2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
courtesy of Liza Wieland
96
number 22
“ Quickening,” from Fiction to Film: A Conversation with Liza Wieland and Mary Kate Monahan by Tanya Nichols It was my good fortune that Liza Wieland allowed me to read her story “Quickening” in advance of its original publication. The story had won second place in the New South writing contest and was pending publication in that literary magazine. It would later become the title story to Wieland’s third story short story collection.1 After reading “Quickening” that first time, I sat in silence for a long while, thinking about Jill and Noah, worrying about their lives as much as if they were the neighbor kids down the street. I imagined bands of teenagers drinking beers and clamoring among the Babson Boulders, about three-dozen carved boulders found just outside Gloucester, Massachusetts, in Dogtown.2 It is there, among the inspirational mottoes to, for example, “work,” “study,” “help mother,” “use your head” that fiction writer Liza Wieland imagines a group of high school girls making a “pregnancy pact.” Reading Wieland’s story, thinking about it after, I could feel the chill of the sea, the bitter cold of a snowy night, as these teenagers sat on the boulders and all decided to get pregnant. I immediately called Mary Kate Monahan and told her I had a story for her to read, confident that she would care about these characters as deeply as I did, hopeful that she would give them life on the screen. She didn’t let me down. Liza Wieland is a multi-genre writer. She has published three novels and three collections of short stories as well as a collection of poetry and numerous personal essays. But, I confess, I am partial to her short stories. Liza’s stories are infused with a nuanced spirituality and vision that compel the reader to stop and reflect on the subject at hand, to see the situation through a wider lens, sometimes with a sharper focus, sometimes with a softening filter.
Tanya Nichols received her MFA in fiction at California State University– Fresno where she now teaches. She has published short stories in Sycamore Review, In the Grove, and San Joaquin Review. COURTESY OF ERIC Bickernicks
1
Liza Wieland’s story “Quickening” was originally published in New South 2.2 (2009). Wieland’s short story collection Quickening was published in 2011 by Southern Methodist University Press. Pamela Cox of Five to Ten Design in Washington, NC, designed the layout of this interview.
2
In order to create job opportunities during the Depression, philanthropist Roger W. Babson contracted workers to inscribe sayings onto the large stones of Dogtown Common, near Gloucester, MA. left (and throughout)
Examples of the Babson Boulders