Author Q&A with Tiffany Promise

Tiffany Promise (she/her) is a writer, poet, chronic migraineur, and the mother of two wildlings. She holds an MFA from CalArts and has participated in the Tin House and American Short Fiction workshops. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Okay Donkey, Jarnal, Francesca Lia Block’s new literary magazine, Lit Angels, and elsewhere. Tiffany lives in Austin, Texas and her flash fiction, Bird of Prey, won this year’s Honeybee Literature prize in fiction and is featured in Issue #12.

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Tiffany Promise. I live in Austin, Texas, with a four-year-old Scorpio and a six-year-old Gemini. I’m a writer, poet, chronic migraineur and an old school punk rock riot grrrl. At six, I started penning funny little poems (about unfair bedtimes and pink underwear) and I never stopped. Writing poetry was the only way I knew how to make sense of life, to make meaning out of things that seemed meaningless. My high school journals are full of headaches and heartache, the broken promises of bad boyfriends and bad dads. I found Sylvia Plath when I was thirteen and ballpoint-penned stanzas from Lady Lazarus onto the soles of my favorite shoes. I didn’t try my hand at fiction until I was forced to choose a secondary genre for my undergraduate degree. I thought I could get away with disguising prose poems as stories—but I fell fast in love with the accouterments of story-making—plot! dialogue! scene!—and I haven’t stopped writing them since.

The first story I ever wrote was called Vanishing Act and was published in my fiction mentor, Lynda Schor’s, now-defunct online lit mag, The Salt River Review. That story, like Birds of Prey, took place entirely inside of a car. I find it interesting to give myself limits—in setting, word count, form, sometimes even sentence length—and find ways to maximize really small spaces. While a few of my pieces have been long- and short-listed, the Honeybee Prize for Literature is my first first place. 

How would you describe your writing style?

I would describe my writing style as language-driven and southern gothic-inspired. Some of my favorite books are We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, Cruddy by Lynda Barry and Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh and I often think of my work as being in conversation with them. I am still interested in blurring the lines between poetry and prose, allowing language to be its most ferocious and unforgiving self. No matter how long or short a piece, every word has weight, and when I read my work aloud, I want to hear and feel its movement and breath.

What inspired you to write Birds of Prey?

I started Birds of Prey thirteen years ago as part of my MFA thesis. Even short-short stories sometimes take me decades to write; I’ll keep going back over and over until some kind of silence finally rises from the page. I often write stories based on images that come to me randomly. For this piece, the image was of a girl holding a ziplock baggie full of cremains. Sprinkling these ashes into her morning coffee, she was attempting to imbibe her lost love, to hold onto him forever. Though this image has long been cut from the story, I think Nightingale’s abandonment-anxiety is palpable throughout. 

When I went back to this story (seven years after having started it) I had a wildly new close-to-home perspective. At thirty-nine weeks pregnant with my first child, my younger brother passed away unexpectedly. I was terrified of drowning my fetus in tears, of deforming her with my dark thoughts. The pregnant body is an alien surface on which every version of every story can be written. Nightingale’s unborn baby is the perfect blank slate for all of her nightmares to come to fruition.

The way Birds of Prey was written allows the reader to empathize with both characters. Was it your intention to make this a two-sided tragedy? Why or why not?

It was not necessarily my intention to make Birds of Prey a two-sided tragedy, I just happen to write about humans that I can imagine moving through the world. Because real people are multidimensional, Nightingale and Dusty both contain multitudes. In this story, they are both victims of circumstance.

What made you want to choose birds of prey as the allegorical theme of a piece about an unplanned pregnancy?

Birds cross thresholds and fly between worlds, they are small and light, but have resounding folkloric import. I think of them as creatures that are strange and wild enough to express inexpressible things. In this story, the narrator’s name is Nightingale, but she is called “Birdie” by Dusty. I have other bird-named characters in other stories: Robin, Raven, even Magpie. (IRL, my baby’s name is Sparrow!) At the end of this story, the “birdie”—the thing that seemed frail and frozen, just a slip-up—becomes an all-powerful bringer of death. 

What message do you hope your readers take away from Birds of Prey?

I like to investigate underbellies, to shine a light on things that other people shy away from. For whatever reason—and to my family’s dismay—I feel like it’s my job to write the totally honest and totally terrifying stuff, unashamedly. As products of our environments, how we tell and retell our stories shapes us. While I’m not necessarily concerned with relaying messages, I want people to read my work and feel something: understanding, heartache, joy. Maybe even just goosebumps.

How do you think storytelling is therapeutic for both writer and reader?

I write to make sense of the world around me, to make meaning out of the terrible and the mundane. As a mother, I am interested in exploring mother-child dynamics and the feminization of madness. I spend a lot of time investigating themes from my bloodline and attempting to unravel them. By writing about my family’s generational trauma, my goal is to rewrite our future.

What advice can you give to other aspiring writers or writers in general?

The best advice I can give to an aspiring writer is the same advice I give myself every day: Keep writing and keep submitting. Birds of Prey was rejected from at least five literary magazines before it won the Honeybee Prize; it’s all about finding the right readers for your work. I completed a novel a few years ago and I’m still querying agents and small presses. Daily, I send out poems and stories; I’ve submitted my poetry chapbook to ten contests so far. Life can get really complicated and it’s easy to let your writing fall to the back-burner, but just keep doing it and keep putting it out there—even if most of the time it feels like you’re screaming into the void. 

What do you think of when you hear the term, “The Good Life?”

When I think of “The Good Life” I think of mason jars filled with lemonade, fireflies in oak trees, the smell of rain disintegrating on hot concrete. Even though I lived in big cities for many years (mostly Los Angeles) most of my stories are set in the south, and even though these stories are filled with dirty aching things (glue strips stuck with dead flies, stillborn babies, runs in pantyhose set right by clear nail polish) they are also filled to the brim with truth, which makes them—somehow—“good.”

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Tiffany’s Flash Fiction, “Birds of Prey” can be found in issue #12 of The Good Life Review.