the porch. I could hardly breathe. The concrete step felt like ice. I banged on the locked door, gasping and whimpering, looking back over my shoulder into the dark unknown. There were no streetlights on our quiet street, but a few porch lamps glowed meekly in the distance. Something rustled in the bushes at the edge of the pool of yellow light. A breeze maybe. Or the neighbors’ cat. Dad had said there were coyotes around. Mom had warned me about kidnappers that lurked in shadows, waiting to snatch little girls away from their families. Pushing the doorbell over and over, I could hear it ring somewhere in the house, but my pleas were met with eerie silence. Eventually Mom opened the door and the memory ends. I figured it was a nightmare like the snakes and the room stretching. Years later, I asked Mom about it.
“Yes, I put you out there,” she said.
“What? Why?”
“You were doing that screaming thing again.”
“Screaming thing?”
“You’d gotten in the habit of screaming out in the middle of the night. It always woke us up and I was tired of it.”
“Wait,” I said, “Was I awake when I screamed, or did I do it in my sleep?”
“I’m pretty sure you were always asleep.”
“Jesus, Mom, do you know how scary it was to wake up on the cold porch with the door locked? I was just a little kid.”
“I imagine it was. But we needed to do something drastic to break you of the habit and you were only out there for a minute or two. I had tried everything else, but putting you out there that night finally seemed to do the trick.”
What else, I wondered, had she tried?
Maybe the screaming was some kind of after-effect from the anesthesia I’d been given in the hospital during my tonsillectomy. Like the snakes and the room stretching. I’ve since wondered where my screams went off to after that. If something in my brain roused up nightly screams from my unconscious, did the stint on the cold porch really do the trick? Or did it stuff down the screams, only to have them return years later as ulcers, headaches, or something else?
For a long time I saw snakes slithering on the nighttime walls of that pink bedroom, either in sleep or awake, I was never sure which. And regularly the room stretched out into the distance with the closet growing smaller and farther away. Tiptoeing out of my room breathless, I crept down the hall to silently climb in bed next to Mom in the wee hours. Too tired to protest, she scooted over and made room for me while Dad snored on the other side of her.
Paulla grew up out west and was dragged to the East Coast by her husband’s job. Twenty years later, she loves Maine and thinks of it as home. She is the mother of three grown children, two of whom moved to Arizona, while one is still in Maine. Her background includes bouts as an editor, a substitute teacher, a nonprofit fundraiser, and a homeschool mom. Paulla’s writing has appeared in the now defunct Writer’s Journal, The Classmate Magazine, and Antiques and Collectibles, as well as the very much alive Providence Journal. Now she is working on a memoir. When she’s not writing, Paulla can be found hiking with her German shepherd, Dinah, on the trails that meander through the Maine woods. Paulla is a first semester student at Stonecoast and a reader for the Stonecoast Review.