In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Anna Molenaar

“Transportation Fantasy” in Volume 28 holds such an imaginative liveliness. Where and how did the idea for this nonfiction first spring to life?

My first car was a thrice-owned glorious clunker of a Suburban named Scrungus. I loved that car, and her quirks and breakdowns and the way you needed to be gentle with her always made me think that I was working in tandem with a living thing. My favorite thing was driving home at night in the summer with the windows down, a necessity because she had no air conditioning. When I gave her gas and felt her buck under me I thought of digging one’s heels into a horse, and how it wouldn’t be much different than the beast I used to get around.

In the first half of the piece, there’s a lot of car terminology used for horses. How did you develop that and fit together what felt right?

I love defamiliarization as a craft strategy. I also love the idea of people being willing to switch to horses but still stubbornly refusing to let go of car culture.

You write with the combination of modernity moving forward even with horses (the DMV), but also the process of slowing down within society (in the final lines). How did you find a balance between these two ideas?

If the internet’s wealth of weaving and sourdough content is any indication, there always comes a time in the cycle of society where we turn back to practices that were commonplace in the past. I think as the world continues to get more complex we will turn away from the excess and leave behind the bare bones. Naturally, turning back will come with doing things slower, and I would think we would take advantage of the positive side effects of those choices.

I wanted the piece to make it clear that we could be advanced but still cut away the excess–the doctor could still have a 21st century knowledge of medicine even if he rode a racehorse to the patient. 

I feel like I could have read a much longer piece on this topic. Why did you decide to constrain it to flash?

I trend towards shorter pieces just in general in my prose; I always struggled in school to meet word counts for essays because I would get in and out and say what I needed to say! I also subscribe to something I’ve likened to a “whip” effect: the hand holding the whip retreats before the whip has even touched anything–the pulling back actually makes the impact of the tip of that whip white hot. 

I love the idea that everyone would use horses—and not only individuals, but companies as well. How else do you think the world would adjust with the return to horse-powered transportation? 

I would hope that empathy for living creatures would be on the rise. People in the Olden Days certainly weren’t always kind to their mounts (reading Black Beauty as a girl definitely made that clear!) but I think we would have to stop and think about another creature’s needs more often once our transportation wasn’t an unfeeling piece of metal and actually needed recovery time. And with any luck, that would bleed into compassion for the other beings with whom we share the Earth.

What themes do you find that you write about?

I usually write about “Hey lookit this” subjects: aspects of the world, mundane or exceptional, that I feel like people should think about for at least the amount of time it takes to read the words. There is so much delight and joy to be found in every speck and every smear of the world, and I am lucky not only to be able to experience it but to have an artistic outlet to share it with others.

What are you currently reading? What books and authors do you return to? 

I am listening to Watership Down on audiobook at the moment. I also just finished reading Born by Lucy Inglis. My favorite section of the library is the “new releases: Nonfiction” so anything there about plants or animals, memoirs of people who work jobs I would work if I had endless lifetimes, or science is fair game.

What are you working on right now?

I am working on poems that use strict forms and rules (Abcedarians in particular). It feels like such a wonderful kind of play to be constrained to specific structures while maintaining my voice and message. 

Aside from physical writing, I have also tumbled headfirst into oral storytelling, courtesy of my Pre-K students! I took to telling them stories to fill time and they love it, so I am deep into coming up with little fables and morals involving woodland animals, knights, and inanimate objects (magna-tiles can have adventures too!)

Anna Molenaar is a writer of poetry and prose concerned with nature, humanity, and the messes that occur when the two mix. Her work appears or will appear in The Nassau Review, The Tiger Moth Review, and The Columbia Review among others. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she received her MFA from Hamline University. She works as a preschool teacher and teaches writing courses at the Loft Literary Center.