Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.
Zilla: Rachel and I both absolutely adored Gyre, Dale Stomberg’s literary fiction novella about abuse, fate, the creative urge, and repeating our mistakes. We had to bring Dale in to talk about this work of art, so here he is! Dale, give us your best shot at putting the magic into words.
Dale: The story begins when Abigail is born with a fully formed adult consciousness and an awareness that she has lived a prior lifetime, albeit with no specific memories of her past life. As an adult mind in a baby’s body, she is physically helpless but also impossibly precocious. Her father, Raj, is overjoyed at how special she seems; her mother, Faye, is disquieted.
As Abigail grows up, scraps of memory from her prior life begin to return to her. She comes to understand that she did something terrible back then, and her wonder at being reborn clashes against her deep sense of shame and worthlessness. A family tragedy exacerbates the strain in Abigail and Faye’s relationship, and things start to spiral downward.
So the book ends up being a meditation on cycles of mistreatment, on the ways we struggle against our own pasts and ingrained predilections, and on how a sense of fate’s inescapability can come to tyrannise us.
Rachel: Can people change? The commercial fiction model is about a protagonist who changes as a result of their experience, and Gyre almost seems like a grim rebuttal to that narrative arc. How important was realism in this story?
Dale: The real world is given to us by evolution, by history, and by the ongoing machinations of disunited masses of individual minds. Fiction, on the other hand, generally takes place in a world created by a single mind. So it stands to reason that fiction will tend to be more orderly than reality. I think the stereotypical “tidy-change arc” is a symptom of this bent toward orderliness. There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with this kind of arc, but there’s also no law demanding that every story conform to it.
Can people change? (Yes! We’ve all seen people change for the worse. Your fascist uncle used to be hip.) I’d reframe the question: how much of the way we change is under our conscious control? To say, “I shall now change,” and expect to just up and change is of course about as realistic as deciding to forget your native language, on the presumption that it will be wiped from memory on the spot. We all know this, but this fact is also weird because supposedly “I” (and no one else) am in charge of “my” decisions. So we recognise that our behaviour derives only in part from the in-the-moment choices of a sovereign will.
Speaking only for myself, to attempt to control my own mind can feel like being in the pilot’s seat of a spaceship whose autopilot system fights me, sometimes allowing me to exert a certain amount of manual control or at least influence, but other times not. I think of the quarrels I’ve repeated “a thousand times” with someone close, quarrels which inexorably end up running along the same awful, habitual grooves—despite the fact nobody involved wants them to. I think especially of certain shortcomings of mine (thoughtlessness, forgetfulness, habitual failures to duly notice) whose core characteristic is precisely that they are outside subjugation to the conscious will in the moment they occur. So you might read the overarching situation in Gyre as an exploration of the feeling of self-heteronomy, of being unfree vis-à-vis your own self. The story has a magical-realist setup which makes its protagonist literally unfree, yet I also think the way it reads is that, within this unfreedom, she has some latitude of action, and what constrains her (at times) is not a monolithic external fate but an internally imposed fatedness. Does the fact it comes from within make it more, or less, unshakeable? Hard to say. But I think it is noteworthy that Abigail normally doesn’t say she is unfree—instead, she insists she is worthless.
Zilla: Abigail is unfree in some respects, though. She’s a victim of the cycle of abuse, she’s predisposed to alcohol abuse—though she’s also a victim of her own choice not to try to escape the cycle. How much did you intend to show her as doomed by the narrative vs doomed by her own choices?
Dale: The premise in Gyre, that Abigail knows she has been reborn, turns the whole story into, as it were, an extended metaphor, or in other words a story with two simultaneously possible readings. In the story’s reality, fate has mandated her path, so she is of course trapped by the narrative. To readers standing outside that narrative, I think this will be overlaid with a sense, perhaps familiar from their own lives, of existing hemmed within the consequences of a million prior decisions others have made, and of having before them only a very limited palette of available choices, a narrow range of freedoms within which to act, with not every freedom equally available: the cost of getting things wrong is higher for some paths than others, and our level of confidence that a path will lead to a good outcome likewise differs for each. Escape from is also escape to, and what is on the other side can be frightening in its unknowability.
In the face of such anxiety, the self erects defences. Abigail indulges in a dichotomy between blame and responsibility. The more harshly and pitilessly she blames herself, the more she damns herself as doomed never to change—which of course “absolves” her of responsibility to change, since you can’t very well escape your doom. I find it remarkable and difficult to explain why some of us cling so strongly to our own intense feelings of self-dislike. Perhaps this helps clarify it: a strong self-dislike can be easier to face than the fear of trying and failing to make forthright choices, even including choices which could offer us escape or liberation.
Zilla: One line that’s stuck with me is when Abigail suggests, “Perhaps a computer could be taught to write songs, but it would do it only when you told it to. A songwriter would write songs even if you told her not to.” It’s an interesting counterpoint to her mother Faye’ song writing, which is described that, “She wrote for the satisfaction of a puzzle well solved.” Is this the same kind of restless creativity, or is this a different flavour?
Dale: I think a fair number of would-be creatives (musicians, artists, writers, &c.) hit a snag in the gap between the initial urge to make something and the laborious process of seeing it to its conclusion. What sparks the creative notion and what drives the creative work can be different things.
Some creators I’ve known have had the ability (necessary in order for them to make a living) to create things according to someone else’s specifications. Think TV writers, or 3D animators, or pro songwriters. Because nearly any other job would have been easier to get into, they would never have become creatives if they hadn’t been driven by the pure need to create—but they are also able, for example, to revise dialogue (initially written by someone else) in response to notes given by the showrunner: to create art specifically to solve a problem set before them.
Faye is the sort of songwriter who has a knack for this. Doing so involves effacing the self, and (as the story shows) Faye has plenty of reasons for wanting to escape herself. But she also, when not working for hire, compulsively explores sound in a highly solipsistic way, a retreat-from-the-world that can be keenly personal. I think this latter personal exploration comes out of the restlessness Abigail mentions, but with Faye it’s a two-sided thing.
Zilla: I thought it was fascinating how Faye enjoyed the construction of a public persona. Could you tell us a bit about your thoughts on public vs private identities?
Dale: This ties quite nicely to that concept of two-sided-ness. Faye, like many entertainers, maintains two faces: one private, one public. I think many of us, though not famous, nonetheless might recognise this in ourselves. When I was a teenager, I was one person around my parents, a rather different person around my friends; I recall a situation once in which I, my mother, and a certain school friend were all in one place for the first time, and I experienced an uncanny weirdness that made me hesitant even to speak—I was unsure which version of me I should be. Each of those me’s was, in a sense, a construct, and they were not very compatible with each other.
The special thing about a public persona is that it is designed to ease you past such uncanny paralysis. The world will know you as, not the bumbling screw-up you are, but the manicured image you would rather be. The less fond you are of the person you imagine yourself to be, the more attractive you will find the possibility of donning a mask, and Faye knows that there is something festering down in her core, something she feels she must, at all costs, conceal. We were just talking about Faye’s two different modes of songwriting, and this ties in to that: for the most part, her personal explorations of sound and music stay concealed from the world. What the world sees are the songs she writes for others.
The mask can also pose a danger. However professionally detached Faye may be when writing for hire, when it comes to her passion projects, she has not risked exposure and thus has not developed any callouses. A point comes in the story when she reveals her private self to the world in a pair of songs but is unprepared for the attention, especially the criticism. She’s taken a rash risk and been unsteeled for the outcome—thrown herself from the pinnacle of the temple and expected angels to break her fall, as it were—in a kind of ill-considered gamble that to give the world a glimpse of what’s behind the mask will not bring disaster. But eventually her mask slips entirely off. The consequences are ruinous.
Rachel: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?
Dale: The best way to keep up with me is to sign up for my newsletter. It’s called The Seldom because I send it only seldom, but when I do, I include my own and my comrades’ writing and publishing news.
Or, for anyone who’d like to cut to the chase, Gyre is available as a paperback ($8 on Amazon) and an ebook ($3 on Kobo, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Amazon &c).
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