A Conversation with Mariah Rigg

Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: In anticipation of Mariah Rigg’s visit to the University of Cincinnati, I had the pleasure of asking Mariah a few questions about craft, inspiration, and process. Mariah’s short story collection, Extinction Capital of the World, is available now from HarperCollins.

KJ: I thoroughly enjoyed your multimodal approach to point of view throughout Extinction Capital of the World. We open with “Target Island” in third-person point of view, which feels appropriately acclimatizing—the omniscience introduces us to an engagement with place and time that moves generationally in this super fascinating way. The collection also includes stories written in first-person and second-person points of view. How did each point of view appeal to you in your drafting process, and did any stories switch perspectives from draft to (published) page? 

MR: I love playing with point of view in my fiction!! My hot take is that poets get form, and fiction writers get point of view (I know it’s more complicated than this, and that poets also work with point of view). How you choose your point of view determines nearly everything for a story—its scope, the temperament of your narrator, how time will work, etc. etc. In this collection, all of the stories are loyal to the point of view they were first written in, though many have deepened retrospection or interiority than their first drafts. Interestingly (or perhaps predictably), the stories that feel the most “traditional” in the Western sense of point of view—“After Ivan,” “Field Dressing,” “Dawn Chorus”—are the stories that I wrote earlier in my career as a writer. Stories like the titular novelette, “Extinction Capital of the World,” which utilizes two and a half points of view, including a collective point of view, a close third to a father, and a close third to a daughter, were the last written. The more I write, the weirder I get with point of view, a trend that I hope continues!

KJ: A compounding sense of trauma is felt deeply in the emotional and physical landscapes comprising the collection. As I mentioned in my previous question, time operates “generationally” across this collection. We get this compressed sense of consequence by following grandfather to granddaughter, mother to daughter, etc. Through that movement down the family tree, we witness characters grappling with attachment and detachment to one another as well as to place.I would love to learn more about how you negotiated attachment and detachment, closeness and distance, when writing these stories?

MR: Some writers are interested in character, some in place or plot, but I’m most interested in relationships. Because of this, my stories often eschew linear time for relational or recursive time. The things that happen to the characters of Extinction Capital of the World are impacted by events that have already taken place, events that are taking place concurrently in the timeline of the collection, or events that will, someday in the future, take place. The attachment (or detachment) that the characters of the collection feel is dependent on where they are—in time, in lineage—to these events. As a Samoan-Haole who was born and raised on Oʻahu, I am constantly reckoning with my identity as both a diasporic Pacific Islander and a white settler of the Hawaiian Islands. On one hand, Hawaiʻi is my heart, is my childhood, it is where my immediate and much of my extended family live. On the other hand, I do not always feel that I have the right to call Hawaiʻi my home, because of the violent occupation of Hawaiian land and generational displacement of the Hawaiian people from their ancestral lands by settlers and the U.S. government. A lot of the characters of Extinction Capital of the World are in this same position, are wrestling with this, along with the increasing unaffordability of Hawaiʻi as it is being bought up by billionaires and corporations to build compounds and resorts.

KJ: I’m curious about the first line of “After Ivan,” (originally published in Issue 19.1) “I met Ivan in Cuba, three years before I quit kayaking and nearly a decade after my brother—Max—and I found the man in the canal.” 

As a reader—I was really struck by this move. It pulled me in so immediately…and yet? I was totally shocked by how (and when) the story ends.

What led to your decision to begin the story with this temporal framing around the event of meeting Ivan’s character? Did earlier drafts of the story contain this framing structure? 

MR: “After Ivan” always opened this way! And it always ended the way it does in its current draft too. Like so much of this collection, “After Ivan” is an homage to the work of Edward P. Jones. For this story, I wanted to write a queer sporty romance, but I was also really interested in building a story around mirrors and echoes. Ivan’s death echoes the death of the man in the canal that our narrator, Mason, finds in his childhood. Max and Mason, both elite kayakers, are identical twins. At the center of the story, our narrator is trying to make sense of these echoes and repetitions. He’s haunted by Ivan’s death because he loved him, but also because it reminds him of the man he found dead in the Ala Wai so many years ago, when he was young and thought that having his whole life ahead of him meant that he would get what he wanted from it.

KJ: What’s been inspiring your creative practice of late? Anything you want to share regarding upcoming projects? 

MR: Lately I’ve been really inspired by the Northampton winter farmer’s market. I lived in Denver before I moved to Western Mass, and the produce there was absolutely horrible, at least in the part of the city where I rented. It’s been so lovely to be able to get watermelon radishes in winter and fresh oyster mushrooms and leeks! Oh my god, I love leeks. But anyway, I’m supposed to be finishing my debut novel, which is another sporty queer romance, though this one includes sailing and a love triangle between three childhood friends, and I am working on it!! But I’ve also been sneaking away to write a weird grief novel on the side about a printmaker in Knoxville who falls for a farmer after running from her mother’s death. The farmer’s market—with its summer wildflower honey and lavender magnesium oil and rainbow carrots—has been a huge touchstone for this side project of a novel. As was Hungry Ghost Bread (RIP).