In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—April Darcy

Your fiction piece, “The Bright World,” is about a daughter losing her father to cancer, and how she’s trying to balance her own life, a complicated friendship, and caretaking. How did this story come about?

First, thank you for reading and for asking such thoughtful questions. 

I worked on this story, off and on, for more than ten years. It’s the story that taught me how to write fiction, by which I mean, how to take some elements in which I had experience (what family doesn’t,  ultimately, experience loss?) but to break from my personal reality into a bigger and more imaginative narrative world. I’ll always be grateful for this story.

You’ve layered this piece with beautifully complex relationships, from Megan and her mother, to the sisters and the father, to Megan and David. How did you develop these relationships as you wrote?

Oh, this story went through maybe a hundred drafts. Some centered on Megan’s complicated relationship with David, and some didn’t. There were years where Jessy wasn’t even in the story, and yet she eventually became a primary focus. Bringing Megan up against these challenging relationships is how I figured out who she is, or maybe, who she wants to be. 

Going off of the above question, can you talk about the caring, yet tense, relationship between Megan and her sister—the jealousy that she has of Jessy’s freedom, and the time constraints it puts on her? It feels like her caretaking responsibilities have doubled or even tripled because her sister has moved. 

What’s interesting to me about this pair of sisters is how hard they are both trying to do right by each other and by their parents. For instance, all Jessy did “wrong” was grow up first and move away from home, which of course, isn’t wrong at all. That’s just birth order! But a byproduct of that is Megan’s perception of being left behind. Megan knows there’s not really anything to be mad at here. But it’s easier sometimes to be mad at someone else than it is to deal with reality. Megan learning how to handle her new realities is what interested me about this story.

You do a smooth job of simultaneously keeping readers in a scene with a running commentary of Megan’s internal dialogue. What was your process like when crafting her thoughts and memories in the actions around her?

This is a fabulous question, and I have no idea. I will say that writing emotional states comes more easily to me than scene-writing. I tend to free-write piles of emotions and thoughts and vibes, and then go back and force myself to create scenes and scaffolding after the fact. Whenever it works out I am pleasantly surprised!

At 18, the age Megan is, we all hold onto unrealistic ideals, just as she holds on to David. We do get a bit of her future, where she’s able to move forward without him, but she hasn’t reached that point yet. What do you think is the event that Megan is able to move past him? To move past her father’s accusation of: “What I worked for my entire life isn’t good enough for you either?”

I love this question. Megan is, without fully realizing it, using David to distract herself from her life at home. She’d rather be a  normal college freshman, going to parties and dating and having adventures, than navigating terminal illness. Obviously. Their connection is real but the intensity is misleading, a kind of pretend-world. After her father’s death she’ll have to accept reality and move on—she intuits that in the story. 

As for moving on from her father’s statement, I suspect she actually won’t. 

Do you find that you return to similar themes within your writing?

I am endlessly interested in writing about caretaking, the pressure it puts on us, and of course the beauty it brings out in all of us. Who is good at it, and who isn’t? Who can face it, and who can’t? Does it steal from us, or does it give back in growth and in love? It’s all so complicated. And I’m super interested in place-based writing, and how people use travel as a means of escape or adventure, etc. A writing teacher once told me my characters were fond of “the geographic cure” and I love that way of looking at it. Who isn’t cured, at least a little bit, by really good geography?

What authors inspire you? Who are some of your favorite books? 

Lately I’m super into Claire Keegan, and I’ve always loved Anne Enright. Irish writers, man. A biblical story for me has always been Our Town, which I read or try to see staged every five or so years. More recent favorites are Marie Helene-Bertino, Emily St. John Mandell, Andrea Barrett, Yiyun Li, etc. I go to poetry a lot to calm myself down or when I’m stuck in my own work—Jack Gilbert and Elizabeth Bishop are steady go-to’s.

What are you currently working on?

A novel about Megan and Jessy, of course! So far each chapter is a new geography, but who knows how it’ll wind up. There’s a lot of Jersey in it, but hey, you cannot write about diners and disco fries too often, I am finding.