L.J. Bowden’s “The Lack Of Noise” was selected for third place by our judge of this year’s Winter Short Story Award. Read the excerpt and then check out this interview in which Bowden discusses the importance of place, the addictive nature of loneliness, and the importance of distracting yourself.
One of the things Bret Anthony Johnston mentions in his introduction to “The Lack of Noise” is the specificity of detail surrounding place, noting that “this story could only happen where it does.” And something I keep coming back to is the scene with Vic and his father at night, his father taking aim with a rifle at a kangaroo. What for you is the importance in the relationship between place and conflict in this story?
An inability to express oneself honestly and sincerely is something very Australian to me. Even more so in rural Australia. A lot of the conflict in the story is a struggle to meet, achieve, or even be comfortable with a prescribed identity. This identity being the stoic, providing, and strong farmer/country-person. So when fulfilling this persona isn’t possible, both Vic and his father lack a sense of worth and social currency. To me, place and conflict is important because place holds an implicit criteria of behavior, of how to be. In a rural environment, the available barometer and yard stick one has to measure themselves against is limited. And what examples there are have been carved in stone by the families who survived. These exemplars are often always the height of tradition, a no-bullshit, don’t complain and carry on outlook. Growing up, I spent time in these places. The community warmth, the sublimity, and the way unwavering way of doing things are often sitting on top of a swelling feeling of loneliness. It’s like a violent persistence not to recognize pain. I feel as though an emotional conflict in a rural place is when this inability to ask for help poisons everything. I love country Australia, though.
At its core, this is a story about a boy coming to see his father in a different light, a kind of coming of age. What’s the effect, in your eyes, of being a witness to something like this?
I think it’s all about an inevitable sense of disillusionment—something everyone experiences with their parents. It’s about witnessing your parent’s fallibility and what that means to the child’s safety. In the story, it’s not just Vic understanding that his mother and father are deeply flawed, but him grappling with their inability to fulfill their rural identities. There is an internal abjection that ensues from this death of character. Further, this simultaneously becomes Vic’s reckoning with his future identity being taken from him before he could assume it. While a lot of the action in the story is the shifting dynamic between Vic and his father, to me, Vic’s relationship with his mother is of just as much importance, if not more (both unaware to him and me while I was writing it). In the scene in the kitchen, when Vic reaches out and touches Laurie on the back, an implicit recognition of trying but failing to connect is present. While Laurie and Foster can’t earnestly communicate with their son, neither can their son communicate with them. Essentially, he has become his parents. And in moments where slight actions of tenderness disrupt the silence, the characters will fall suit into their isolation. There is such an indulgence in feeling lonely. It’s addictive in the same way gambling is.
We’ve got three adults in this story—“Uncle Anthony” and Vic’s father and mother—and Anthony is the only one who really comes close to talking to Vic directly about what’s going on. That’s a delicate line to walk in fiction, especially with a first person narrator: keeping information from the character without obscuring what’s going on from the reader. Was that something you were conscious of while working through this story? Was it difficult to balance?
Yes. It’s obvious that parents have an inherent desire to protect their child but it gets to a stage where it becomes othering and ultimately damaging. In the story, the withholding of information is of a different breed between Vic’s mother and father. Laurie is almost fighting to maintain Vic’s innocence, while Foster is concealing his true character and the fear is of being revealed (there is also a subconscious fear that Foster will see his son display traits that he himself possesses, a kind of self-hatred and guilt I guess). Vic assumes he wants to evolve into an iteration of his father—the strong and silent farmer type—but in reality this identity is being dissolved for the both of them. On the other hand, Uncle Anthony has fewer stakes and can talk more sincerely with Vic about the decline of the family farm. Maybe not talk, but disclose and warn, and almost boast about his distance from this. It was a difficult thing to balance in the sense that I wanted Vic’s mother to have a desire to communicate honestly with her son, but be unable able to. Her relationship with Anthony was somewhat like a failing life raft for her and Vic. At the start of the story it could be intreated that she is excited and is holding things together. But this is shortly disabled after Foster’s drunken roo hunt. So, she holds things together until she can’t, until she starts drinking and recedes into silence. Like many that inhabit country spaces, they are a conservative family. And like many fathers in such environments, direct and earnest expression of emotional and financial states doesn’t really happen. That’s why when Foster tells Vic to come help him load chaff (hay bales), he rather instructs Vic to wait in the car so he can indirectly inform his son of the bleak circumstances via a conversation with another man (Sunshine). It’s not that Foster doesn’t want to be frank and direct with Vic, it’s more that he can’t—he doesn’t possess the skills. After all, it was he that lost the farm, and therefor the security of rural identity for his family.
I’m curious about your writing habits—what does your process look like?
It changes too much. Sometimes I can write at home—at the kitchen table or wherever—but more often than not I need to go to a library. I also write is short bursts. I’ll take quick walks, make coffee or tea, and go play basketball. I recently bought this perfect red bouncy ball. It’s really satisfying. When I first got it, it had a barcode printed on the surface, so I had to get a knife and etch that off. Now it’s just a perfect dark red sphere. Sometimes I will just stand by the table and throw it against the wall. I was hoping that by distracting my hands my mind would think of something interesting. It hasn’t worked yet. I’ll go through phases where I like to read a bunch before I start writing, but then I found myself being dishonest when I sat down. However, I’m sure that phase will come back. I’m terribly guilty at going through phases.
What are you working on now?
I’ve just started my MFA in creative writing at Boston University. It’s my first time in America. So far I love this city and I desperately want to be a Red Sox fan. But I am working on mainly short stories at the moment. I’ll endeavor on something longer soon. About two years ago I wrote a story that was roughly a hundred pages. When I went to revise the first draft I was so mortified that I cut it down into a short story. But I’ll take another run at it soon.
Interviewed by Cole Meyer