Caroline Mao’s “ghost x garden x grow” was published in The Offing’s Fiction department on June 3, 2019. Q&A conducted by Kosiso Ugwueze, Reader, Fiction

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Kosiso Ugwueze: There’s a great sense of the mystical, the otherworldly in “ghost x garden x grow.” I was especially taken by the idea of being birthed by the soil. How did you come up with this concept? Do most of your pieces take on the mystical or is this a unique experiment?

Caroline Mao: I believe there’s magic in everything already, and it just needs to be communicated. I’m a huge fan of magical realism, and a lot of people misunderstand it as “put magic randomly where you want,” or “put magic where it’s convenient for the plot,” when really magic can be used to emphasize the points the author is making; for example, in Latin America, magical realism was often used in a political context. Much of my work involves the mystical, but not at its center. I don’t do that just for the sake of it or because it seems cool, but consider how it can be used to uniquely convey my ideas.

Regarding the concept of being birthed by soil, I don’t think it was too far a reach! Soil is already where growth happens, usually just not for humans, but why not take that and apply it to humans? It’s an extension of an already understood concept. The plants that grow out of soil inspire me, and they can overwhelm me with their beauty and capacity for life. I’m not a fan of Romantic poetry, but I remember stopping at a really, really tall tree in Richmond Park a few summers ago and thinking, “Wow, I’m starting to understand why the Romantic poets just couldn’t stop talking about these things!” From a different angle, though, I’m also a bit entertained by the Harry Potter depiction of mandrakes as unappealing, screaming babies being yanked from soil and hastily shoved into new pots.

KU: The language in “ghost x garden x grow” paints such a powerful picture and underlines the otherworldly strangeness of the story. I especially loved the opening line “I had to haul my baby sister out of the blood-drenched soil once I was done watering life back into the wet, clumpy post-abortion fetal tissue she used to be.” I read it a few times because I was so captivated by the word choice in “blood-drenched soil,” and “post abortion fetal tissue.” What role do you think language plays in your work?

CM: Language is one of the things I’m most obsessed with. I can spend an hour or even days ruminating about a single phrase. Hannah Gamble wrote an article called “The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too)” for Poetry Foundation. It’s a fascinating article worth reading in its entirety, but the last sentence is a good summary: “The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.” Fourth graders write interesting, unconventional poetry because they don’t know enough about how language is used to follow those conventions. Most writers are a little more experienced than your average fourth grader, but that just means you need to forget with intention. Do it with purpose, not because you don’t know better. Forget convention, forget that the SAT said this word most nearly means that word, forget five paragraph essay structures and a refusal to use “I.” It might get you an A in your high school English class, but it’s pretty soulless to read. I care about words with soul.

One of my favorite poems, “The Melancholy of Mechagirl” by Catherynne M. Valente, frequently compounds already-existing, fairly simple words into new ones. For example: “pipe that sound into my copper-riveted heart, / that softgirl/brightgirl/candygirl electrocheer gigglenoise / right down through the steelfrown tunnels of my / all-hearing head.” Many of those words don’t currently exist in the English language, yet you still understand what the speaker means. When I use language, I take risks because I assume the best of my readers, not in terms of fancy vocabulary, but that they are able to interpret what I mean, even if what I mean is unconventional.

I also believe you can have a pretty simplistic vocabulary — like, the vocabulary of an average elementary schooler, probably — and write beautiful, interesting work. I used to turn to those lists of pretty words that get passed around, like “iridescent” and “sempiternal” and whatever, and then I thought, why? You don’t need them! Learning new vocabulary is fun, but how about making sure people understand what you’re saying? It’s not just about sounding pretty. It needs to convey what you’re saying.

The language of my work isn’t everything, but it’s pretty close, especially when my pieces are so short.

KU: There’s a line that jumps out at me, the line “I taught my ex-ghost baby sister what my mother did not teach me.” I thought of the facts of the piece, the idea of growing a sister out of the soil, and I wondered whether it was a commentary on mother/daughter relationships as well as sister/sister relationships. Did you set out to explore these relationships in this piece?

CM: I’m an only child, but I’ve spent much of my life curious about other people’s siblings and their relationships with them. I wrote this as a way to explore my own relationship with my mother, and the “what could have been’s” between us. (Some of this piece is autobiographical, but I’d rather not say how much.) Growing up, I wanted a sibling badly, but I remember one day in high school when I thought, “Oh my God, that’s a terrible idea. I don’t want my parents to raise another child to be as messed up as I am.” I even contemplated trying to raise said potential sibling myself, like in the piece, so she didn’t have to suffer the same way I did, but obviously that doesn’t preclude suffering in other ways.

In some ways, I am a good Chinese daughter: my grades are excellent, I don’t party or drink or do drugs, and my mother approves of my Korean boyfriend, an Oxford student who speaks fluent Mandarin. On the other hand, my own Mandarin is abysmal, I hardly ever talk to my extended family, and I keep a lot of secrets about my religion, sexuality, and mental illness from her. There’s a lot of me trying to shape a potential sister into a better daughter than I was in this piece, an attempt to come to terms with my own failures. Though my mother has made many mistakes as a parent, I love her deeply and I regret that we haven’t been a better mother and daughter for each other.

KU: The earth seems to captivate you as a writer. There are many references to the soil, to plants and gardening and other elements of the natural world. What relationship do your characters usually have with nature? Does it reflect your own relationship with the natural world?

CM: My father likes to belittle my mother’s accomplishments — a frequent joke he made as I grew up was that she was “brainless,” and her PhD stood for “permanent head damage” — so as a child, I never really understood how much work it took for her to obtain her PhD in crop science. I regret that despite the years I spent as a child in the greenhouses my mother worked in, and then her current job as a professor at the botanical gardens, I never appreciated this environment for the unique opportunities it offered to learn, explore, and grow.

I think this has skewed my relationship with nature quite a bit, especially since I now reside in a heavily polluted city where nice gardens and greenhouses aren’t common, and hence my unconventional use of the garden. So much of my life has been spent around nature without me actually just stopping to think about it, and I’m trying to do that now, and hoping it’s not too late.

Regarding my characters’ own relationship with nature, it tends to vary, but I’m inspired by Studio Ghibli’s film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Nature is beautiful, and yes, it’s about growth, but part of that means it can fight back. It’s a character in itself, and my characters understand that — for better or for worse, it’s dynamic, tough, and unpredictable.

KU: Do you usually focus on flash fiction pieces like this one? What would you say are some of the benefits of writing such short fiction?

CM: I used to write novels. I completed NaNoWriMo five years in a row, including a handful of Camp NaNoWriMos. Then I stopped, because 1. I never actually finished any of those novels despite reaching that coveted 50,000 word milestone and 2. it did not make me significantly better as a writer. I had no idea how to edit, because I was so overwhelmed by the volume of my own literary output. I have trouble slowing down, and in the process, I lost a sense of intention. With so many words, it’s so easy to wander.

After I turned to flash fiction, I make every word, every punctuation mark and line break and piece of white space, work for it. If it’s there, it’s because it earned its place. Working with so few words forces a writer to consider every choice they make. Of course, this can be a problem if you have an intense inner editor, but I try to fix this problem by handwriting my flash fiction — it’s quite doable, since it’s so short! — so it can’t be easily deleted, then editing. It really forces you to consider every choice you’re making and whether it conveys your intentions.