Adjusting the Resolution: An Interview with Molly McGinnis

An interview with the author of "the bright codes"

by A.R. Castellano
 
Molly McGinnis is a recent graduate of American University whose writing has appeared in Hobart, CQ Researcher, Winter Tangerine, and the Adroit Journal. She currently works as a researcher and lives in Washington, D.C.
 
I first met Molly in 2016, during a fiction workshop which read an earlier version of “The Bright Codes,” and I was admittedly eager to revisit the story prior to its appearance in Grace in Darkness. She told me that when she was a kid, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories freaked her out, because she thought a genie would come to turn off her “story writing current,” too, but luckily, that doesn’t seem to have happened. In “The Bright Codes,” protagonist Lisa notices one night that, amidst the mundanity of every-day life, she has developed an unusual condition – what McGinnis aptly terms “chronic invisibility,” a periodic fading in-and-out of visibility which begins with something as innocuous as a missing finger joint but quickly escalates. Like much of Rushdie’s fiction, McGinnis’s story occurs in a world that is largely similar to ours, but only incidentally strange: a resolution adjustment on the pixelated screen of unreality.

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Themes of (in)visibility recur throughout “The Bright Codes.” Even before parts of Lisa begin to disappear, the reader gets a sense of her relative invisibility—where the other characters are introduced and identified relative to their occupations, Lisa is a student, and one either still taking Gen-Eds or an otherwise disparate set of classes, at that. Could you talk a little bit about why you chose to set this story of a chronically invisible girl alongside the 2014 Ebola crisis?

​I started thinking about this story in 2014, during the Ebola crisis, so I had a lot of notes about Ebola mixed in with my notes about a chronically invisible person and her world. When I wrote the first draft in 2016, the Ebola notes seemed like a part of the plot itself, so I left them in. Ebola was this huge, invisible threat, where symptoms became visible only when it’s too late, and the other part of the threat was in its invisibility – citizens in Ebola-affected areas couldn’t access information on prevention or didn’t trust what they were told. So, there are many metaphorical implications, but really, the story is set in the fall of 2014 in Washington, D.C., and for me, the fear of Ebola had to be part of that landscape.
I was also taking an introductory ethics class at the time, and it was the first time I learned about bioethics and all its exciting backroads – I remember the phrase “invisible illness” caught my attention, and so did the concept of covering (your identity). I knew I wanted to write a character who was not only chronically unseen by others, but lost her ability to recognize herself as well, and understood how disorienting that could be. I’m not Lisa, but I did always wish for invisibility as a superpower when I was a kid, and learning about covering and the double consciousness in my lit and ethics classes was a good reminder that what was once protective can become harmful over time.

In addition to Lisa’s chronic invisibility and the Ebola outbreak, there’s another thread in the story regarding Catherine’s condition. The “series of bright codes” Cathy sees the world in doesn’t get much space on the page relative to the other major threads, and yet Cathy’s vision is what gives the story its title. How does Cathy fit into this matter of invisibility?

When I started writing this, I knew Lisa’s sister was sick, but I wasn’t sure how it would fit into the story. Then I realized, of course, illness is always hard to fit into stories, and usually tries to warp them to fit its needs. I tried to stay away from tropes and write the illness in the context of Cathy, rather than write Cathy solely in the context of her illness. While Lisa’s disembodiment is too otherworldly for realistic fiction, I wanted that surrealism to grate against her otherwise ordinary life. On the other hand, Cathy’s illness is a realistic element that can feel surreal – there’s a shift when you realize your life, or the life of someone you love, can be dictated by forces totally outside of your control and can’t always be protected with technology, intellect, or willpower.

I told you before how stunned I was while reading “Guns in the House,” which is such a markedly different story in terms of tone, content, and style, and you mentioned that you’ve found yourself moving away from strictly realistic fiction towards the slipstream style on display in “The Bright Codes.” Was this a conscious shift on your part, or was that just the way your writing has taken you over the past few years?

I don’t think it was a conscious shift, although I was worried about genre for a long time. I was really focused on fitting into certain literary categories and brought it up with a professor at one point, who essentially said there was no need to stress out about this because forms and genres are just intellectual methods. You just have to choose the one that will be best for the story. I think doing that is difficult, but I don’t worry so much about adhering to a specific label anymore. I don’t think I’m moving away from realistic fiction so much as realizing that it’s not always going to be the right choice for the story I’m trying to tell, and that’s wonderful and terrifying.

What is it about slipstream that appeals to you as a writer?

Well, I found out about it when I read Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals” and wondered what had just happened. It wasn’t strictly realistic fiction, or fantasy, or sci-fi, but an eclipse of worlds. It appealed to me because it spoke to the wonder and horror that sometimes bolts up in everyday life – there’s a kind of drama that can be conveyed with realism, but it’s the added sense of mystery and uncertainty that draws me in. That feels realistic, in a way. A computer lab becoming haunted or coworkers inadvertently switching afterlives are situations with a welcoming strangeness – the idea that the Other was not confined to its own world or genre, but was part of this reality all along. Plus, I think the feeling of unreality is familiar to a lot of people. Slipstream just adjusts the resolution.

As writers, we all have those things we return to again and again in our work. For me, it’s fairytales, wicked witches, fathers and sons—and an alarming number of my protagonists tend to die. Is there anything you find yourself returning to, even unintentionally?

Your protagonists do tend to die! That’s true. Mine don’t die, but they are always looking for something that’s disappeared or is about to go missing. Or maybe they’re just constantly misplacing things around the house. I like search histories – writing and reading them.

To be more specific, though – this is such a fun question – I do think there are little genetic markers in my work. I always come back to dislocation, secrecy, family myths, and descriptions of light. One of my classmates pointed this out and she’s right. Something is always glowing or fading or exploding in my stories. I don’t know why. It’s not intentional. I read a paper about brain scans last week and saw the phrase “unidentified bright objects.” If I can borrow a medical term for literary purposes, I think that’s a good way to describe what’s going on.

I want to ask about the end, but I don’t want to spoil it, so maybe we should end somewhere completely different, instead—the dinner party question. Alive or dead, real or fiction, who’s at your literary dinner table?

I like that you didn’t specify writers! In that case, I want Thomas Pynchon’s fictional fraud investigator, Maxine, to be there, which means Thomas Pynchon should come, too. I think Maxine and I would be great friends. Also: Nellie Bly, Walt Whitman, Chris Hedges, Stuart Dybek, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Salman Rushdie, Paul Celan, Adrienne Rich, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Lethem, Arabelle Sicardi, and NoViolet Bulawayo. It would have to be a long table.

​I’ll risk sounding “upsucky” for a minute, as the philosopher Carl Elliott would say (he tweeted that once about academia, I believe), but I think, in reality, I can’t have a literary dinner party without several of my old AU professors. I have no shame, and I think they deserve a nod in an interview about stories and invisibility, because at least a few of them are very much responsible for my own retreat from it, whether they know it or not. I suspect they have no idea. Maybe that’s good. But it’s a powerful thing to read about characters who are just like you in ways you’d never seen reflected before – even better is realizing the author is someone you know. It’s like your earlier observation, that Cathy’s vision is what gives Lisa’s story its title. Adrienne Rich wrote, “What we see, / we see / and seeing is changing.” I don’t have heroes, literary or otherwise, but I do have people I’m incredibly lucky to know.

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A.R. Castellano is an MFA candidate at American University, the Editor-in-Chief of FOLIO, and is constantly misplacing things around the house. Following this interview, he has begun to wonder if he isn’t just a character in another Molly McGinnis story. Results have been inconclusive.