The Heart Keeps Faulty Time by Siân Griffiths
Bull City Press, 2020
Hannah Hicks, Kailee Isham, Eliza Souers, and Eric Van Gorden interviewed Siân Griffiths about her new short story collection. They discuss her writing style, the identity of her characters, how readers relate to the characters’ struggles, and more.
You’ve mentioned that you want to sell enough books to own a horse again. Is that still a goal of yours? Tell me more about the equestrian side of your life and how it affects your writing and teaching.
Funnily enough, I just bought a horse this week—though it was less a matter of selling enough books than it was a matter of earning enough raises in my profession. I’ve made very little money from book sales, which is typical for literary fiction writers. Even though riding is expensive, the discipline of it has been good for me. There are so many days when it is too hot or too cold or too rainy or too snowy, but if you don’t ride, you lose a day of training that you can’t get back. Writing is the same way—most days aren’t the perfect writing day, but I need to put the work in. Also, I feel like writing and riding are both different kinds of language, one built of words and another of movements. So much of my work in one informs my work in the other.
You use the second-person POV quite frequently in The Heart Keeps Faulty Time. What are the advantages of this POV? Are you writing to the reader, someone specific, or no one at all?
Second person is a fascinating point of view because it can do so many things. I actually just wrote a craft essay about this that I published over at Waxwing. In the stories in this book, I tend to think of second person as a kind of self-talk, the character processing their experiences and reflecting on them in their own mind. I like the way second person opens up that space, creating a little distance between the person in the action and the story itself. Poets often talk about the work that white space can do, and I think in fiction, we often need to create spaces where the story can do unexpected work as well.
In your interview with Jeffrey Condran, you said, “I am more interested in the small, seemingly inconsequential, everyday love we can feel in person-to-person interactions, even with relative strangers” when talking about your story “Slippers.” Can you discuss how this comment might apply to other stories in the collection?
Sure thing. That story specifically is about a man who writes romance novels. The man himself is no Fabio. He’s not a muscle-y romantic hero who says the right thing and earns great money and wears fabulous clothing. Rather, he’s struggling, like the rest of us. His struggles are pedestrian and he has a sharp temper and he judges people prematurely, but in spite of this, he finds himself having a moment of connection with a neighbor. This feels truer to me than the romantic ideal, and maybe a much more important kind of love to celebrate. It may not feel grand or perfect, but the little moments like these are where we forge community and develop human connections.
At the end of “Slippers,” the narrator talks about the aunt in a way that seems intimate: “You want her to join you more than you’ve ever wanted anything… You want to know this woman, to understand.” The narrator says that she is the reader for whom he has been waiting. In what ways do you feel that you as an author share an intimacy with your readers?
So often, writing feels lonely and removed. You type words and revise them and hope that they are received with an intention similar to the one you had when writing them. This moment is about that craving for connection, and a chance to see in person whether it bears out, but of course, the author never gets that. We write from a position of hope, knowing that hope does not ever get fully actualized.
Your stories feature fantasy-like creatures, including mermaids, a dragon, and aliens—but not in the expected ways. Why did you choose this? How has your work been informed by the fantasy genre?
To be honest, I don’t think I was ever any more aware of fantasy than most kids my age were. I read and reread the Narnia books and countless Choose Your Own Adventures, but I wasn’t really into Tolkein or Shanaara or Dragonlance or Robert Jordan, so I was interested but much less fascinated than some of my friends. Currently, most of the writers I teach are aspiring fantasy writers, and while some of the writers are doing some really inventive writing, I have to admit that on the whole, I feel frustrated by how little the genre has moved—particularly on the issues of race and gender. As a genre, it also tends to be less interested in character than I am, and more interested in moving character-types through an intricate plot. In my book, I wanted to mess with some of these images and see how they might be recast.
You dedicate “An Imaginary Number” to Gwendolyn. Is she represented by the girl in the story? Who is she, and why did you dedicate this specific story to her?
Gwendolyn is my daughter and painted the cover art for this book. She’s always been an amazing kid. When she was younger, she had a habit of sleepwalking, and one night I heard her thudding around in her room. I asked her about it the next day, and she told me that she had “danced with the aliens” and that “they spoke to me in math.” You can see how I had to use those lines and figure out how to make a story from them. It took me a few years…maybe a decade?… to get that done.
“Clockwork Girl at the Opera” sees the young girl reaching out to a dead woman on the road. She reaches out to touch the woman, marveling at her death. Is this foreshadowing of the fate that awaits her, or is she just as demented as those around her and fascinated with violence?
I see her less fascinated with violence than she is with the human body and its miraculous, if fragile, mechanics. I suspect that, as a piece of clockwork, she can share in the experience to violence that all women share to some extent or other, but what she can’t share is the human body itself. No matter how much she may pass as human, she is always aware of her difference.
The last sentence of “Clockwork Girl at the Opera” describes a drum that “like the heart, keeps a faulty time.” Why did you put the title of the collection within this story? Is there a reason you didn’t make this story last, so that the final words of the collection could crescendo with the title?
I wrote the story long before I knew I was going to put together a collection, so rather than putting the title into the story, I wrote the story and then, a few years later, assembled the book in an order that seemed to make sense to me and lifted the book’s title from this story. I thought that this line captured themes that ran through many of the pieces—the body, a longing for connection, the flaws we share, our finite life span.
As mentioned in “Two Mermaids,” Pike Place is a kind of Starbucks coffee; two mermaids appear in the Starbucks logo. Do you write at coffee shops in your area, and did you draw inspiration for this story from them?
Starbucks was definitely on my mind when I wrote this piece, specifically as an embodiment of a longing for home. It started as a poem that I wrote while in grad school in Georgia. I’d recently travelled back to the northwest, both to my home in Idaho and to visit my husband’s family in Tacoma, and, like so many tourists, we’d stopped by the first Starbucks in Pike Place Market. The images that start the poem are drawn from that very specific place, and the earliest version of the Starbucks mermaid logo which has since been made more corporate and chaste. Our understanding of mermaids has really changed over the years from dangerous sea maidens who lure sailors to their deaths to Disney’s Ariel (a name I really want to complicate and tie to both Plath and Shakespeare though the film does not make those connections)—I could go on here about the implications of this shift and get us really out in the weeds. Instead, I’ll just say the story contains the same questions I had in its central character/speaker: home sickness, the desire to write and find a voice, what she had given up in that pursuit, and the question of whether the deal was worth it.
In an interview about “They Key-Bearer’s Parents,” Erin McReynolds asked, “How would you want these parents judged by their society?” We wonder, how do you judge the parents in this story? Do you see them as heroic for trying to save their son from a life of luxurious joylessness? Or do you see them as harming more than helping, for trying to make their son into somebody he is not?
I feel for their struggle. At the core of this story is a question of nature and nurture. The parents desperately want to create the best life for their son, and they have bent themselves in pretzels to do just that, but in the end, the man is who he is. There’s so much messaging about what parents should do for their children, and I had that very much on my mind. These parents have done everything mostly right according to the common wisdom of what good parenting looks like, but their son has a tendency towards being self-absorbed and entitled, and their efforts on his behalf backfired and fed into this personality’s worst aspects. Even so, I can’t dislike them for making the effort.
In “The Key Bearer’s Parents,” the son of the clowns will become the key bearer. Beyond that, there is the question of happiness. Was it intentional for the outward appearance of the parents (“wide ties and honking red noses,”) to vividly contrast with the son, a depressed and lonely teen? What are the implications about people who wear a facade of happiness versus the ones who do not?
Do you think he’s depressed and lonely, or do you think he’s angry and wishing to be more alone? I have to think about that. Either way, the parents and son definitely contrast one another. The parents want to spread joy, especially to their son, but he’s uninterested in their work. Or, perhaps, he’s simply unable to accept their efforts.
In “Persistence of Geese,” the main character walks home with the remains of the goose still clinging to their body. We learn that this has happened before and that all the heads of the previous geese are still fastened to the speaker. What do the geese represent, and why do they still cling so heavily to the speaker, especially after death?
For me, this story is about experience and how we carry the things we endure. We cannot detach ourselves from the past, but rather, it weighs on us as we move forward.
From your education at the University of Idaho and University of Georgia, what techniques do you still use in your own writing? You mention in an interview with Jeffrey Condran, “this whole book may be prompt-driven.” What are some prompts you specifically used to write it, and do you teach those in your classes?
I love a good prompt, mostly because a prompt makes my mind move off its normal tracks and takes me some place unexpected. I tend to start my classes with what I call Quick Fire Challenges—a term borrowed from Top Chef. At the start, I give the students a quick prompt, and we all write for five minutes, but after the first couple of weeks, I turn the prompt duties over to my students. The story “You Were Raised by a Dragon. What Was It Like?” was brought in by my student Garrett. Other stories were from prompts written by friends. “Key Bearer’s” is from one of Barrelhouse’s Stupid Idea Junk Drawer prompts (Clown parents are disappointed in non-clown adolescent) combined with my own desire to write something about an old thought experiment regarding war. “Clockwork Girl” is from a creepy gif that my friend Kirsten Kaschock shared when she taught a short course at my university.
“You Were Raised by a Dragon. What Was It Like?” is a series of questions. You’ve stated that this story was based on a student prompt and that you struggled with it because it wasn’t in your preferred genre. Were you intending to portray a mother warning her daughter to be wary of men (or knights). If not, how did it evolve in this way?
Absolutely. This moment ties into a feminist undercurrent that I hope runs underneath this entire collection, a deep-seated questioning of the male hero implicit in so many of our common myths and fables.
As “Paper Hats” progresses, the “hat-boats” are described more and more as hats, becoming “a fedora, a boater, the cap of an English fox hunter, the Kaiser’s helmet,” and later, to appease the mother, “a dainty pillbox circled with twisting clusters of roses, each stem delicately thorned.” It isn’t until the very last sentence, when all the hats are thrown into the fire, that “all his hats look like boats.” Why this sudden visual change at the end?
I always quote Pam Houston’s remark that in flash fiction, the plot doesn’t necessarily need to resolve, but the central image needs to resolve. In this case, the image of the paper hat needs to evolve over the course of the story. Here, the child leans into his art and creates increasingly beautiful objects. When they’re burned, he’s less aware of the objects than he is of where his creativity has taken him. The fire can’t destroy that.
Siân Griffiths lives in Ogden, Utah, where she directs the graduate program in English at Weber State University. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Cincinnati Review, American Short Fiction, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, and The Rumpus, among other publications. Her debut novel, Borrowed Horses (New Rivers Press), was a semi-finalist for the 2014 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.
Eliza Souers, Eric Van Gorden, Hannah Hicks, and Kailee Isham are English writing majors at Lee University in Cleveland, TN. Each student hopes to work in the publishing industry post-graduation.