A Conversation with Olympia Vernon

ROWELL:

I am aware that you were encouraged by some of your English professors to write creatively when you were an undergraduate student majoring in Criminal Justice at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. What motivated you to enter Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge to study for the MFA degree in Creative Writing? In other words, how did you move from criminal justice to creative writing? Were you writing before you went to study in Hammond? How did you come to this art form—the writing of prose fiction? Do you also create in other art forms?

VERNON:

There is the sperm, the egg, the embryo. And I have pictured myself in it. And in it is the Word. And thus it was there, before my conception, lying upon some grand tune. Yes, some thing must have been lurking then—the mercurial harvest of the violin, perhaps—wailing upon my birth that this, this woman, this Word, this Word and woman are, alas, thus and coming.

I would lie, for hours, upon the earth, during my childhood, imagining my Birth as an atom, something atomic, some particle whose first Birth was a motion; an angle—the response that I had come from my mama’s belly was not enough—I had seen pictures in encyclopedias of the umbilical cord; of Birth happening; of that elongated canal that tugs at its subject. In that human space was I captured by Birth, itself, as first an idea that had come from the angle of two people. I found it fascinating that two people could lie together, could angle themselves incredibly in the throes of diction, of language, the vocabulary of some inaudible predicament, and with this, their lives, the atlas of their lives, of the words unspoken give Birth to another human being who possessed these words, these traits, these fascinations.

Thus, the Word came.

And I was mesmerized by it.

By the sound it made in my throat, the nature of its unapologetic innocence. My mother will tell you, if you asked her now, who she thought I was and who she thinks I am now; but the Word came first, before her, before my father, before each of them were merely ideas passing through the spatial diction of a moment between them. And because of this angular motion, the angular entrapment of two people, did I come.

My mother will also tell you that I have been in love with the Word since the beginning. I was raised with farmers and hunters. I woke to the scent of blood: the fresh corpse of a cow, gutted and pulleyed, strung upon some machine, the world bloated and cascading atop the surface of its eye. I woke to the sound of a gun, the deer hunter. Have you ever seen the posture of a creature when a bullet strikes it? It is much like the visceral effect of witnessing a kite roaring upon the wind with its wooden throat. It is the sound of that crackle. Of death. To witness a deer, with its lean and graceful strut, to witness its legs coming out from under it when the bullet strikes will shatter the innocence of the things you carry in your heart.

For with every angle, I saw the Word. And it was bloody; because the world was bloody. I did not understand it, then. But every motion, every angle of both human nature and behavior passed through my eye in words. Always, always in words. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine witnessing these things as a child and feeling the words pass through your brain of their deaths? In your brain is a mausoleum of death, of creatures, of those who angled themselves to kill, like the deer hunter, the cattle killer.

So from the beginning, dearest Charles, life has been both honest and brutal in my eye, and the interactions of people were also brutal and honest; but they were also beautiful. I can recall the exact measurement of my mama’s hand when I stretched my face across her lap with the flu. It was less...