Eugenie Montague

Eugenie Montague received her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine. Her short fiction has been published by NPR, Mid-American Review, Faultline, Fiction Southeast, Amazon and Flash Friday, a flash-fiction series from Tin House and the Guardian Books Network, and was selected by Amy Hempel for The Best Small Fictions (2017). She currently lives in El Paso, Texas with her family.

Montague's new novel is Swallow the Ghost.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I like what my super-smart and talented friend and writer, Brendan Park, has to say about titles: that they should open up rather than shut down, evoke, rather than diagnose. And, actually, he suggested the title here. I had originally chosen another title, and my (also super-smart and talented) editors encouraged a change. When I mentioned that I needed a new title to Brendan, he recommended "swallow the ghost," which came from a line in the book. The specific sentence the title comes from did not make it into the final book, but I think Swallow the Ghost is a title that begins to make sense within the context of the novel and that it works on both plot and thematic levels.

What's in a name?

With almost all of my writing, I hear a rhythm in my head. I wouldn't be able to pinpoint it. It's not related to pentameters or syllables or stresses on any conscious level; but when I write a sentence, it either sounds right or wrong to me, and I'll edit over and over until it sounds "right" in my head. I have a similar relationship to names. A character name either feels right or it doesn't. Sometimes that comes immediately, but I often change them over and over as I write (which can lead to some funny "Replace All" situations down the road). My "office" is a desk a closet--not a walk-in closet, just a normal closet with the doors taken off. It has a shelf on the back wall for sweaters and such that I have filled with books. The name "Jesse Haber" came about when I looked up at that shelf and saw a book by Jesse Ball and one by Mark Haber, and put them together—mainly to survive the sentence. But this name felt instantly right and I never changed it.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

What an interesting question—I've never thought about it. But, no, I don't think she would be very surprised. She might be surprised she finished a novel, but I think the themes and subject matter would seem of a kind. Hopefully, she would see some growth from how she thought about them at sixteen though!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I think this might depend on the story or the book but, I have always found middles pretty difficult. I generally subscribe to the notion that if the ending isn't working, the problem lies somewhere else. I do think endings and beginnings can feel hard to change, so it's good to have a trusted reader to help you see it. There are some snake-eating-its-own-tail aspects of revision for me; I write from the beginning and at some point realize what I am doing (hopefully), so then I have to go back and incorporate what I have learned into the beginning of the book, which refines the middle and the end—again making it necessary to work on the beginning. At some point, this process ends or at least, the amount and importance of what I have to revise or refine approaches zero (if never actually getting there).

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I think there are aspects of myself in my characters, especially major characters. It's not a one for one certainly and it's not autobiographical, but the major characters are likely guided by or interested in at least some of the questions that I have about the world and art and other people, though their path and personalities and how they go about trying to answer these questions may differ.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Well, for this book, certainly the internet, and I do think about the internet a lot. There’s infinite creativity working within the formal structures of the tweet or the Instagram story, or the Tik Tok; in the same way, for centuries, writers have been playing with the novel. For example, Alena Smith, who created the TV show Dickinson, had a number of fake Twitter accounts, including Tween Hobo: tweets in the voice of a tween who was riding the rails; also Eighties Man (self explanatory). I also had friends who were always playing with Wikipedia, and a friend who once started a crime story on Yelp. The character left reviews at restaurants that were part of the story, slightly more narrative than one would usually leave. No one really noticed but, then, he left a review where there was a shootout—and the restaurant very much noticed, and he got kicked off Yelp. So I was thinking about all these things, and the little I knew about the publishing industry from being mostly an outsider; I wrote but had not had a book published, but I followed writers on Twitter who posted about the shrinking media market, less places for reviews, the importance of follower counts in the process, et cetera. All of this was in my head when I thought about Jane and Jeremy and this Twitter mystery they created to help promote Jeremy's book.

I also thought about the internet in how we read. There are the radical differences in tone, fragments, but also there's this contingency. It’s fairly common now to read a text, and then there’s the think piece on the text, and then there’s the twitter thread on the think piece, and then maybe there’s a new think piece on the twitter thread. Along with that, there’s the whole milkshake duck of it all—that one day we’re all laughing at something online, new information comes out, and we realize we shouldn’t be laughing. So, there’s this instability that's more a part of the reading process, as I experience it, and this is mirrored by the instability of all the platforms, which are subject to the whims of a few billionaires, really. A book is never stable, the reading changes with each reader, even the same reader at different times--but this cycle on the internet, specifically, there's a Rashomon aspect about it that I thought about with this book.

Visit Eugenie Montague's website.

--Marshal Zeringue