"I wanted this novella to feel like a story passed down for generations until the truth of what happened begins to feel like myth." (An Interview With Sammie Downing)
Half Mystic Press’ debut novella, The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs by Sammie Downing, is out on December 18 and available for preorder now. The poet Ed Roberson once told Sammie, “You only have one life and you only have one work.” She's taken this advice perhaps too literally and has lived in seven states and two countries. She’s been a housekeeper, a huntress and a fraud investigator. Currently, she resides in Denver, Colorado. She looks forward to her next adventure. You can find her on Instagram and at her website. To kick off the blog tour of House, Sammie joins us on the Half Mystic blog for an interview on the creation process of the book...
HM: What inspired the narrative in The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs?
SD: Crack cocaine causes pulmonary alveolar and interstitial edema, which appears in X-rays as a tree or a blossoming flower. I know this because ten years ago I met my father for coffee after his first doctor’s appointment in over a decade. The free clinic had given him a copy of his X-ray, and he laid it cavalierly on the table between us. Clearly visible were a series of branches, like the buds of a cherry tree obscured by morning fog. My father’s sickness had grown something new inside.
A few weeks later, I arrived at school for my final year of college and couldn’t stop thinking about that image. How it felt to sit across from my father and know he was going to die, hold the proof of his death in my hands, and recognize that there was nothing I could do to prevent it. So I wrote a very literal poem describing the science behind “crack lung” and the historical and cultural roots of the drug. As you might imagine, the piece was flat and detached.
I realized then that our narrative wasn’t contained within the X-ray. Our story lingered in feeling, not fact. An X-ray could never convey what we would lose in my father, but perhaps, through specificity and fantasy, I could get to the heart of the future we’d miss out on together, the alternate worlds we could choose for ourselves instead. That’s where House began nine years ago, but over time it has transformed into another creature entirely.
Throughout The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs, sisters Miriam and Essie are depicted as reflections of one another. What connections do you draw between mirrors and siblings?
I think siblings are unique social experiments. I’m interested in studying what happens when you take two people and give them the same environment, the same parents and the same opportunities. Inevitably, these children will have unique desires despite the fact that they originated from the same core. But it’s through their differences that you can more fully understand the home from which they came. Siblings are projections of each other. From birth they grow towards balance. One’s strength is the other’s weakness. Your sibling is the first person you imitate—and through that imitation you discover what is uniquely yours.
People say that we are naturally attracted to partners who behave like our parents. That might be true, but I often feel that for long term partnerships we would do well to end up with people like our siblings—who, from birth, grow to fill the missing pieces of our whole. Our flaws are reflected back to us through our sister’s perfections, and vice versa. Watching my sister as an adult has taught me about the person I want to be because—magically, inevitably—she contains everything I don’t and everything I do.
A complex net of memory lurks beneath the surface of The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs. Tell us a bit about how memory seeps into your narratives.
Memory is defined as an organism’s ability to store, retain and retrieve information. It’s been clear to psychologists for some time that trauma can mar the brain’s ability to perform these functions. That is to say: trauma can so radically transform the landscape of memory that often it is nearly impossible for a person to return to their regular thought patterns.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve struggled with conveying my memories to certain members of my family, often because those people don’t hold those same images, feelings or thoughts to be true. When I set about writing this novella, I wanted to avoid the trappings of fact versus fiction. Instead I wanted to create a world that felt, smelled and looked exactly like the world in which I’d grown up: the world from which I’d watched my father slowly disappear, in which I’d watched my mother stripped of her agency. I didn’t want to build this world within reality because, in the end, belief in reality is belief in fantasy. What I remember and what my mother remembers are two different universes. I wanted this novella to feel like a story passed down for generations until the truth of what happened begins to feel like myth.
At one point in the novella you write, “family, even transformed and unfamiliar, has the power to wring music from your bones.” What is the relationship between family and music?
Music, like family, is inherited—each song has its own lineage and history. To listen to an artist in 2019 is to listen to everything that came before her, from Gregorian chants to something more primal and borne out of community. So it is with families. To meet a person is to meet both a unique voice and also a chorus of thousands that converged to create this one. Music is an essential part of daily ceremonies in many families, like during bedtime rituals or even in cleaning the house. Our parents would sing my sister and me to sleep every night, but they each chose their own songs. For a long time my mother was the only person I’d ever heard sing the old folk song “Shenandoah”, and the memory of those words and that melody was like a well within me. 26 years after I first heard that song, I was standing in the kitchen of a remote lodge in New Zealand when an Irish woman began to sing—“away, you rolling river / oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you / away, I’m bound to go”—and I felt like I might drown in ancient feeling. Some of the first sounds we hear are our parents’ voices, our family’s songs, and even years later their music can carry us home.
A binary between Housebearers and Wild Things is drawn throughout the story, but Miriam often seems to act as a bridge between the two. What does Miriam’s understanding of these diametric opposites say about her character?
Miriam understands the binary she’s presented with, but it takes her a long time to take any sort of action. In fact, her understanding of the choices laid out for her is almost paralyzing. I’d say that while Miriam’s ability to hold two truths at once enables her to see what other members of her family cannot, it also distances her and at times brings out the cruelty inside of her.
What do you feel home means in a narrative in which home is ever-evolving?
Miriam’s family is always moving and yet their home never leaves them. Despite their transience in space, home is in many ways constant. But House’s consistency doesn’t make it any more stable, certain or safe. I wanted to use this narrative to explore the fact that homes and houses have many layers—some are safe havens, some wildernesses that teeter between the domestic and the feral. We place a lot of nostalgia on our old homes, but often our experiences there weren’t wholly good.
My family moved twelve times before I was ten, and most of this book is based on the house my sister and I lived in with our father for a short time after our parents’ divorce, what we now call the Pearl Street House. In some ways it was the most magical place—a tiny, tiny white building off the side of an alley the city seemed to have forgotten. Our dad had let the garden run wild, and my sister and I spent our days eluding the capture of the neighbors as we broke into their yards. Broken glass and old appliances were strewn everywhere. Some of my favorite childhood memories are from this yard and the adventures my sister and I had there—but it’s also the site of some of my most traumatic childhood memories. In this book, House holds both those truths. As I grew up, I found myself continually trying to move further and further away and build a new home. It was only later that I discovered that the Pearl Street House will be with me always. For better or for worse.
How did you go about writing such complicated family dynamics through the novella? How do you reconcile the opposing forces of your characters’ wants, fears, and memories?
Writing family dynamics is hard. I’d like to say I did it all on my own, but that wouldn’t be entirely true: I workshopped the novella last year, and my instructor Mark Mayer helped me see that I wasn’t telling the full story. Through his attention to the piece, I came to understand that in pursing Miriam and Father’s relationship, I’d neglected Mother and Essie. I’d like to think the final draft treats all of the characters equally.
Smart readers are essential to good writing, and House wouldn’t exist without them. In my experience you can’t let someone else in too soon, only when you believe you’re really and truly finished. And I’ve found that after they’ve taken a look at your work, you’ll start to realise just how far from finished you really are.
The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs is wonderfully musical—the prose dances around the page, leaving readers breathless and hungry. What kinds of music inspire your writing?
I started writing this book in 2011, which was a great year for music. I was living in Chicago at the time and I spent a lot of that winter walking around, looking for salamanders carved into the stone of old buildings (look up salamanders and Chicago if you’re curious about this little treasure hunt!). As I walked I listened to a lot of music, but mostly Metals by Feist, Bon Iver by Bon Iver, Montezuma by the Fleet Foxes, Ceremonials by Florence + the Machine and Civilian by Wye Oak.
Much of my writing is done first by walking. I try to walk as much as possible, because that’s when my mind loosens and I’m truly free. To that end, you could say that everything I write comes from the music I listen to and the music I make with my body as I move. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Phoebe Bridgers, Choir Boy and Charlie Cunningham.
The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs reads, at places, as Miriam and Essie’s coming-of-age story as they discover more about their family and their world. What did you learn about yourself and the world while writing the novel?
As the story developed through the years, I realized that I wanted to understand why I, a queer woman, spent years attempting to fit within a heterosexual story to which I never belonged. The novella morphed from an examination of my own family into an interrogation of how all children are so often forced to grow up the way their parents expect. During the final edits of this books I came out to people who weren’t my closest friends or my sister, and I fell in love with a woman. I do believe I owe a lot of my new life to Miriam. She helped me see that I didn’t need to take the thread I’d been given—I could tear my old world apart at the seams and create something wholly my own.
In the book, folks carry their houses around with them. Where are you taking your home next?
At age 29, I’ve moved 28 times in my life. It has been easier for me to live with one foot out the door, dreaming always of the next place, than it to be fully rooted within a specific moment or time. The true risk for me is not leaving but staying in one place. I’m looking forward to staying where I am—growing deep instead of wide—for the foreseeable future.
In Sammie Downing’s The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs, young Miriam is born into a world where women carry houses stitched to their backs, while men carry keys with the power to unlock them. Miriam’s nomadic family moves from clearing to clearing within a dark wood, but no matter how deep into the forest they travel, the haunted calls of Wild Things follow. As precious family heirlooms disappear and Father roams through the woods later and later into the night, Mother slowly loses her memory and Miriam begins to understand that her family might not be as human as it appears.