I like being funny and sad at the same time, or funny and disturbing at the same time. Why do people think they’re funny? Then I decided I like that mode. It kind of worried me these are some pretty disturbing and sad pieces. When I first started writing, I didn’t find my stories funny, but people kept saying they were. Rumpus: Your work is often described in reviews as funny or humorous. In fact, one time movers thought it was garbage and took it into pieces and threw it in the dumpster. It was already so old, and now I’ve moved so many times, and it’s completely broken apart. I’ve been using it as my writing table all these years. The Rumpus: Could you tell me about where you usually write, or work?ĭeb Olin Unferth: I work at a table. (Read an exclusive excerpt from I, Parrot here.) Unferth and I spoke by phone, our conversation spanned from her writing to her dog, her inspiring work in prisons, and the graphic novel titled I, Parrot, published by Black Balloon Publishing in November.
Reading this collection, I was jolted by her sense of hopeful doom, and surprised by her surreal narrative twists. During “37 seconds,” Unferth details things that take thirty-seven seconds as a couple fights: “the contemplation of it: it’s his fault!” or “a mango falls in a nearby field.” Her narratives often shift perspectives rearranging expectations with signature deadpan prose. In “Voltaire Night,” students compete to recount the worst thing that has ever happened to them, exposing shame and awe.
Unferth has a knack for choosing disturbing topics and creating access for the reader, or twisting the familiar into an exotic shape.
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In Unferth’s excellent story, “The First Full Thought of Her Life” a shooter gets into position and considers, as a target, a girl on a sand dune.
Unferth has brought that same mixture of humor spiked with sadness to last year’s Wait Till You See Me Dance, where her careful prose resonates through thirty-nine stories of alternate lengths. You might already know her from her previous work, which includes Minor Robberies, Vacation, and Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, which was a finalist for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. With her newest short story collection, Wait Till You See Me Dance (Graywolf Press, March 2017), Deb Olin Unferth dazzles once again.
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