Thaisa Frank is a psychotherapist and psychic reader
who also writes amazing short stories. In The New York Times
Book Review, William Ferguson raves that her work "could be
said to occupy the shadowy land between poetry and prose -- at
times strong in narrative, more often fantastic, transfixed by the
possibilities of metaphor." She frequently teaches writing, and is the
co-author with Dorothy Wall of Finding Your Writer's Voice,
one of the most useful writer's guides of the last decade.
RH: How does a short story start for you?
TF: Well, I'm not a character-driven writer. I'm not catalyzed
by character and I'm not catalyzed by plot. A story starts for me by
phrase, by title, by an idea, or by an inchoate sense of the scene.
Most of my short stories are written over a period of time. When I
started writing, I didn't think of myself as writing stories. I was
producing scraps of paper that would sit on my desk for a year. Now
I have faith that most of those scraps will become stories.
RH: Your stories have striking imagery that stayed with me long
after I put the book down. It seems as if there's an almost poetic
sensibility at work.
TF: I've written fiction since I was eight. I abandoned it
because both my parents were wannabe writers who were also
jealous and competitive, and because there were family secrets that
couldn't be told. When I came back to writing, I started with poetry,
and I still do write it, although it's kind of my secret.
RH: The language you use is somewhat poetic as well.
TF: I usually hear my stories, and when I revise, I can hear
what's wrong as I read them. I don't bother explaining to myself
what's wrong, I just know. It's a little like composing music.
RH: Do you read your stories aloud to yourself?
TF: Yes. I don't really need to, but it's a good idea and I advise
my writing students to do it. I literally can hear my stories the way
that you read a musical score. That's probably why voice is my first
concern when I teach writing.
RH: It's a quality that many writers underdevelop, preferring to
focus on characters or plots.
TF: Voice is a very scary thing for writers, because it has to do
with vision. It's who you are when you express yourself artistically,
and it means not copying anybody. Most writers first try to fit into
the establishment by living up to the generic idea of a storyist.
Particularly in America, where free speech leads to a multitude of
expressions of the trivial; being able to say anything you want is a
great way to inspire people to say nothing. Lots of the best writing
comes from countries where personal expression is restricted,
because it forces writers to find different ways to express
themselves. Language is precious and costly.
Most writing is taught formulaically: the Writer's Digest model,
"list 25 things about your character". When I teach, I always teach
voice first. It's not just a question of the specific musical notes in a
piece, it's about the composer's involvement in the work. When you
find your voice, you create the stories only you could have
written.
RH: Is your voice particuarly suited to shorter forms, or do you
want to write novels eventually?
TF: I'll never stop writing short stories, but I actually have
written a novel, a novel about cyberspace that I was commissioned
to write, which I'm revising right now. And I'm working on another
one. I see myself doing both.
My stories, from my first collection, Desire, to this book, have
gradually been getting longer, and each of the Black Sparrow
collections includes a novella consisting of interconnected stories. My
voice seems to have been able to sustain itself for greater lengths the
more I've written.
I think what distinguishes people who write short stories from many
novelists is a different sense of time. The novelist believes more in
cause and effect. Epics, the slow culmination of events, make sense to
the novelist. Short story writers tend to believe in epiphanic
moments. There's a place for both beliefs, but I'm suspicious of
causuality and I believe in the epiphanic moment.
RH: One aspect of the epiphanic moments in several of your stories
I want to discuss is their ambiguity. In some cases, the exact same
story could appear in either a fantasy or science fiction magazine or a
mainstream literary magazine and fit in perfectly.
TF: I'd say that it's surrealism, which is different from fantasy
and science fiction. Surrealism presents the reader with
extraordinary events that occur in an ordinary world. Science fiction
usually involves extraordinary events in an extraordinary world that
provides a causal explanation for those events.
RH: There's a triptych of stories in Sleeping in Velvet about
cyberspace, and it strikes me that cyberspace itself is a very
surrealist environment.
TF: It is. You don't meet people in cyberspace; they create
characters, they invent the world as they go along. For many people,
it can feel like an alternate reality.
RH: How long have you been online?
TF: I started on the Well in 1990, and I started hosting the
Writers conference shortly after I came on. I think doing the
conference attuned me to the creation of a community in the ether,
one where people don't have bodies, where time is a flexible fourth
dimension, and where voice is extremely important. You have to
become aware of how your posts are seen by the reader to thrive in
that community.
RH: Do you see any connection between your surrealist sensibility
and your psychic abilities, in terms of seeing the world differently
than other people?
TF: That's interesting; I've never thought about that before. I
don't know very many psychic readers who are also writers, so I just
don't know. I think maybe my psychic background turns up more in
the way I see relationships between characters, the way I see people
together. If a character doesn't feel embodied to me, they don't feel
real...and it's not about knowing the color of their eyes, it's a deep
sense of how they move in time and space. But I'd have to think
about whether there's a deeper connection between that and the
surreal. Maybe surrealism is a slightly more flamboyant expression
of the imagination that all writers possess.
RH: Black Sparrow Press has done a really wonderful job with this
book. It's a very beautiful physical object. And this is the second
book you've published with them.
TF: I adore Black Sparrow. It's very hard to get John Martin,
the publisher, to accept new writers; he prefers to publish editions of
older writers like Wyndham Lewis. There are two big advantages to
publishing with him. He always keeps your books in print, and if he
believes in your work, there's a literary freedom almost nobody else
provides. I can write almost anything, and John rarely edits.
RH: I noticed that both books feature epigrams from Yeats.
TF: I noticed that, too, although it wasn't a conscious decision.
Wallace Stevens is my very favorite poet, but I think Yeats talks
about passions in a way that's more soulful for me. And when I was
studying writing, I studied him because I was interested in meter
and rhyme, in breaking down the elements of writing. He got under
my skin at a time when I was really beginning to think that writing
had to be my career.
