A Q&A with Emily Ruskovich, 2019 Dublin Award winner

Emily Ruskovich is a fiction editor of The Idaho Review. She grew up in the Idaho Panhandle on Hoodoo Mountain. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, One story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. A winner of a 2015 O. Henry award and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Boise State University. She lives in Boise with her husband and young daughter. Her debut and L.A. Times-bestselling novel Idaho has won the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award.

Our editorial staff member Di Bei chatted with Ruskovich over email about Idaho.

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DB: In your acknowledgements, you mention that Alice Munro has been a great influence on your writing. Idaho does remind me of Munro’s works, with its poetic and calm prose, as well as the honest and surprising observations of human nature. I’m curious about how exactly Munro influences your process of writing Idaho?

Whenever I feel lost when I am writing, whenever I feel that I don't know how to express what my characters are feeling, I turn to Alice Munro. I read her as if to find my own voice. Sometimes, I don't need to read a whole story of hers; sometimes I need only read a few descriptions to remind me what a single sentence can do, how it can transform a paragraph, a page, the tone of a character's entire life. Usually, one of her descriptions can set me free for quite a while, because she reminds me again and again that anything is possible. Her influence on me is very profound and feels very personal. I try to get her voice in my head, and I try to write as Alice Munro. Of course, I will always fail: No matter how hard we all try, none of us will ever succeed in writing like Alice Munro. But it's in the attempt, however failed, that I find my own voice. I feel that's an incredible gift that she has given me. It's a mystery how it works, and I owe so much to that mystery.

DB: A another novel that keeps coming to my mind while reading Idaho is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In both novels, the horrifying plot of mother murdering her own daughter happens before the storytelling begins, and the story unfolds as memories of losses and longings. I am amazed at how you keep the novel riveting even when the climactic event happened before the first chapter. I am also intrigued by the structure of Idaho, as the nonlinear timeline mirrors the way memory works. Please tell us how you organize the story structure. Do you design a rough outline for your plots? Do you write chapters down and move them around until you find their right places in the novel?

When I first read Beloved, which is one of my favorite novels, I, too, was very struck by the similarities between its plot and my own. I did not read Beloved until I had already finished a few drafts of my novel. But reading it at that stage did really help me in revision, because I felt I had been given permission to do what I was doing—to withhold where I felt it was honest to withhold.

I do not outline. I wish that I could plan ahead, but I can't. I might have a scene in mind that I am writing toward, but often, I'm not sure I understand the scene myself, and very often, it's not a pivotal scene, but a peripheral one that has, for some reason, caught my attention. I feel like I am always feeling my way around, guided by character more than plot. Plot is something, for me, that emerges only from character. Some elements of my plot were very mystifying to me, shocking and even frustrating. How did this happen? Why did the mother kill the daughter? This mystifies me still. But it was the premise I was given. I had to deal with it honestly. And that meant I couldn't plan what would happen; I couldn't change what was already done.

But, after the novel was written, I did move chapters around many, many times. It was amazing how moving one chapter could change the balance of the entire story, and could color the themes in the surrounding chapters so profoundly. The order of chapters was something I struggled with throughout, as I did not write the book in order, except the ending. The ending was the last thing I wrote, and I didn't know how it would end until I was there, seeing it happen.

DB: I’d love to know how you did your research, whether for the prison scenes or the dementia. Can you share a little bit of your research process with us? What are the challenges/discoveries you had when you wrote from Wade and Adam’s perspectives when they are struggling with diseases?

I wrote from memory and from feeling, and not from research. The research I did came later, to correct any errors I had made. All my life, I have listened to stories people have told about Alzhiemer's disease. Strangers, loved ones. It was something I learned when I was very young, that there was a disease that took away your memories. It was so horrifying to me, and seemed so unreal, like a terrifying science fiction premise, that I found myself paying attention all my life, everywhere I went, my ears and my heart open to the stories of this horrible affliction. So, though I did not do much research at all about the disease, I did feel like I had been studying it my whole life through a lens of empathy and through fear.

I taught briefly in a prison, as did my father. So the prison chapters were also written partly from experience, and then were expanded upon after reading a journalistic account of women's prisons. But one of the most important moments of research for me was when my husband and I drove to the Women's Correctional Facility in Pocatello, Idaho. We did not go inside. We parked our car, and sat in our seats, and looked upon it in silence for a great long while, and thought about all the lives that were being lived behind those walls.

I did do a great deal of research regarding the naming of the state of Idaho. The story of Idaho's name is fragmented and not well-documented. The narrative that I put together is as close as I can come to the truth, based on the research. I don't believe there is another account written about the naming of Idaho that is as extensive as my own; I'm very proud of this. This research, too, came after several drafts had already been finished. It was a great gift, then, that what I found in the research were two lost little girls—one named "Ida" and one named "Idaho." To find something like—after spending years writing about two lost girls—that was a surprise. I could hardly believe it. I think that a lot of fiction is accidental, based on strange affinities. It's very mysterious, also.

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Di Bei is a second year fiction MFA candidate at Boise State University where she teaches and works as an editorial assistant for The Idaho Review. Author of the novel, The Horse Ballerina, her work has also appeared in The Masters Review.