Remembering and Claiming: An Interview with Noley Reid by Wendy Elizabeth Wallace

Henry on the left and Bugsy on the right

For this week’s tenth anniversary interview series, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Split Lip contributor Noley Reid. I first came across her work in SLM, fell in love with it, and then was fortunate enough to publish her myself in my literary journal, Peatsmoke. I knew, from our correspondence about her piece “Movement & Bones,” that we’d have plenty to talk about if I reached out to her again.

Noley Reid’s third book is the novel Pretend We Are Lovely (Tin House Books), which O: The Oprah Magazine called “scrumptious!” Her fourth book, a collection of stories called Origami Dogs, is forthcoming from Autumn House Press in early 2023. Under her given name, Nicole Louise Reid, she is also the author of the short story collection, So There! (SFA University Press) and novel, In the Breeze of Passing Things (MacAdam/Cage), as well as two fiction chapbooks, If You Must Know (Burnside Review Press) and Girls (RockSaw Press). Her work appears in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Meridian, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and Tinhouse, among others. She has won a Dana Award in Short Fiction, Many Mountains Moving Flash Fiction Contest, Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Competition, and Willamette Award in Short Fiction. She studied creative writing at George Mason University, where she earned an MFA. She lives in southwest Indiana with her husband, son, two dogs (Bugsy and Henrietta), and a Netherland Dwarf rabbit (Pru). Henry was supposed to be the name of their daughter, but Noley and her husband had a lovely boy instead, so their dog got the name.  

In our email exchange, Noley spoke generously and eloquently about sneaker decoration, the joys and dangers of being part of an “us” when growing up, disability, the view from her window, and so much more.

Image caption: image is attached. Henry on the left and Bugsy on the right, they are atop a hassock pushed up to one of a set of three French doors in our living room, which is where I write. It’s a beautiful view, especially right now, for the blooming dogwood, redbud, and cherry trees against the backdrop of our Maples leafing out. We have a pole hanging four different types of birdfeeders, as well as two Plexiglas box feeders suction-cupped to the French doors, so there is a constant flutter and song and the wonderful milling about of mourning doves on the ground beneath. Our latest excitement is the arrival of a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak we hope is scouting for a larger flock to come.

Wendy E Wallace: Okay, first question! One of the things that struck me about both your piece in SLM, “Coming Back,” and your story in Peatsmoke, “Movement & Bones,” is your command of dialogue. It’s crisp, sharp, and often devastating in its fearlessness to let characters say deeply true things. I’m particularly impressed with how you’re able to write child dialogue, which can so often feel forced, saccharin, or simple. And yet, yours feels so natural and effortless.  (I am very jealous.) What is your process for getting it down on the page? How do you manage to capture the purest and most essential of what characters need to say to each other?

Noley Reid: Oh wow! Thank you. Gosh, for me, writing dialogue—especially children’s dialogue—comes fairly easily and I think the reason why that’s true is that I have a running voice in my head constantly narrating my own thoughts and, well, my life. And this voice is constantly shifting about on me. My mother is one of those people who starts talking in someone else’s accent when talking with them. My brain does that internally all the time, which makes me a slow reader—I audiate and deliver the words on a page as their characters would say them—but, I think, it also makes me good at adopting voices of disparate characters in my own writing.

And I write a lot of kid narrators. I find childhood fascinating: the magic of discovery, the allure of severing one’s personhood from being an appendage of the mother, and the danger of our own and others’ desires. I don’t think I’ve ever lost my childhood voice. I may be forty-eight, but I feel anywhere from ten to fourteen on any given day probably because I’m a big baby. I’m kidding, but I am the baby of three siblings in my family and I’ve just never really grown up. I still want what I want when I want it and the immediacy of children’s perspective, the way it’s tied so closely to a current moment, feels natural for me. I don’t mean to suggest that my facility with voice and dialogue is strictly of my making. I tend to read stories and novels in which voice is a prominent feature of the writing, and those voices certainly help give rise to my own.

WW: That is so fascinating about the running head-narrator. I think I have something similar. And I love what you said about the delightful strangeness of childhood, about the process of individuation. So wise and lovely. And I totally believe in holding on to at least a corner of one’s child self! Incidentally, this plays exactly into the theme of our anniversary issue—memory and the number ten. Can you tell me about a memory of your ten-year-old self? Transport us back into a moment that stuck with you? And (if I’m allowed a twofer), can you recommend some of your favorite voice-driven stories/books that have inspired you?

NR: Ten years old is, I think, when kids really start feeling alone in this world. Your parents aren’t checking on you all the time and you start to feel, truly, like your own person. I was in fifth grade at ten. It was the year I couldn’t tell two blond boys, Sverre and Travis, apart. They had the same see-through white/blond hair and the same haircut, so I could only identify them when they sat at their desks and Ms. Amster called on them. At ten, I’d already had a boyfriend—Hunter Gregory in the fourth grade who gave me a gold(ish) necklace with five gold balls on the chain then broke my heart when he dumped me via a green folded-up note thrown on my lunch tray. In fourth grade, we lived in Blacksburg, Virginia, where I set a portion of my first novel and my entire second one. That summer, we moved to Falls Church, Virginia (in the D.C. area). I hated it. I pined for Blacksburg. For the friends I had there and the freedom I had there. In Blacksburg, all the neighborhood kids would gather at Brian Riley’s house to play Ghost in the Graveyard nearly every night that it was warm enough and dark enough to be outside. That game terrified me, but I was a part of something, a part of a larger collective, a group, an “us” and a “we.” Moving to northern Virginia, I lost that. There were only two boys around to play with and, though I tried, being with them—at their houses, walking with them between houses, trying to figure out something to do—there never was and we were never an “us.”  

That said, at school I had friends: Betsy, David, and Chris. And we paired up, girlfriend-boyfriend. I was with Chris and Betsy with David, who lived just near enough that once, on a snow day, they all came to my house to play in the snow and hang out inside, too. What I remember from that day is us talking at length about how to avoid a girl named Emily coming over—Emily claimed Betsy as her best friend with a Krazy Glue grip and the jealousy of a thousand caged cranes looking on as other wings take up into the sky. Betsy wasn’t up to the task of breaking Emily’s hold. Emily was extremely popular, I think just by asserting that she was, though it didn’t hurt that she dressed preppy, had cute bangs and thick shoulder-length hair curled under, wore wide yellow and green headbands, and had those white, canvas, slip-on shoes (a precursor to checkerboard Vans’ popularity) with perfect designs markered on. (When I finally got a pair of those, I drew dull flowers on them with my name spread out across the toes. Nothing looked good; it was all just basic, shaky designs that spread out too wide in some places and too cramped in others. Not like Emily’s at all.) Her perfection was extremely annoying—so too, her being overly talkative and the problem of her taking ownership of Betsy—but we knew that if her mother, a total busybody, asked Betsy’s mom where her daughter was, Betsy’s mom would tell her and bring her to my house. So we plotted ways to keep her from seeing us: hiding in my bedroom, lying down in front of the loveseats in the partially sunken family room so she couldn’t look in the picture window there, or trudging through the snow far away to David’s house. We were still deciding when Emily’s Moon Booted legs appeared in the picture window. She bent over then, her thick hair spilling out of her parka hood. We all threw ourselves down on the floor, faces frozen in terror, but it was too late, she was already knocking on the door, her mother’s yellow Volvo wagon backing down our long hill of a driveway.

I don’t remember throwing snowballs that day, though I believe we did, and I don’t remember what happened once Emily came inside. What I do remember is that it was the first time I felt power. I was part of the in-crowd and Emily, though she tried with all the best accoutrements, wasn’t liked by any of us. Exclusion was a dangerous power, one that quickened my heart and flushed warm my face and palms.

That power was short-lived for me. The very next year, one of the neighbor boys I’d hung around and tried to play with began bullying me just after asking me to be his girlfriend, so I was the one being excluded, my cheeks and hands flushing hot again and again every time he called me “Mass” or made a fat joke. (My father mercilessly bullied me for my weight and from time to time assaulted me, too.) Power is blinding, pain brings insight. As a mother now nearly forty years since the bullying (which lasted until high school graduation, when I could finally get away physically, though the shame and hurt of it lasts to this day, not to the same degree, thankfully), I’ve parented in reaction to how I was raised and bullied, teaching my son never to bully and I am overjoyed and relieved to know that when he sees bullying, he calls it out. He values people as individuals and allows them to simply be themselves. I wish I could have always taken such a compassionate approach to living. 

WW: This leads me to ask about another identity that is so often the source of exclusion in society: disability. It’s a subject about which you’ve written so beautifully—in your Split Lip story, the narrative begins with a grandmother taking her own life because of her fears of the ravages of Parkinson’s. In “Movement & Bones,” the main character survives an accident that results in the amputation of an arm and a foot and grapples with navigating both physical spaces and her relationship with her husband. As a disabled writer myself, it is so gratifying to see fiction that examines these themes and puts disabled people in the spotlight instead of hidden in a corner, or completely absent. Can you talk a bit about why writing about disability is something you’ve embarked on, and what you see as the role of fiction in engaging with these identities? How do you approach these themes? 

NR: I never would have considered myself disabled in the first half of my life. I was not physically impaired by injury or heredity, but I was classified by my neighbor as catastrophically huge. He called me “Mass,” as I’ve said, from sixth through twelfth grade, saying I was causing an earthquake when he saw me come walking down the hall, his long arms flung out side-to-side as if he needed help balancing on the shuddering floor. And so I began to see myself as separate from the rest of my peers, as someone unworthy, as someone who doesn’t belong, as someone other people saw as gross. In sixth grade, I weighed ninety-five pounds. According to the CDC, this is just three pounds heavier than the 50th percentile weight for this age. That didn’t matter. I was pronounced fat by that neighbor, my grandmother, and my father, and so I ate.  

I don’t claim to understand fully the switches that got flipped inside me—one that made me experience my life as alone in the world and one that made eating, overeating, some kind of salve to that loneliness—but they flipped on and others flipped off. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I wore a size 22. And I was paralyzed with fear and shame in gym classes, where I’d be directed to jump a vault, run laps, or do a pull-up. I couldn’t do any of it. I wasn’t strong enough, but mostly I was terrified of failing at these feats in front of my peers, so I begged off with complaints of menstrual cramps, hay fever, or a sprained ankle. Not even trying, sitting at the margins of the class and my life, was so much better than running up to the vault and being unable to lift myself up and over.

Now, thirty-three years later, I can see that my weight didn’t disable me so much as I disabled myself. I have been heavy and thin for various swaths of my life and when I am heavy and no longer fit into restaurant booths or movie theatre chairs, I have removed myself, yet again, from living. And when I was thin, I’ve found new freedoms intoxicating: fitting in, literally and figuratively.

The second half of my life is when I first felt physical pain. My one pregnancy was torture and my neck and lower back have never healed, despite many surgeries. But I wouldn’t know true pain until I was forty-four when my right hip bone was dying. Until then, for decades, it had hurt and sometimes felt weak, and doctors only said “Lose weight,” and looked no further for a cause. And then, in my forties, I found myself unable to walk without a cane. The way it felt was a red-hot coal burning in my hip joint, with bone grinding bone every step or pivot I made. Finally, after being sent to physical therapy for six months, forcing movements that only made me hurt more and had no chance at helping, a new doctor sent me for an MRI. I had Avascular Necrosis or Osteonecrosis: not enough blood was getting to my hip bone and so it was dying.  

I needed a total hip replacement, but here’s the thing: I was 320 pounds and no one would operate until I was under 270. And so I did what I’d done every time I got thin, I counted calories and only allowed myself 1,200 a day. Losing those fifty pounds took a little more than a year because I couldn’t exercise, I couldn’t even walk to burn more calories. But I finally got my surgery and, although my femur cracked when my surgeon was drilling the final screw into the bone, delaying my recovery because I could not bear weight on that leg for six weeks, it was amazing to finally be able to move again without the searing pain—even if only slowly at first.

I’d been told by the diagnosing doctor that my weight caused the Osteonecrosis, when truly I have a blood-clotting syndrome (a common cause) that I should have been tested for immediately. I wasn’t tested and had pulmonary emboli just after my last book tour; all the driving allowed blood clots to form in my legs and then travel to my lungs. I could have died. Had I not passed out that night, my husband called for an ambulance, and the wonderful EMT suggested getting tested for clots at the ER, I would have. (It hadn’t occurred to the attending physician to test me for clots.)

Just three years since that surgery, I’ve had two failed foot surgeries and am headed for another replacement: this time my right knee, due to arthritis. I want to say something here, though I tremble to do so. I am disabled. Acutely so. Serially so. Chronically so. Having always been physically limited to one degree or another, I’m at home with the frustration that my body cannot move the way I want it to, that I cannot run, that I struggle to walk a straight line, or feel part of the ableist majority. And I guess I’m okay with that. I’ve almost always felt on the fringe of society, whether based on the way I look or, now, on the use of a device (a cane or a walker) to enable me to get from point A to point B. I don’t know if other disabled people would accept me into the fold or if, perhaps, I would be on the outskirts of this group, too. And that’s okay.

WW: Thank you so much for sharing this. Self-identifying as disabled is such a difficult thing. Partially because of the stigma imposed by society’s ableism, and partially because of the feeling, I think, that there is some sort of yardstick by which we all must be measured, like the ones barring entrance to a theme park ride. “You must be this atypical/disadvantaged to enter.” However, I’ve found that identifying as disabled is not an exclusive club but an inclusive community—one that recognizes, supports, and respects everyone whose body does not operate in typical ways. So, on behalf of at least this one disabled person, welcome. Come as you are. We love you.

I’ll move to something a little less emotionally charged (potentially—we’re writers, so what doesn’t evoke emotion?). Tell me a little about what’s going on outside your window right now. What do you see/hear/smell/feel/taste out there?

NR: Let me begin by saying that we just moved and the three French doors I used to sit in front of, with light pouring in, one of our two dogs (Henrietta) up on a hassock in front of one door to bake in the sun, the other dog (Bugsy) sacked out beside me on the sofa, and a dozen birds visiting our four feeders for seed, thistle, and suet, and me able to gaze out onto this scene at any moment I needed a pause or new idea while writing—all of this has changed. Now, my couch is perpendicular to two windows separated by a fireplace, the exposure is northern so there is light but not direct sun beaming in. I’ve placed the hassock in one of the windows, but Henry doesn’t use it and I know she misses the sun. We’ve brought our four feeders, plus two plexiglass feeders that suction cup onto the windows, with us, but where I sit is farther away and I struggle to make out detail. That said, I still hear the birds: the cardinal song, the starlings’ water drop, finches’ chirping, the mockingbird’s frog ribbits and car alarms, silent downy woodpeckers slipping their beaks into the suet, and the doves’ cooing. There is a mourning dove who comes to the long window box. She pecks at the plastic and when I hear that, I look over to see her throwing seed out of the feeder, trying, I guess, to find what she likes.

I am lucky, I know. We moved into my mother’s house, which is directly behind ours, both yards touching, so we still benefit from all the mature trees and shrubs we planted as saplings thirteen years ago in our old house and our birds found the new feeder location easily. My mother will get to stay in her home longer with us here to help, I no longer have to struggle to get up a flight of stairs every night, we are able to sell our larger house, pay off our mortgage, and buy her home outright, giving us a nest egg we’ve not known since I sued my university and resigned my tenured position teaching creative writing, leaving us with only my husband’s teaching income. So moving is a boon to my mother and us, but when I look out that window and see our old house, I see my own failure.

I can’t go into specifics about why I left my job because with the small settlement I had to sign an NDA, but the failure I feel is not that I failed at my job—no, not at all. It’s that I’ve let my husband and our son down by not contributing enough to our household. I try to pick up classes at writing centers here and there as I can and, when I have a new book out, I visit colleges and universities to give readings and teach, and I occasionally get a slim royalties check for my books, but all of this is chicken scratch when compared to the salary I used to bring in, and we struggle each month to pay our bills.

God. I feel like I’m just complaining and complaining here. Whingeing, as the British say. And I don’t mean to take this interview down. But I’ve struggled over the last handful of years to define what I am now that I don’t work (and am disabled). A writer, yes, but I can’t feed my family on that income so I feel like an imposter saying so. (Imposter Syndrome is no stranger to writers and I’m no exception, but this is a little bit different maybe?) It’s more about claiming respect and receiving it, too, I think. That’s such a hard thing for me after having tenure at what I thought was a secure job in which I earned the highest raises in my department year after year because I published so frequently. I had to fight through embarrassment, shame, and guilt after I quit. And that’s gotten better. I had a novel published by Tin House Books a couple years after leaving and have a new book coming out March 2023, and both have helped me feel more entitled to claiming the job title “Writer” and the self-respect that should accompany it.

So I guess when I look out this new window at the old house, what I really see is our moving on from disaster. Let our old house hold onto my blame. My guilt. Let it hold all the bills that nearly bankrupted us. All the fights with my husband (the absolute love of my life!) over feeling disrespected, feeling like a second-class citizen in our home and our marriage. And let this new home be one where I truly know myself and my worth, where I can continue telling stories with self-doubt and shame unbidden, and all those birds sing late into the night.

Wendy Elizabeth Wallace (she/they) is a queer disabled writer. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and has now landed in Connecticut by way of Pennsylvania, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Indiana. They are the co-manager of social media for Split Lip Magazine and co-founding editor of Peatsmoke Journal. Wendy’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, Willow Springs, Brevity, Pithead Chapel, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @WendyEWallace1 or at www.wendywallacewriter.com.