“Stagnant and Delirious”: A Conversation with Julia Elliott https://ift.tt/Q7Yxo8P
Julia Elliott’s latest story collection, the fantastic and fantastical Hellions, is an absolute summer delight, containing humid swamps, muddy magic, and dreamed escapes. When reading for titles for “The Southern Summer Book Club,” I knew within the first two stories that this one had to be a part of the fun.
In these splendidly atmospheric pages, readers get to know nuns in a medieval convent, a young girl and her cousin navigating complicated summer days of pet alligators, a Swamp Ape, and rowdy kids, a transformative trampoline performer, a family preparing to view The Exorcist, monsters aplenty, and much, much more.
Julia Elliott is the author of the forthcoming story collection Hellions as well The Wilds: Stories, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch (all from Tin House). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, and the New York Times. She has won a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina and lives in Columbia with her husband, daughter, and five hens.
It’s so cool to be able to talk with you, Julia. Thanks for taking the time. I’ve already used the word “atmospheric” in the opening to describe Hellions. I’m sure I won’t be alone by using this term in regard to this collection. I kept noticing how several of the stories — I’m thinking of “Hellion”, “The Maiden”, and “Arcadia Lakes” specifically – are set in the summer and how the season gives so much power to your stories. Why summer?
Thank you so much for choosing Hellions for the “Southern Summer Book Club” and for chatting with me about my new story collection. In past interviews, when answering questions about how my work fits into the Southern Gothic tradition, I usually discuss ecological aspects of this genre orientation, particularly what I call “psychedelic summers” — lush, loud, endless summers that begin in tender, green floral mode and eventually lapse into a fever dream of carnivorous vines, sweltering heat, swarms of mosquitoes, and a variety of shrieking insects — a climate conducive to dizzy yarns and what Brian Evenson calls “swampy magic realism” in a blurb he kindly wrote for Hellions.
As a child growing up in the South Carolina Lowcountry, the beginning of summer was full of promise — the world green and fragrant, ripe for enchantment and adventure, lightning bugs floating in the air on balmy nights. In both the Lowcountry and the Midlands (where I currently live), the magic and feeling of freedom usually run until midsummer (late June). But then, around the fourth of July, when the dog days kick in, summer lapses into a stagnant and delirious mode, eventually collapsing into disenchantment that makes me pine for autumn but also dread the return to school. Because I’m a college professor who writes during the summer instead of teaching, I never lost the archetype of this season as a spell of time that exists outside the realm of responsibility.
I want to stay with summer for just a moment. Two of my favorite stories here, “Hellion” and “The Maiden,” both end acknowledging that summer will be gone at some point not too far ahead in the distance. With this awareness, it seems like the magic in the protagonists’ lives might be fading. The fun is maybe on its way out. Maybe even childhood itself is saying goodbye in a way. Am I onto something here? Is summer’s end symbolizing something greater?
You are onto something! Interestingly, the plot arcs of both of these stories follow the stages of summer I describe above, beginning with fresh mysteries and/or adventures and concluding with the dread of returning to school and all of its penal, bureaucratic entrapments. While Butter is transitioning from childhood into adolescence, the kids in “The Maiden” are poised to move from middle school to high school, which is further along in the adult disillusionment process. But the wonderful thing about summer is that it returns year after year (until one dies). The Swamp Ape still dwells in the woods near Butter’s house. Though a supernatural being has flown off into with wild blue yonder, leaving the narrators of “The Maiden” bereft, at least the four kids who witnessed Cujo’s strangest transformation have some concept of the mystical that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Though I’m old enough to be thoroughly jaded, I still get excited each year when I submit my last batch of grades and walk out onto the porch to smell the honeysuckle and admire hopeful perennials not yet scorched by weeks of drought.
Many of the stories in this collection are set in the South — and specifically South Carolina. But not all of them. For example, “Bride,” which was included in the 2015 volume of The Best American Short Stories, takes place in a medieval convent. No matter the location itself, the place always feels so real and so true. Do you think of your settings as being like a type of character in your stories?
I don’t think of settings as characters exactly, but as atmospheres through which characters navigate the liminal spaces between the mundane and the magical — spaces that highlight the tension between earthbound states and the yearning for otherworldly transformation or understanding. Because I build settings sentence by sentence to immerse readers on a sensory level, describing a suburban backyard is just as challenging as evoking the courtyard of a medieval convent.
Will you talk about how you arrived at the collection’s title?
Although I’ve been publishing short fiction in journals since the release of my 2014 collection, The Wilds, Hellions did not cohere until 2023 when I realized that the title story, “Hellion,” embodied the perfect central concept for a collection about unruly girls and women who lurk along the border between the real and surreal. Growing up in rural South Carolina, I often heard the term applied to misbehaving children, mischievous imps with the Devil in them, a type evoked most directly by Butter in the title story. While children in Hellions explore the uncanniness of girlhood and the temptation to stray beyond the control of adults, adult female characters embody the archetype of the witch, border-rovers who chase obsessions that take them into hinterlands or states of consciousness above and beyond polite society.
Monsters are very much here in the pages of Hellions. Will you talk about your interest in them?
JE: I’ve been obsessed with monsters since I saw The Exorcist on Primetime television at age twelve, an experience that scared the hell out of me but also inspired a strange fascination with the concept of possession — particularly the idea that an adolescent girl could be enhanced by the presence of an immortal entity, becoming so formidable that two priests have to be called in to subdue her vomiting, levitating, obscenity-spouting body. In “All the Other Demons,” the most overtly autobiographical story in Hellions, I explore my family’s obsession with this movie. Since 2018, I have curated a community feminist horror film series in conjunction with a service-learning horror film class that I teach at the University of South Carolina. My course — Monstrous Mothers, Diabolical Daughters, and Femme Fatales: Gender and Monstrosity in Horror — examines classic horror monsters conjured by veteran male directors, but also a rich array of recent films directed by women who explore the monstrous feminine in exciting new ways. In this class, we examine the deeper psychological aspects of female monsters and also the “historically specific” meanings of monstrosity. As Jack Halberstam argues in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, “monsters are meaning machines” that reveal particular desires, fears, and anxieties unique to their respective historical eras. In my own fiction, monsters enable me to evoke ineffable aspects of human experience — whether the monstrosity erupts from within or threatens the norm with its mysteriousness otherness.
Before we end our conversation, I have to ask about the “Notes” in Hellions, which give some additional background information to the stories. For example, you have details about where phrases you mention came from, what inspired descriptions of objects, and, my favorite, details of ads that ran during the 1981 CBS Primetime version of The Exorcist.Does your research lead to your story ideas? Do you research after you already have your ideas?
Sometimes research leads to story ideas, while other times I incorporate necessary research as I compose a story. For example, the first story in Hellions, “Bride,” was inspired by grad-school-era studies in medieval and Renaissance English lit, which included texts by female mystics like Margery Kempe. Even after reading plenty of musty medieval tomes and squinting at digital facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts, I conducted additional research on European medieval convents and scriptoria before beginning the story. “Moon Witch, Moon Witch,” the eighth story in Hellions, depicts a woman who uses a “time-travel dating” apparatus to explore romance during the stone age. While I began that story without an intensive study of prehistoric life, I frequently Googled to make sure I was somewhat accurate with invented details like clothing, hunting tools, and herbal remedies.
Thanks again for your time, Julia. And congrats on Hellions! It is a fantastic collection.
Thanks for asking such insightful questions!
FICTION Hellions
By Julia Elliott
Tin House Books
Published April 15, 2025
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