Chatting with Eleanor Lennox

Eleanor Lennox lives in New England. She likes to write about the vagaries of space travel, and that most unpredictable of dimensions: time. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crepuscular, Factor Four, MudRoom, and 34 Orchard. Find her online at eleanorlennox.com.

Eleanor is the author of “The Fish in the Garden” from Radon Issue 9.

Q: What makes time travel and loss sources of creative inspiration for you?

I never set out to write about loss! I’m one of those lunatics that loves the first fifteen minutes of the movie before the conflict emerges. But somehow loss creeps in through the cracks of some stories.  

As for time travel, that’s where I go to have fun—I’m currently working on a time travel story that’s on the lighter side for a change, which I’ll hopefully finish in the next few weeks. But space travel—or specifically, space travel for the purpose of colonization or rehoming—I find a very dark prospect. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, especially with Western spacefarers. We’re not as accustomed as Eastern civilizations in thinking with a collective mindset—we’re more fixated on the individual. Yet space travel is ultimately a journey of sacrifice (at least, any journey beyond our nearest neighbors). Those journeys would be for the sake of future generations, not the travelers themselves. I’m not sure Americans on the whole would be very sanguine about that.

Q: Was there an initial spark or idea that led you to write “The Fish in the Garden”?

Yes! I was participating in the New York City Midnight flash contest, and my group prompts were sci-fi / garden / sunscreen. The first thought I had was of how sunscreen would instantly be rendered moot upon leaving earth and traveling away from the sun, becoming little more than a curiosity—or a trigger. 

My other thought was of what visiting a garden on a spaceship might provoke amongst humans in the black emptiness of space, traveling away from earth to a new, more artificial world. It would be a different experience, depending on your psyche. Of the three groups listed in the story, I honestly don’t know which one I’d fall into. I doubt I’d be amongst the first group. I’d hope to be like Anais– but then, I’m always looking back.

Q: “The Fish in the Garden” balances bleakness with beauty and connection—how did you decide where to place those moments of light?

Just as the garden in the story is itself encased within an old, grimy, rattling spaceship, I envisioned the story with a similar structure—the garden scene is this pure, light-filled core, surrounded by tragedy and bleak reality all around it. Like the sensation of drowning, followed by a life-giving breath, followed by . . . more drowning.

Q: Your story utilizes a fragmented, almost vignette-like structure. How do you approach form as a way to reflect the ideas found in your writing?

I try not think about it, especially at the outset. If I think on it too much, I worry that I can veer away from the natural and into the affected. So I trust that the right form, and voice, to serve the idea will find themselves pretty quickly without my devoting much conscious thought on it. If the structure or voice of a piece isn’t working, I’ll revisit and tinker.

Q: What draws you to short fiction? Do you have any plans for a other prose forms down the road?

Short fiction is well-suited to the kinds of stories I’m most interested in telling. I enjoy writing dark, unsettling stories that are usually centered around a thought experiment—not deeply clever thought experiments like Einstein’s where he imagines riding on a beam of light—but the kinds I like to dwell on in the small hours, which are usually vaguely existential and horrifying, as befits “night thoughts”. 

Those kinds of stories are usually short—I’m not as interested in writing a 100,000-word generational saga. BUT, I am working on my first novelette, so we’ll see how that goes.

Q: What, for you, makes a perfect picnic?

Now this is a very serious question. I’m a firm believer that the closer you get to a 1:1 ratio of pickly things to everything else, the more successful the picnic will be. To that end, pickled quail eggs are picnic perfection. I first experienced these as a bar snack in the Azores, and they are an absolute delight. 

Beyond that, let’s pack a few cheeses (a Wensleydale and Manchego would be my picks), some figs and olives and the cutest, tiniest little cornichons we can find, the crackliest loaf of bread that ever broke, and, if we’re really having fun, one of those nice big bottles of super malty Belgian beer.

Q: You shared that “The Fish in the Garden” is your favorite piece you’ve written—what makes this story resonate most with you?

Entirely because of the garden scene, the remembrances in there. That’s my love letter to earth, my vision of paradise. It will always strike something in me.