Interview with Alia Volz

Alia Volz’s story, “Vacajun” appeared in Dark Sky’s Issue 11. Here Alia talks about stereotypes, insomnia, and her earliest memories of magical desserts.

Seth Amos: Your website says that you started writing during a long trek across the Iberian Peninsula, what was it about the journey that inspired you?

Alia Volz: The Camino de Santiago is a Catholic pilgrimage — which is odd because I’m not religious, and wasn’t raised Catholic. I stumbled onto it, so to speak. There’s a great deal of old power on that trail. It transforms everyone who sticks with it, though not necessarily in the ways you might imagine. That was a confusing process, and since I walked most of the 500-ish miles alone, I had to keep a journal, which I’d never done before. Writing made everything feel more vivid, which I loved. The smallest became significant. Plus, I’d always been a voracious reader, and if you consume enough words, they eventually start dribbling back out. So when I returned to the states a year later, I went straight into a Creative Writing program. I’ve been wrestling this beast ever since.

SA: Who are your biggest literary influences?

AV: I’m pretty disloyal. Maybe I will always be a Faulkner girl. Cormac McCarthy makes we want to smash my fingers with a sledgehammer, he’s so goddamn good. People like Carver and Goodis taught me dialogue, and Flannery taught me to be vicious. Then there’s Woolf, Bolaño, Díaz, Dickey, Ellison, Thompson (Hunter and Jim), Oakley Hall, yadda, yadda, yadda…

Honestly, my biggest influence is the book I have my nose in today. I’m a very receptive reader. So if I’m working with a particular genre, style or subject, I’ll look to a (local, independent) bookstore to ramp up my chops. Some writers worry about taint their output, but I’m thrilled to find shades of what I’m reading in my own work. It still comes out sounding like me. It’s hilarious: you can’t escape your own voice.

SA: What/who are your biggest non-literary influences?

AV: International travel, definitely. It’s a big, gorgeous world out there. Also my parents, who are both painters, and showed me artistic diligence. And storytellers of all stripes. Everybody has a good yarn or two. It pays to shut up and listen.

SA: Tell me about your short story, “Vacajun.”

AV: This story follows an urban couple on a weekend trip to a small bayou town in Louisiana. They fancy themselves adventurers, hungry for an authentic Cajun experience. But the town does not exist to please tourists. They can’t consume the culture, as they’d planned, and their bumbling attracts negative attention. Ultimately, they are forced into a more authentic experience of themselves, which is also beautiful.

The underlying interest is in stereotypes. This couple can’t have a genuine experience, because they are prisoners of their own expectations. The people they meet are also stereotyping, so everyone is sizing everyone else up ineffectively. Stereotyping is an unconscious function of the mind, to help process and categorize unexpected information. It limits us deeply, yet no one is free from it. Of course, I was just writing a story, but that’s how I look at it after the fact.

SA: The present-tense voice in “Vacajun” is very fitting for the story and the reader can’t help but think that these events are true, or based on personal experience. How close to personal experience are they?

AV: The events are almost entirely true. The conversations are as I remember them. The voice, however, is fictional. That is not me telling the story. It’s a trick I use, because I find it extremely distracting to depict myself as a character. Either I’m glorifying my virtues or mocking my flaws. It feels dishonest. Fictionalizing the narrator frees me up to tell a true story. It’s just a trick I play on my own brain.

SA: Was there a lot of revision for this story? It’s fluidity of tone hints that it was written all at once.

AV: You’re right, this was a 3:00AM story. I’m a terrible insomniac. I was lying in bed and hating my sleepless brain, when this rhythmic, insistent voice started talking about the bayou. I got up, pounded out the whole thing, and finally got to sleep. I catch my best flows when I’m too tired or stressed to think clearly. This came out clean, so I didn’t mess with it much.

SA: Do you have a set writing routing or do you sit down to write only when inspired?

AV: I don’t have a fixed schedule, but I work with an intense, high-output writing group. We all submit work every other week, so that keeps me on track. Threat of public embarrassment is great motivation.

SA: Do you write on a computer or in longhand?

AV: Usually on a computer, though I do carry a notebook. As a Spanish Interpreter, I spend a lot of time in waiting rooms, so I use that time to draft scenes or develop characters.

SA: Your non-fiction work, “Sticky Fingers Brownies,” tells the story of your parents and their “magic” brownie company. What made you want to tell this story?

AV: My mom is a stellar storyteller, as are many of her stoner friends. I grew up listening to these outrageous tales, and thought they were worth recording. The 1970s in SF was a time of totally unfettered exploration, which all came crashing down with the Jonestown Massacre, the assassinations of Milk and Moscone, and the horrors of AIDS. Fearless times are rare and precious, and deserve respect. Talking with the survivors of this era brought them alive in a really exciting way. I wanted to record that thrill.

SA: What is your earliest memory of them selling these tasty wonders?

AV: Oh boy, that was my whole infancy. The brownie kitchen was in our house, so my earliest memories are rich with the aroma of pot cooking, the sensation of dried marijuana itching under my clothes, the warm gooey batter. I remember being out in the stroller, while my mom did her sales in the Castro, and how the giddy gay guys would fawn over me. Of course, there were many dark aspects, but my associations are oddly comforting.

SA: What is next for Alia Volz?

AV: There’s so much on tap!

I’m deep into the writing of my first novel, Little Jon. It’s a modern cowboy noir, about a group of wranglers hanging onto a ramshackle horse rental stable on a cliff near San Francisco. My protagonist is a roughhewn teenage cowboy, sorely misplaced in gangland, USA. It’s funny and mean, violent and sexy — and I’m having a blast with the writing.

I’m also busy producing Literary Death Match, a well-loved international reading series that places fine readings in the context of a hilarious game show — a raucous mating of Deaf Poetry Jam, American Idol and Double Dare. This week, I’m hosting shows in Portland and Vancouver.

Then October is all about Litquake, San Francisco’s mastodon literary festival. I’m hosting or performing in three great Litquake events this year, so I’m up to my eyeballs. It’s a busy time for little old me.

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Alia Volz is the West Coast producer of Literary Death Match. Her fiction, fact, and translations appear in ZYZZYVA, Instant City, Nerve, and elsewhere. The spawn of dope-crazed San Francisco hippies, she’s crossed Spain on foot, heard Papa Fidel speak in the rain, made love under the Moai — and keeps rolling home to good old SF.