Rule-Breakers, Risk-Takers, and Romantics

Rule-Breakers, Risk-Takers, and Romantics

An Interview with Luanne Smith, editor of the anthology Taboos & Transgressions—Stories of Wrongdoing, which was inspired by a masterclass by Joyce Carol Oates that encouraged people to talk about taboos. by Kate Gale

KG: When most of think of taboos, we think of all those taboo things we were not allowed to do as teenagers, but did anyway, sex, drugs, cigarettes, older men, older women, cars, bars, and this book has some of that, but the taboos go much deeper.

Were you looking for specific taboos or taking excellent stories on the subject?

LS: We advertised for taboos from legal and moral to familial, societal, and cultural to the expectations of peers, friends, and the self. We wanted to cast a wide net and see what others defined as “taboo.” We had over 200 stories submitted in our open call, and we were looking for variety along with excellent writing in our choices.

KG: The story about Noah seems particularly well written. Can you talk about that?

LS: That story blew all of us away. My co-editor Kerry Neville read it first and immediately drew my attention to it. It is so original and powerful, and it was one of our early selections. We built the anthology around that story and a couple of others. Talking about it, it sounds so improbable. A story in the voice of a goat on the Ark, crowded conditions, stowaways, the modern element with dying cell phones, but ultimately, it works so well. The voice is particularly strong, and it is matter-of-fact about the improbable elements, making them seem ordinary and real. It’s a layered and emotional story without being sentimental or preachy. I feel it’s one of the best stories I’ve read in a long time.

KG: Tell us about working with Joyce Carole Oates and how that story came in.

LS: I worked with her agent and publisher, so there was no real contact with Joyce Carol Oates. She did inspire the theme of the anthology, though, as I say in the introduction, through her masterclass and her talk about writing about taboos. Because of that, I felt we had to have one of her stories. We read several to find one we wanted. I wanted a story of hers that was not anthologized over and over. I had read “Gargoyle” in Narrative Magazine years back, and because we also have “transgressions” in our title, we decided that story fit both the transgression and the taboo. I like that you feel for the character as you read the story, especially at the end. She is the one breaking the rules, but there is such loneliness in her voice, a desperation to her actions, that you read along thinking she is headed for disaster. I think the ending is the best part of the story because it is unexpected. Her emotions at the end, the image we are left with, they are not what we expect to find at the end of the story, but they ring true. I think Oates is one of the best when it comes to story endings and doing just this—taking us to an unexpected place. The story represented her work well, then, and fit with our theme. And I could afford the use of it in the anthology, which is a fact of publishing.

KG: The story about the man who kills people by drowning them in the Charles River seems to go beyond mere taboo. How do you see that?

LS: As I said, we wanted a wide variety of broken taboos, and breaking the law was part of that. It’s more than breaking a law; it is committing a sin within most religions, breaking expectations of civilization, etc. I went into our reading looking for one “murder story,” and Pamela Painter’s “Stroller” fit the bill well. There’s no remorse, which may be the ultimate taboo. There are two stories where you see little to no remorse on the part of the character. This one and “Not a Cupid” are disturbing stories for this reason. I felt, if we are going to put together an anthology on breaking taboos, we had to go as far as possible with the actions of the characters in the stories we selected.

KG: The Salem witch trial story felt so apt it was though I was waiting for it, can you talk about that story?

LS: I love Lee Zacharias’ story. First, for us, it was something entirely different from anything else we had selected. Secondly, it showed taboos have been with us throughout history. There is also a wonderful reader connection within the story through the actions of the girl towards the end. As we read and place ourselves back in that time frame, many of us would want to do what the character, Hannah King, does. We want to break the rules of that timeframe and that scenario. We want Hannah to do as she does. This, to me, is one of the interesting aspects of this book. In some of the stories, we want the character to go against family, society, laws, sins, etc. The breaking of the taboo is empowering. I wanted to touch on that phenomenon surrounding taboos—the desire to break the rules. In selecting stories, I looked for a few stories where this happened as well.

KG: Why do Biblically based stories work so well for a book about taboos?

LS: I think that for most of us growing up in America, the Bible is ever-present, whether one is Christian or not, a believer or not, so when you start looking at what is taboo, a lot of what is going to present itself is Biblically based. Just as Soniah Kamal’s piece set in Pakistan shows us cultural taboo there, many of the stories show us morally questionable behaviors in American culture. Also, when we think “taboo,” we think moral digressions first and foremost. While we wanted stories that examine breaking laws, stories that show empowerment through the actions and stories that explore very personal taboos, the moral choice is the one I think we consider first with the concept of the taboo. As a result, the Biblically based story is the moral story, the one we expect. That’s why the lack of remorse in certain characters in the book is so affecting. That’s the complete lack of any moral center.

KG: You touch on some of the big taboos including money and poverty. Why is money so difficult?

LS: We aren’t supposed to talk about money in our culture. We aren’t supposed to have poverty in the ideal America. But, of course, we do. I grew up blue collar in Kentucky, and I have hocked possessions to have enough money for gas to get to work. I want class represented in most any work I put my name on, and I gravitated to the stories that had something to say about this. Above all, we wanted excellent writing. Next, we wanted variety. Then we got into making sure certain taboo subjects were represented. We worked very hard at putting together a book that covered a lot of ground. In terms of money, I think class is often a hidden or forgotten issue, possibly because we want so much to believe in the American dream. In academia, I often found myself defending, say, students who came to us from community colleges. It isn’t always because of grades. It often has to do with what students can afford. I’m a product of two years at a community college before going to a four-year school. I was amazed how often I had to defend students in this position with colleagues. To me, this is indicative of society at large. The poor either haven’t worked hard enough to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” or they are lazy or some other derogatory notion. When you are poor, though, it is almost impossible to pull yourself out of it. But talking about that is a taboo in and of itself.

KG: The story about the young gay couple who haven’t come out touches on a different kind of taboo—being gay in a world where it isn’t safe. How do you feel about that taboo in America today?

LS: Cultural taboos are something we wanted to explore, and this, to me, is one of our big unvoiced or underlying taboos. Its cultural bias, sometimes based upon the Biblical, which we already mentioned. I believe the previous administration allowed a lot of ugliness to rise to the surface. Don’t get me wrong. That ugliness, that evil, was always there. It just became more “accepted”—and thus, more unsafe for certain individuals in America. The real taboo in such a story is the cultural thinking. That’s why a story like “I Still Like Pink” worked for us. It has one of those empowered endings I mentioned, and in ending this way, points out the backwards thinking of elements of our society. We have rules to make us safe and civilized. But what if the cultural taboos do just the opposite? We wanted to ask that question. I want to ask that question.

KG: For a kid admitting your parent is in prison is a taboo or a dating the son of a mother who is a prostitute, where is the line for you in the story you chose between taboo and shame?

LS: If we have characters incapable of any remorse or shame, then we needed the opposite. The two stories mentioned, for me, have more to them than shame. For Hadley Moore’s story on the father in jail, there is a family taboo of talking about this subject. With Soniah Kamal’s piece, which is memoir, by the way, she’s not even supposed to talk to boys, let alone date the son of a prostitute. There is a cultural taboo her mother does not want her to break. In other words, the line for me had to do with the underlying taboo creating the shame. Was there something cultural at work? Familial? Was there a taboo broken? But I see shame as going hand-in-hand with taboos. I chose the ending story because of the last lines that are all about feeling shame for one’s actions. I felt that was the best way to end this particular anthology, to show a character expressing remorse.

LS: This story, “She Sheds Her Skin,” was chosen by Maurice Ruffin as our prize winner. It’s a very textured story. First, we very simply have the taboo of prostitution. The character is unashamed of her actions, though, it seems, so there that word comes again—shame—and I think that adds to the strength of the story, to her strength as a woman. It’s a sensual story, another boundary it crosses. Can you write a sensual story about a prostitute? As far as gender taboos, it does address power in terms of gender, I think, in a way that ultimately makes a statement. She is more powerful on the testosterone, at least through our eyes, because she doesn’t work as a prostitute at that time. So does that mean her final choice is a failure? That’s another line this story crosses. The character comes across as very much in control of her choices and actions. She loses something important to her in the end, but still makes her own decisions. We don’t think a woman chooses prostitution. But this character does.

LS: I don’t know that we really get into all of those teenage taboos you mentioned. We certainly addressed some of them—drugs, sex, etc. I also would have liked at least one story that dealt with domestic abuse. Andre Dubus did this so well in some of his stories that I wish we had seen something like that in the submissions. Also, there were some excellent stories we chose not to use because they were too similar to something else we had selected. We had enough work for two anthologies easily, but not the budget. I made a point of casting that wide net, as I said, and I let the writers submitting determine the taboos we addressed. While there were some taboos I specifically looked for in our submissions, for the most part, I was as surprised as anyone by the variety of taboos addressed. I was pleased with the range of stories we received. There were some we saw so many stories about that I backed off using anything typical with them. The drug story, for instance, or the pedophile story. I think the stories we chose that do address these subjects are well-written and unique in their take on the subjects.

Overall, the anthology covers more ground than I expected it to when we first started. It touches on so many taboos and on both our need for rules and our need to break the rules sometimes. I’m excited by what we managed to put together and what we managed to say with this selection of stories.

Kate Gale is co-founder and managing editor of Red Hen Press, editor of the Los Angeles Review and teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction and in the Ashland, Ohio MFA Program.

Luanne Smith is a native Kentuckian who now lives between New Jersey and Florida. She is recently retired after 30 years of teaching creative writing and film at West Chester University near Philadelphia. Her fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Texas Review, Oxford Magazine and other literary journals and anthologies. She has published poetry and nonfiction as well. Luanne has hosted well-received AWP Conference panels focused on women writers and the challenges women face writing gritty material and bad-ass female characters. She last presented a panel on the double-standard women writers encounter compared to men when writing sexual content.