We chat with award-winning author Mary Otis about Burst, a powerful story about how we become—and unbecome—our mothers, how we absorb the past, and how we burst into our own futures.
What was the genesis of your novel, Burst?
Burst originated from my short story, “Flight,” which sprang from the image of a mother madly driving down the freeway with a child in the back seat of her car. Once the story was published in Zyzzyva, I thought I was done with the characters, but apparently, they weren’t done with me. It was a favorable and urgent haunting—powerful enough to carry me through many drafts and revisions of this novel until I finally reached the jubilant days when the story locked into place.
Often, synchronicity came into play. Once, after a long day of writing, I took a walk
in the park and saw a woman who bore a close resemblance to a character I’d just imagined. While writing a story or novel takes work, I have great respect for the invisible and mysterious signs and signals that guide us along the way, when it seems the world leans in and conspires with us to write.
What author or authors inspired you when you first began to write?
Two authors that inspired me when I first started writing are Alice Munro and Joy Williams. Alice Munro’s ability to inhabit and reveal the hidden, complex lives of her characters, her skill in moving forward and backward in time, and her ability to illuminate emotion with depth and precision showed me what was possible in scope and scale in a short story. Joy Williams’ writing is ominous and comic, and I am in awe of her spiky observations, ferocity, and ability to upend expectations, as well as the symbolic poetry of her language. I recommend Friend of My Youth (Munro) and The Quick and the Dead (Williams) as a starting place.
In the early chapters of Burst you write partially from a child’s point of view. You’ve also created younger narrators in some of your other work. What compels you to write about kids?
I’m pulled to write about children, particularly about their secrets, worries, and desires. Writing from a child’s point of view offers me the opportunity to access a kind of “clear channel radio” to the subconscious. With children there is that immediacy, lack of a filter, and extremely high stakes (even when the stakes are forgotten five minutes later). The writer Penelope Fitzgerald once said, “I like to bring in children because they introduce a different scale of judgment, probably based on one we taught them but which we never intended to be taken literally.” I find that very funny and true.
What is one of the central themes of Burst?
Risk is one of the unifying themes in my novel. In the opening scene of Burst, ten-year-old Viva and her mother Charlotte are barreling down the “suicide” lane in their old van. This was a type of highway that used to exist in numerous parts of the country—one in which drivers could pass going in both directions. In my novel, I wanted to illuminate the risks inherent in addiction as well as the emotional risks that need to be taken to flourish as an artist.
While you write about artists of all kinds, dance is central to your novel. Why did you choose to write about dance?
Dance is the ultimate harnessing of the ephemeral to the corporeal, and it’s a powerful way to express emotion and story. Sometimes words are ineffective and dance taps into human instincts at a visceral level. It’s an incredibly demanding art form, and unlike writing, which one theoretically could continue into old age, the length of a dance career is fleeting, and because of that the stakes are even more compelling. I wanted to explore the commitment with which my character Viva pursues dance, its costs and rewards, and how it becomes the organizing principle of her life.
What did you want to convey about alcoholism with this book?
One of the themes I wanted to explore in Burst is how artistic purpose and tenacity can lead to transcendence, and yet, how when artistic impulse is thwarted, that energy can express itself in destructive ways. I’m also interested in alcoholism as it dovetails with a crisis of personal faith or as a response to anxiety or deep and private pain. We’re an addicted culture, with some addictions being more obvious than others, and some being more accepted than others. I was pulled to explore how this plays out in different ways for my central characters.
What is your writing process?
My writing process has to do with being captured by something to the extent that I become somewhat obsessed about it. The emotional challenge is to head fully toward something that intrigues me, frightens me, or gives me great joy. I’ve been surprised to find that the emotion that yanked me into a story in the first place can crack open another emotion—usually one I didn’t expect. Finding something hilarious that on its face seemed tragic comes to mind. My intellectual challenge is to learn something I don’t know (or learn something new about something I do know) and share it in a way that readers can deeply connect to.
What part of the writing process do you find the most invigorating?
The “gathering” part, when I’m finding my way into a piece of writing, is invigorating and mysterious in that sometimes very unexpected things make their way into the work. The rigor of completing something is also compelling to me, and I love the feeling of being so deep in a piece of writing that I’m kind of living a double life—my actual life and the life of the story that, hidden, runs parallel to it when I’m working. I also actually like to revise, so, for me, each part of the writing process can be energizing.
Where do you find inspiration?
I often find inspiration simply by going about my day—running errands, walking in the park, going to the store, watching people at a stop light. I see and hear so many things that compel me, whether it’s the way someone moves or something they say, and I frequently write these things down on an index card. Sooner or later the image or line usually makes it into a piece of writing or provokes me to begin something new.
How do you hope readers will connect to your novel Burst?
Many readers are familiar with complex family dynamics as well as the processes of acceptance and forgiveness—each of which are often ongoing and not a conclusion. In all my work, I’m interested in illuminating character interiority and the mystery of people’s hidden lives, and I’m compelled to explore wonder and shame, longing and will. I hope that my readers will feel less alone and that they’ve had the opportunity to take a deep look into the mysteries of the human heart. I hope people will find that grace sometimes happens when you least expect it.
