Eniko Deptuch Vaghy: Hello, Meghan, it is such a joy to get to discuss your work
with you and to also welcome you as the new Creative Nonfiction editor of
Lover’s Eye Press.
Meghan Lamb: Hi, Eni. Thanks for the opportunity.
EDV: What themes do you find yourself gravitating to and/or returning to in your
work? What haunts you?
ML: I don’t know if I’d call this a “theme,” per se, but I’m interested in in-between
spaces: liminal spaces, transitioning spaces, spaces stuck in time (that refuse to
transition), spaces that are neither this nor that. I’m also interested in in-between
people, both in terms of those who occupy in-between spaces, and in terms of
people who live on the fringes of spaces: people who don’t really belong
anywhere, and—for that reason—have a particular kind of vulnerability (and,
perhaps, a strange power that comes from vulnerability).
EDV: Mirror Translation takes place very clearly in Eastern Europe. Of course,
being Hungarian and having traveled to Hungary as a child, I could pick up on
your references and kept on imposing my memories of Budapest onto your
writing. Because I’ve known you for years now, I also know you’ve traveled to
Hungary, as well. However, you soon mentioned Cyrillic—an alphabet
Hungarians do not use—and that didn’t throw me off so much as intrigue me
about how you were approaching Eastern European countries and identity. What
made you want to approach Eastern European as an amalgam? What is it about
this representation of Eastern Europe that compels you?
ML: I’m glad you could engage with the landscape of these stories as both a
recognizable space and a blurry, not fully recognizable amalgam, because that’s
very much how I wanted the Eastern Europe of Mirror Translation to read. I
developed the world of this collection as an amalgam for several reasons. I don’t
necessarily want to reveal all of those reasons, but I’ll try to gesture to the main
driving ones.
First off, I wanted to create an uncanny atmosphere, kind of like a modern tale. In
many ways, I think tales are the purest form of horror. You first encounter them
when you’re a child—a tiny, in-between, not-yet person—who’s trying to figure
out how the world works, to understand the logic of adult language, behaviors,
ideas that seem strange and foreign, even if you see them everyday. Tales are a
kind of imaginary in-between space, I suppose, from the standpoint of
defamiliarizing reality—as the adult tale-teller knows it—and giving the child-
listener a kind of alternate reality to engage with: an in-between space where
their two understandings of the world can meet. That, and, of course, there’s a lot
of creepy shit in tales. Literal and metaphorical wolves swallowing little girls.
Husbands who give their wives a blood-stained key to a secret room (containing
all the other murdered wives). Witch houses that move around on giant chicken
legs. Princesses donning animal skins to escape from their rapist fathers. This is
all to say: I wanted the Eastern Europe of this collection to be that kind of
uncanny, in-between tale-like space that hovers somewhere above the world as
we know it, while being just recognizable enough that it allows the reader to
perceive reality in a new way, perhaps with a heightened sensitivity toward things
that would otherwise go unnoticed.
More specifically, I wanted to write a landscape that was both relatable and
totally alien to anyone reading it, that any reader could simultaneously inhabit as
an insider and outsider (because all of these stories are steeped in that insider-
outsider tension). When I lived in Hungary and traveled throughout Eastern
Europe, I noticed a certain tendency—at least, among the people I
encountered/the people who were eager to commune with an American—toward
scapegoating, a kind of mentality like, “Oh, our country is in the toilet, but at least
we aren’t like the real bad guys in Poland…or Russia…or Serbia…or the U.S., or
whatever,” and I wanted to shine a light on that tendency while also making it
more difficult to default to, if that makes sense. I didn’t want to write an unsettling
environment that could be easily brushed off as “scary and bad because ___ is
scary and bad.” I wanted readers to be engaged in the process of othering, and
to always feel like an other/outsider in the narrative landscape.
In many ways, this was also the most (and perhaps the only) natural way for me
to write toward the landscape of Eastern Europe. I lived in Eastern Europe for a
little over a year (and would have lived there longer, if the COVID pandemic
hadn’t disrupted my plans), but throughout that time, I was very conscious of my
liminal residency, of the outsider-aura that followed me everywhere I went. By
writing this landscape as an amalgam, I was able not only to gesture toward that
sensation (of in-betweenness, of foreignness, of liminal residency), but to
incorporate little bits of experiences from all the places I briefly inhabited. This
book contains bits of Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro,
Lithuania, Latvia, and Macedonia. It also contains a lot of actual lived
experiences that I formerly tried to write as autobiography, and failed to write
because I didn’t feel a claim to the space I was writing toward. I certainly didn’t
want to write something like, say, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
(which is an amazing book, but also kind of an insane ego trip, the idea of
purporting to be an expert on some place you only spent a few weeks traveling
through). So, this is all to say: I guess the amalgam was meant to free me from
making a claim toward something that wasn’t mine…or, at least, to free me from
my overwhelming consciousness of that claim long enough to write what I wrote.
But beyond all that, the title of the collection itself is a major hint-hint, wink-wink
in this direction. I want identities—American and Eastern European alike—to
mirror, merge, bend, and refract, in the world of this book.
EDV: I’d really like to discuss the significance of atmosphere and weather in your
work. When I read your previous work Coward, everything about that book was
hot, stifling, on the verge of suffocating. I use these terms in a complimentary
way, they are indicative of how you convey the “no way out” trajectory of your
characters’ lives. In Mirror Translation, everything is so…cold. And when things
are warm, like in the story “Mirror Translation,” your protagonist cannot take it for
long. Eventually, you offer us this great description of her: “She is a channel for
the cold. She is becoming liquid cold.” When you’re crafting a world for your
audience, what is your relationship to these worlds’
atmospheres/weathers/ecologies like? What is their purpose?
ML: Oh, how interesting! Honestly, I don’t think this was something I was
consciously trying to develop on the page (though now that you point it out, I
certainly see it). Maybe the back and forth interplay of hot and cold books is my
subconscious homage to the hot and cold novels of Anna Kavan (and the way
she’d relocate the same essential plot sculptures and characters into hot and
cold environments).
But beyond that…I don’t think of this hot versus cold atmosphere in terms of any
specific meaning-making end, or interpretive purpose (or in terms of any
single/diagnosable purpose). Maybe it’s just another layer of liminality, as you’ve
suggested: a way of thinking about experiences we endure for long periods of
time, versus experiences we can only hold for a very short, very intense liminal
space and time. Or maybe it’s something akin to the ways we characterize hot
and cold cultural phenomena, like The Seattle Freeze, or The Cold War.
EDV: I loved the grotesque kind of sexuality your first two stories “The Space of
Memory” and “Mirror Translation” portrayed. In “The Space of Memory,” this
really denigrating husband gets this marvelous kind of comeuppance in a remote,
swanky strip club which sort of reminded me of the club the characters in
Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (La Bête) repeatedly return to. Then, in “Mirror
Translation” a foreigner finds herself physically overtaken by her paramour Anna,
and this reminded me of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. Both stories take on
the subject of sex work as well as literal and figurative consumption. Could you
say a little more about your approach to these elements in your book?
ML: Both stories are essentially situations where fantasy blurs with reality, and
the characters are questioning: “What am I paying for? How much does this
payment entitle me to?” And in both stories, I think the main character essentially
gets what they asked for, in a horrifying (but maybe strangely liberating?) way.
I don’t know that I have much to say about “literal and figurative consumption”
that hasn’t already been said, but I am interested in the overlaps between service
work and sex work. I first read about the concept of “friends for hire” in an article
on Calvert Journal, and I was perplexed by this idea as (something that was
being presented as) distinct from, say, hiring an escort, or hiring a sex worker to
perform “the girlfriend experience.” Most of the people interviewed in this article
(who’d worked with “friends for hire”) were lonely and isolated in one way or
another: immigrants, students, liminal inhabitants of Eastern Europe (much like
myself, at the time when I encountered the article). And most of the people being
interviewed stressed that they were just looking for companionship, patience, and
understanding. Someone to have coffee with. Someone to practice the local
language with. Someone to make day-to-day life feel a little more habitable.
But when I went to do research for a possible story on these “friends for hire”
(which is to say, when I started poking around the mostly Russian websites
referenced in the article), most of what I saw looked a lot like escort ads. And,
much like escort sites, the “recipients of friendship” would leave weird little
reviews of their “friendship experiences” that seemed to be winking toward sex.
So, I don’t know what to say about these overlapping discourses beyond what
I’ve written in these stories, but I guess it’s interesting to me that 1) we have
different scrims of plausible deniability for what ultimately end up being the same
fantasies, and 2) immigrants and transients are so often the target audience for
these “services.” Fantasy is particularly treacherous terrain for people who are
already estranged…when the fantasy is of a kind of normalcy. This isn’t a
profound or particularly original idea, but there were definitely times when I felt
very vulnerable and exploitable (as a foreigner who just wanted to walk to the
neighborhood Spar without feeling exposed to the elements).
EDV: Let’s talk about this amazing album! Mirror Translation is this multimedia
work—you’ve got your literature, your music, and then art by our very own Art
editor Shannon Hozinec—and I’m really curious about how you approached
recording these tracks that you sent along (and which we will not be publishing
here. Sorry, y’all, you’ll just have to buy the full work!). What was going through
your mind when you imagined these tracks? What are those visions like?
ML: It was a very intuitive process, way more so than writing. You’ll have to ask
Shannon if you want to know about her end of the process, because honestly,
the entirety of it was me giving Shannon the book and asking, “Would you want
to make some paintings as illustrations for these stories?” And then, Shannon
just made a bunch of amazing paintings and I greedily used them.
Music-making has always been a very intuitive process for me. I feel very free in
what I’m doing because I feel no obligation to pretend that I know what I’m doing
(and I don’t and I never will, haha). Maybe I’d feel differently if I taught music “for
a living”/had to perform the role of “expert” or “model” or “mentor” in some
capacity.
But a lot of that freedom also comes from a certain collaborative sensibility,
whether I’m freely “borrowing” and remixing recorded sounds from the world
around me, or collaborating in a very literal way, as I did with Robert (my
husband/the other/better half of our noise project, Violet Fistula). Robert would
basically send me batches of rough tracks he’d been toying around with, and I
would hone in on something I found interesting/find ways to “bring that thing out
even more” (whether by isolating a particular beat or sound, or chopping it
up/turning it onto more of a motif…honestly, I’m such an idiot in this arena of
artistic endeavor that I don’t even have the language to effectively describe most
of what I do; I just do it, lol).
All the Mirror Translation album lyrics are essentially a hodge podge of
“moments” from Mirror Translation, but they’re definitely not a linear narrative…or
even necessarily the same narrative as the book artifact. Making those tracks
was a delightful way to re-engage with something I’d created, and to expand it
beyond my original imagination as a text. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of
this dual book/album experiment, if anything. When you’re distributing on this
niche-y little scale, the “if anything” is always a matter of dark internal debate, but
whatever. It was cool to work with other people and brush fingers with their own
interpretations of my project.
EDV: This is a bit of a segue, but I always love to know what media and literature
people are obsessing over. So, give me the last book, album or song, and film
that inspired and/or thrilled you and tell me why they resonated with you.
ML: I’m always so bad at this question…it feels like so much pressure to make
something that isn’t about me “about me,” but I also get why it’s an important
question to ask and answer, so I’ll just stop whining and answer it!
I think I told you about the most recent book that really inspired (or, at least,
inspired me down a particular path): Underneath by Lily Hoàng. Lately, I’ve been
really interested in alternative narrative structures…or, more precisely, stories
that innovate on their own narrative structure in radical ways from beginning to
end. I think this is a particularly valuable practice (I guess “practice” is the best
word for what I’m getting at) when an author is “fictionalizing” something “true,” a
story the reading public ostensibly “already knows.” By constantly pushing,
morphing, and re-shaping the reader’s understanding of “what the thing is,” the
author prevents the reader from feeling too settled and stable in their
understanding of the truth. Anyway: It’s a remarkable book, and its inspired me to
propose a course on True Crime Fiction which showcases other books that
endeavor to do different versions of what Hoàng’s doing so beautifully. And yes,
I’m sure it goes without saying that I also hope to write a book of true crime
fiction that inhabits my own tensions with those two words…but I’m still going
back and forth about my subject and my approach to said subject.
Pharmakon’s Maggot Mass was definitely the album that embodied this year for
me, creatively, emotionally, existentially (and, of all the tracks on that album, I’m
definitely most haunted by the final one, “Oiled Animals”—which, interestingly
enough, was the first track she wrote for the album, and I love the idea of a
reverse process like that). I won’t endeavor to say too much about this album that
she has already written so much about (and written about so much more
beautifully than I can), but I will say that her blend of ferocity and vulnerability,
righteous rage and squirming culpability, raw terror and surprising beauty—all
these neither-this-nor-thats, contradictions that aren’t contradictions…they
resonate with me and inspire me to sit with/within difficult spaces.
EDV: Meghan, this has been an awesome discussion. I’m so excited for you and
the projects you will be creating.
ML: Aw, thanks! And likewise!
Please follow the link to read Meghan's story "The Space of Memory," originally published in Grimoire.
Meghan Lamb is the author of Mirror Translation (Blamage Books, forthcoming in 2025), COWARD (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2021) All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020) and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). Her work has also appeared in Quarterly
West, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and Passages North, among other publications. She
currently teaches creative writing through the University of Chicago, Story Studio,
GrubStreet, and Hugo House. She is the fiction editor for Bridge Journal and
Bridge Books, and the nonfiction editor for Lover's Eye Press and Nat. Brut. She also
creates music, video, and performance art under the names Iron Like Nylon and
Violet Fistula (in collaboration with her husband, Robert Kloss).