Rumpus: In “Snow,” “The Loss of Heaven,” and “Exotics,” you examine the service industry as a venue where race, gender, and class dynamics play out. Honestly, I’m just happy to get to bring the kinds of characters I’m most interested in to life. I needed to hear that plainly, that I’m allowed to write about whatever I want to write about without worrying about other people’s expectations. When I first started this collection, I actually asked my agent: Is it a problem that so many of these characters are girls/women? And she said: No. When I was younger, I’d get bored or frustrated with shows, books, or games that had no characters that embodied my lived experience, or ones that were superficially drawn, but now, looking back on those mediums, I’m so intrigued by what those superficialities say about the person who created them, and the societal impact of the time period in which the creator was informed. As far as sister/daughterhood, I’m really interested in the varying connections and shapes of femininity, and how our ideas of what that looks like are both limited and complex. So, on the one hand, it feels natural to explore all of the joys and anxieties that come with the territory. Think about growing up as a girl in this country (and beyond) and all of the gendered expectations that come with that-the kitchen sets, toy vacuums, and baby dolls you might have mothered as play. Moniz: I think, by force of conditioning, motherhood is something that has always been on my mind, even before it was conscious to me. What drew you to explore the many variations of motherhood, daughterhood, and sisterhood?
There are absent mothers, domineering mothers, sweet mothers, grandmothers as stand-in mothers, and “cold wars” between daughters and mothers.
You write about miscarriage and the anxieties of pregnancy in the twenty-first century. Rumpus: Motherhood is perhaps the most significant theme in the book. How is one story propelling or expanding the reader’s understanding of another? These are cyclical stories, and in putting the collection together, I was interested in how each piece might be in conversation with those around it. Those are not small things, and what would happen if we, as readers, as critics, broadened our definition of what constitutes a link? There are certain words (besides milk, blood, or heat) that I think of as totems, that build resonance throughout the collection. A lot of times with short story collections, it seems people have trouble thinking of them as linked unless the characters are the same, and that leaves out all of the other points of immersion-why someone might be attracted to a particular book-like voice, place, mood, ideology. Milk, blood, and heat factor into almost every story, often in some form of ritual, like the blood-sisters oath in the title story or the moon festival in “An Almanac of Bones.” Do you think of this collection as an interconnected whole rather than a set of standalone stories?ĭantiel W. The Rumpus: I was impressed by the thematic coherence of this collection. I caught up with Moniz recently over email to discuss linked story collections, rituals, motherhood, spirituality, Florida, and the value of writing workshops. She lives in Northeast Florida, where most of the stories in her collection are set. Moniz is a Tin House Scholar and a recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction and the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar the latter was where I met her in 2018. All of the stories here are boldly told and hum with tension. In “Feast,” she explores a woman’s alienation and grief following a miscarriage “The Hearts of Our Enemies” details a “cold war” between a shamed mother and her teenage daughter “Outside the Raft” dives deep into the darkness latent in the human heart. Moniz writes about family, marriage, class, loss, and race with wisdom and intensity, and her stories are rife with vivid images and sentences that can stand strikingly alone. Moniz’s debut story collection, Milk Blood Heat, just published this week from Grove Atlantic, but you might’ve already encountered her work in the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere.
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