Gina Nutt: This story pairing presents main characters grasping toward what’s beyond their reach. Both these reckonings occur alongside the expectations, avoidance, or futile aid of secondary characters. Where do you see these witness characters within the narrative frame? How do you see minor players influencing pace and tension?
Catherine Foulkrod: I think the minor characters are essential to the kind of tension I was going for, they keep both stories from being just solipsistic meditations. In both stories, the main characters are pushing up against a frustration or inquietude or mystery that is in its essence something intimate and internal, but the secondary/witness characters serve to externalize the conflict, and hopefully to heighten it. They also really dictate the action and pace of each story. Both stories are getting at the contradiction that we are alone in our battles and explorations, but also we are never alone. We are all here to help one another and relieve one another’s suffering, but we also thwart one another and cause suffering. The secondary characters in that sense aren’t really secondary at all. I think both stories are at their core about situations, relationships, about cohabitating conflicting interests/desires/needs within a greater unifying context, be it a family or a metaphysical or geographical situation.

GN: The cadences in “Territorial” lend themselves to an atmosphere in flux between agitation and relief. What rhythms—sonic and thematic—did you consider as you wrote and revised? 
CF: Both of these stories were born (a while ago) as exercises in recursion, in writing a phrase or sentence intuitively then looking at it and using the elements within it (rhythmic, sonic, thematic) to inform what comes next. When I wrote them, I was just playing with language and instinct and subconscious, coaxing out something until it created meaning and had an effect. In “Territorial” I was very much working with a recurring scenario from my childhood but twisting it and making it from the adult perspective and making it more fucked up maybe. The syntax and rhythm is one of trying to convey a feeling of frustration, of unsatisfiable bodily need and psychological/physical fixation, like the thought and action keep getting cut off but also won’t go away. Some of that comes from the actual process of trying to get at a certain feeling but not being able to describe the feeling. Sometimes a period is the only solution. A start, a stop, another start. A stilted repetition. I tend to revise as I go, which is a really slow and annoying way to write. In “Territorial” I wouldn’t move to the next line until the line I had on the page felt “correct,” and what I deemed as correct was a combination of how the sound worked to create an effect and how the diction worked to evoke meaning. The language very much comes from my childhood, the way things were said in my family when I was growing up and the looseness/malleability/off-ness of language within a family unit.

GN: “Routeless” portrays a topographer who is no longer able to walk the ground he maps, yet he continues making maps anyways. What do you think most motivates him to continue his work—the pressure from characters who seek his counsel, or his devotion to the work itself and the beauty he finds therein? (Or something else entirely?)
CF: This story for me is about the mystery and beauty in landscape that is impossible to rationalize. I feel that the topographer’s motivations are a devotion to or a reverence for the natural world, how it is simultaneously fixed and mappable but always changing and also immaterial. His desire is to somehow contain the uncontainable, to delineate what cannot truly be delineated, and this only became more intense when he could no longer walk the land himself/fully experience it? The topographer doesn’t have answers, and he knows this, but his work puts him in contact with the mystery. The pressure of the other characters doesn’t motivate him at all, I don’t think, these people come to him hoping he knows what they cannot, but his “knowing” is just dedication to unknowing, an imperfect craft that he nonetheless tries to perfect? I feel I should also say, the topographer’s motivations are whatever the reader thinks or feels they are. I really don’t know.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
CF: Oh sooo many things, but I’ll try to keep it short. Lately I’ve been obsessed with all of the little books Hanuman Editions is putting out. Grocery List by Bora Chung was a lot of fun, and I think the The Lie of the Truth by René Daumal is perfect. I could read it again and again. I live in Naples, Italy, which is like dripping with centuries and centuries of inspiration. I love the layers of history, being able to walk on stones that were put there in the 1600s, 1300s, 1200s, or even like 580 BC. I love the wild baroque and Rococo architectural details, an excess of flourish both in the buildings and in the ways people communicate here. There are centuries and centuries of mysticism and neurosis as well. Like you can go to the cave of the sybil that Virgil wrote about in the ancient Greek colony of Cuma just outside the city, then go eat clams and pasta on the beach with the kids blasting Neapolitan Reggaeton from portable speakers. Or like lately so many food delivery people have said that they have an irrational fear of elevators. I recently read Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover to get a different perspective on Naples, and it’s fantastic. There this one part where the teenage king prepares a huge pyramid of food in the main square. He puts guards around it, then like rings a bell or something and all the rich people go out on their balconies to watch a mob of poor people violently fight over the food. It’s horrific, insane. On a more beautiful note, the landscape here is wild. Fire meets water energy: A volcano that is still very much alive and causing earthquakes all the time, the gorgeous Mediterranean… I can see the island of Capri from my window. There are pine trees south of the city that are over a thousand years old. The way the frescos aged at the ancient city of Ecolano (those colors!) makes me cry. Also, my daily life very much occurs in Italian, with tons of Napoletano thrown in, which after years I think is making my English totally weird. Also, through my work for the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation I am fortunate enough to get to spend time with and support so many insanely talented writers and artists from the US and Italy, but also from all over the world. Those conversations and that growing community are essential, and very much feed my creative life.