You Know What to Leave Out: Quan Barry on Genre, Witches, and the Poetics of Fiction

Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore, Amy Quan Barry is the author of the poetry collections Asylum, Controvertibles, and Water Puppets, and the novels We Ride Upon Sticks and She Weeps Each Time You’re Born. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and other literary publications. She is the recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (for Asylum) and has received fellowships from Stanford University, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

On Thursday, November 19, 2020, Amy Quan Barry joined The Interlochen Review editors Lane Devers and Bianca Layog, along with Interlochen Creative Writing major Ivan Pelley, for a virtual conversation about her recent novel We Ride Upon Sticks. 

Lane Devers: In your new book, we're examining this group or chorus of a team. It was a really interesting choice to me to consider this perspective, this collective “we.” I was curious if there were previous drafts where this took on a more traditional perspective. Can you speak a little to the process that ultimately decided on this? 

Quan Barry: I always knew from the get-go that I wanted the book to be first-person plural. So I never tried writing it from a more traditional number of people. I'd have to go back and actually look at my notes. I only ever usually have one version of things, because I just write over it, which I suppose could be bad, but it's a system that works for me. I don't remember if I was trying to figure out if it was going to be present tense or past tense, because that's also something that's really super important to me. But I think I figured out pretty early that it was going to be past tense. 

So, like I said, it always was going to be first-person plural. The question of who was going to be telling that story, was it going to be the freshmen girls, or was it going to be the entire school watching this field hockey team, deciding to tell their story? I figured out in about twenty pages of writing that, no, it's actually going to be the team. I am a poet, and the question I get most often from people is “who is the narrator of the book,” right? People always want to know, because it's never explicitly stated who the "we" is. It is open to interpretation. 

As a poet, I always say that Hemingway, after he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, supposedly said, "if I wrote it, it will mean many things to many people." He never wanted to be pinned down. He never wanted to say explicitly whether or not it was a Christian allegory. Obviously, you can interpret it through that lens, but he thought it could be many things to many people. I similarly think that you could interpret it to be many different kinds of stories. But, having said that, it is true that I think of the "we" as belonging to the team. I will say at the very, very end of the book, there's one place where I still will remain cagey. I feel like in the last couple of pages, actually, there is a shift that happens. And that to me, the "we" actually enlarges and becomes broader than the team. I won't tie myself down as to who I see that "we" as belonging to, but I do feel the "we" becomes more than just the eleven of them by the end of the book.

This is my second fiction book, and I have another book that's finished that will probably be published in 2022. Probably the hardest part for me as a fiction writer, right now, is figuring out the structure of a book. Once I have the structure in place, I'm not saying that it writes itself, but that's half the battle for me, figuring out structure. With my very first novel, it took me a while to realize that the structure was a journey, that a character was taking in Vietnam, place to place, as it moves through time. Once I understood that we were watching this person grow up over a couple of decades, it helped me understand things about structure, but it took me a while to understand that. 

But with We Ride Upon Sticks, I had the idea for the structure right away. I knew it was going to be structured around different games. Even if the games are front and center, I knew that each chapter is going to be the Danvers High Falcons varsity women's field hockey team, playing a different team, and I knew that, because there are eleven players on the team, that gives me eleven chapters. I knew that, if you think in terms of novel software, I figured, okay, I'm used to writing a twenty page short story, so each chapter will be at least twenty pages. It'll give me an opportunity to look at each character. I had that structure in mind all the way through the book, even before I started writing it.

I didn't know how quickly they would be successful as far as winning their games, when they have any setbacks, I didn't know that. As I started to get closer and closer to the end of the book, I didn't have an idea for how I was going to end it. It was going to end with the big championship game and all that fun stuff. But as I got closer to it, I realized the book is about much more than the field hockey game. I realized I didn't really want to spend a lot of time on the actual description about field hockey, because truthfully, writing about sports is not that interesting. Someone runs down the field, their stick goes back, they hit the ball. You can only write that kind of thing so much. It's actually not inherently dramatic, even though that sounds weird, because we think of sports as being so dramatic. 

I think of Friday Night Lights, the book, because it was a book before it became a movie and TV show. It's a book about an actual place. So it's creative nonfiction. My understanding is that that book is actually much more about the town and much more about the people and the players, and the school and race. Football is obviously an important part of it. But again, it's much more about the people. And so my book is very similar in that sense, that this field hockey is a vehicle for me to look at these characters. It wasn't until I started to get to the end of the book that I realized how the structure would change right at the very end.

LD: I really admire how you were able to both ground us in what was happening in the actual game while keeping from feeling like we're monologuing about the logistics of sports. It was very accessible and beautiful. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more to the process of making that action sound poetic and fun and keeping it from weighing down the reader.  

Quan Barry: It's funny, because when I first started writing fiction, I didn't think of myself as somebody who could come up with plots easily. I don't know what the shift was for me. I suddenly realized my imagination is just constantly going. I think I realized that everything is a plot, your whole life is a plot, decide what you're going to do today. I think when I loosened up my expectations about where the plot was supposed to come from and how I was supposed to come up with it, it just made everything easier. 

I'm just getting started with the beginning of my career as a playwright, which is a very different world, and my first production will hopefully happen in 2022. So it's interesting, because right now, when it comes to playwriting, I think the way I used to think about fiction. I think in playwriting that I don't understand how to plot a play. I'm like, how do you make characters on a stage move? And how do you know? For right now, I feel like I'm learning this all over again, how to write in a different genre. Hopefully, I will figure that out.  In thinking about fiction, though, I don't know when I understood. I used to think that I didn't have a sense of plot and that I didn't have a sense of action. And I thought that because I was primarily thinking of myself only as a poet and not as just a writer. But the more I began to let go of that poet identity, the more I realized that I do have a sense of how to write action, I do have a sense of how to do plot, it's just natural. 

There's certain things that you realize, if you're writing a scene where a character is in a car, there's certain things you don't have to set: she puts her hand on the knock on the door handle, she pulls the door open, she lowers her body, she gets into the car she gets—you just really don't need that. What do I need? I think so much of writing really is intuitive. We tell stories all the time about our lives, and you know what to leave out. You're going to leave out the boring parts and just tell the meat of the story, right? 

As far as making it seem poetic or smooth or those kinds of things, I have to admit, it's something that after I write a book, I have to go back in and cut out. I love similes. I've never met a simile I didn't love. I often have to go back and cut out a lot of the similes. I like imagery; I like metaphors. It just naturally makes it in when I'm describing action. I'm also weaving in other elements that make it seem poetic and make it seem like something that people can visualize. And I think in some ways that poetic description helps do that. Because in some ways, if you just describe a scene, like the sky was blue, the grass was green, and it was 46 degrees out, there were ten people, that's just flat description. But by weaving in simile, and imagery, and metaphor, which I'm used to doing as a poet, it helps that scene you're creating feel more textured, more multidimensional, and come alive more. 

LD: This is sort of more in line with what we were talking about earlier with examining these characters as a chorus or collective body. We talked in class about how Homeric epithets are working within the book—assigning a physical attribute to the character that encompasses or speaks to a piece of their identity and how that both acts to single them out as an individual and to make their role clear, how they're operating within this collective body. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. 

Quan Barry: You get that with "fleet-footed" Achilles or you get a female with "flashing eyes" or whatever, right. It's interesting that we've been doing this as writers for like, 3000 years, right? It's the idea that you have a description of someone, and not only does it help you visualize things about them, but it also helps tell you something about them, right? So if you think about "fleet-footed" Achilles, in some ways, then you get a little bit of a sense of it. In The Iliad, we never get discussion about whether or not Achilles is smart. He's just the muscles, you know? It makes sense that he would be personified by his body, by how fast his foot is, right? Whereas with Athena and her flashing eyes, we know there's a real intelligence there, right? So not only does it help us see her, but it also tells us, "Oh, my gosh, she's a smart one, she plots.” 

I wasn't thinking in terms of Homer, but I was trying to do something very similar. It's the idea of, how do I create these characters, because there's eleven of them? How do I keep them distinct from one another, which can be very difficult when you have that many characters for your reader to be able to distinguish between them. I knew that I wanted to have physical characteristics be important so that a reader could tell them apart. And at the same time, it's not just the idea of giving physical description, because if you just do that, it's a bit flat. It's the idea that you want your descriptions to be working on two levels at the same time. It's a physical description, and then hopefully, that physical description also tells you something about their character. In some ways, for me, it was almost like a cheat. I had to create those moments in order to help myself keep them apart as characters. So I knew somebody is gonna have this crazy bruise, and it's gonna talk at some point, or JP Renza has this claw. It was a cheat sheet for myself in order to help me realize who these characters are and how they're different from each other. 

Ivan Pelley: What was the process like of creating the multitude of main characters that you had for this novel? Creating one main character is hard enough, but then there were plenty of teammates on the field hockey team, and they all came out feeling realistic. They also reward you when you follow their character. Did you plan them all from the beginning? Or did they all develop an identity as you worked on the story?

Quan Barry: Yeah, definitely I had ideas for who they all were. As I got into it, my ideas morphed and changed, and I was surprised by things. I don't know if this thing still exists anymore, but there used to be the after-school special, and it would always be on TV. The after-school special would be about some serious social issue facing the team, and in the after-school special, you would definitely see stock characters. The same thing happens in various ‘80s movies like The Breakfast Club: you have the athlete, you have the druggie, you have the artistic girl, you have the preppy girl. I think a lot of TV still revolves around the idea of having types, but it used to be really pronounced in teen movies. That's who you were, and even in terms of school, it would be at lunchtime.  Where am I going to sit at lunch? Am I going to sit at the athletes' table? Am I going to sit at the brainiacs' table? Am I going to sit out? 

When I sat down to create these eleven characters, I already had thoughts about all those different types of high school kids that we were familiar with in the 1980s. It was just a matter of going in and creating these characters in such a way that they fit the types. But then they expanded and became much more specific and played against the types that we expected for them. That was something that I definitely thought about: how can I create characters who we can recognize as being the quarterback? It's the handsome quarterback who's not that smart, but then how can I complicate him? 

Something else I had to do in writing this book was that I wrote the first chapter and I had way too many characters whose names ended in “y”,   like Tammy and Amy and Kimmy and it was like, Oh, my God, so many -y ending names. After I read the first chapter, I had to go back and think about names that seemed very ‘80s-esque, but that you can easily distinguish. So, for example, Mel B, she was okay, so her name is Melanie, but she goes by Mel and it's a single word. There's not going to be that many names that rhyme with Mel. Similarly, I had Rebecca, but her name is Becca. Becca was a big name in the ‘80s. There could be at least three Beccas on the field hockey team. That is definitely something that I had to work at. It was to try and distinguish them, because when they were all Tammy and Amy, it was a nightmare. 

LD: You spoke a little bit about The Breakfast Club. I'm always thinking in terms of those movies, like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, how parents are operating. The parents of this novel seem to act as an off-screen force, for much of the book they speak very little or are in the background, but give a great context to the characters that they are in relation to, and I was wondering if you could speak a little to their role and their effect on the players of the team?

Quan Barry: I didn't have any expectations about the parents when I went into the book; I knew it wasn't their story. I didn't have a sense of how much or how little of a role they would play. I just let things evolve organically. I always thought of them in terms of Peanuts, like if you watch Charlie Brown, you have the parents speaking as if through water. That's all they are, they're trombone noise. They never even say anything, because it's not their world. 

As I was letting things evolve organically, it made sense that there would be places where mothers in particular take on serious roles. The daughters' relationships with their moms really formed who they are, right? It wasn't anything that I planned out, it was just something that I realized I needed. For example, I always knew from the get-go who Girl Corey's stalker was going to turn out to be, and so that wasn't something that I necessarily had to pump up. Fortunately, I wrote the Jen Fiorenza chapter fairly late, and I knew that something was going to happen to her claw. I just didn't know what it was going to be. Because I wrote her chapter later, I figured out how her mother is involved in the downfall of the claw. I didn't have to do that much work to really tweak that. The dads are there a little bit; they really don't have that much of an impact on the story. It really is about mothers and daughters.

IP: Even though the novel is written about a field hockey team, most of its length is actually focused on events in the characters’ lives outside of the game, although it does focus on the team. And the games, when you choose to describe them, are pretty short. Was that a conscious decision from the beginning and for the sake of pacing and other parts? Or did you decide to take them in that direction, in the process of writing?

Quan Barry: In the process of writing, I figured out I just didn't have the chops to really dramatically describe field hockey eleven different times for eleven different games. That very first chapter, that's the most field hockey you get, that the goalie has been scored on eight or nine times, that their summer camp was basically done. I don't have much more to say about actual field hockey. That was something that hadn't been my intention, before I ever started writing, my intention was each chapter is going to look at a different game, and a different character. I really thought that there would be a lot more about the individual games as the season progressed. But that's just not how the book wanted to unfold.

Bianca Layog: The story, in this novel, has a lot of elements of a lot of genres. There's sports fiction, of course, and the supernatural. And then, of course, because it's about teenagers, high school, there's an obvious coming-of-age theme. I was wondering if, in the early planning stages, you had all these different ideas that aren't always in the same realm together from the beginning? Or if you started to sprinkle them in as the idea progressed?

Quan Barry: I rarely think in terms of genre. I had those three elements, but I hadn't thought of them as genre elements. I had just thought, it's a girls' field hockey team which uses witchcraft in the 1980s. Despite having that as my central idea, I already had teens in there. I already had sports in there. I already had witchcraft in there. But I didn't think of it in those terms [at first]. I did sometimes think of it in those terms, after I was closer to being done. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes I have to go back and pump things up. Field hockey is not front and center in the book. And you can make the same argument actually about witchcraft. This is not a Harry Potter book, people aren't flying, even when they try to do magic, it's like, did that actually work? So I did think about that as I was coming towards the end, if I needed to pump up the witchcraft and actually make this a "witch book." I thought, well, there'll be readers who are disappointed because they came here thinking this was going to be a real witch book, like The Craft, or something like that, and it really isn't. I ultimately decided that the book is what it is, it made those decisions for me. It really wouldn't be genuine to my vision and the story I was trying to tell if I went back and tried to make it much more of a Harry Potter story. It just didn't end up that way.

LD: You spoke a little to pushing up against and disregarding genre elements in your writing. I was curious, having read both Water Puppets, your poetry collection, and We Ride Upon Sticks side-by-side, about the elements of similarity in terms of imagery. Both seem interested in interrogation of the female body in some ways. We get that really lovely line about the girls' pale underbellies being like flags in the first couple pages of the novel. I was wondering if you would say that there are certain stylistic choices that carry over from your poetry to your prose and vice versa.

Quan Barry: I think in some ways I see my poetry as being foundational to me being a writer. It's the foundation for my writing. Even if I'm writing somebody an email, there's a way in which I craft it, it's kind of funny among my friends, people know this about me. And I don't say it with any pride. For example, I don't own a cell phone, I don't really text, I do have an iPad. If somebody has an iPhone, they can text me, but I text with very few people. And the people that I text with, they're like, your texts don't read like texts, because I don't really understand that idea of brevity. I'm not saying that my texts read like short stories, but there's heft to them in a way. 

And so to me, poetry is the foundation from which everything else springs. With my sense of the richness of language, it would be very hard for me to write something that's thin. For example, now, as I'm starting to write more and more plays, I was talking with somebody last week about the possibility of a screenplay. It's true that usually these things never get made into TV shows, but I have sold the rights to We Ride Upon Sticks to a TV studio and NBC. The chances of them actually making it into anything, it's very rare—I'm not expecting it to be turned into anything. But when I was going through the process of selling it, talking with various production people and my agents, I told them I'm a playwright, I do know how to write plays, it couldn't be that difficult to figure out how to write a screenplay. 

That's when I read for the first time the pilot episode for Friday Night Lights. And when I read that, I was kind of actually shocked by how "thin" it seemed to me, because it just made me realize how visual TV is, that on the page, there really wasn't that much happening, in my estimation. And yet obviously when it's shot, when all these different things are happening, it seems really rich. And so I could foresee that if I write a screenplay, that will be a challenge for me, because I'm used to having a lot of richness. I realized that in some ways that kind of richness doesn't necessarily translate to TV, because TV is about simplicity, because the visuals will do so much for you. 

For me, poetry is what's fundamental to all the other genres that I work in. And there are ways in which the fiction has influenced the poetry, in the sense that my poems have started to get a little bit longer. At the end of the day, I really believe in this idea of not making distinctions, because I think that when you make those distinctions, it can make it hard when you want to move into a different area. 

I've been at various artists' colonies, there's one in New York called Yaddo, one in New Hampshire called MacDowell, and when you go to those, there are artists, visual artists, musicians, composers, writers, playwrights, sometimes dancers. The more I'm in those kinds of spaces, and the more I start to think of myself as just being an artist, I don't even think of myself as being a writer. For example, I've been taking classical voice lessons for a very long time. I would love to be able to learn how to sing, which I have been working on for a very long time, and I'm still not that good. But I just think the more you can think broadly about how you are an artist, the better off we are.

LD: Speaking from your writing, coming up with the context of a foundation of poetry, it's a very different thing to write a novel in terms of pacing than it is a collection of poems. Can you speak a little to maintaining that same momentum that keeps a reader pushing forward even in something that's such a long prose project where that might be difficult to do?

Quan Barry: Maybe it was Hemingway who said it, I'm not quite sure what writer said it. But basically, it was the idea of "you write, you write, you write, you write, when you sit down to write, you know, you do your thing, and you leave, you call it a day right when things were about to get good," right. That way, when you come in the next day, you're really excited to write. If you keep doing that, you're going to have a lot of parts where things seem good. 

That's definitely what I was thinking with this book. I was like, Okay, I'm going to stop. So, that means every three pages, we're going to hopefully have something that's going to pull the reader through, because if it pulls you through as you were writing it, it's hopefully going to pull the reader through, as well. So I really believe in that idea, if possible. You write to a good point, and sit back, because when you finish, hopefully it will mean that you've got a lot of high points in your work.

BL: I'm interested in your research process, since obviously, you're writing about something you know. But this novel set in the 1980s has a lot of background work in terms of setting a cultural tone for the book, and some of the topics, such as the history of witchcraft and field hockey, are a little niche. What was it like writing it? What was it like using research and working on the book? And did the younger perspectives make it difficult for you to include some of the research? 

Quan Barry: I grew up in the 80s. I grew up in this town, Danvers. I knew a lot about the witch trials, because Danvers, if you live there, it's a built-in field trip, like, you're in fourth grade, you're going to go here. There's various ways that we really study it. And you see it around town, you see the monuments, you see one of the old homesteads, so it's really just part of your history when you grow up there. So honestly, I didn't have to do that much research.

I know that as I was writing the book, people would ask me about it. And I would describe it, and they would instantly ask, oh, is that Young Adult fiction? I would say no, but they would assume that, because it's about a group of teenage girls. I would say the book is not YA, even though it might be about girls. If I had thought of it in terms of being YA, then a lot of the references are not YA references. So for a different generation, a lot of the references to movies or TV shows, you probably don't know. That's not to say that young adults can't read the book, and hopefully still get a lot out of it. But it's true that a lot of those references are not necessary. They're really made for Gen X in certain kinds of ways. I do believe that if you write something, hopefully, if it's got other things going on, and if there's enough context, that it might not matter if you don't know the song, you can be like, Oh, it's a song that they listen to, you don't actually have to know the specifics of what the song actually is.  

I will say that when thinking about research, I did not research this book very much. But I'm working on a space play right now, with a set on the International Space Station. And yeah, I had to do some research for that. I just read the memoir by Scott Kelly, who has the record for the longest amount of time in space by an American. There are mathematical elements that I don't know right now. So I've just written it, and I know that I'll actually have to talk to a math person and be like, okay, help me out. Sometimes people will talk to you, if you're like, Hey, I'm working on this thing. You can ask a mathematician, or you could ask an astronomer. I have to admit that for me, I'd much rather ask somebody who really knows and can just give me expert knowledge. 

The book of mine that hopefully is going to come out next year is a book set in Mongolia. It's about Tibetan monks in Mongolia who go and search for reincarnation. So for that book I reached out here at the University of Wisconsin, and we have people who are experts in this, I reached out to somebody who's an expert on Buddhism. I've also reached out to somebody who was a former Tibetan monk. Lastly, I just reached out to somebody who read my book, who lives in Mongolia. I have to do it because I don't want to do a lot of research. I do what I need to and then I ask people, is this right? Is this not right? Can you help me out here? So that could be another way of going about that stuff. 

BL: You mentioned yesterday that the coach is the only character lightly based on someone. Can you speak to the process of writing a character that came out of more personal experiences?

Quan Barry: I don't live in Massachusetts anymore. I found out after I'd finished the first draft of the book that this legendary coach, Barb Damon, had just passed away when I finished my first draft. I guess she was 81 or 82 years old. Once I found out that she had passed, I created a character in my mind, maybe I knew it was based on her. You shouldn't really write about people who are living, in certain ways. There are ways in which I buried things about her when I thought she was still alive and I was creating that character. After I found out that she had passed away, I went back in and I definitely pumped up things about her that returned, so that people who didn't know her could read that and be like, Oh, yeah, that's definitely Barb. It's just little things. For example, she wears a trucker's cap, or she had very bad arthritis in her knees, and had these big scars on her knees that made it very hard for her to walk, or drove this Subaru station wagon. It’s an homage to her. 

IP: A major part of the plot is the mischief the team creates in order to please their benefactor Emilio, and as they get towards the end of the novel, their acts become more blatantly malicious, like pointing a gun at their classmate. I wondered if you considered where you would draw the line with their questionable morals. Was there anything you considered adding that would’ve crossed that line, making them unsympathetic? 

Quan Barry: That’s a great question, because I have thought about that. For example, I knew they needed to start doing stuff, but they can’t be so crazy that you lose all sympathy for them. I thought, do they actually sacrifice anything, an animal? Would they actually kill? And so the thing with animals in the book, is, obviously, you have the character of the rabbit Marilyn Bunroe, who happily dies a natural death, and they put her in the earth, and it works out for them. They didn’t have to kill her. Obviously, towards the end of the book, there’s this question of, Is something bad going to happen to the iguana? 

I was very aware that sometimes you can push things too far and lose a reader quickly. Even the bus ride conversation, where they’re talking about sex, which is actually one of my favorite conversations, one of them, at the very end, never says the “a-word,” but says have any of you ever been pregnant? There’s a pause, a silence, and then the coach comes in like Hey, it’s game time! And so none of them have to say, because it would change how you would look at them, if you heard certain things. And so I was very aware of this idea of taking it up to an edge, but if you go over that, you’ll lose your reader. 

LD: I was wondering if you had any media you consumed while writing this book, whether that’s readings or movies that were helpful to your process. I also would love to know more about your upcoming projects, especially since you mentioned that space play. 

Quan Barry: I am not a big consumer of media, especially since I don’t have an iPhone. I have Netflix but I never watch, although I did watch the vampire show What We Do in the Shadows while writing this. It’s a comedy almost like The Office, but with vampires, and it’s on Hulu. It’s very funny, and I highly recommend it. I might have been watching that while editing things, but the book was already done. There’s not too many things as far as books I looked at. There were books I thought about looking at, John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, and yet somehow I never got around to it. 

As far as future projects, I mentioned the space play. There was a super interesting article in The New Yorker recently about all the space junk that is circling the Earth. The space junk, which is made of satellites and all that, creates a dangerous situation for the International Space Station, because if any of it hits the station, it could destroy it. I read that article and became fascinated by the idea of, What do you do if you knew something might hit? All the space junk is tracked by NASA so that it won’t hit it, because they can move the station, but it takes hours to do that, so they need a certain window. That’s something I’m working on right now. 

I only have ten pages of it done, but I have a strong interest in writing my next novel. So I have the Mongolia book, which hopefully will be out in 2022, and then I’m interested in the idea of genre, because I don’t really think about it, I just write whatever interests me. I want to write a horror book, a classical horror one, not a stabby, bloody one, because I don’t watch horror movies, and I have a very hard time reading Stephen King, who I think is brilliant, but really scares me. But my horror book would be closer to Lord of the Flies. A bunch of tourists get stuck on an island in Antarctica, where I’ve visited. What happens to them as they begin to go crazy? So that’s a long-term project I’m working on.