Author Q&A with Deidre Jaye Byrne

Deidre is a retired teacher and recovering Long Islander happily living and writing in the Hudson Valley. Her previous work has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Avalon Literary Review, Cafe Lit, Literally Stories, and other online and print publications.

Her short fiction piece, Puppy, is featured in Issue 17.

Tell us about yourself.

Over the course of my life, I’ve had many jobs, all of which have influenced the person and the writer I am today. I’ve been a waitress, a cook, a dishwasher, and a bookkeeper. I’ve worked in a cemetery, delivered pizzas, been a career counselor and a paralegal. I was a teacher and a lawyer. Today I am retired but still a wife, mother, and grandmother. And a writer. That last one was, for the longest time, the most difficult to claim, perhaps because it is the one that is hardest to define. 

Is someone a writer because they’ve been published or because they continue to write, maybe in secret, without any acknowledgment of their work? I don’t think I felt comfortable calling myself a writer until my fourth or fifth story was published. Saying aloud “I’m a writer” used to trigger something like imposter syndrome in me. I’m over it now, mostly, because I’ve just become more comfortable within myself. Puppy is my ninth published story, so that helps.

In Puppy, how has Dina’s experience with adoption made her hesitant to bring a puppy home after several attempts?

Dina is a woman whose lived experience has not made her stronger. She is choked by a need to fix her perceived failure as a mother, but without the confidence that she can succeed. In getting a puppy she hopes to prove to herself she can raise a living thing successfully; it’s a do-over for her. Dina blames herself for Erika’s problems. But she can’t see that Erika had and has agency and bears responsibility for her own choices. Dina wants to raise a puppy because that feels like a less daunting challenge than raising a human. But she can’t commit because she doesn’t want to make another mistake. She perseverates and is paralyzed by her perseveration. What would it mean if she did a better job with a puppy than she did with Erika? Dina isn’t sure and she’s afraid to find out.

Adopted or born of your own body, don’t most people go into parenthood blinded by expectations and hope? How has Dina had to adjust her expectations?

I love the phrase “born of your own body.”  I’ve rolled it around in my brain for a few days now and I think it applies, not just to one’s natural child but also to the process we all go through as we mature. Our adult selves are born of our own bodies as well. 

Yes, we are all blinded by our hope and expectation when we become parents. The difference I think is that as the birth parents we feel we can always match up our children’s personality traits, as well as their physical traits, and sometimes faults, tie them to the genetic pool. “Oh, he has grandpa’s eyes!” or “She’s stubborn like her father,” which leads us to have certain sense of familiarity, a level of comfort and confidence. And certain expectations. We think we can anticipate the meaning of those traits and our hopes grow from there. In this situation the genetic connection is absent. 

Of course, as parents we want certain things for our children. The hardest part of parenting, and particularly of being a mother, is learning that the child who came from your body does not belong to you. He or she grows into an adult and an autonomous person; we must love them just as they are and let them go on to live their own lives, even when it may not be what we hoped. Dina never understood that.

Through your story there are several analogies for adopting a child vs. adopting a puppy. Dina’s husband Hal suggests two solutions to their adopted daughter Erika’s behavior, both seeming more appropriate for managing an unruly puppy rather than a young woman. Does Dina also view Erika as an unruly puppy? Is that why she has yearned to raise a four-legged adoptee? So she can have the happy ending she pictured prior to Erika’s adoption?

The analogies were intended in part as commentary on the way our society has been blurring the lines between pets and humans. People talk about their “fur-babies” and “grand-puppy” the same way they talk about their children and grandchildren. They share pictures on FaceBook, they frame photos and put them on the mantel, they buy outfits for them. We no longer purchase pets, we adopt them, and it makes no difference whether they come from a small home breeder, a puppy mill, pet store, or a shelter, the language is always the same. I know someone who was getting a kitten, and her friends held a shower for her as if she were having a baby. I think it’s very interesting.

So, for Hal to use a phrase like “brought to heel”, it might go unnoticed in another context, but here it stands out because of Dina’s fixation on getting a puppy, of having that do-over, as if children and puppies are interchangeable. And for some people they are.

How much of a factor do you think generational trauma plays into a person’s personality or condition?

I think we still don’t appreciate the ways that trauma seeps into a person. Yes, it permeates culture, socio-economic history, and in a host of other ways, but I think the most visceral and least understood is the way trauma gets into our cells. The body holds trauma; and I think that in a pregnant woman that trauma can transcend the placenta and can influence the developing fetus. 

Our bodies hold our experiences and shape us in ways that we not only don’t necessarily understand but also in ways that don’t show up for years and years in some cases. Our adult selves are born of all that our bodies hold. The reader, like Dina and Hal, knows nothing about Erika’s natural parents, we know nothing of the birth mother’s circumstances or how she came to be pregnant. But whatever the circumstances, I think those things are baked into Erika’s cells and have made her who she became, irrespective of any parental failings on Hal and Dina’s part.

How did your years of teaching influence your writing?

It taught me the importance of allowing for the interplay of planning and the factors that disrupt planning. Having a perfect lesson plan and then, without notice, there’s a fire drill in the middle of class—well, it’s not unlike being halfway into a story and realizing the main character is all wrong or the idea you thought was so great is really rather lame. It’s made me appreciate flexibility and the ways it can work to a writer’s advantage. It’s okay to be committed to the story in my head, but I’ve got to be willing and able to roll with it when something doesn’t work the way I expected or anticipated.

What did your students teach you about life?

Everything takes longer than you think!

Our everyday life influences our writing, but how has your writing influenced your everyday life?

This is a great question; I’d not thought much about until you asked, and it’s led me to do some journaling around it. I don’t know if this is the final answer, but I think my writing has made me more conscious of time, how much time I have available to devote to my work in any given week, and how much time my other roles demand. But also, I find that sometimes, when I’m waiting to see what comes up next for a story idea, I start putting my life at arms’ length, examining it to see if there is something there I can use. I don’t know if I like that I do that, but I see myself doing it. 

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

As soon as I read the question I heard in my head Frank Sinatra singing “The Good Life”…to the good life, to be free to explore the unknown… This was funny to me because I am not particularly a fan of Frank Sinatra, and I don’t know any other words to the song. And yet, when I started to think about it, the freedom to explore, to discover who we are, to move through as many iterations of ourselves as we wish, to find the place where we thrive and when we’ve had our fill to move on. Yes, that is the good life.

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Thank you, Deidre, for being a part of our growing community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A and the audio recording. We’re glad we were able to connect and we wish you the best with life and all your writing endeavors.