Charles Yu selected Deahna Fumarol’s “Global Environmental Support Hotline” as the third place winner in our New Narratives contest. Read her story here and then check out this interview in which Fumarol talks about how the story came to take this form, injecting humor into serious writing, and the authors who influence her.
First, congratulations on being selected by Charles Yu as the third-place finalist! The idea of this contest was, in part, to encourage writers to push the boundaries of form, which “Global Environmental” certainly does. How did the story and form come together for you? Did you have the story and then the form? Or did the form come first?
Thank you! It’s an honor to have been selected, and to be among such exceptional company.
Around the time this came together, I’d been writing lots of procedural and systems poems: legal documents, medical reports, recipes, instructional manuals, etc. This story started as another systems poem, borrowing the framework of a customer support hotline, so the form absolutely came first. It was just a curious little freak that I almost abandoned, handwritten in my notebook—nearly all my writing is born there—but far more goes there to die.
And I guess that’s the vibe that teased the story out of the form. I’d also been reading a lot of postmodern pastoral poetry, which spills over into ecology, landscape, environmental stewardship. A lot of my attempts at writing pastorals went weird and apocalyptic, so I started writing into that. Mining the graveyard of my notebook weeks later, I came across it again and it basically fell together.
This story is laugh-out-loud funny, yet it’s grappling with big environmental issues. Was that difficult to balance? Were early drafts very different than the finished story?
I’m definitely one to try and lighten a heavy mood with a joke. Balancing big issues with humor comes naturally to me. Addressing serious things seriously is much trickier—I’m still working on that one.
The original poem was formatted as a general complaint line, more concerned with human inconvenience than larger environmental issues. Complaint tickets like “the weather forecast said it would be clear today, but it’s raining and now I am dissatisfied.” It amused me to scribble it down at the time, but I didn’t take it seriously as a poem, or anything else, until I started putting the fire to it, giving it some actual stakes. I didn’t want to go at it entirely straight and address real-world environmental concerns in plausible ways; the preposterousness gave me permission to discover, rather than announce. It could have taken a much more didactic turn into preachy territory, but I hate it there. Plus, it would have been no fun at all.
I think it ultimately became a story because I just kept writing, and before I knew it, it was twenty-five pages. It was also nice to step outside of poetry for a bit and work different writing muscles.
One of the things I like best about this story is the absurdist tones, particularly in the internal memos. Can you talk a little bit about blurring the lines between reality and the absurd?
The absurdism sure helps. None of these situations are real concerns, after all—yet. But I’m not convinced reality and the absurd are particularly separate to begin with. I’m one of those who believes we could in fact be living in a simulation—maybe we are the glitch. A support system classifying sentient moons and civic-minded deer is ridiculous, but the institutional response—categorize it, develop a protocol, discourage certain terminology, keep the queue moving—is extremely recognizable. The impossible events start to become internally coherent while the bureaucracy starts looking like the stranger thing.
Who are the writers that inspire or influence you?
I admire Amy Hempel for her craft; every sentence is a poem. Aimee Bender for her surreal fabulism. Twain and Vonnegut for their pithy humor, humanism, and empathy. Virginia Woolf for her independence and associative writing, and her everything. I’m currently obsessed with the poetry of Ruth Stone and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. I’m reading Stephanie McCarter’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and following those branches outward to poets carrying on and/or turning those myths on their heads; Louise Glück, Paisley Rekdal, Danielle Ryle, to name a few.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on my first full-length poetry manuscript, Another Animal, which, like “Global Environmental Support Hotline,” is interested in systems and procedural language, documentation, the natural world, care, and control. This story isn’t part of that project, but it shares some strong connective tissue. I’m also chipping away at a collection of creative nonfiction essays.
Interviewed by Jen Dupree