Aimee Pokwatka grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia. She studied anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and received her MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University. She lives in New York with her family. Her debut novel, Self-Portrait With Nothing was published in 2022 to wide acclaim. Her latest novel is The Parliament and she recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.
What was your inspiration fo The Parliament?
There are two books inside The Parliament, and each has its own origin story. The primary story in The Parliament is one of a group of people trapped inside a library by flesh-eating owls, which stems from my love of stories about characters under siege, particularly Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. I’d been thinking for a long time about writing a story about characters who were trapped, but where?
I found my answer when I began teaching writing classes for middle school students at the C.H. Booth Library in Newtown, Connecticut. It was the students themselves who inspired me most—these were kids who chose to spend two hours a week on a school night, when they had loads of homework, writing with me. And they were so funny and weird and vulnerable and generous with each other, and writing with them gave me actual hope for the future.
At the same time, I was thinking about the many dangers that we as adults want to protect our kids from—gun violence, climate change, communicable disease—but are unable to do so fully as individuals. I wrote much of this book early in the pandemic, and the reluctance of ordinary people to make simple changes to their lives for the common good was always present in my mind.
The Parliament also includes a fairy tale called The Silent Queen, the earliest inspiration for which came from a 2014 documentary called Searching for Augusta, about a Belgian-Congolese nurse named Augusta Chiwy who survived the siege of Bastogne in 1944. The documentary (infuriatingly!) places much of its focus on the search itself, and when Chiwy finally appears at the very end, we discover she’d been suffering from selective mutism. It was this detail that stuck in my imagination—the idea that Chiwy’s trauma had stripped her of her ability to speak about it. This was the seed for The Silent Queen’s Alala, a queen who has traded her voice to a monster as a way to cope with her own trauma.
Are Mad, Nash, or any of the other characters in the novel inspired by or based on specific individuals?
Most of my characters are composites, a blend of qualities stolen from myself, friends, and strangers alike, more than they’re based on one specific individual. Mad is a cosmetic chemist because I read an interesting essay with one in xoJane. Nash’s terrible sense of humor is based on my husband’s insistence on making groan-inducing jokes when we travel. The character in the book most directly based on a real-life counterpart is actually Jolene the lobster (technically an electric blue crayfish), who is based on an escapee pet lobster (a Bobby who then became a Bobbie Sue) owned by my friend Erin.
How did the novel evolve and change as you wrote and revised it? Are there any characters or scenes that were lost in the process that you wish had made it to the published version?
The biggest challenge in writing this novel was dealing with two different books simultaneously. It was important to me that each book worked on its own, and I actually went through three drafts of each individual book before I began shuffling them together. I did this in the least efficient way possible, using Word documents, a process so crazy-making that I finally taught myself to use Scrivener.
One memorable scene that got cut early on was a sex scene between Mad and Nash. As soon as I started writing this book about characters trapped in a library that used to be a bank, I knew two characters had to have sex in the vault. I wrote the scene (and much of the earliest drafts of the book) while my kids were doing remote learning, so I was writing an absolutely filthy sex scene while my then-nine-year-old sat in a school Zoom ten feet away, constantly interrupting me to tell me to look at how cute our dog was. Mad was much more reckless in the first draft, and the scene no longer made sense as her character became more cautious, so it had to go.
Has the situation with the owls in The Parliament ever really happened somewhere, or is it something you created? If it is based on something that really happened, how did you hear about it? Where has it happened, and often does it happen?
Owl attacks do happen, though rarely, and there was an incident in 1961 in which seabirds, possibly affected by neurotoxic plankton, attacked a small town in California, which, in part, was the inspiration for Hitchcock’s The Birds. More than any real attack, I was inspired by the sheer scale of starling murmurations, which have been reported to contain hundreds of thousands of individual birds (which is terrifying to me).
Mad knows a lot about a lot of different things! Did you have to do research to provide her with the information she knows? Did you ever start off looking for something you wanted her to know and change your mind/direction to go with something different?
Mad, The Parliament’s main character, has long coped with her own trauma by collecting skills, most of which are skills I do not myself possess. (If I tried to juggle while atop a unicycle, it would certainly end in injury.) The process of finding these skills was one of the most fun parts of writing this book. I watched a lot of YouTube videos—survival skills, magic tricks, matchstick grenades. I watched reviews of MREs, and my bookmarks are full of websites about extremophiles and fumigation, and chemistry. A lot of the more technical descriptions of chemistry were ultimately cut because they were boring, but my favorite cut was a joke about lab coats I found in a subreddit for chemists: lab coats are the “condom of the lab”—nobody wants to wear them, but a spill could ruin the day.
What was the most interesting or surprising thing that you learned during your research?
I went on a lot of deep dives in the research process: cricket song, eusocial behavior, acronyms for remembering the periodic table. But one of my favorite new bits of information came from my editor, Lee Harris. In my original draft, Mad writes on a whiteboard with a permanent marker (something I absolutely did myself, thus ruining the library’s whiteboard). But Lee introduced me to a cool trick (too late to save me from my own embarrassment)—writing over permanent marker with dry-erase marker can actually erase the permanent marker.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
I’ve been thinking about both labyrinths and nontraditional narrative structures lately, so the book at the top of my nightstand is House of Leaves, which I’m rereading for the first time since college. (It’s still scary!) Others in my stack for this project: Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson, Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec, Borges’ Labyrinths, and Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar.
Can you name your top five favorite or most influential authors?
I was very into Kurt Vonnegut as a teenager, and he was the first writer I encountered who combined humor and speculative elements while also tackling serious topics. I grew up on fairy tales, so reading Angela Carter for the first time was a revelation. Other contemporary writers who shaped my idea of what I want to do in my own fiction include Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, and Kelly Link.
What was your favorite book when you were a child?
The Parliament is, in part, about how the stories we hold near can (or can't) shape and sustain us, and the main character’s favorite childhood book, The Silent Queen, serves as both an anchor in a time of crisis and an impetus for action. The Silent Queen is partly inspired by my own favorite book from childhood: Sammy the Snowflake and Friends by Mary N. Schroeder. Like The Silent Queen, it was published by a now-defunct vanity press and written by an author with no other books to her name. The book tells the story of a snowflake who is separated from his family as he moves through the atmosphere, eventually becoming a water droplet who moves into the river and sea, finally becoming a wave. (For her part, Sammy’s mother joins the pool with the "liberated ladies back in Palm Springs.") These ideas of transformation and power of the whole vs. the individual are very present in The Parliament.
Can you name a book you've bought for the cover?
Most recently: Supplemento al Dizionario Italiano by Bruno Munari, a little visual dictionary of Italian gestures. The cover features a hand in the "finger purse" gesture, which the book calls Che Vuoi? or What Do You Expect?
Is there a book that changed your life?
I’m not prone to superstition, but there have been a handful of books that I have loved so deeply I felt compelled to sleep with them under my pillow after I read them as if some part of that book might cross a threshold into my brain in the night. Duplex by Kathryn Davis is one of those books: a strange and enchanting novel that completely shifted my idea of what fiction can do.
Can you name a book for which you are an evangelist (and you think everyone should read)?
One of the best things about having a book in the world is getting to see how unique each reader’s relationship with a book can be, so I don’t think there’s any "one size fits all" book. But I love pressing books into people’s hands. My older son is thirteen now, and the book I’m giving to all his friends is Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace, a gorgeous and thrilling ghost story about friendship. I’m forever recommending Miriam Toews’ books for their humor and humanity, especially All My Puny Sorrows, as well as Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever. And I’ve been recommending Karin Tidbeck’s deeply strange and moving The Memory Theater to everyone since I read it last year.
Is there a book you would most want to read again for the first time?
I would love to relive the sheer deliciousness of reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson for the first time. One of my most distinct reading memories is reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson on a train from NYC to Syracuse, an experience I would love to reexperience. And Remainder by Tom McCarthy is a book that goes so far beyond anything I could have imagined—I would love to go on that journey for the first time again.
What is the last piece of art (music, movies, TV, more traditional art forms) that you've experienced or that has impacted you?
I recently saw "To Live on the Moon (For Lorca)," a performance piece by artist Marcel Dzama that combined a film based on an unproduced screenplay by poet Federico García Lorca with live performance. It was a work of pure wonder and delight, and also I caught a handful of fish thrown into the audience.
What is your idea of THE perfect day (where you could go anywhere/meet with anyone)?
If I can go anywhere in this scenario, I’m going to start my day someplace beautiful, with great food: let’s say Italy. I’d spend a long morning in the cool and quiet of a museum, have a languorous lunch alone with a book and a glass of wine, then take a walk or a run through some woods or by water. The perfect end for a day to me is around a fire, roasting s’mores and looking at the stars with people I love.
What are you working on now?
I’ve been working on a haunted house novel based on my own house in New York, the oldest part of which dates to the 1750s. When we first moved in, my husband and I found a creepy doll in the yard, which we immediately began hiding for each other to find. Once, upon finding the doll, I thought: what if two people were so busy pranking each other with a creepy doll that they failed to notice a real haunting around them? The book is about what happens when an artist stops making art, the monotony of domestic life, loving other people despite their ultimate unknowability, and the many ways in which people can be haunted. (I do not believe in ghosts, but I have seen one in my house.)
