Community, Friendship and Belonging Anchor “Wonder State”: An Interview with Sara Flannery Murphy https://ift.tt/GH8n2PM
Sara Flannery Murphy’s third novel,The Wonder State, finds a group of six former high school friends back in their Arkansas hometown after receiving an urgent message: You promised, from Brandi, the one friend who stayed behind. In the Oath House senior year, they vowed to always be there for each other, and the magic Theodora Trader injected into the home she built decades before now binds them to that promise.
The story is told through two timelines: fifteen years prior, when the unlikely friends spent their senior year searching for magical houses built by an architect with ties to another realm, and present day, revisiting the love, loyalty and betrayal of the last year of their youth as they race to find Brandi before the police decide they’re to blame for her disappearance. Community, friendship and belonging are at the center of this Southern Gothic novel infused with magical realism and a quest for something more.
Sara Flannery Murphy was born in Arkansas, with her family dividing their time between Little Rock and the Ozarks. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and is the author of two previous novels: The Possessions (Harper, 2017) and Girl One (MCD/FSG, 2021). Her shorter work has appeared in The Guardian and LitHub. She loves weird mysteries, long walks, Kate Bush, ghost stories, Shirley Jackson, Sour Patch Kids, the smell of rain on a hot day, bad puns and reading in bed. She currently lives in Utah with her husband and their two sons.
We spoke via Zoom in late June. This interview has been edited for length.
This book was phenomenal. It was gripping and complex, with its dual timeline and richly developed characters. I found myself deeply invested in these characters because of the way they were deeply invested in each other. What were some of the challenges you faced in creating this?
This was my first time writing a dual timeline book. I’ve always heard that dual timelines are tricky. It’s intimidating, trying to maintain these two stories that overlap and making sure both are pulling their own weight and are interesting. In this case, I felt really lucky because it felt natural to have the story progress this way. How I conceived this story was thinking about how it felt for them as teenagers to be looking for these houses, to have magic under their world, to feel that they were on the brink of this big escape and then be separated from it. It gave it a really natural structure, one where they’re more hopeful and brash and optimistic the way teenagers are, and one where they’re looking back and they have to contend with all this guilt that didn’t exist in the teenage timeline until the very end. It came down to whose story it is to tell. I was fortunate that it ended up working out for this book.
At the heart of this seems to exist a conflict over whether or not one can ever really go home again. It’s one of the questions for me that remained unanswered, in a way that allows readers to decide for themselves. Was this intentional?
Hearing you talk about it is really cool because it’s hard to see it in your own work. I agree that I was trying to examine, especially through Jay, this assumption that where you grow up might be this place that you automatically leave behind. I felt like when Jay came back, she got in touch with these sides of herself that she completely took for granted.
When she’s a teenager, she wants to leave Eternal Springs, and she also wants to leave [Earth] and find this portal and go into an entirely different world. At first I did have a little bit of difficulty merging and exploring those ideas, and then I kind of started to think that these two things are more similar than I realized. I didn’t want there to be a sense of Jay coming back and resetting her life, because she really couldn’t come back to that teenage self. I felt like Jay coming back, she got in touch with these sides of herself that she completely took for granted. It wasn’t until she went out into the world and thought oh, there were bonds and ties there that I completely didn’t appreciate at the time. So returning to this spot kind of got her back in touch with that.
The role of magic in this novel was incredibly well done, with each of the houses and their creator, Theodora, a character in and of themselves. It felt very natural, like of course there would be a Truth House and an Oath House and a Forever House. What role has magic played in your life, for it to flow through these pages so effortlessly?
I feel like I’ve always been into those types of things. When I was a kid I read so much fantasy. I was a big Narnia nerd. I loved any book where kids were separated from this really fantastical realm by one entryway – just this idea that around any corner or doorway you might suddenly be part of this world so entirely different from your own.
I was raised in the Catholic church, and my parents were involved in the charismatic movement, and it was very focused on a more mystical side of religion. I grew up in a world where I believed in angels and demons and these presences felt like a very strong part of my existence, so my brain was just a little more naturally tuned to believing in things that I couldn’t see or touch. I did end up leaving Catholicism when I was older, but I almost feel like leaving it behind left this space where I still wanted that sense of something mysterious, something bigger or stranger out there – not that the visible world isn’t complex and fascinating, but my imagination turns toward things that are more speculative or fantastic. I’ve tried to write a few novels that don’t have this supernatural element, but my brain wants to put something in there – at least one ghost, at least one unexplained moment. I instinctively go there.
I loved the complexity the Garnet twins bring, a sort of foil for a group of native Arkansan kids. Just by being “outsiders” they bring this consciousness to the Southern existence, like Adam and Eve realizing they’re naked. And yet the twins are drawn to Eternal Springs because there’s something so special about a place that’s looked down upon. They want to earn this native connection with this place, while Jay, for instance, begins to separate herself from it.
I remember as a teenager having all these little moments to step back and feel, “Oh, this is the way the rest of the country views the South.” I would grow up hearing jokes or dismissive comments, and I think I started distancing myself from that out of self-consciousness, because you want to get ahead of the joke and not let someone else have that power over you. There’s this impulse to distance yourself by showing that you’re worldly enough and sophisticated enough to know that the place you come from is embarrassing in certain ways, which I tried to explore through Jay.
I think Brandi likes the twins as people and has a sense of admiring them, but for her, the status anxiety that Jay feels around [the twins] doesn’t kick in. And I wish I had been more like Brandi. When I was a little bit older, I developed this sense of trying to show that I was from Arkansas, but I was a little bit different, like I was not of the stereotypical people from the South. I’m more comfortable and confident now coming from Arkansas, but writing the book I did come into some anxiety, I did feel nervous. I wasn’t quite sure if readers would be as open to a book set in Arkansas. Those anxieties came up especially in writing Jay because she struggles with this, too.
At one point, Jay seeks out her art teacher for help with college applications, and they discuss art as a career, and Ms. Hart essentially says there is “wonderful artistic talent here, but it’s a lonely thing, to feel like the people around you can’t … afford to appreciate it.” This same idea is woven into the existence of the AIR House, a home for artists outside of Arkansas to come live for a year and create, but it’s out of touch for locals. What are some of the things you’ve witnessed as an Arkansan with artistic aspirations?
It’s a really complex issue that maybe I only touched on briefly, but I have seen happen. There was this grant designed to bring artists into Arkansas, and I remember some of the Arkansans that I knew being like, “We are living in Arkansas, and we have lived here our whole lives. We’re creating art, we’re struggling financially. Why do you want to bring new people in?” There was this idea of wooing them, as if people really needed to be rewarded for even considering coming to Arkansas.
There are people already living there and creating amazing things, but maybe they aren’t as able to succeed with their art, so why wouldn’t this money go to someone who is already there and could use a little bit of a boost, at least in tandem? I remember the frustration I saw from some of the artists living there.
It feels like a really big question about how artists in Arkansas are making a living, in a place where it feels like if you’re going to try and succeed in the arts and live in the South you’re bringing it on yourself by choosing a career that’s unrealistic, and if it doesn’t work out it’s your own fault. You’re expected to leave, or you are expected to have a tricky time. I have a lot of admiration for the people who stayed there and, against odds, are creating and bringing an art scene and artistic spirit to Arkansas, because financially it isn’t easy, but it’s really beautiful to see how many people have managed to do it. I wish there was more support for the people who have been living there.
Ms. Garnet, the twins’ mom and a painter living in the artist-in-residence house, tells Jay, “I wouldn’t call [art] a career. That’s exactly the wrong word. A life immersed in the arts is a necessity, it’s almost a curse. You’re an artist because life gives you no other choice.” How much does this statement resonate with you as an artist?
My attitude for why I chose to be a writer is a harder question for me. In a self-deprecating way, I feel like it’s one of the only things I’m really good at, like you only become a writer because you’re generally unemployable in other ways. But it was a really big dream I had since I was a kid. I wanted to channel that a little bit in Jay. I think [being a writer or artist] can sometimes feel emotionally draining. There are times I question it or worry that it’s not going to continue on for me, but at its best it brings me so much joy that I keep being drawn back to it. I think every artist feels like that, because this career path is so fraught and unpredictable. Is it really a curse? I grapple with that a lot. I do think for me it is a choice, maybe not the most practical choice, but it is something I do have to build my life around and make that commitment to try and make this work.
FICTION The Wonder State By Sara Flannery Murphy
MCD
Published on July 18, 2023
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