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MF: Could you describe your writing process? Do you write
every day? Have a lucky pen? Are you someone who outlines a story before you write or do you start writing and see where
the story takes you?
MD: I try to write everyday, though between teaching and spending time with my daughter, it doesn’t always happen.
I think the benefit of writing every day is that it allows a writer to fully sink into his or her work. I love it when I’m
working on something with such a complete sense of absorption that the words, ideas, and problems of the piece stay with me
even while I’m doing other things—the dishes, errands, walking. But that’s a luxury, and real world demands
so often step in and require attention. Mostly, I write when I can, with no superstitions and as few excuses as I can manage.
Time is scarce.
MF: The main character of your novel is a clown named Sniffles, and she and many of the other characters live a marginal
existence in a poor part of their city known as Baloneytown. One of her tricks is making balloons into religious figures,
a skill learned from a pamphlet called Balloon Tying for Christ. How did you come up with the idea of making a clown the
main character for a novel? Did you have to do a lot of research about clowns? Can you twist balloons into shapes, religious
or otherwise?
MD: A very long, long time ago, for a short while, I fell into work as a clown. I started out with much higher artistic
ideas about performance art and theater, but found that there was money in basic clowning. Who knew? It paid well. I took
on jobs right and left and soon enough I, and a few people I worked with, had to come up with more tricks to fill the time.
I learned to tie balloon animals and do a little juggling. It’s been ages, though.
When I first started writing this book, the main character wasn’t a clown so much as she was clownish and Chaplinesque,
or based in my interpretation of Charlie Chaplin.
In the Chaplin tradition, it was meant to be a comedy based on a hard luck story and a lot of spirit. When the first version
was finished, I passed it around. Some friends found it really funny. One friend of mine said she started reading the manuscript
in a McDonalds, and got such a kick out of it she kept reading, and stayed in the McDonalds all day, turning pages and laughing
until one of the employees, wiping down tables, stopped to ask her what she was reading.
A couple of New York literary agents offered to represent the work. I picked one and thought I was on my way. However, when
the manuscript circulated through editors, it came back with comments like, “this is tragedy upon tragedy…”
and “I’m sorry, but we just don’t have a market for this…” One editor asked why the character,
seemingly smart, was so painfully under employed—but that’s how I saw Chaplin’s characters, as always just
getting by, and it’s how a lot of my friends lived here in Portland, too.
Perhaps the market was different in New York.
After a while I put the manuscript away and started drafting personal essays about things that had happened back when I worked
as a clown. These things were on my mind, because I’d been thinking about those days the whole time I was writing the
first version of this novel. When I showed the essays to writer Kassten Alonso , (now my husband) he said, “This,—this!--is what the book needs!”
And he was right. I rewrote the entire manuscript, this time with the main character, Nita, as a clown. I thought it would
be a quick rewrite, because my vision of it was so clear, but still it took another three years.
I think I’ve often erred on the side of subtlety. It was really wonderful to re-envision the book with this increased
sense of the central metaphor, with a way to bring ideas right up to the surface of events rather than keeping them submerged.
MF:Unlike a lot of literary fiction, the chapters in your novel have actual chapter titles rather than numbers or a
change in formatting to let the reader know a new chapter has begun. Why did you decide to name the chapters and what do
you think that adds to the novel’s plot and the reader’s understanding of it?
MD: I think the chapter titles contribute to the comedy of the work. A number of them are meant to be funny. They
also tie in to the early days of film—Chaplin, again—when scenes were often kicked off with titles, headlines,
or subtitles, that defined and described the dynamics of the plot.
As I was writing, the first chapter just screamed out for the title it has. It was what came to mind each time I sat down
with the manuscript to keep working. Once I put a title on the first chapter, I carried it through the book.
MF: The book has a lot of humor in it—both humor that’s straightforward as well as dark humor. There’s
a character named One-Night Stan. Rex, one of the main characters, is described at one point as the Clown Prince. Part of
the plot revolves around the search for a lost rubber chicken named Plucky. Some tense situations in the novel are described
as if they are a set up for a joke: “a clown and a poodle walk into a hash bar…” I was wondering if you
could talk a bit about wordplay as a technique for scene and mood setting.
MD: One of the most difficult aspects of writing this novel was trying to work with slapstick on the page. The whole
beauty of slapstick is in the physicality of it. In the novel, I tried to use words as the language-based equivalent of slapstick.
MF:In the course of the novel, Sniffles develops a relationship with a cop, someone normally distrusted by the people
Sniffles works and lives with. Yet, Sniffles and the cop have one think in common—they both have a profession that
demands they wear a uniform of sorts. In a way, this gives the opportunity to reveal and hide certain things about themselves.
Did giving two of the main characters jobs that required them to interact while in costume allow you to develop the novel
in ways that would have been impossible otherwise?
MD: Yes. It was really interesting for me to have an externalized way of conveying how these characters position
themselves in relation to the larger world.
Also, in an earlier version, the motives of the cop, Jerrod, were more suspect. As I revised, he became increasingly a good,
solid guy. I think there are all kinds of police officers out there. For me, I enjoyed playing against a certain type and
developing an officer who really is altruistic in many ways.
MF: In Clown Girl, many of the characters have dreams of making a living in the world of high art, but are forced to
make other choices in order to make economic ends meet. Do you think creativity suffers when people are forced to make artistic
choices based on survival or is there a way to balance the two?
MD: Making anything—art, music, writing—takes so much time and commitment. A person has to make whatever
is most important to him or her. Once I was fortunate enough to have breakfast with Arthur Miller. Arthur Miller! He sat
down with me at my table at the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop, and we ate scrambled eggs. We had a nice conversation.
He was so wonderful and brilliant. One of the things he said was something like, “Just write what matters most to you.
That’s what I did, when I wrote The Crucible.”
How could a person ever forget hearing words like that first hand, and from a genius?
Ever since, I always check in with myself and ask if I’m writing what matters most to me, and I doubt if I could do
it any differently, anyhow. But still there’s that conflict between trying to sell something and trying to satisfy
oneself—between a sense of audience and being ones’ only audience. The best route is probably just to keep reading
and writing and staying up on everything, all at once. How easy is that?
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