Interview with Christine Stark

WG: Christine, your novel Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation deals with parental sexual abuse and its subsequent effects. Some reviewers have called your book a tough read. In your own experience, how have readers responded to your novel?

CR: Reader responses have varied from "I need to read this slowly" to "I read it over the weekend" to "I couldn't put it down and stayed up all night". A few people have said it was a tough read, but because Nickelsis dealing with issues not often written about in a unique style and voice, readers have responded with interest and gratitude and amazement more than anything else.

WG: One of the things that makes your novel so affective is that you decided to make the protagonist the narrator of the story. Will you talk a bit about the artistic challenges this presented to you as a writer?

CR: I was clear from the beginning that the story had to be told in first person by the protagonist. I wanted the readers to be in the head and heart of the protagonist as much as possible. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, I wanted the reader to experience the protagonist's world with her, not removed by being in third person, or by having someone else recount her story. Second, I wanted to tell her story through her eyes, ears, mouth, and skin. I wanted to tell a story about father rape and mother betrayal from a girl's point of view, without softening it or being overly concerned about the roles, responsibilities, and accountability of the parents. What I mean is that so much talking and writing about father rape is more about the father or the mother, and I wanted the girl to be the center of the story. I wanted the reader to be able to follow what her mind does in order to survive the rapes.

Probably the biggest challenge was how to present the protagonist's different states of consciousness. Sometimes she flips between more than one state of consciousness at the same time and it was challenging to figure out how to present that on the page in a way that someone who is new to this kind of thinking would understand and be able to follow in print. So punctuation had to go. I didn't want it to interrupt the flow of her thoughts, her way of being. Also, water is a major image or theme in the novel and her thinking is fluid and punctuation would have disrupted that flow.

Some of the questions I asked myself were how does one explain a way of being that is antithetical to our culture's world view, that challenges the basic issue of what is identity, what does "self" mean? What is the nature of the human mind, of human consciousness? If you are conveying someone who becomes many separate (mentally and emotionally) selves, with different ages, genders, and races, yet is all one, this challenges the most basic principles of selfhood. Yet it is a "normal" "human" response to trauma. It's not supernatural. It's not out of this world. So that was another challenge, how to show this so-called disorder that is hyped up in the media as being this bizarre, freakish "mental illness" through a character that people will identify with, will understand, will hopefully care about and emphasize with, all the while staying true to presenting her as a whole and complete human being–one who hates, loves, fears, hopes and so on. Mostly, for me as an author, this was an exercise in finding this character and remaining true to her. I wanted to show the interior world of someone hurt beyond belief, and if another character tried to tell her story, there would just be periods of staring, or jumps in behavior, or silence. The reader would not gain much insight into the character, or the outcome of the rape of girls, if we did not get the story from her directly.

WG: Did you have a pretty good sense of how your character would develop throughout the novel before you wrote it, that is, what kinds of stages she would go through in her development and how things would eventually turn out for her at the books end or was that some that that just sort of grew as it went along, once you had established her initial character and situation.

CR: From the very start, I knew that the story would follow her at age 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25, so I knew those would be the ages and experiences that would show up in the novel. Her development occurs--most definitely--she changes, she grows, but she also slips back into not only old patterns, but selves that are young in age, but old in her development of self. By that I mean, she is 25, but she slips back into her self at age 5, etc so her growth and development is always slip sliding and her 25 year old self reunites with her 5 year old self and so on. So one of her selves may be 5 years old, but she has actually "been around" longer than the 25 year old self. It is all too easy for her to be presented with a situation as a 25 year old, but internally react to it as if she were 5. So her development is much less linear than the development of someone who has not been repeatedly raped as a child, yet it still exists. Having said that, what I always knew was that she was going to make it, despite the set backs, the slip sliding selves, this girl would get out, get away, and gather together a life for herself. That is what I knew.

WG: What kinds of events or readings have you had to try to get the news about Nickels out? Do you have any upcoming events planned?

CR: I am having a book release party at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis on Wednesday, January 18th, with Olga Trujillo, author of A Sum of My Parts. We are both excited about reading at The Loft. I've also been doing some readings around Minneapolis at Patrick's Cabaret and Queer Voices and Olga and I read at Women and Children First Bookstore in Chicago in October on a very blustery evening.

Other readings at bookstores and universities in North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are set for this spring. I've posted them on my website http://www.christinestark.com. Some of the events are a combination of readings and talks about issues related to the book, such as sexual violence. The readings will really be enjoyable. I always wanted to be a rock star, traveling about, and this is probably as close to that dream as I'll ever get.

WG: No doubt this is a question that you get often when discussing your book, but I'm sure that women who have been victims of sexual abuse as children are going to identify quite strongly with Nickels. Do you have some sense from other women about how accurately you have portrayed the feelings that rape victims go through?

CR I think this is an important question. What I'm finding is that some people, even a couple of my friends, are having a hard time understanding that this is a work of fiction, which it absolutely is. But to me that is a testament that the writing rings true. Incest survivors thank me for writing this, for giving voice to what so many go through, for something that most often silences the child and the adult the child grows into.

It is true that many if not most fiction writers sometimes partially draw upon experiences they have had. This is true for Nickels in the sense that I am a survivor. Part of my motivation in writing Nickels was to give voice to a subject matter that is more often than not trivialized, pathologized, sensationalized, and even sexualized in literature and in the media. A few years ago I met a fiction writer who had written short stories about incest. I was excited and hopeful to read her work, until I read the book and knew after a couple of paragraphs that it was written by someone who had no personal experience with the issue. (She told our group after I read the book that she had never been sexually abused.) I was disappointed, so I wrote my own book, one written by someone who has been there, survived it, and given voice to it.

WG: I want to thank you for the time that you've taken to do this interview. Is there anything else that you'd like to say about the book or your experience in writing it that we may not have covered.?

CR: I don't have anything else to add, but I want to thank you for interviewing me.