The authors Alex Behr and Spencer Fleury both have smashing new books out now—Animal Kingdom, a short story collection, and The Shitbird, a novel, respectively. They recently had a rollicking conversation about military life, glorious fuckups, grief, isolation, and why we write. That conversation is as follows.
Alex Behr: The scenes on the Coast Guard cutter turned the Stargazer into a character: sometimes almost an accomplice or certainly an enabler to the crimes. As you were writing, how did you navigate (ha) the ship AS a setting and as an aid to developing the plot? Did you use pictures, sketches, etc.?
Spencer Fleury: I’m actually gratified and relieved that the setting spoke to you the way it did. In my fiction, I always try to make setting an integral part of the narrative in whatever way I can. For The Shitbird, it kind of felt like I had a cheat code for that, because the ship is a very distinctive setting all on its own. For McAllister, the Stargazer is an actively hostile environment, even if not to the extent of, say, a haunted house would be in another kind of book. I actually read The Haunting of Hill House three separate times while I was writing The Shitbird, and while I didn’t realize it at the time, I do think my subconscious had made that connection and was directing me to try to glean as much as I could about writing hostile, closed environments from a true master of the art (though this book is not horror, and I’m certainly no horror writer).
The Stargazer is based closely on the ship I served on for two years during my own Coast Guard days, the Campbell. I lived on that ship full-time for the first year I was assigned to it, and for that second year, I still spent more time on it than I did in my own apartment. Even though it was thirty years ago, I’ve never really forgotten the layout of the place, and I’m sure that if I were to suddenly be dropped back into my former role there, it wouldn’t take me long to fall right back into the swing of it. I did use my collection of photographs from back then to get some of the details right, and there is actually a pretty good documentary about a similar ship on YouTube that I revisited more than once (it has the additional benefit of having been made around the same time the book is set). But I found that those visual aids were more helpful in stimulating my own memories than in any of the direct information they conveyed.
Alex: I had a feeling you served in the Coast Guard! My son spent three years in the Army ROTC, including leadership training in Fort Knox, Kentucky. I got insights into the military world that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I think it would’ve been hard to fake some of the details you included.
Spencer: Let me segue into my first question for you. The stories in Animal Kingdom keep coming back to a few specific settings in time and place: San Francisco in the 1990s, Portland in the 2010s, punk bars in the Mission. It gave the collection a sense of cohesiveness, even though it didn’t seem (to me, anyway) that all the stories are intended to be read as linked. Can you talk a little about these specific settings, and why they in particular spoke to you strongly enough to use as a framework for the collection?
Alex: You’re right, the stories aren’t supposed to be linked. I read historical fiction and some sci-fi, but due to basic character flaws, some may call it ADHD, I lack the patience to research and create believable worlds that don’t draw from where I’ve lived before. I immediately see lights flashing the word fear. I wouldn’t know how to stop researching. Animal Kingdom intersperses autofiction with fiction, although I don’t believe in genre formalities. But most of it draws on places I’ve lived, with the exception of a beach full of walruses. Why do I write about places I’ve lived? It’s partially homage to a lost time and perhaps that I’m more comfortable re-creating structures, sounds, smells, etc., so my characters can bash around and be glorious fuckups.
Back to you: The Coast Guard has been co-ed for a long time, but not having women on the ship created unique plot tensions. They paralleled what I imagine prison life is like. Settling scores via beatdowns, etc. Why did you choose to have a male-only book?
Spencer: I knew this question was going to come up sooner or later, so I’m glad you asked it! You’re right, of course—women have served in the Coast Guard for decades, in front-line operational roles at small boat stations, as pilots, and aboard ships. But for my first year on the Campbell, the crew was still all male. A lot of this had to do with the ship’s design—specifically, with the way the crew’s quarters were configured. Most of us enlisted folks lived in one of three large spaces that slept as many as 24 sailors, which posed a logistical challenge in providing an appropriate level of privacy for any female crew members. Officers had cushier digs: each of them shared a stateroom with one other officer, so when we did finally add women to the crew, they were two officers, and they roomed together. I’m sure all of that has changed in the last thirty years, but when I was in, the ship was indisputably a very male space.
That said, The Shitbird is fiction. I could have done anything I wanted with it, including adding female characters to the crew, which is something I did experiment with in early drafts. I did not set out to write a book with only male characters. But as the story and the themes took shape and then solidified, those female characters felt more and more like they just didn’t belong there, like they had wandered in from a different story and gotten trapped, which in a sense is exactly what had happened. As disappointing as it was to remove them, doing so helped me tighten the thematic focus of the book, and I think it works better because of that. Perhaps they’ll appear in a future short story.
The funny thing is that the same thing happened with my current work in progress, which started as a short story but then kept expanding. But this time, finding space for a female character with agency and who can alter the course of the narrative through the pursuit of her own goals was a lot easier and made a lot more sense, so she’s definitely staying in that manuscript.
Alex: Your description of the machine gun going off helped me understand the allure for my own son more than anything he’s said or that I’ve read.
Spencer: That scene was probably the most difficult writing of the entire book, not just for the content but also because I never actually fired a machine gun. It wasn’t a conscious decision not to participate or anything like that; it just seemed like I was always on watch or otherwise occupied when they decided to have a gun shoot. Oh well.
So, my next question for you is about grief. Several of the stories in Animal Kingdom seem to explore different types of grief, such as mourning a partner, or the kind of grief that is often part and parcel of being a parent. What can you tell us about the importance of grief to these stories, and about how and why your characters choose to process it?
Alex: In the fall of 2020, my fiancé, Chris Hartman, was hospitalized with a variant of mad cow disease and died within a few weeks. We’d reunited at the end of 2019 after three decades, so I was in shock on many primal levels. The world opened up as he was dying, because of all the care we received, but lockdown isolation closed in again quickly. That winter and for months after I compulsively wrote in journals and had dreams where I’d wake with “his” words in my brain. I wasn’t suicidal, but I had no purpose in living. However, as a single mother, I had to rouse myself to be somewhat functional. My son ran wild because school was an afterthought. Luckily, he’s funny and we muddled through.
After writing mostly poems for years, I drifted back to fiction. My poetry teacher, Matthew Dickman, invited me to contribute to a two-author chapbook. I was given the same phrase as my co-author as a prompt: cold plum wine. I created a story based in part on Chris’s experience on an airplane when he was in a manic episode. That little chapbook reminded me how much I enjoy writing fiction, so I started again. I’m not sure how my characters process grief apart from me, because I created them. But I know when I can read stories aloud, I connect with people and connect with ghosts. I’m looking forward to reading parts of Animal Kingdom aloud. It’s really why I write.
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Spencer Fleury is the author of the novel The Shitbird and the story collection I Blame Myself but Also You and other stories. A longtime Florida Man, he now lives and writes in Portugal.
Alex Behr is the author of the forthcoming Animal Kingdom: Stories, Grief Stick, and Planet Grim: Stories. She lives in Portland, OR, where she teaches occasional writing workshops and plays bass guitar and piano.