Our fiction team is this week featuring new work from writer Brooksie C. Fontaine, titled 'Labyrinth'. Read the whole story at the link here.
Brooksie C. Fontaine is an obnoxious coffee addict who got into college at fifteen and annoyed everyone there. She is a teaching assistant, illustrator, and recipient of MFA degrees in English and Illustration. Her work has been published by Fahmidan Journal, Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, Defenestration Magazine, Eunoia Review, Aureation, Report From Newport, Boston Accent Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, the Cryptids Emerging and Things Improbable anthologies, and more.
Recently one of our managing editors Emily Linehan asked the writer some questions about her new work, flash fiction, and her inspirations more broadly. This is a transcript of their exchange.
Emily Linehan, managing editor: So, college at fifteen; impressive is an understatement! How do you think being surrounded by college students from such a young age shaped your writing?
Brooksie C. Fontaine: This is a fun question to start with!
As a preface, my parents had already laid the foundation for my love of writing – my dad is a brilliant storyteller with a treasure trove of rich and interesting life experiences, and my mom is a book fanatic who read EVERYTHING with me. I always wrote, because storytelling felt so integral to how I experienced reality and how I’d been raised.
With that love of storytelling in place, I couldn’t NOT view college as a jackpot of inspiring and interesting experiences and people.
Okay, that makes it sound a little bit too idyllic! My childhood was amazing, and my adulthood so far has been stellar, but my mid-teen-years – fifteen to seventeen – were a sort of a horrible chrysalis of hormones and big feelings. I had some awkward experiences.
I spent the night at college during my freshman orientation, and sleepwalked out of the dormitory at 2AM. I had to track down campus security to get them to let me back in, and was terrified they’d think I had intentionally broken the rules to go out partying or something!
During my first painting class, I accidentally covered myself in blue oil paint that wouldn’t come off, and spent a month or two looking like a smurf. My professor directed me to pen and inks, so I wouldn’t poison myself, which worked out great because I’m now a professional illustrator with pen and ink as my primary medium.
In Biology, I spent several agonizing hours tracking the positions of tank guppies, and squirted myself in the face while dissecting a pickled sea anemone – two incidents that made me realize I wasn’t meant to be a Biology major.
I didn’t find these incidents enjoyable at the time, but looking back, so many of them inspired my storytelling as an adult! Not just the experiences themselves, but the range of feelings they evoked – uncomfortable feelings are so fundamental to humanity, and to relating to other people’s humanity. And, in hindsight, all these experiences are extremely funny.
I can’t go into detail about some of the colorful people I met there – I’m squeamish about sharing details about people I know in real life, which is one of the reasons I fear I’ll never be the next David Sedaris – but suffice it to say, I learned a lot from witnessing such a vast array of people and relationships at such a formative time in their lives. And, of course, such a fundamental period in my life, too.
When I turned eighteen, I blossomed. What an insufferably annoying thing to say about myself, but I stand by it. I met Professor Jen McClanaghan, who helped best-selling author Ann Hood establish the Newport MFA in Creative Writing, a program I enrolled in after I completed my bachelor’s degree.
Suddenly, instead of just teens and twentysomethings, I was around full-fledged adults, of all ages and walks of life. A whole new kind of richness and wealth of experiences! They were all lovely, and because I was the youngest student there, they all wanted to buy me things when we went places. Mostly food, but once a Jellycat unicorn plush. Absolute 10/10 experience.
Emily Linehan: How did you come up with the idea? Personally, I loved the slow reveal of your plot. Did you always want to start with that amazing opening line: “up until the girl bit his ear off, I never doubted for more than an instant, that he was a good person”?
Brooksie C. Fontaine: Firstly, thank you! The opening line was the first line I wrote for this story, and once it was there the rest of it just flowed out onto the document. But before I sat down to write it, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to start. A lot of factors coalesced to inspire “Labyrinth.”
The idea of a survivor fighting back through forcible ear amputation was an idea I got from my dad, who has hard-won street smarts and gave me a lot of advice growing up on how to protect myself. He said the best protection is prevention, to avoid situations in which I feel vulnerable. That’s one of many reasons why I choose not to drink, why I don’t go places alone with men I don’t trust, and why I don’t even go out alone after dark.
But he and I both know that assault is a near-constant risk for women, and can happen from people we’d least expect, and in situations where we’re supposed to be safe – in public and at home. It’s good to take precautions, but the culpability always belongs to the perpetrator, and absolutely never on the victim.
That’s part of what inspired Chloe’s situation: she’s clearly a good kid, who does everything a young woman is supposed to do. She attends Church, helps out with younger kids, and is in a situation where she’s supposed to be safe with trusted authority figures when the assault – or attempted assault – takes place. Moreover, all her good qualities do nothing to quell Brian’s misogyny. I’ve noticed that as a pattern from predators: they dehumanize their targets, to make them feel better about their actions against them.
My dad always told me that if someone ever grabs me, a good defense is often to bite a protruding appendage – a finger, a nose, an ear. Bite as hard as you can and don’t let go, bite until it comes off. “And then maybe spit it at them,” he added, in what I assume was his attempt to lighten the mood. “Make them wonder if they can get away from you.”
That’s where I got the idea for Chloe’s form of self-defense providing the catalyst for the story. I liked the idea of Bryan underestimating and denigrating Chloe, only for her to fight back with her best and only available weapon: her teeth.
But the concept of a predator attacking a young girl, and that girl biting his ear off, felt almost too direct. It hindered my ability to approach the premise. Things only clicked for me when I conceived Katy, whose position is just as interesting as a loved one of the attacker.
When an individual finds out someone they love and trust is a predator, there’s such an interesting range of responses: on one end of the spectrum is pushing away the information to protect their image of the perpetrator, and often the life they built with that person. On the other is accepting the truth and dealing with it.
That’s Katy’s personal “labyrinth,” made all the more complex by the fact that she’s pregnant and needs to decide if she values the illusion of the life she built with Bryan more than the child she’ll soon be responsible for. As she gets closer to the truth at the heart of this labyrinth, the truth also unfolds for the reader.
As for the concept of the labyrinth itself – well, that was inspired by a trip I heard my Church was offering when I was a teenager! It apparently involved spending the night there, but I never looked much into it, because as I mentioned earlier I used to have a problem with sleepwalking. But the thought stayed with me. (To be clear, I had a great experience with that Church, and there was nobody like Bryan there to terrorize me.)
Back when I was a kid, I was frustrated by the fact that I’d probably never be as physically strong as most men, and I thought that my lack of physical strength made me weak. As an adult, I admire a different kind of strength: the strength persevering, especially when the odds are stacked against you.
That’s the kind of strength I emphasize most often in my writing, and the kind of strength Chloe and Katy both exhibit.
Emily Linehan: Flash fiction is, in my opinion, an underrepresented and underestimated type of prose. It’s very hard to create an impactful piece in so few words. Why did you decide the flash fiction format was best suited for your story?
Brooksie C. Fontaine: I love flash and microfiction, as both a reader and a writer. As a reader, I’m impressed by the ability of flash fiction authors to compress an entire story – sometimes an entire lifetime or world – into a few hundred words.
As a writer, well – if I don’t write flash fiction, I often end up writing a novella! I have to give myself a restriction, or I get lost, and just write more and more and more. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Condensing is a real skill, capturing just one pivotal moment. Which is why “Labyrinth” is perfect for the format, I think. It’s about one night that changes the protagonist’s life forever – really, just the moment when her husband knocks on the door is when her life changes. There’s no going back for her after that moment.
Emily Linehan: What is your advice to writers who want to try flash fiction?
Brooksie C. Fontaine: Well, if you’re on Twitter, check out daily writing challenges like #vss365, which stands for Very Short Stories 365 days a year.
It’s a daily prompt, and you have to write a microfiction story below the Twitter character limit that fits the prompt. I’ve been doing it most days for the past – well, I started January 2020, so that means I’ve been doing it for nearly five years! Sheesh.
That really helped me build my flash fiction muscles. And you don’t need Twitter to partake in such a challenge, or social media at all. You can get a line-a-day journal and try it that way.
A good book that talks about flash fiction from a craft perspective is FLASH! Writing the Very Short Story, which really helped me as I was getting started writing flash fiction.
Finally, expect it to feel uncomfortable at first, especially when it’s a new muscle. But when it finally clicks for you, and you write that first flash fiction piece you’re really proud of, it’s an amazing feeling that you’ll want to capture again and again.
I guess this marks the end of the Q&A, so I’ll finish by thanking the amazing Wild Umbrella crew for being so great and supportive to writers, by thanking everyone who reads the story, and by thanking my family for being my biggest sources of encouragement and enrichment.
Brooksie C. Fontaine
Brooksie C. Fontaine is an obnoxious coffee addict who got into college at fifteen and annoyed everyone there. She is a teaching assistant, illustrator, and recipient of MFA degrees in English and Illustration. Her work has been published by Fahmidan Journal, Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, Defenestration Magazine, Eunoia Review, Aureation, Report From Newport, Boston Accent Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, the Cryptids Emerging and Things Improbable anthologies, and more.
Emily Linehan
Emily, a Tipperary native, has shown a great interest in all things literature from a young age. She has been published in the anthology Cork Words 2, Icarus, and is a 2021 runner-up in UCC's Eoin Murray Scholarship. After completing her M.Phil. in Creative Writing with Trinity, she is currently in TEFL teaching, and submitting furiously to literary journals.
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