Award-winning author, Nancy J. Allen’s A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is a collection of twelve stories that explores those pivotal moments in time where everything shifts. Across the collection, her characters’ decisions—sometimes impulsive, sometimes seemingly inconsequential—cause a butterfly effect that alters the trajectory of their lives. Set in the Southwest, Allen’s honors the enduring power the Indigenous peoples who still reside in these places despite their tragic history. Her settings, described vividly and with grace, possess an eternal quality. A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is a timeless collection that has obviously been looming in Allen’s imagination for years and has finally found a home amongst some of our great American short story writers.
Dawn Major: Your characters can be quite impulsive. To point out some examples, in “Running,” jealousy leads to a rash and violent reaction between two teenage girls. In “Camouflage,” three women on a hike encounter several male hunters. Will these women—who have every right to be there—hightail it out of the forest? Recklessness comes to mind. In “Eat You Up,” the young girl’s outbursts of rage seem uncontrollable but even more reckless is her mother’s refusal to acknowledge that her daughter may be suffering from a behavioral disorder. In “Impulse,” the female protagonist makes sudden decision that alters the course of her entire life. Whether these impulses are good or bad seem irrelevant.
Would you agree with my assessment of your characters? Maybe “reckless” isn’t the right word, but their reactions do seem to produce major shifts in the direction of their lives.
Nancy J. Allen
Nancy J. Allen: I’m laughing. I’ve never thought of my characters as impulsive—except, of course, for Annette, and her story is entitled “Impulse.” Short stories are necessarily compressed and involve moments of change, not the years of frustration and/or anger that in “real life” may or may not lead a person to change. If that’s “impulsive,” so be it.
“Running” took many years to write. In one of the first iterations, Georgina wants Rose to pay attention to her so she throws a rock—to ding the pipe, not to hit Rose. A good friend, braver than I, said “Why don’t you have the rock hit Rose?” I wrote that scene: the rock hits Rose and she wobbles, but she doesn’t fall. My friend said, “No. Have Rose fall off the pipe!” Oooooh. Scary. I wrote that: Georgina’s thrown-rock causes Rose to lose her balance and fall down into the dry bed of the Rio Hondo. It was perfect! It solved all my structural problems, but my point here is that Georgina was in a vacant lot putting a dislodged rock back into it place, and she vented her frustration. She never imagined she would/could actually hit Rose.
In “Camouflage,” there is no reckless behavior. Alice and Jane have hiked the Caney Creek trail many times and have never before encountered hunters. It is late afternoon, the trail is a dead-end. They couldn’t have hiked out if they’d wanted to—that would have been reckless. Setting up camp and staying quiet is the conservative, safe action. (The real danger, of course, isn’t the hunters, but, Gracie, the woman Alice invited on the backpacking trip to entertain Jane.)
I agree with you about “Eat You Up.” Susan, the mother, is preoccupied with her PhD thesis (perhaps to bury her concern about Lucy?), and she does seems oblivious to the severity of Lucy’s “differences,” but she is also quite protective of her. In my experience—and I have a lot of it! —most parents are in denial about problems their children have. When this story moves into Lucy’s POV, the worry, the many nighttime conversations the parents have had about Lucy’s behavior are revealed. I have a 55 year old daughter with ADHD. She is a wonderful woman, wife, and mother, but she ran my husband and me a merry race for many years. I always said she was what I wanted my thirty-year-old daughter to be—but not my three year old!
Lacy and her family flew from California to Dallas for my book launch. Only when she walked into the party, did I think about her actually reading this story. (Talk about oblivious!)
“I read ‘Eat You Up.’ ”
“Darling, you know none of that really happened.”
“I know,” she said. “But it’s true.”
And that explains all my stories. They never really happened, but they’re true.
DM: I enjoyed how you juxtaposed the untamed natural world with characters that have this wild quality about them. Do you think your settings helped create characters with bravado?
NJA: Your calling my settings “untamed” interests me. I grew up in New Mexico and Texas with sky from horizon to horizon and vast powerful vistas. These landscapes are certainly different from the gentility and softness engendered in the South, but does that translate into “untamed?” I don’t know. Our lives don’t unfold against a backdrop. Our destiny is always, always intertwined with the landscape around us. And, of course, location is also a geography of imagination, filled with invisible multitudes, cultural scraps, memories. Settings are very important to me.
Dawn Major
DM: Your story “Running” hit me in the gut. So, I feel compelled to purge a shameful preteen story of my own. I had a best friend who didn’t run in the popular crowd and one day I totally cut her off. She asked me (ironically, in the girl’s bathroom where your mean girl politics also take place) why I was ignoring her. I told her that she wasn’t popular and I wanted to be. Just like that. So on an emotional level, “Running” took me right back to that scene, but of course from an adult reflecting back in time. It got me thinking about how memories operate and I really loved this passage:
My family lived as if we had no past at all…And it’s because of this, I think, that time has not changed Rose and me. It’s been a lifetime, but, even now, I can summon our lost world.
Like Georgiana, my family also moved and left one world for another. Yet, my memories persevere. At the end Georgiana acknowledges the loss of her home, her friendship, and a loss of innocence.
She reappears as an adult in “Real Life,” and I was surprised (in a good way) based on “Running” who she had become. Do you think she reclaimed her true self in the later story?
NJA: “Running,” Georgina in “almost 13, waiting, barely, to become a shining new girl, allowed to wear kitten heels and spend the night out.” She is under great social pressure from the popular, waist-cinched girls. I don’t think it’s a question of Georgina reclaiming her “true self” in “Real Life.” I think she was true to her almost-13 year old self—and then she grew up.
DM: Do you think short stories achieve a sense of perpetuity that novels can’t do?
NJA: This is such an amazing question! I think the “sense of perpetuity” you’ve intuited has everything to do with the power of image. By definition a short story is short, and is usually about a moment of change. We can’t hold an entire novel in our minds, but we can hold a moment—a moment that doesn’t evolve or mutate, so that it hints at the eternal, the mythological. When I think about famous short stories, what I remember are the images:
- The snow “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead,” in Joyce’s “The Dead.”
- The two women at the end of Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother” (NB: their mythological names, Diana and Helen): “I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.”
- Eighty-three year old Mero struggling through howling wind and snow—and on the other side of the fence, Annie Proulx’s “Half-Skinned Steer” pacing him, “huffing vapor.”
These images are alive. They exist in Corbin’s Mundus Imagainalis, a timeless world of image, which gives psychic value to the physical. Normally we are unaware of this numinous world, but great stories bring us glimpses of it.
DM: Since this story resonated so much with me when I got to the end I started to view Georgiana as the antagonist. Would you agree? Or, is she just flawed character?
NJA: I don’t know how to answer this. Of course Georgina is flawed—we all are. Perhaps you are conflating your guilt over your own teenage “mean girl” moment with my protagonist?
There are episodes from “Running” that I ended up cutting. 1.) Georgina begs to go with Rose to her catechism class, but once there, she argues that Limbo for unborn babies is “unfair,” which results in the priest banning her from future attendance. 2.) Georgina wants to surprise Rose by getting her into S.M.M. (Sorority Minus Men). All the waist-cinched girls say, “Sure, she’s your friend, nominate her.” Georgina does, and not a single one of her sorority sisters votes for Rose Garcia.
I don’t think Georgina is an “antagonist,” but she is a girl who often “fails to read the room.”
DM: One theme you kept revisiting was fate. Your characters experience these pivotal moments where their lives go down a new path. I don’t think many people recognize those moment in real time until much later when you start to take stock of your life. Do you believe in fate?
NJA: I think the word fate—as in, something forecast at birth, not formed by our character the choices we make—fails to take into account the blessing (and curse) of “free will.” I do, however, believe in destiny, that which comes toward us from the future.
In day-to-day living, the future we imagine is always a projection of the past: it’s what we already know. But sometimes something calls you, something from the not-yet. This is a “destiny moment,” when something new and unexpected has the possibility of entering your life. These moments are usually fleeting, and a strong ego—a hardened sense of who we are, where we fit—can easily block the future from getting through. But if we can develop the capacity to stay in the “not-knowing,” it is possible to awaken and begin to be aware of something mysterious operating in our lives.
DM: Some other themes I noted were confinement, entrapment, and avoidance.
For instance, in both “Stolen Boy” and “Impulse” your female characters are confined in bodies deteriorating from diseases, but they are also trapped in unfulfilled marriages. I really liked how you paralleled their “physical prisons” or their illnesses with their marriages which for me were self-induced traps:
Because it was their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, Rollo had acquiesced to her desire to see ancient ruins. He liked Vegas jaunts that involved drinking, gambling, and golf. “I like ruins and bars,” Fran said reasonably, and when Rollo continued to balk, she invented a reasonable statistic. She told Rollo that 65.8 percent of couples who get married in college—it didn’t matter why; it didn’t have to be a pregnancy—divorce when older. She told him she could imagine it. She didn’t tell him how very often she did imagine it: Rollo would never be able to push a wheelchair with grace.
Initially I was sympathetic to these wives, but then I became frustrated that they remained in unhappy marriages. Can you see why it might be hard for the readers to sympathize with these female characters?
NJA: Marriages as self-induced traps. Hmmm.
I’m guessing I’ve been married longer than you’ve been alive, Dawn. When my first-born daughter was a year old, I joined a just-forming Book Club. We’ve been meeting once a month for 54 years and are a small but mighty group. What we have been though together, with our marriages and our children, no one will ever know. Human sexuality is a vast ocean we all swim in; marriage, a great—a sacred—mystery. I hope my stories show this.
DM: There is a subtle difference between being trapped in situations where escape is possible versus being confined to a situation out of your control like the son suffering from schizophrenia, the incarcerated women, or and girls literally confined by waist cinchers and starched petticoats.
In terms of avoidance, in “Impulse,” the husband is a master of denial capable of avoiding anything painful in his life:
Four years since Helen’s death, and Lamar has allowed nothing in his mother’s home to be touched; no knick-knack sold or even moved. Her husband denies death a place in his mind.
And do you think there’s a difference between being trapped versus being confined?
NJA: I understand the question but am not sure I can distinguish between confined vs. trapped. In “Impulse,” Lamar is the epitome of the hardened ego I talked about earlier. He grew up in Rosebud and has inherited four family houses there. He hasn’t sold the houses and no one is allowed to enter them. The original occupants lie in the Rosebud Cemetery, the interiors have disintegrated, but Lamar maintains perfect outward appearances: lawns are mowed and fertilized, flowers planted. Lamar’s wife, Annette, has to wear an oxygen tank in order to breathe, but Lamar is disappointed when she doesn’t want to ride her horse out to see the new cattle he’s bought. His son ran away from home two years ago, but Annette can’t talk about Ben because Lamar has put that subject “in a box, shut it tight, and placed it on a high self in the back of his mind.” Lamar is trapped by his own ego; Annette, trapped by love—of Ben, of Lamar.
I don’t think I answered the question, but it’s the best I can do.
DM: How did your background in spiritual psychology factor into your stories?
NJA: Spiritual Psychology is not an “add-on.” It changed me, changed my life, but I don’t think an interview is the place to discuss this profound and subtle subject. We’ll have to talk, my dear.
DM: In the title story, “Methods of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” you broke the fourth wall finishing off with this very intimate paragraph in first person point-of-view. Was this story autobiographical?
NJA: The defining event of my childhood was when the Roman candle exploded in my little sister’s face. Of course, I wanted to write about this—but not from my child’s POV, from my father’s. I sat for weeks trying to see this accident through my father’s eyes. I could not do it, I could NOT enter him. I went up, higher and higher, and there to my surprise I found a remote voice that could look down dispassionately on a man, not my father as I knew him, just a man and the trajectory of his life as a whole. Was there a Fourth of July accident? Yes. Did we move from Roswell to Fort Worth? Yes. Did our lives unfold exactly like my story? No, it’s fiction. Is the story true? Yes.
DM: “Adventures of the Corn Maiden: A Triptych” and “Real Life” really stood out to me as out-of-the-box stories. This is probably because most of the short story collections I read are set in the Deep South. I had some limited knowledge about the subject matter because as I mentioned to you in a previous email I have friend who has written extensively about his experiences with the indigenous people of New Mexico and the ceremonies he witnessed. Will you discuss how you developed an interest this subject matter?
NJA: I don’t think I “developed” an interest in ancient civilizations and indigenous people. I think it’s something I was born with.
DM: It was a pleasure reading your collection and on behalf of myself and SLR we wish you much success with this book and hopefully future books to come.
NJA: Thank you so much, Dawn.
About the author:
Nancy J. Allen
Nancy J. Allen grew up in New Mexico and moved to Texas when she was thirteen. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. Her fiction has won awards in journals such as Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, bosque, and Short Story America. A research fellow of the School of Spiritual Psychology in Santa Fe, she lives with her husband in Dallas and Taos.
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