You searched for 2011/12/16/making-the-little-monsters-walk-an-interview-with-brad-watson | Numéro Cinq

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The Richard Farrell NC Archive Page

 

Richard Farrell

Richard Farrell is the Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet and a former Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq (in fact, he is one of the original group of Vermont College of Fine Arts students who helped found the site). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor, and a Navy pilot. He is a graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work, both fiction and non-fiction, has been published or is forthcoming in Descant, Hunger Mountain, Newfound, Blue Monday, Dig Boston, Contrary, Numéro Cinq, and others. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel. In 2016, he will be a resident writer at the Ragdale Artist Community in Lake Forest, Illinois. Richard lives with his family in San Diego.
Contact: richardfarrell@old.numerocinqmagazine.com

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Will, Kate & Osama: Jean Baudrillard on Royal Weddings and the Death of bin Laden

Deforming Form: Outlier Short Stories and How They Work

What It’s Like Living Here [San Diego]

Non-Commencement Commencement Address, January, 2011

Unintentional Pugilism: A Memoir

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The Decomposition of Continuous Movement: Review of Juan José Saer’s La Grande

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Laundromats, Lucky Charms and the Labors of Herakles | Review of Anne Carson’s Red Doc>

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Unmeasured Depths: A Review of Steven Heigthon’s The Dead Are More Visible

Desperate Wagers: Review of Scars by Juan José Saer

In Search of the Author, Barthes Be Damned: Review of The Selected Stories of Mercé Rodoreda

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Making the Little Monsters Walk: Interview with Brad Watson

And Make Mine a Double: Interview with Keith Lee Morris

The Confluence of Rivers: Interview With Tammy Greenwood

Change the Weather/Avoid the Dead: Interview with David Shields

When I’m in the Swamps, I Just Need Questions: Interview with R.W. Gray

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From Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives: Fiction — Brad Watson

Dec 162011
 

Brad Watson’s novella, “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,” is like a recursive dream.  You’re never certain about where one dream ends and where reality (or the next dream) begins.  At first glance, it appears to be a simple love story about Will and Olivia, two high school kids living in Mississippi. When Olivia becomes pregnant, they marry, rent a small apartment near a mental hospital and suffer through an oppressive, breezeless summer. Their ambitious love-making disturbs the landlady; their families object to the arrangement; they survive on leftovers and beer. One night, Will wakes and finds a strange couple sitting in his living room. They are familiar yet unnervingly strange. “‘We’re what you might call aliens,’ the woman said.” After this, things change in the story, in dramatic, funny, hopeful and heartbreaking ways.

Watson has re-written the contemporary love story. He challenges the basic assumptions of dreaming and waking states, questioning the idea of destiny and meaning. Part fantasy, part social commentary, part meta-fiction, part Southern Gothic, part autobiography, Watson’s novella bends conventional boundaries in weird and wild ways.  “Young people don’t just drive around, bored, drinking beer and crashing into trees and other vehicles, slashing and flailing away at one another in parking lots and vacant lots out of rage or boredom,” thinks the narrator near the end of Aliens.  Watson makes you wistful for those times.

Watson has written two collections of short stories. His first, The Last Days of the Dog Men, won the Sue Kaufmann Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,  was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize in Fiction and the St. Francis College Literary Award.  Two of his stories, “Visitation” and “Alamo Plaza,” were selected as PEN/O’Henry Award winners and included in the 2010 and 2011 PEN /O’Henry anthologies respectively. His novel, The Heaven of Mercury, was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award.

Read an interview with Brad Watson here at Numéro Cinq.

—Richard Farrell

 

From “Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives”

By Brad Watson

 

 

In the moment after the couple from the asylum had left us that previous night, when I had begun to construct our little paradise in my mind, Olivia had awakened, dressed quietly, crept from the house, down the steps from the rickety deck, and walked away.

As she walked, and as dawn seeped into the cooled August air, the landscape began to change until she knew she was no longer in our little hometown.  It was as if she didn’t know where she was, or where she wanted to be, and the landscape continually reshaped itself with the beautiful, disorienting whorl of a kaleidoscope turned by an invisible hand.

She put her own hand to her belly as she walked.  It was flat and soft.  Well, that was gone.  That had ceased to exist.  That was not a problem anymore.

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