Claire Boyles is an MFA candidate at Colorado State University. Her work has appeared in the Masters Review and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and she is the recipient of a scholarship from Bread Loaf Orion. She raises kids and teaches middle school in Loveland, Colorado. An excerpt from her story “Chickens, 2019” can be found here. It appears in the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Chickens, 2019”?
My family and I ran a small-scale organic farm on the eastern plains of Colorado for six years, and at one barbeque with a large group of our neighbors, there was talk that the state government was going to try to take agricultural water rights from farmers through some sort of eminent domain action. It wasn’t true, but emotion ran high—calls for armed patrols at headgates, real-life “from my cold, dead hands” sentiment. Water rights are a preoccupation of Westerners generally and of mine personally, so the story just evolved from there.
Grace seems to harbor an affection for the feminine and at least a partial distaste for the masculine. She praises her hens, saying “Each one of my girls is only ever exactly like herself” and later admits to having an aversion to her rooster’s arrogance, Jerry’s appearance and paranoia, and Smith’s allegiance to his job enforcing law. Did these sentiments, paired with Grace’s own identity as a farm girl, frame her outlook on life and her motivations in this piece?
I see Grace as torn between her sincere fondness toward the men in her life and her anger and disappointment in the things they feel they have rights to take from her—property and livelihood, certainly, but also dignity and freedom—and those emotions certainly influence her outlook and decision making throughout the story.
Grace has a knack for seeing in what can be beautiful or alarming metaphor. The patterns on one of her chickens, for instance, reminds her of a mountain range and a reclined woman while the pecked-at intestines of her dead rooster conjure the image “gray-blue membrane-shiny maypole ribbons.” What do these pictures and associations do to augment or enhance the reality of your setting and narrative? What in Grace specifically would you say prompts her sight towards both beauty and intense but almost casual approach to violence?
Farm management, in my experience, is a direct and consistent connection to both beauty and death. Grace has likely had to break the neck of a chicken she loved to end its suffering from illness or injury, has certainly disemboweled a bird before eating it for dinner, and has witnessed some of her hens attempting to cannibalize one another. I think this would have given Grace both an eye for the dark beauty of the world and a level of comfort with violence that reads a bit intense in off-farm settings.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
Most of all my family—my husband and my kids, both teenagers, all of whom keep me from taking myself too seriously. My farming years are also hugely influential, as is the time I spend backpacking and camping, gardening, jogging through local open space. I try to get outdoors as much as possible.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I have just finished a short story collection that includes “Chickens, 2019,” so now I’m working to revise a bad first draft of what I hope will be a good first novel. It’s about a family of farmers struggling with the impacts of fracking during the Great Recession.