Inte(re)view: Death, Desire and Other Destinations
Tara Isabel Zambrano takes us across different folds of time, realities, and human emotions in her new book Death, Desire, and Other Destinations from Okay Donkey. I’m delighted to have had the opportunity to dive into this collection, especially given Okay Donkey’s background of publishing stellar pieces and collections in the past. I can firmly say Zambrano marvelously adds to this trend with her book.
Zambrano leads us in “Alligators,” a piece combining both death and desire, priming us for what we are about to experience throughout the rest of the collection. A dead alligator and a desire-filled encounter with a stranger; this is only one of the narrators we are fortunate to meet. Most of the book is written from the first-person perspective, which fully swallows you into each story’s emotions. We are offered the ability as readers to become a wide range of people and speakers across the collection. Instead of observing what is happening as a tertiary watcher, we are transported into the shoes of these voices. We experience this in “The Undecided Colors,” “Cubes,” and “Spaceman,” to name a few. Using the first-person voice allows for internal and external rumination, explaining motives and reasoning of these characters, which digs us further into their minds and lives as we read.
The language in Death, Desire, and Other Destinations is another cornerstone of the collection. In “Up & Up,” we see language like “my mother is covered in moans,” an image that leads us into the lust of a lover, using moans to evoke sheets of a bed. In “Silent Spaces,” Zambrano imagines the characters together with “each other in the same suitcase, their bodies on a motel bed like tangled necklaces in a jewelry box.” This image intertwines the innocence of young women with a moment of desire, perfectly encapsulating the feelings our narrator is having in that moment. Her stories also often contain contrasting images, like in “A Thousand Eyes.” The scene quickly opens with “goat shat shines,” presenting the moment as both beautiful and unkempt in just three words. And these are only a few moments that ensconce readers in the narratives via language and images, coloring the book with a vibrancy throughout.
When I first picked up Zambrano’s collection, I was curious where we’d be going outside of the two main titular themes. The first selection of stories fully communicates death and desire, so what other destinations were we going to come across? I found the locations themselves compelling, but what captivated me were the emotions we were being brought to experience. Zambrano peppers her collection of death and desire with themes like vicariousness, consumption, dovetailing desire into lust, and many more. One of my favorite stories is “Nine Openings,” a flash containing an alien and two characters that drain the alien until it has nothing left. Here, we are shown consumption through the language. Of the two different actors, the alien only “nibbles on shadows” whereas the humans “feed.” This choice description implies that humans are more ferocious in their taking, and this imbalance ultimately leads to the decline of their precious alien and decline of themselves. Other themes beside overconsumption, like jealousy, appear in other stories, including “Milk” and “Scooped Out Chest,” often combined with some level of desire, or lack of desires being met. Zambrano has a talent for taking these common themes and combining them in new ways, new worlds, and new imaginings that are compelling in such short spaces.
Zambrano has the masterful ability to pivot into a major development of her stories. I found myself slowly roped along, peppered with details, until suddenly a huge plot point or quality was revealed, punctuating the story and compounding the impact I felt. She does this numerous times throughout her collection, some examples being “A Surprising Frailty” and “Acid of Curiosity.” What I find captivating is Zambrano’s skill to both maintain and outdo the space she operates in. There is an understanding, as a collection of short stories, that the pieces are going to be a certain length given the medium. Zambrano keeps to this and, I argue, distills it even further, creating compelling narrators, realities, and situations in sometimes the breadth of a single page.
Upon finishing the collection, I was overflowing with questions. The span of interests and topics she covers and the skills she implores in such short bursts had me incredibly excited, and I couldn’t resist asking Tara Isabel Zambrano about Death, Desire, and Other Destinations. Reader, we’re headed toward an interview!
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Madeleine Corley: To begin, what I love about your book is how many places you take us between death and desire. It’s a beautiful compilation of worlds, each starkly different from the next, each captivating and firmly situating us in individual voices. What inspires you to build these worlds?
Tara Isabel Zambrano: Thank you so much for taking the time and your generous comments. I believe, I am an imaginative person but it’s also my background as a person of science, as an Engineer, that enables me to write such different places with conviction and some reality. Moreover, it’s fun to explore the depths of my mind and see what gold or rubble I land up with.
MC: Most of your stories are written from the first-person perspective, which I find plants a reader in the moment’s intimacy. The stories you have in other perspectives, like “New Old,” also deliver intense emotion. I’m interested in how you determine what perspective best suits a story, which voice is the best vehicle to communicate. Do you begin with the narrator or the world or a combination of both?
TIZ: Stories come to my mind with a certain POV. Often, I keep them the way I imagined them. Sometimes, I play around with changing the POV from first to third, because that allows me to expand or contract the character as per the needs of the story. The second person POV is my favorite, and when the story comes to me in that voice, I keep it untouched.
MC: You’ve such a skill of pivoting at paragraphs and breaks to take a story somewhere unexpected. I can think of many, one in particular being “Acid of Curiosity,” detailing a key part of the narrator’s identity after you’ve successfully solidified their voice. I’m curious how you know those moments and these breaks are meant to happen. How do you find these for a story and what brings you to its final pivots?
TIZ: In the initial draft, my stories are a jumbled mess, I try breaks at different points. I write different scenes at different times, bring them together. Then I objectively compare and decide what should remain and what needs to go. Ultimately, the break points should feel natural or a logical node in a story. Something from which another conflict begins. And a story or a flash piece isn’t done until I experience that feeling.
MC: I primarily write poems and am often taken with the visual framing of a story, whether that’s punctuation or breaks or spacing. Across your book, different stories display dialogue differently. Some use quotes, some italics, and some no delineation other than paragraphs, examples being “Clueless,” “Alligators,” and “Milk Chocolate Messenger Man.” How do you decide which visual method to convey communication? What are you looking to evoke in a reader?
TIZ: You’re right. These stories are written at different times and I’ve alternated between quotes and italics as a form of dialog. I believe I am always playing reader of my stories, so whatever feels right at that time, continues. It’s more of an instinctive decision rather than a logical one.
MC: Your collection is punctuated with color and depth across varying themes. Their focuses are interspersed throughout the book and to me, this brings you through each story through variance. I feel beginning with “Alligators” set the tone of the title and what adventures we were possibly heading towards. How did you arrive at the ordering of this full collection?
TIZ: I have dispersed my old and new stories, interleaved the topics of death with stories about desire and travel. I hope that creates a freshness and flavor in the experience. Ultimately as a reader, if you like it and feel the flow, then I am successful.
MC: Last question, I promise. Whose art inspires you these days and who would you recommend to those of us just getting into flash and fiction?
TIZ: Oh, there are many, many wonderful flash fiction writers. I think it’s better to look at some of the flash fiction journals and read what they publish. I would start with SmokeLong Quarterly, OKAY Donkey, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, matchbook, to name a few. I feel, by reading these, you get a spectrum of form, language and content, regardless of the author, and that is where your focus as a writer should be: on a solid story and its characters, and how to make it better, and how not to stand in its way.
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Tara Isabel Zambrano’s book is a must-have. It’s vibrant, illustrative, and compelling in every story, all in their own way. I highly recommend purchasing the book for yourself, for a friend, for your aunt’s neighbor’s son — everyone deserves a copy! You can find it on Okay Donkey’s website
and find Tara on Twitter @theinnerzone and on her website
It was a delight to read and sit with her work, and I think you should too.
Madeleine Corley (she/her) is a writer by internal monologue. When she is not flitting between projects, she is trying to complete a 5000 piece puzzle. She currently serves as Poetry Editor at Barren Magazine. You can find her tweets @madelinksi and her work and other things on her website, wrotemadeleine.com
