Past Resident

Devan Collins Del Conte

Devan Collins Del Conte is a queer fiction writer interested in how physical laws and landscapes shape human understanding and mythmaking, from folklore to science fiction. Her creative work employs the fantastical to explore those domains. Devan earned a BS in Physics and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Memphis, where she served as a fiction editor and contest coordinator for the Pinch Literary Journal. She is a former SAFTA resident, and her short fiction has appeared in The Rupture, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. Devan is currently at work on her first novel.

Q&A with Devan Collins Del Conte (from the Crosstown Arts newsletter, Jan. 15, 2021):

Crosstown Arts residency alumnus Devan Collins Del Conte is a queer fiction writer interested in how physical laws and landscapes shape human understanding and mythmaking, from folklore to science fiction. Her creative work employs the fantastical to explore those domains.

Devan earned a BS in Physics and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Memphis, where she served as a fiction editor and contest coordinator for The Pinch literary journal. She is a former Sundress Academy for the Arts resident, and her short fiction has appeared in The Rupture, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. Devan is currently working on her first novel.

Crosstown Arts registrar Jesse Butcher caught up with Devan to discuss her writing process, the magic of waterways, past works, and her novel in progress.

Jesse Butcher: Absence, both physical and emotional, permeates many of your recent works. The longing and desire for connection to other humans, to nature, and to oneself is both beautiful and mournful. What is your writing process to occupy and interpret these tales?

Devan Collins Del Conte: I’ve always admired writers who are able to sit down and say: I’m going to write this kind of thing to achieve that kind of goal, and it’ll take about 2,000 words. That has never been something I’m able to do. Most of my stories start with a single image or line or idea and then grow in unpredictable ways.

For instance, “Again Undine” was originally intended to be centered on a community of men working on shrimp boats, but the more research I did, the more these scraps of dialogue and description came to me that were for another kind of story entirely. Even though it was so different from what I intended, I loved it, and that ended up being the story I wrote, and the seed of the initial idea is contained within it. For “In Frame,” I just heard Lula’s voice and knew this person was obsessed with the image of lost shoes on the highway, but I had no idea who she was, age or gender, or any of that until I began writing the story and was actually very surprised that I wrote my way into a child’s perspective.

The novel I’m working on now started with a big fat emotion that I had attached to a piece of land in Mississippi. The land was supposed to be a subdivision, but the project had run out of money halfway through construction of the model home. So then it was just a single, half-built house and two hundred acres of pine forest, ponds with cars and televisions sunk at their edges, and a bunch of poorly tended horses trying to find enough grass to eat amongst a bunch of inedible, resinous weeds. A friend and I had access to that space for a summer (we fed the horses, don’t worry), and it made me feel wildly nostalgic for some life I’d never lived. After trying to write an essay about that over and over, I ended up with a novel manuscript that, at this point, contains barely any recognizable remnant of the original concept, but still it’s in there and essential.

There’s an initial seed and then a lot of exploratory writing, outside research, a great deal of revision, and in every instance, there’s a moment where I think, “Oh crap, this is going nowhere!” Or, “It’s going way too many places!” But then eventually, another kind of moment comes where the story finds itself, and I can work very clearly toward something that seems suddenly to have been there all along, under the surface and awaiting a careful excavation. That’s always exciting. Because then it becomes a question of the skillful rendering of something inevitable — of revelation rather than invention.

Your point about absence and connection is I think spot on, but it’s less of a conscious thing for me and more of a fundamental reason that I write. Connection is difficult and incomplete and always based on some assumed or constructed narrative model of reality: our own or another’s or an imagined objective reality. I think I’m drawn toward characters who are grappling with that same issue: that perhaps a life well lived is an always asymptotic approach toward intimacy, or understanding, or belonging. So how do you come to terms with that limitation? How do you try do something with or about it? I think often what you do is try to share a story.

Children’s curiosities and constructions also play a vital role in many of these works. Emphasis is also placed on isolation for both comfort and control. Rooms are often locked, closets become decorated hiding places, and the space underneath the bed becomes a construction site for dioramas. How have these architectural elements helped you design the arc of your stories?

I tend to write about children because they live facing this strange contradiction where their whole job is to receive and reinterpret models of what on earth this life is: an exhaustive processing of the human condition and their place within it. How do we live and why? Why are the folks in charge doing what they’re doing? Why are they so often contradicting themselves? Why do concepts of fairness exist if no one will adhere to them? Figuring this out and learning the rules is their primary and recognized occupation, but at the same time, their conclusions are often treated by adults as foregone or trivial or just inconvenient. There’s an attitude of dismissal, or patronizing indulgence, or a sort of appropriative pride toward their struggle and creativity.

So a lot of the stories I write that feature kids are built around bearing witness to and elevating that struggle and making it central. I’m very interested in how all of my characters interact with their landscapes and physical environments — how those environments shape and are shaped by the stories those characters tell themselves about the world. But with the children, it is more often scaled down out of necessity. Where can you go when you’re very little in order to sort things out? What power do you have? Where are the recesses of your environment where you can exert a certain level of conscientious physical control? These are usually going to be small and overlooked spaces. I like to zoom in on those.

Water and specifically the ocean play a crucial role in several newer works, functioning as both an institution for rebirth and a site of tremendous potential catastrophe. When did these nautical elements arise for you as a place with such poetic potential?

I think being alive now means living with, at the very least, a constant background hum of anxiety about the climate crisis and the accompanying destruction of global ecosystems. I’m constantly worried about and drawn to the water in equal measure, mourning in advance and in real time what we have collectively done, and can’t seem to stop doing, to the oceans and waterways (what we can’t stop doing to ourselves).

At the same time, waterways are undeniable sites of real magic, of the transformation and assemblage of molecules, the origin and sustenance of life. They are a symbol and manifestation of unity, of the interconnectedness and fragility of all life on this little planet. And they seem like a good place for the sort of work I’d like a lot of these stories to be participating in: which is a sort of sifting and rebuilding and renewal of old stories, a sussing out of what’s appropriate and useful for rebuilding relationships of reciprocity with the land and with each other that can potentially sustain us, and lead us toward more sustainable behavior.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, an ethnobotanist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, encourages people to reconnect with their own ancestors’ stories, their mythologized and instructive understandings of relationship with and participation in their ecosystems, the gift of responsibility. That seems to me a worthwhile endeavor and one in which waterways and story both play a critical role.

Several stories have moments that inhabit the process of awakening and the pivotal moment between cognizance and forgetting one is dreaming. It’s such an impossible space to describe, but I relish your use of it within your stories. When you are composing these inner dialogues, how do you begin to design the character’s voice? Do you think of them as colors, as scents, as seasons?

In one of my first workshops, I wrote a character who was in a full-blown psychotic episode, and the feedback I got from my professor at the time was that characters so disconnected from reality are rarely engaging, that it’s much more interesting to access that same space by keeping one foot in the realm of reality, the other foot lost in the recesses of a character’s private vision of the world, their dream or fear or delusion. That instruction stuck with me and is useful, because I do like to spend a lot of time with characters in those blurry places. I think it’s possible to become self-indulgent or overly abstract within them.

In terms of accessing a character’s inner dialogue, I find that usually less a question of design and more one of acquaintance: if I make decisions about who the character is, how they live, and what preoccupies them, then at a certain point and after certain number of drafts, I tend to be allowed access to how they think and speak, and I can let the prose run wild and unconstrained. After that, it’s a matter of carefully hemming it in, pinning that internal reality down to the concrete. Those points of connection where the internal hooks into the external, those are the points of contact by which we can pass stories along. That’s the part that has been a much harder thing for me to learn and to continue to learn: how to tie that voice down to the aspects of external and shared reality that make the character’s individual and sometimes highly disordered or discordant experience transferrable and meaningful outside of themselves.

Mason and Phoebe are recurring characters both in “Sluts Like Us” and “In Which Phoebe Does Not Make Things Harder.” Are you planning to expand their universe into a full-length work, or are we left to imagine the world they will inhabit?

The short answer to this is I don’t yet know. The project I’m working on now, a novel which I expect will continue to demand my attention for a good deal of time, has plunged me fully into the realm of science fiction: an alternate world, an emphasis and exploration of the deep past, a much broader scope of action than Phoebe and Mason’s stories. So it’s a totally different thing to imagine returning to Phoebe and Mason’s world, which is one of contemporary realism.

While their stories are not strictly autobiographical, they pull a lot more directly from my lived experience than anything else I have written. Writing their stories was a big part of processing certain eras of my life — of having been a child, of recognizing and embodying my own queerness, of struggling with mental health and a desire to live awake in the world, to stop self-destructing at every turn. I have a lot invested in those characters and can absolutely imagine a time when I return to them. I can imagine such a return feeling necessary, because they really have helped me. I have a lot of pages of their lives written that have not made it into finished work, and I definitely wonder how Phoebe is doing at twenty-five, thirty, fifty. It’s hard to say for certain, but I would guess I’ll go back to them when I feel grown up enough to take care of their stories properly. I think, for now, I’ve sort of caught up with the aspects of their lives that I have the proper distance from and perspective on to do justice to. For now, they’ll just be living their lives while I live mine, and hopefully we’ll meet again.

Thank you so much for letting us into your world. We look forward to immersing ourselves in your novel!