In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Stephanie Early Green

Your fiction piece tells the story of Sabrina, who begins a new job after the trauma of her last one where she was forced into sex work. Where did the idea of “Nojento” come from? Why did you set it at a summer camp?

The idea for this story sprang almost fully formed into my head. I’d been thinking about human trafficking, which, sadly, is a huge problem in Brazil, but I didn’t necessarily want to tell a human trafficking story. I was more interested in the aftermath: what happens once a person breaks free from an exploitative or coercive situation? How might a person escaping this life try to start over? The setting of a summer camp came from my own memories of my Girl Scout sleepaway camp in Michigan (shoutout Camp Innisfree). All of our counselors were young European women, many of them from Eastern Europe, and I always wondered how they ended up at a camp in southeastern Michigan, and what they thought of us soft, suburban American girls. 

There’s a lot of intricacies with language in this piece; Sabrina looks up phrases she doesn’t know. Can you talk about how language informed your characters and played a role within the story?

I have a real fondness and appreciation for Brazilian Portuguese. My first job out of college was as a paralegal at a law firm in São Paulo, and I returned again four years later as an attorney. I loved learning and speaking Portuguese, which is such a fun, dynamic, and endearing language, in no small part because of how generous Brazilians are with people trying to speak their language. Brazilians absolutely love it when a foreigner attempts to speak Portuguese. They inevitably say, “Oh, your Portuguese is so good,” even when it’s not! But I always appreciated the ego boost. As someone who’s lived and worked in a language that is not my own, I can relate to Sabrina’s struggles to express herself fully in English, and the constant translation, appraisal, and comparison that happens when navigating mother tongue and adopted tongue. Sabrina in America – in English – is not the same person as Sabrina in Brazil, partly because of the experiences that have shaped her in America, but also because of the language that she must use to try to narrate and make sense of those experiences. Living in another language is a process of noticing cognates and false cognates, of searching for equivalences and finding, sometimes, absences. And for some experiences, there are no adequate words in any language.

Alissa is such a fascinating character; she’s a girl who has a wealth of knowledge, and her openness helps to bring Sabrina from her shell. Can you talk about how you developed her as a character, companion, and foil to Sabrina?

I was thinking a lot about silence when I wrote this story: what can be said out loud and what remains pushed down. Sabrina is someone who swallows things, for a number of reasons: hesitancy in a new language, shame, the desire to be left alone. But I see Alissa as someone with no hesitation about speaking out, a person calls ‘em like she sees ‘em, for better or worse. I always think of Charles Baxter’s essay “Counterpointed Characterization,” in which he says, and I’m paraphrasing, that as a fiction writer, you must put characters together who force each other to unmask, to expose the secret facets of their personalities. This is what Alissa does for Sabrina, allowing her to open up, but in the end, she goes a step further and speaks for Sabrina. And, maybe surprisingly, this unmasking feels liberating for Sabrina. On Alissa’s end, I thought of her as a child who does not easily make friends or fit in, and so to have the undivided attention of an older girl – a counselor! – probably felt really validating. Both of these characters were getting something out of their friendship; it wasn’t one-sided. 

This piece jumps back and forth in time, talking about Sabrina’s past work. When first writing “Nojento,” did you have these time jumps included? What was your editing process like to shape the piece into what it is today?

I actually went back to my initial draft to answer this question, and the time jumps were in there from the beginning. In the beginning of the first draft, though, I spent more time on Sabrina’s backstory. I explored her relationship with the family whose house she cleaned, as well as her relationship with her parents and siblings back home. In the revision process, I ended up cutting this backstory because it slowed the plot down too much. I initially workshopped this piece at the Community of Writers (virtual) workshop in 2021, and went on to tinker with it for several years before it reached its final form. 

What themes do you return to in your writing?

Girlhood, motherhood, foreignness and alienation, female friendship and rivalry, body image.

What authors or books have influenced you as a writer?

Oh, man, so many! In terms of craft books, I was introduced to Charles Baxter’s essays during the first semester of my MFA program at Warren Wilson, and they were so brain-expanding for me as I started to think more deliberately about craft. Some of my favorite fiction writers are George Saunders, Kate Atkinson, Anne Enright, Shirley Hazzard, Susan Choi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Emily St. John Mandell.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing my novel, which is an adaptation of a short story of mine that imagines a world in which some but not all women turn into neanderthals. At this point, three years into working on this novel, the plot only bears a tangential relationship to the story that inspired it, which was published in 2021. It’s been an interesting process of adaptation.

Stephanie Early Green‘s writing appears or is forthcoming in Narrative, The Chicago Tribune, New Ohio Review, The Cincinnati Review, Southeast Review, Juked, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2021 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing (judged by Charlotte Watson Sherman) and her work was Highly Commended for the 2021 Bridport Prize (short story). She was also named a finalist by judge Rumaan Alam for the 2021 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize. She is a current MFA candidate in fiction at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Virginia with her family and is at work on a novel.