Venita Blackburn Thinks You Should Turn Your Troubles Into Stories

When I heard Venita Blackburn had a novel coming out, my desire to read it was palpable, a hunger. Her work is distinctive—it’s sharp, smart, and imaginative, often pushing voice and form—and her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is no exception. 

The novel follows Coral, a lonely author of a dystopian novel who discovers her brother’s body after he dies by suicide. Aside from the EMTs who clear Jay’s body, Coral is the only person who knows of his death. She takes his unlocked cell phone and begins responding to his texts as if she is Jay, as if he’s still alive. None of these correspondences carry as much weight as the ones to his daughter, Coral’s niece. Told in first-person plural and set over the course of a grief-stricken week as Coral attends a comic convention and attempts to date, the novel has an eerie, otherworldly quality from the very first sentence: “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” 

As Coral slips from reality, her dystopian novel, “Wildfire,” swirls to life, amid her attempts to keep Jay alive to those who don’t yet know he’s dead. Dead in Long Beach, California examines trauma, desire, grief, hunger, loss, and our society at large in an inventive, form-shifting novel that truly no one but the singular Venita Blackburn could’ve written. 

I had the pleasure of talking to Venita Blackburn about voice, hunger, humor, and more.  

Rachel León: The premise of this novel is compelling, and like all your work, the voice is distinct and strong. This particular voice has an enigmatic quality. I don’t want to discuss who exactly is narrating because not knowing right away makes for an alluring reading experience, but I’m curious which came first—the premise or the voice? 

Venita Blackburn: Definitely the voice came first. I usually don’t write anything without having the sound of the narrator established. The most interesting parts of stories for me aren’t necessarily plot oriented. I’m most moved by characters and relationships. No character is real enough to me to put in motion until they sound real. They have to have a speech pattern, a rhythm that matches their personality and psychoses perhaps. It’s fun.

RL: You’re such a master of voice that I suppose that first question was too obvious. It’s one of the things I love about your work. Plus you often play with form, which you do here with “Wildfire.” But I’d argue it’s used differently than most novels within novels… At what point did “Wildfire” come in? 

VB: I had the essence of the main story ready, but I did find it difficult to write much of it, so I spent a lot of the early drafting period working on the story within the story. I also wrote a lot of it during the pandemic in long stretches of isolation where I wanted to be far away from the realities of that time, so writing the “Wildfire” sections gave me that escape. I also rewatched a lot of Star Trek during that period for the same reason. Going into distant speculative sci-fi fantasy worlds offers the illusion of safety from modern troubles and makes every trauma a little more manageable because the future promises reprieve, right? Of course good sci-fi acts as a reflection of humanity and parallels most modern concerns and bad habits at the core. Eventually, I had to cut a lot of the material I wrote for the “Wildfire” sections because they were not what the real story and situation were about. I don’t have a hard time cutting, but those sections were comforting to me for a while, dreaming in a land via a lesbian assassin with a solid fashion sensibility. I couldn’t fantasize forever and had to face the hard part of the book.

RL: That blending of fantasy and facing hard reality hits at the core of the novel. I think most of us can slip into fantasy pretty easily, but Coral is the perfect character for this story. 

VB: Coral does not handle the situation well at all. What would the ideal reaction to that kind of horror be? I don’t know. I do know that every reaction is legitimate, and eventually we have to be accountable for those actions. The story though is not about healing or excellent coping skills at all. The story happens in the space between the event and acceptance, that point where our emotions, our sense of reality loses all clarity. I wanted to put images and meaning to that space of grief.

RL: I think the way the novel also explores hunger and desire somehow makes that space of grief more profound. Do you think the two are related—hunger and grief? 

VB: Absolutely. On a literal level there are probably psychological studies to confirm this link, but it is definitely something I’ve observed and experienced. Hunger is something I wanted to put language around. Coral has a real struggle to feed herself sometimes in hilarious ways, but that is a reality of grief that we’ve understood forever; it is an ancient reality that the body will not always take care of itself well under the pressure of catastrophic loss. The need to be fed will be there though, and manifests in awkward ways for Coral from standing in an alley eating cheap tacos or failing to order pizza in an almost cruel but funny way.

RL: And that brings us to the humor. While the novel does deal with catastrophic loss, that’s balanced nicely with humorous moments like what you mentioned, as well as funny insights. Was the humor always there or did it come in later? 

VB: The humor was probably always there because of my natural instincts. So much of life is absurd but we take it seriously, and that is the ultimate formula for ridiculousness. During the early drafts though I wasn’t always laughing. When writing some of the harder scenes and material where I really had to remember what it was like in my own body when experiencing the shock of grief I had no awareness of the humor taking place. During the later reads and assessment stages did I see some really wild things happening. I thought I must be insane or this is just hilarious or both. I’m fine with that too. I’ve also read some pieces to different audiences at this point and found that the audience laughs at times I didn’t think were funny, but my delivery is also part of the experience. It has been a ride going from a private idea of the story to its public presentation. 

RL: Can you tell me more about that ride?

VB: Well, this book is the first one I’ve ever written on contract where I sold it as an idea instead of a completed project, which I did for the first two story collections. So, I had expectations I’ve never had before and a commitment to a single story that I’ve never had to have before. I usually write whatever is troubling me and I either finish it or I don’t and I publish it or I don’t. This time I had to follow through with the concept and I had a lot of eyes and minds waiting on the other side. The editing process was great and super easy. I’ve been lucky to have such a solid relationship with my editor Jackson Howard. He’s young and brilliant. A lot of the emotional “ride” has been with myself in the process, self-imposed pressure. I don’t know if I’ll ever do another book under these circumstances where the manuscript doesn’t exist before I sell it. Who knows.

RL: So did this novel originate with something troubling you?

VB: Every story I write originates with something troubling me, and I encourage everyone short on content to do the same. I won’t attempt to put anything on a page unless it is material that is sacred to me, nags at my heart and brain for any number of reasons. I like to say that all stories are grief stories these days. They’re also love stories too. Having experienced significant personal loss at various states of my life, I was able to tap into those experiences to understand the emotional core of the novel, that nameless shaking place of trauma, the sudden emptying out of expectations and possibilities. The novel started with the sense of grief and loss of possibilities that I’ve had with family and circumstances then cascaded out into wider observations of our civilization.

RL: I loved those wider observations of our civilization. Like the part about human evolution and the commodification of Later, and how that both came from More and had to be filled by it. This kind of commentary adds a fascinating layer to the exploration of loss. Grief can make our world feel so small, but these wider observations offer a backdrop, or context, to the physical space we’re in as we’re grieving. Was that your intent as the novel cascaded out? Or was it one of those happy accidents that come from following the novel where it wants to go?

VB: I didn’t always know what kinds of concepts I would use from moment to moment while writing, but I knew the voice and the psyche of the novel needed to look far away from the current moment of crisis. That was in a way an act of self-preservation for the character because the crisis was unbearable if it existed alone in a bubble of time, but as one bead on a long chain of events no given tragedy seems so daunting. That’s how my mind works at least. That sense of organization is anxiety reducing though I can imagine for some it could be overwhelming and have the opposite effect. It was important for me to allow the voice, which was acting as a filter for Coral’s own mind, to travel to places where we have everything figured out, where we can quantify our madness, greed, vanity, curiosity, devotion and all the rest then neatly put them away into files. That way the worst sudden explosion of horror seems like less of a catastrophe. Even though we have to get close and feel our pain eventually, I wanted to acknowledge how for a moment that we can lean back, way back. From far away our nightmares can be funny or pretty or almost nothing at all.