This conversation took place on June 4, 1998, on a balcony overlooking the river in the village of Montolieu, near Carcassonne. Eakins was staying at the International Inkwell, a wonderful pension for writers in Montolieu, which is the French book-village. We are commenting on Patricia Eakins's collection of stories (The Hungry Girls and Other Stories).

FP: What about fables?

PE: Well, it's interesting -- you know there's a new translation of Aesop. It seems the rigid little stories we know are nineteenth-century creations. The actual stories are much more like Jack stories, they're real survival stories, they're down-to-earth and really gritty. I think I need to qualify some of what I said about fables.

FP: You mean about the constraints of the fable?

PE: Yes. Earlier, you asked about traditional forms and inscribed voices, the "pastiche" question. The truth is that I don't work in traditional forms. I work in re-invented traditional forms.

FP: Exactly. That's what I wanted you to get into.

PE: I'm always surprised when the word "pastiche" is used. I'm not sure of its derivation, but it reminds me of pasticcio, pasta, cook books. There would be something cynical and crafty about a writer who mixed a pinch of this and a pinch of that, cooked the whole mess -- maybe not cynical, but certainly it would be an artisanal mentality, which, come to think of it, I may in fact possess! There is a prejudice nowadays against the idea of the work of art -- art that is patently artificial, or artefactual. And it is true that trompe-l'oeil is an ancient tradition, mimesis, the representation of life -- but so is tall tale. Anyway, supposing for the moment that I am a "mere" cook, let me give you a recipe for The Hungry Girls. An important ingredient is natural history, fermented by inversion, braised in hypothesis, seasoned with experimentation, a pinch of history, a pinch of anthropology, a dusting of oral tradition -- a cup or two of sideways scuttle.

FP: What do you mean, "sideways scuttle"?

PE: Well, here we are in, let's say, nineteenth-century France, or the France of Jean Giono or whomever, and bangety-boomer! A sideways scuttle into the France of the imagination. That's not much of a scuttle, though; it's a bigger one from Japan to Kyono. Never in Japan were there stags with these bizarre sexual habits (in "Milady's Ploy"); sleeve-dogs I believe were Chinese. A lot in that story is made up, but it echoes the courtly conventions, of say, Lady Murasaki's Japan.

FP: Some real anchorage, but yet --

PE: But yet it is invented. Lady Murasaki writes about people who were so discreet that they ate behind screens. ...

FP: So the concerns of Murasaki's characters are the opposite of your characters' usual concerns -- her characters refuse to acknowledge bodily functions.

PE: That's the other side of the coin, isn't it? Maybe you were writing about side-ways scuttles when you were writing about similes. I once read a very interesting article about the psychological processes that are inherent in certain figures of speech. I can't remember what they all were, but displacement is expressed, it seems, as metonymy. And there's a sense in which all fiction is metonymy or synecdoche. I let this piece of iron and this railing stand for the house -- I can't possibly replicate the whole house, and anyway, it's not about that. . If I want to give the reader Françoise, I'll give them your glasses or your ears. Maybe that process is carried a little further in my stories. It's just a thought, and some of what I thought you were getting at that in your article ("La Comparaison en mue dans les nouvelles de Patricia Eakins", Revue française d'études américaines 73, juin 1997, 14-21).

FP: Thanks.

PE: It is by analogies and a cantilevering out from some known anchorage that in some ways I can -- it's like an inchworm: here's the leaf and then he... but maybe my inchworm starts in the leaf and then anchors himself in the air and then goes from there. But he starts in the leaf.

FP: To go on and on.

PE: Right. That's what I mean by a sideways scuttle. But going back to the cookbook, the recipe, the list of ingredients -- the civet may be seasoned in a few other ways too. One is -- in many of the stories there's what I would call a voiceover voice -- the narrator of Encyclopedia Britannica film strips I watched as a schoolchild. The film would always be rolling before the sound came up, so it would come on with a kind of whining growl into coherence. Rwhooooo...! And then there'd be some music, and this deep, bland know-it-all voice would tell about the land and people of Indonesia... Like God was talking. And that voice to a child, to me, was the voice of inescapable truth. So to give that voice to made-up things is to lend to invention the voice of veracity, of the unquestionable. Pseudologia. Playing around with that notion of the reliable omniscient narrator. Actually, my narrator isn't ever all that omniscient, because he knows he's in history, but he is sincere. In utter sincerity, the narrator gives you Brosse-Les-Bains and Le Montal. But the author's sincerity is suspect. She's having fun there, and maybe she shares with her narrators a sense of how arbitrary names are, how fragile a marker over the void, the black hole of history, the name of any village or any writer is.

FP: And so often the narrator is wondering about his own narration at the same time --

PE: As the author is lying -- wondering and lying..

FP: Isn't that what fiction is all about?

PE: To tell a big lie that's true. Or a big lie that will somehow save you. When I was a child I read a lot of books where dogs and horses were the heroes. Children's pot-boilers -- Albert Payson Terhune's books about collies and Anna Sewall's Black Beauty, about a wonderful horse. I think my imaginary animals continue in some ways from those hero dogs and horses, but without a child's -- those books portrayed a world of right or wrong, whereas my stories portray a world in which that ideal has been betrayed.

FP: So that's a departure from the classical fable idea. And you twist around the framework of the fable to unsettle the certainty that is usually attached to it.

PE: Yes. But "unsettling certainty" sounds like serious subversion. I think there is just a lot of mischief in my stories. A playfulness that is a very direct continuation of childhood. For instance, one influence that I can see or hear in "The Hungry Girls" is -- I had a record when I was a child, a phonograph record called "The Noisy Eater" -- Jerry Lewis -- I can't tell you how much I loved that record. I suppose children were given it so that they wouldn't grow up to go Krrrrunch...Grrrraw...Slooorp when they ate. But I loved all the noises Jerry Lewis made, it was horrible and wonderful. I don't have the record any more.

FP: But the memory of it is still very vivid.

PE: Yes. When the play (adapted from "The Hungry Girls") went up in August 1997, for the program I had to say all my influences. I said Robert Coover, Italo Calvino, Borges, Ursula Le Guin -- my grad-school mentor, George Chambers -- I put all that in the program, but I didn't put Jerry Lewis and hero dog books, and they belonged there too.

FP: So the munching sounds -- I mean the sounds -- when you read your stories I can hear the sounds better. And on your web page, apparently, your voice can come through.

PE: Just little sound bites, because sound files take a lot of memory, and it's time-consuming to download them.

FP: Was sound important to you?

PE: Very! There's a saying that the ear is the direct route to the heart, and that is true in the most literal way. You know, the ear is the only organ that receives the world directly into the body. We register "bird" with our eyes, but a bird doesn't fly into our brain. We register "bird song" with our ears, and the sound actually enters our brain and our body. But there was something else I wanted to say -- about the idea of pastiche. That my work is not so much about inscribing a given writer's style -- though I do some mimicry. I have been much more interested in creating stories that grow from the implications of basic distinctions in made-up cultures. So there really is quite a constructive process. I am not a big reader of Levi-Strauss -- but what he describes about how cultures are built up in a series of oppositions is very analogous to the process by which I have built my stories. The stories accumulate gradually, often from some very small beginning. In the case of "Oono," I am quite sure the name came first. Then I made an animal to fit the name. Then I made people to say the name of the animal and to hunt him. Then I made the mythology of the people who hunt the animal.

Much of the writing I did in a house upstate that my husband was renovating. It was summer, the temperature on the second story of the uninsulated house rose each day to 100 degrees fahrenheit, and while I worked with paper and pen, my husband was working with very noisy power tools. It is possible that the intensity of the story reflects in some measure the difficulty of concentrating on what I was writing under such conditions. I had to concentrate extra hard to compensate!

Later, while I was revising the story, I did do a lot of browsy reading in a very free-associational way, skipping around from one thing to another, seeing what caught my attention. Some of my reading was in popular natural history -- National Geographic and Natural History magazines, which have lots of photographs. At some point I read a book called Kabloona, by Gontran de Poncins. I have read Jerome Rothenberg's collection of Native American poetry Technicians of the Sacred, which contains some Inuit poems and stories. I recall a museum exhibition of Inuit clothing and objects. Some dioramas of Inuit life at the Museum of Natural History. And I know I have seen the Robert Flaherty film.

Then there was a book I had as a small child, called The Eskimo Twins. This book gave me quite a vivid sense of Inuit customs and the Inuit way of life. The story was a simple adventure story that I have long forgotten. What stayed was that early, clear sense of the artifacts of Inuit life. It was from the implications of these artifacts, and of the animals, and of the basic features of the landscape, that I made up the mythology for the people I had invented.

But The Eskimo Twins also supplied the basis for a more performative understanding of Inuit life. My sister and I played a long-running freeform game based on the book. There is a sense in which the Ignook hunter of ooni in the kayak out on the sea in "Oono" is little girl on an upside-down bridge table, paddling on the green-rug sea with a broom. The seal cooking over the fire is a milk-bottle seal. The sleeping shelves of "Oono" are the back stairs of our house, rising above a small vestibule that is the igloo. The babies on the shelves -- a large collection of dolls wrapped in the hats and mufflers and jackets my sister and I would later wear outside to play.

Yet, my Ignook are not Inuit. When I wrote the stories that became "The Hungry Girls," I made a conscious decision not to reflect any culture or known version of history in a completely accurate way. I wanted the sense of recognizable fragments joined with unrecognizable ones, but not for experimental purposes. And only a little to tease the reader. I wanted the stories to read as if the storyteller might always be on the verge of telling other stories.... To invent "the Ignook" gave me a freedom that accurate ethnography would not have permitted.

FP: It's interesting that you have to bring in very different cultures from your own.

PE: Well, I may not always. I don't know why I started there, except I think there has always been something performative about my storytelling -- as if the givens of a made-up cultural style were a costume or a skin and I were putting it on -- a shaman's mask. I once saw a documentary about a Siberian shaman. She became possessed by her narrative powers after she went behind a simple curtain. She was in a room with a lot of other people, she went behind a curtain, she came back into the company in a mask that covered her head and was attached to a costume that fell all around her body. Inside her mask, her voice became the voice of the story. I think it is like that with me. Inside these masks I become the voices of the stories. However, there is quite a difference between my mask and that of the traditional shaman. The character of the traditional shaman's story was known to and shared by the culture of which the shaman was a part. There is a seamlessness, a unitariness, of culture and story. Whereas my mask is a multiple one formed of the fusion of a number of elements which are not all known to my readers or even to me and may not have been combined before, or not in this way. You could compare my narrative masks to Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon." There is recognizable figuration there, the recognizable influence of African sculpture, but the point-of-view has been shattered. Sometimes the mask is the disembodied voice-over of Encyclopedia Britannica films, sometimes the voice is that of a wandering story-teller, sometimes the voice comes from within a culture, or from the border between cultures, as is the case with my character Pierre, who is first moved to tell the story of the African diaspora, and later moved to tell the story of his pregnancy, his hybrid children, and the culture he and his children share with underwater creatures he cannot completely know. Pierre sees himself as a trained observer, a savant in the European sense -- after all he's a correspondant of Buffon -- but he is also speaking from his own Africanness. And of course, he learns from his fishy "sons" -- his unique experience -- as well. But really, you were asking not so much "what kind of masks" as "why masks"? To hazard a guess -- if you read my essay "Manifesto of a Dead Daughter" -- the experience of marrying so much out of caste, of being disowned and hearing yourself pronounced dead -- it changes your sense of yourself and your culture. You no longer see things the same way.

FP: And yet you still have the same history.

PE: Yes, but you don't know what to make of your own history. I have no objection to claiming it, nor am I ashamed of what my experience has been, but it has been very hard to speak of it. And being unable to speak is a kind of living death for a writer. But perhaps I felt somehow trapped in my culture, as if it were a coffin, I buried alive in it, all along. Even as a small child growing up in a subdivision, I felt stifled by the narrow range of permitted culture, and there was a lot that I couldn't make sense of. One thing, for instance, that never occurred to me as a child, and that certainly occurs to me now, is the number of houses that had white pillars, they looked like southern slave-owners' houses, and this was in Michigan. And sometimes people even had those black iron jockeys up front with rings in their hands, fake horse-hitching posts. What were they thinking of themselves as?

FP: Plantation owners.

PE: Yes. And the Barthian sense of mythology really applies: here's this architectural style that's been borrowed to say something about these people. Here are all these children of immigrants and Okies, people risen from the working classes, who wanted to represent themselves as slave owners of the antebellum South. Marrying a Black ex-jailbird poet very young -- I found myself so at odds with the subdivision culture of the Midwest, that I no longer felt at home in my own history. It was lost to me, and I began looking everywhere for it. I think you can read in those stories a quest or a search for the buried life of the "dead" writer, an obsession with transformation and birth .... I think that my masks helped me to speak from silence.