"I want you to stun me"
a mini-interview with author Corinne Manning
I read We Had No Rules by Corinne Manning in December 2020, according to my notebook. Among the notes I wrote were, I didn’t want this book to end, so many rich, wonderful characters. Short story writers, how do you do it?? “I want you to stun me,” one character says to a group of students, a professor who asks to just be called “Professor, in lieu of gender pronouns.” Corinne’s collection stuns. They are one of the writers I consider part of the greater west coast ecosystem I’m a part of and I’m grateful for their presence. Corinne also offers classes and mentorships.
As is my mini-interview practice, I asked Corinne to respond to three to five questions from a total of eight offered.
What is your dream life (at night, asleep) like?
I used to predominately have nightmares and night terrors (medication and somatic healing has helped attend to this mostly) but the thing that I value and that tires me about my dream life is that it is often not about me. When I was a kid I used to call this “having other people’s dreams” as I would watch strange dramas unfold. But the other night I had a dream that was mine where I talked to a large and beautiful bird in a cove who was eating a geoduck with a spoon.
“Do you sleep here?” I asked.
“Yeah,” they said between bites. “What about you?”
“Oh, no. I sleep that way,” and I motioned out away from the ocean. Then the wind blew and shifted the clouds all around so that the sunset came through this pillowy frame. A series of Orcas with wings (and one boar) ascended from the sea up into the sky.
What project(s) are you working on right now that you're most excited about?
I’m working on a memoir that examines my relationship to desire and longing throughout my life. Much of it is framed around a year where a thirteen year relationship ended, which also resulted in splitting from the friends we were co-parenting with, and no longer co-habitating with my kid. Amidst this loss also included a dog (I know!) and job and housing precarity. This really shifted my relationship to both desire and loss and how shallow my views on these states of being were earlier in my life. I pull in European medieval Catholic notions of devotion to explore how colonialism and capitalism affect our longing for utopia, how we fuck it up when we get it, and how even utopias end. Working on this project simultaneously excites me and makes me fucking miserable.
How did/does the pandemic change your creative process?
I think the pandemic continues to make my creative process even freer and wilder. I was hospitalized at the beginning of the pandemic and was alone and on drip morphine. I had a lot of weird visions including a visit from the ghost of Pasolini who told me how to rewrite the novel I was working on and that he should be in it. This yet to be published novel Dirty Joke, as a result, is a strange wild romp through a literal hell full of Italian Americans that is loved by agents and potential publishers but , I'm told, is difficult to market. So Wendy, perhaps the isolation of the pandemic just frees me up to make my work even more unmarketable! But more imaginatively rich and interesting to me.
Thank you, Corinne! Three cheers for the imaginatively rich, interesting, and unmarketable!