From Our Authors | March 15, 2024

Recently, TMR intern Shayla Malone interviewed Genevieve Abravanel about “Wilderness Survival,” which tells the story of a recently widowed mom and her young daughter, who becomes an avid follower of a YouTube survivalist, Joe Wilderness, as a way of coping with the loss of her father. First published in TMR issue 46.3 (Fall 2023), Abravanel’s effervescent story considers the bewildering process of shared healing. You can read it here.

 
Shayla Malone: What inspired you to write “Wilderness Survival”?

Genevieve Abravanel: I would say a combination of factors: one is, obliquely, my childhood; another is seeing my kids grow up with the scripted reality of YouTube, so different from my own childhood watching sitcoms and soap operas. My children don’t watch any television. They only watch YouTube. And these YouTube personalities are significant to them. Maybe not to the extent that Joe Wilderness is to Candy, who reaches out to the Internet in a sort of unconscious reckoning with her own grief, as though it were an oracle.

SM: The narrator in your story realizes how difficult it is to raise her daughter, Candy, after the death of Candy’s father. How have your own relationships with mothers and/or motherhood affected how you write about mothering?

GA: Sometimes I feel everything I write is about motherhood! I am obsessed with writing about motherhood in particular and parents and children in general: fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. I was worried about this until I heard T Kira Madden speak about writerly obsessions as something to accept and even foster. That was helpful for me because, although I do enjoy exploring other topics, I am repeatedly drawn back to this primal relationship and its variations, its complexities, and the deep way that it lives within us.

Becoming a mother was fully transformative for me, as I know it is for so many others, and I think I’m still interrogating that. The realization that another being is entirely dependent on you for their survival provokes such a radical decentering of the self. This is actually what made me a fiction writer. I had not been publishing fiction prior to becoming a parent. Which, if I think about it, is a kind of backwards way to do things, because I now have essentially zero time to do the work. However, this is just how it has gone for me.

SM: What caused you to pick wilderness survival as Candy’s method for dealing with loss?

GA: I’ve always been intrigued by wilderness survival and, particularly as a child, was interested in survival narratives of various types, whether that be in the wilderness or in an urban setting. I remember this children’s book that I loved—I can’t recall the title but it was about a boy who lived under the subway and had to survive on his wits. That said, I don’t think I personally could survive in the wilderness without someone like Candy to guide me.

I also think there’s an insecurity that comes with losing a parent or having a significant disruption as a child. Although I don’t know if I went into the story thinking this outright, it makes sense to me that with such loss or disruption, the question of material survival and independence, even preadolescent independence, becomes primary. If childhood is this uneasy balancing act, this continual negotiation between dependence and independence, I was really interested to see that happen at age ten for Candy. At ten, Candy is prior to puberty and still in that child mode but, at the same time, old enough to be capable. It’s a really interesting age.

SM: Candy’s obsession with wilderness survival is inspired by a YouTube channel starring Joe Wilderness. What is your relationship with the wilderness? Is it mediated by television or video, as it is for Candy?

GA: I do like to get out in nature, go for a hike—there’s a lot of beautiful hiking in Pennsylvania— but then I like to come home again and go to sleep in my bed. I wouldn’t say my experience of nature is especially mediated by television, but I did have a morbid fascination with some of the wilderness survival reality television out there, including one with Bear Grylls, the British wilderness survival personality. Although Joe Wilderness is definitely his own man, I do see various wilderness personalities in his make-up.

SM: Are you working on any future projects we can look forward to?

GA: Yes, I’m working on a novel. I’m not ready to talk about it yet, but I’m really excited about it. I also have a couple of pieces of short fiction in the works, one forthcoming from Story and another from Ecotone, and I’m excited about these as well.

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