Your story “The Promise” follows a couple of days in the life of an eight-year-old girl named Birdie, who is growing up in a Mennonite community, in the nineteen-eighties. Her parents are away, and she is staying with her aunts and her grandmother, about to start second grade. What inspired the story, and what makes these two days in Birdie’s life so important?

In “The Promise,” Birdie’s aunt Miriam tells her a story about the Devil and a typewriter. My aunt Clara also told me a story about a devil and a typewriter when I was little, but all I retained were those two details. I couldn’t remember what happened in the story, so I decided to write my own version. I think it was so peculiar, and also incredibly fun, that Clara told me this story. Did she believe it had actually happened? I’ll never know.

When Birdie stays at her aunts’ house, she learns about complex concepts and has new feelings that she’ll spend decades sorting out: the feeling that her parents betrayed her by leaving her behind and missing her first day of school, the conflicting terror and appeal of the Devil on his typewriter, the confusion between love and hate. Perhaps these two days represent the end of an era for her.

In the course of her stay, Birdie explores the rooms of her aunts and grandmother’s house, and has encounters with her relatives. Both of her aunts seem kind but also seem to want to scare her, one by insisting that she look at the scar from her grandmother’s mastectomy, the other by telling her a story about the Devil. Why do they do these things?

I’m interested in the ways that Mennonites repress or beautify or overlook horror. When I was a child, my uncle’s veal barn was a locus of true horror for me—These babies are going to be slaughtered!—but I could never say something like that. It would have been viewed as sensitive, dramatic, maybe funny. Instead, I stopped eating meat. I think Birdie’s aunts are trying, in the best ways they know how, to cope with complicated emotions that are unspeakable—Rebecca, with her grief, as she pulls at her mother’s dress to show the scar, and Miriam, with her ambivalence toward marriage and her tale about the Devil.

The story captures the very tactile, sensory details of Birdie’s physical world, and her thoughts and perceptions. How did you inhabit that child’s-eye view?

This story is first and foremost written out of love—love for this place and these people and this particular cultural moment, all of which are now long gone. When I was a little girl, I was able to love them in an uncomplicated way, and I wanted to return to that pure love. It was a relief.

I had also recently given my students an assignment to write a scene inspired by Claude Debussy’s “Rêverie,” so I decided to do the exercise myself. I picked this piece of music because for me it elicits such a mix of emotions and tones—dreamy, nostalgic, sad, beautiful. I began writing the story while listening to this song on repeat, and I think it helped me to feel my way back to that little girl.

Birdie meditates on the idea of roots, how they hold her family’s house and her relatives themselves to the land where they live, and where they are “happy, and happy, and happy.” But she herself doesn’t want to be rooted. What has she already learned at age eight that makes her feel this way?

I spent a lot of my childhood watching women work in the kitchen, be it my aunts making casseroles, or my extended family cleaning up in the church kitchen after a Thanksgiving feast, or my own mom, after a full day of work, coming home to cook dinner. I did not see a single man in a kitchen, ever, until I was much older. Believe it or not, kitchen work didn’t interest me as a small child, and it doesn’t interest Birdie, either. She is dreaming of going to the moon, and of being a ballerina, center stage, with everyone watching her. Both of these dreams are somewhat sinful: Why would you want to go so far from home? Why would you want all the attention for yourself? So, at eight, she already understands that her desires are bad, maybe even evil. She can’t stay.

Birdie takes to heart (and into her imagination) her aunt’s story of the Devil with a typewriter, writing people’s life stories in exchange for their souls. Is Miriam trying to give Birdie a message? In the community where you grew up, was being a writer considered a sin? And, if so, how did you navigate that choice?

I don’t know that Miriam is all that aware of why she’s telling Birdie this story. I think the story titillates her more than anything. And, no, being a writer isn’t a sin, but, at least in my extended family, stories are sacred, and who gets to tell them is of great importance. Typically, this has fallen to the men, so I think it’s uncomfortable for some to have a woman who is now telling stories publicly and, even worse, not telling the right stories. For instance, some members of my extended family dislike my novel “Nightbitch,” and I heard that a cousin called it “evil.”

In your mind, does Birdie leave the community? It seems that she will, but then her wedding reception, decades later, is held in a barn, which perhaps implies not.

I think the more pressing questions for me are: What does it mean for Birdie, at the end of the story, to forget? And is it essential, at least to some degree, for a woman to forget herself in order to belong, whether to the Mennonites or to a marriage?

At the end of the story, Birdie, feverish and somewhat delirious, holds out a butcher knife and tells her aunt, “I am the bride, and this is my promise.” Her promise expresses, in some way, her kinship with her unmarried aunt, who didn’t trade her own freedom for a set of good knives. But there is more to it than that, right?

I don’t know exactly what the promise is, but it has something to do with the submerged violence of patriarchy, and also what it takes for a woman to sever herself from this tradition. I think it takes a knife—whether literal or metaphorical—to do that, and I think it hurts, and can be violent, if not physically, at least emotionally. I like that we don’t fully understand what the promise is, and that it can keep refracting in different ways, like light bouncing off a blade. I think the promise might also be, in part, a threat.

“Nightbitch,” which came out in 2021, tells the story of a new mother who transforms into a dog at night. It is, obviously, not a directly realist work in the way that “The Promise” seems to be. Was it difficult to approach storytelling in such a different way? I believe you’re working on a new novel; does it fall into one of these two styles?

What felt most different for me when writing “The Promise” was the engine that was fuelling the narrative. For “Nightbitch,” that engine was powered by a pronounced voice and a boundless rage, so the first third of the book is written in these gangly, roving sentences that are in incredibly close third person. “The Promise” is driven by observation and horror, so the sentences came out much more orderly and restrained, with a greater distance from the main character, and mere suggestions of some unarticulated violence lurking beneath the surface. (In “Nightbitch,” there is nothing lurking beneath the surface. It is all jettisoned from the body and onto the page as soon as it is thought.) The new novel is a mess! I think it’s working with repression and grief as narrative forces, and I’m still figuring out what that looks and sounds like. ♦