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5questions · 7 years

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BELLA BRAVO

Bio: Bella Bravo was born in San Diego, CA in 1987. She is a writer living in Bloomington, IN.

What writing or other projects are you working on currently?

Currently, I am converting my story “Public Figures” into a play. A couple of years ago I converted a very short segment of text, which was mostly dialogue of a pizza delivery person recounting a strange experience, into a skit. A friend also wrote a skit from a story of his, and we performed them in a rec room at community center, so the audience was sitting and standing among the actors. The whole experience was so fun. Then, earlier this year, I adapted another story into a longer, one-act production, adding props, lighting and sound effects, and multiple sets.

This creative process gives me a second way into the story, like a back door, because the actors help workshop the script. They ask questions about the characters’ lives, and so I get to tell them things that didn’t make the final cut of the story. They improvise phrasing, so the lines sound how they imagine the characters speak. It’s so cool to see them embody these characters that have been living with me (in my head) for so long.

Writing is normally such a solitary practice for me, whereas this is a community effort in every way. This month I’ll start reading through the script with the performers (wonderful actors from a local troupe called Sitcom Theater) and the musician who is writing a score (Jon Meador of Saintseneca and Kleinerwasserbär). It’s rejuvenating to finish a story and then follow other people’s ideas as they extrapolate from it.

Your recent single story chapbook Public Figures, along with your past collection The Unpositioned Parts, put some of the focus on the fringes of society. It isn't like a lot of the world of mainstream fiction, especially in this manner. What books or experiences influenced your development of this kind of focus in your work?

I feel like by fringe, maybe you mean, what my grandma would call “open.”[1] My grandma always says, “It’s important to be open.” Her gesture for that axiom is bringing her fingers softly to the corners of her eyes and guiding her hands out as though demonstrating nearly 180 degree vision, “open, not closed.” She has large brown eyes. I feel drawn to “openness”, spaces and experiences where I can have a wide outlook where the boundary is not closed. Let’s see examples of open experiences would be queerness, gratitude, crime, becoming, hope, communism. I guess I’m fine with opening boundaries as well. I write from experience, usually from a place or visual image stuck in my head. I think a sense of abandonment is a theme connecting many of those incidents or images. My family felt like an open container; I always felt exposed, a little to the side of their primary concerns. I tend to feel more at home or more confident in negative spaces or spaces that lack definition—absences. I think that’s where the focus on fringe or openness comes from.

Your prose has a heavy sense of control, with a strong feeling of power in the story and the kind of step-by-step way that sentences build up this huge staircase of words and narrative, where you end up really high and then you maybe fall off or make peace with being so high. Who are writers you really like for the craft of their prose? What really draws you in most to the works that you like the most?

For craft inspo, I read short-short fiction. Thrifty writers like Grace Paley, Italo Calvino, Lydia Davis, Donald Barthleme and Sophie Calle know how make the most of a syllable. I think of a given text as a closed economy. Its fundamental principle is circulation; stagnation is expiration. These writers experiment with different patterns to modulate the dynamism of a story, but every word, punctuation mark gives the story at hand energy.

I tend to rely on incremental escalation, like a staircase pattern, because that’s what I do in legal writing as well. In legal writing, I have a rule of one new fact per sentence, which gives the text a slow and consistent building momentum. It’s easy to control. (Humor often relies on this same incremental escalation, and I think all of the above artists write hilarious prose.)

I love also poetry for its excesses and gaps. When I read Bhanu Kapil and Anne Boyer I feel like there is so much that I don't understand. I love how they use poetics to expand the genres of memoir and social critique, blurring them into one another. I keep a copy of Ariana Reines’s Mercury on my nightstand. She harmonizes within the complexity of gender, existence and species, in some moments with five-word lines surrounded by a blank page. Her writing is intricate and strong like a healed burn.

What's your day-to-day life like? Do you live in Indiana or did you just go to school there? What do you think about Indiana?

Let’s see, I sit a lot, ha. I’m a deputy public defender in Bloomington and I write, so much of my day passes seated behind my desk, in a courtroom or at my dining room table. In terms of the workday-to-workday, it’s my job to defend people from criminal penalty zealously. I have a complicated relationship to my work. For the most part, I defend indigent people against State prosecution. This is an easy position for me, because I don’t believe in prisons, police or the State. My job gets difficult emotionally when I know my client has hurt someone or when I can’t figure out a way to prevent a penalty that I think is particularly unfair. Many of my cases deal with the same conduct and circumstances, and that’s a consequence of the nature of criminal law, where the legislature has identified and proscribed specific behaviors. This pattern forces the facts of my clients’ lives to bleed together. I learn private details about my clients’ lives shortly after meeting them, but I try to respect the narrowness of my glimpses. I’m humbled by my job, because my clients have a lot of confidence in me from the very beginning. Fear and anxiety are excellent motivators for dependence and bonding. Despite the unfortunate circumstances, I feel grateful to be a public site for trust.

I moved from Salt Lake City, Utah to Bloomington to go to law school in 2009. Like 60 percent of Salt Lake County residents (approximate), I was raised in the Mormon Church. Many of my family are still practicing members, and it wasn’t until I left Utah and moved to Indiana that I realized how culturally isolated and cultish my childhood was. Shortly after I first moved here, I remember feeling shocked when I saw an undergrad, like a typical university student, smoking a cigarette on a public sidewalk. Salt Lake was such a sterile place, both physically and socially. To me in 2009, smoking was something weirdos and disestablishment folks do, not something for college kids. Indiana has become my archetype for the U.S., and that’s just because it’s my primary contrast to Utah, which is not representative of anywhere else. That estimate was validated unfortunately by the election. I don’t feel much affinity for Indiana at this point.

That said, Indiana has many wonderful people. Bloomington is a small commercial center for south-central Indiana. I’m lucky to live here with a group of compassionate and thoughtful social heretics who have been drawn to Bloomington for various reasons, some from other parts of Indiana, some from other parts of the U.S., and some from other parts of the world.

Fuck this Midwest humidity though. My body was meant for the desert.

A lot of artists and writers have had calls to action or predictions that art/literature in America will change greatly in this new era after the recent election of Trump. Could you or do you see your own work changing? I guess all writing will change at least contextually, although all writing is also always changing contextually.

You make a good point that art is contextual. I think resonance comes from historical patterns as they repeat and shift over time. The election angers me because it demonstrates a resurgence of far-right populism in the West. These trends are so dangerous as they build momentum. America has always been racist, but now anti-immigrant and Blue Lives Matter sentiments are the rally cries of a fascist platform and that platform will be publicly-funded first-term agenda. Many of my family members are immigrants who have practiced—with varying degrees of predictability—cyclic migration, living in both aboard and the States. The father who raised me is a cop. My mom voted for Trump and Pence. Since the election, I’ve had dreams—at night and during the day—where I scream at the top of my lungs in my mom’s kitchen and all nine of her small dogs mill around my feet. I think anger and absurdity will resonate over these next 8 years, lbh. I’m selfishly excited for a resurgence of punk.

Though, I think climate change will have a greater impact on my work and experiences over the next decade. Having an immediate environmental catastrophe will make explaining what I’m doing—writing, touring, gardening, developing relationships with many levels of intimacy—and not doing with my life—having kids, marriage, and a path to salvation—easier when I visit my mom. Last Christmas, she asked me when I think I’ll have kids, so I brought up an article about millennials are mostly having children out of wedlock. Over the next few years, higher energy storms will cause greater levels of damage to the coasts, fresh water will become a scarcer commodity, and both will cause higher prices at Costco, so I feel like we’ll mostly talk about that instead.

[1] They have complementary definitions: “of an outer edge; margin; periphery,” and “allowing access, passage; not closed or blocked up.”

#bella bravo #monster house press #costco #christmas #anti-fascism #fascism #midwest #bloomington #grace paley #italo calvino #andrew duncan worthington

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