Chelsea Bieker: On Trauma and the Body, Writing about Pregnancy and Birth and Her Debut Novel, "Godshot"
Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for. Lacey’s life begins to unravel when her mother is exiled from the community and runs off when a man she barely knows.
Gold God glitter falling from church ceilings, the pain of mother loss, baptisms with soda instead of water, and a grandmother who loves taxidermied mice, Godshot is a dazzling debut from a gifted writer who can weave poetic, sparkling language with the pain of family, the beauty and strangeness of girlhood, the power of grief and the mysteries of God. I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with Chelsea over the phone where we discussed the way the body stores trauma, writing about the physical and spiritual experience of pregnancy and giving birth, tiny, accessible writing routines and her debut novel, Godshot.
Kailey Brennan: First off, I’d love to know what sparked the idea for this story? Did you have the idea for the cultish, religious aspect first or did Lacey and her mother come first?
Chelsea Bieker: I think initially the idea was revolving around this mother-daughter relationship. That was always kind of at the heart of the book and the cult aspect ramped up more midway of the writing, where I realized that I wanted the town to have more of a story in and of itself.
I actually wrote a draft of this book from the mother's perspective. It was sort of this older woman looking back on this time in her life, among other things. But it was a really different tone. I was interested in this story, but as soon as I finished it, I felt intuitively that I needed to try to write it from the daughter's perspective. And immediately her voice felt so much more vibrant to me and it felt more alive and it felt more full of tension. I never shifted back to the mother's perspective after that and it became a different book. I wanted to explore this sort of ambiguous loss that Lacey goes through where her mother leaves but she doesn't die. But yet the grief is similar to a death. And at the same time, the town was important to me to characterize as well. So it was sort of both things and finding ways to braid them together. I think that's where the cult aspect was born because it was a nice way to get things really claustrophobic in the town.
KB: Lacey is constantly conflicted between following this leader she has been told to trust and adore and her own instincts as a young woman. I couldn’t help but think of the idea of trauma and the body — how our bodies know when we have been through trauma, oftentimes before our minds fully understand it. Lacey, despite her naivety and the lies she has been told, can somewhat grasp what is happening. She feels it deep inside herself. Can you speak a little more about that instinct she has as a fourteen-year-old and young woman?
CB: Right from the beginning of the book, when she gets her period —that kicks things off —we understand that women's bodies in this society are seen as church property. They're thought of in terms of servitude. It's like how can the body serve the larger body of the church? And so these women are being groomed to feel that way about their bodies and they don't have a lot of ownership surrounding that. They're trained to suppress intuitive thought and suppress those more bodily gut feelings we might have. When something's not feeling right or something's wrong, it's under this guise of religion where if you feel that way, just ignore it because that's not really God's will. And here's God's —we'll tell you what it is. And so over time, that's how she grows up and how she watches her mother navigate things.
But she also begins to watch her mother come away from that a bit. And as we see in the book, she goes on her own journey to listen to that voice a little more. I think she does when the pregnancy happens. There is no more ignoring it. I think the pregnancy is like the ultimate manifestation of something screaming out, look at me. You can't ignore this. Which really does pull her back into more of that body awareness. She continually meets people along the path, the women at the red house and the doulas and birth workers, who are explicitly asking her to look at her body. So there is this encouragement to turn inward in that way that definitely wasn't present in the church. I really wanted to explore that. There's a part in the book where she talks about this knot in her neck and that's where she holds like the pain of her mother. So she does have some awareness about that. That does feel really intuitive. Personally, I'm interested in the way that the body stores trauma and the way that the body has a record for these experiences we've had. The way that we can lay on an acupuncture table and a needle can go in one place and we can just start weeping —that’s startling to me and amazing. In a way, it says a lot about how we hold emotion. I remember the first time I discovered that it felt shocking but it also felt encouraging because it gave me a little more control over my experience with trauma and what to do with it if that makes sense.
KB: It definitely does. You mentioned the doulas and the women in the red house — I loved how Lacey has those experiences with other women. Despite the oppression of all the men in this book, motherhood, girlhood, and then these women supporting each other, by the end of the story, overshadows the patriarchal confines of her world. Was it really important for you to show that resilience of women throughout?
CB: Absolutely. I also wrote the book throughout two different pregnancies and birth experiences. And so I think that really made it all the more important for me to not ignore the writing of that physical experience for women and that spiritual experience. The birth world is a world unto itself. I mean you don't enter it until you're pregnant. For me at least, I had had really no sex education around what the body does. I knew basic things mainly from magazines and self research, but no real tactile education about birth. I realized I had never seen someone give birth, not only in real life but even on a video. That was crazy when I thought about it. So I started watching a lot of videos of women giving birth just to normalize it for myself as well as researching everything that no one tells you. Things that I believe that we should all be learning as we grow up so that we don't hit this point later in life when the body is performing some function and it's totally mysterious.
And I wanted to bring Lacey through that experience as well in a book and for her to encounter these really powerful women who are tuned into that. Their whole job is to assure other women through that experience, which, I think is a beautiful thing. I can't speak for literature and movies as a whole, just what I've read or experienced but I think birth and pregnancy are captured in one way. Which is that it's kind of this miserable disaster, hospitalization situation, emergency, scary. Or it’s also comical. There are no real details given about it. The woman just comes out on the other side holding a bundle and she screamed a lot. In a lot of literature, I think the babies and the birth itself is sometimes off the page. I wanted to bring that to the page and show it in this different way. Through Lacy's eyes, everything is new. Everything including the world she's entering with these other women is brand new. And also, of course, the experience of being pregnant and having to give birth is brand new. So it was kind of an opportunity to see it through these fresh eyes.
KB: There is a section when Lacey is speaking about her baby, where she says she wants to tell her to be ugly and not worry about beauty or what anyone else thinks of her. Where she tells her not to have fear and she will know it as the deepest truth. She will be wild and free. This freedom and “ugliness” will, in turn, make her beautiful. That’s the ultimate dream as a woman I suppose. Is this what freedom looks like for you as a woman? Do you think this is something we can attain? Or something you want to instill in your own daughter?
CB: Yeah, I think I thought a lot about the messaging. Once I had my daughter, it felt like a mirror was being shown back to me, where every time I look at her, I am forced to kind of reckon with who I was at that age or what my life was like at her age. There's just a natural comparison that gets drawn and realizing how much messaging I'd already received from society, from other women in my life, from school, from teachers, from, from everyone and where I grew up, that ultimately didn't serve me. That part of the book is sort of this message that I wish that someone had said to me as a young girl instead of focusing on the way I looked. For me, it always felt like physical beauty was an attribute that should be refined and it meant something about you. It meant you were good or bad. It had consequences and felt serious in this weird way. I felt like if I could tell my daughter something different, what would I tell her? Going back to the body, I was thinking I would want her to think of her body as this vessel that she can really do anything with. Go hiking. Get dirty. All of the things that I felt, maybe even intuitively, but wasn't really encouraged to do growing up. That felt important to me.
In the book, Lacey watches her mother and she sees the way that beauty is what she's known for. And she also sees the ways that has not served her mother very much. So Lacey is thinking about a new way of considering that for her own daughter.
KB: You contributed an amazing list of songs for us a few weeks ago, that you said were inspiration for writing Godshot. What other forms of art helped you on your writing journey?
CB: As far as books, I read Bastard Out of Carolina years ago and it really changed something in me in terms of how to write trauma and traumatic scenes —that it could be done in a way that is true and doesn't look away. But also in a way that isn't exploitative or where the narrator is losing the power of the situation. I think Dorothy Alison does that beautifully. Have you ever read that book?
KB: I haven't!
CB: I mean it's a really intense book. It's beautiful. It's really heavy. But the way she does it, it felt like an example of how it was important for me to stick to the truth of this story. I didn't want to couch certain things that happened to Lacey or make them go away for this idea that a nicer story or like an easier to digest story was the answer. I wanted to somehow write the truth in a way that still felt like art and still allowed Lacey to keep the power in her hands. I did my best with that. That'll be up to the reader to decide if that was achieved, but I saw what Dorothy Alison had done that so well.
Cruddy by Linda Berry was such a lesson in writing voice. There is a fast-paced, entertaining narrator and it’s heartbreaking and has a relentless voice. I love that book. Other inspirations came from kind of random places. A lot of the inspiration came from where I grew up in the Central Valley of California. Some of the odd things about that place that I just wanted to deepen and fictionalize. I wanted the energy of that place to be in a book. Music feels like an inspiration. This sounds really weird, I guess, but YouTube. I remember at the beginning of this book I watched a lot of very random videos that people had posted on YouTube. A lot of teen moms doing these like self-recorded pregnancy updates. So they'd be these extremely young girls, 13 and 14, talking about their pregnancies and measuring their bellies and giving these lighthearted updates couched with these really awful details that they would be saying kind of like it was nothing. I was addicted to watching those and also watching videos of people in a church situation. I went down rabbit holes with that in the beginning and then after a while, I just stuck to my own thoughts with it. The internet holds endless, endless miracles but can also be a huge distraction. I didn't want to get too muddied down in research or I'm watching these sorts of things.
I was also really inspired by this church in Northern California that is kind of like a healer university. It's a Christian Church, but they do a lot of healing work and a lot of miracles are reported to happen there. It's a really private, really intriguing place. Feathers are falling from the sky and God is manifesting himself in physical forms in their church.
KB: I was curious how long you worked on Godshot and if you kept a certain writing routine or if you just write when you can. What does that look like for you?
CB: It was a little over six years start to finish for this book and I worked on it really solidly throughout those six years. I really loved having the escape from the novel turn up in short stories. So every time I felt like I hit a wall with the novel, I would write a short story. It was helpful for me to have two projects going at once. Just listen to the voice when it was like, that's enough for today. Nothing else good is coming out today, so just move on. Rather than painfully feel I have to religiously stick to this schedule of X amount of hours every day. It wasn't really like that. I liked to tap into a more intuitive flow when I'm writing and really listen to that inner voice.
I think that we know what a story wants to be somewhere inside of us and that's the compulsion to write it in the first place and not losing sight of that energy. In the beginning, I didn't outline. I had a few guideposts that I knew I wanted to hit throughout the book, but that those were also flexible. So for me, that's sort of my process. And then in revision, I did start to do some outlines and some more structure, focused kind of helpful exercises. But yeah, initially it was important to me to just get those first few drafts out with that original energy of that voice because the voice is the most important part for me in this book.
And as far as the ritual, I knew after I had my daughter that nobody was going to guard my time for me. Suddenly I was at the mercy of someone else all day long. I started making these tiny commitments with myself. They were really tiny. It would be like one hour, once a week I'm going to show up and that hour is just for this book. Slowly that would grow. Or then, if I could sneak in an extra 30 minutes somewhere, I would do that. Or if I could write while I was nursing her, I would do that. But I knew at least I had that day coming up that I'd have that hour or two hours. You can get a lot done in two hours if you know that's all you're going to get all week.
It also really highlighted to me how badly I wanted to write and how much I was willing to commit at that point. Not that I didn't know I wanted to be a writer before I had her, but it was so different because I was able to have so much more flexibility when I wrote. But it changed something in me after I had her, where my time felt so much more desperate and so much more hard-won that I perhaps became more productive in those small amounts of time than I had. I was always teaching a lot too throughout the writing of this book. I don't know if I recommend all of that at once, but I did it. (Laughs)
KB: What is some advice you can give aspiring writers that helped you while writing this novel or advice that you tell your students?
CB: I think a common question or issue I see with students over the years is that they have a lot of anxiety about actually writing. The act of writing is very panic producing. And often I see students try to, which I kind of talked a little bit about already, this idea that they're going to wake up at six every morning and write for an hour or two hours before they go to work. And that's how they're going to get this done. They're going to do it every single day—these big schedules, these big commitments. Inevitably, unless you're a small percentage of people, I think that is setting yourself up for failure. You're going to have a day where you don't want to wake up at six and write, so then that day comes and they don't do it. Then the next day they don't do it again. And suddenly— it's like going to the gym— I haven't been there in weeks and it's because it was the lofty goal and now I failed and it's all crumbled down. I just see a lot of anxiety around that. I think another way to look at it is through these tiny achievable goals that will inevitably build on themselves. Even if it’s I will write one sentence a day. Something just as small as that can be a helpful step toward the kind of writing routine or writing life that you want. One paragraph a day or one page. Something small that you truly will be able to do, even if you're tired, even if you have a headache, you can still crank out that one sentence. Those small chunks accumulate into something bigger and they'll accumulate much faster than not doing it at all.
Then, I would say, think about what in your life is a yes and what's a no. Spend a day going through the actions of your life. Obviously, we have commitments we can't get out of —those are not part of what I'm saying. But you know, asking yourself as you're making your coffee, do I really like this? Going to a workout class, do I really like this? Listen to your intuitive answer. So often we're doing things just out of practice, or routine or some idea that we should be doing them.
Really whittle down, what do I want my day to actually look like? What are the things that are primary for me? If writing is one of those things, then it needs to be in there. And maybe that lunch with your cousin that you don't even like, doesn't need to be in there. I encourage you to highlight where are you on autopilot and what can be replaced. Are you scrolling on your phone for two hours every night? Maybe sometimes that's fine and that is good and what you need, but sometimes it standing in the way of that novel that you want to write. So get really honest about what’s a yes and what’s a no.
Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, and the author of two forthcoming books, the novel GODSHOT (Catapult, April 7th, 2020) and the story collection, COWBOYS AND ANGELS (2021). Her writing has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, Electric Literature, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, No Tokens, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. Her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. She holds a BS in journalism from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Currently she lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children where she teaches college composition as well as fiction writing for Catapult and the Gotham Writer’s Workshop.
