5 Questions with Chris Vanjonack
Last week, we published the final installment from “Harrison Changes.” Michael Colbert spoke with Chris about the project’s inspiration, body horror, and writing friendship narratives.
The Rejoinder: The first story of yours I read was a ghost story in One Story (I loved it). I'm curious--what initially drew you to speculative fiction? How does bending reality allow you to explore relationship dynamics in new ways?
Chris Vanjonack: The shortest and most honest answer is that I’ve always gravitated toward speculative books and movies and television shows, and so that tends to be the mode that I like writing in. I enjoy it when stories have ghosts or monsters or in them, and I like the hyper-specific itch that gets scratched when a piece of fiction presents a well-worn genre premise in a way that feels novel or exciting. At the heart of any good story is a sense of discovery, and when you’re playing in a genre sandbox, there’s a real opportunity to tie what the audience is learning about the characters to what the characters are learning about the world around them. Moments of joy and awe are so important. Beyond that, even if it’s subconscious, I think that what most readers want is simultaneously to be surprised by what they encounter in a story and to have that jolt of recognition when they come across a line or an observation or a relationship dynamic that feels like it was somehow transcribed from their own experiences. That’s definitely something that you can accomplish in a more realist setting, but it’s always been easier for me to get there in genre fiction. It’s possible I’m a little lazy in that regard.
TR: This story goes deep into body horror and the grotesque. How did the idea for this originate? What possibilities did it open for you?
CV: It’s changed so much since then, but I wrote the first draft of this for a college fiction workshop back in 2014, which now feels like several lifetimes ago. At the time, the idea that got me excited enough to actually write the thing was to try and do The Metamorphosis but with dysfunctional college roommates. I wasn’t thinking of it this way at the time, but in retrospect, it seems like everybody I knew back then had either recently endured or was embroiled within some relationship-ending roommate drama with someone that they had once considered a close friend. Even if their tangible complaints were about the petty minutia of cohabitating with another person—dishes piling up in the sink, significant others being over too often, whatever—the actual heart of their grievances always seemed to run much deeper. It’s painful to realize that you’re growing apart from someone that you love, and, especially in your teens or early-twenties, there can be an almost gothic hyperbole to that depth of feeling. I wanted to write a story where the divergence between the two leads hurt as much as possible, where it felt grotesque to even look at it.
TR: Harrison spends much of his time tracking developments in American politics. Does his descent into C-SPAN intentionally mimic his bodily transformation?
CV: I think in any degrading relationship, there comes a point when you realize that you and the person that you’re partnered with just don’t have as much in common as you used to. There’s nothing literally menacing about Harrison’s hyper-fixation on politics, but Steven is such a stunted figure that he can’t help but to be just as threatened by it as he is by Harrison’s bodily metamorphosis. His best friend throwing up worms is unexplainable and upsetting, but he interprets Harrison getting into The Daily Show in high school and attending DSA meetings in college as a kind of betrayal. It’s all so mixed up for him.
TR: I found the friendship between Harrison and Steven to be touching and complex. Steven always has a hard time describing what Harrison means to him; I'm curious how you think about writing friendship narratives. Are they more complicated than romantic ones?
CV: I think friendships are just complicated in a different way. There’s less of a script for them than there is for most monogamous relationships, less of a roadmap. The majority of platonic connections don’t end in a break-up or a long-term commitment but somewhere in a more ambiguous and often unspoken middle. I’ve had fallings-out with friends that have felt just as devastating as any romantic separation, and I’ve had early periods of infatuation with new ones that have felt just as euphoric as any honeymoon period with a significant other. Because there are fewer models for what friendships can look like, in some ways I think it can be harder to directly communicate with a friend about the ways they make us feel, be it love or jealousy or resentment, or, in the case of Steven and Harrison, a rocky combination of the three. I don’t think friendship gets explored enough in fiction. Usually whenever you have a situation where it’s difficult for two people to communicate what they mean to one another, you’ve got the starting point for a pretty good story.
TR: What's exciting to you in fiction right now--whether with your writing or reading?
CV: For the first time in forever I’m not spending much time at all on short stories, and instead I’m plugging away on an in-progress novel about horror movies and friend groups and climate change. I’m excited about the project in a way that makes me nervous. It’s new territory for me writing something this long and this unwieldy, but I just read Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done and I was pretty blown away by that. Just a practical, very no-nonsense approach to drafting and revising long-form work that I think would be beneficial to pretty much any writer. Otherwise, I’m trying to cast a pretty wide net in terms of what I’m reading these days, with a focus on work that’s connected to the novel I’m working on but from a tilted angle. I just read The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Frannie Choi, for instance, and then Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage, and I’m halfway through my first collection of Eve Babitz essays. My writing is always better and more interesting when I’m reading a little bit of everything.
