The Pink Institution
An Interview with Author Selah Saterstrom

Photo by Noah Saterstrom

Q. What inspired you to write The Pink Institution and what exactly is The Pink Institution?

I'd have to begin by saying inspiration is not something I think much about. Instead I try to see with as few filters as possible. Writing The Pink Institution was an experience of trying to see something that seemed murky. So writing it was an attempt to adjust my eyes to a dim light, to learn to see in the dark.

This text began before its writing, hatched between particular obsessions that made a configuration I couldn't exhaust. It felt like something essential, like the marrow of something that was called the pink institution. And in all of these obsessions was also a feeling of childhood and childhood was filled with stories and they were all ghost stories.

The need to give form to silence as a language and the need to choose questions instead of locating the truth in answers—these were needs that very much energized the writing of The Pink Institution

The Pink Institution is the institution of memory/bodies/marriage/blood/madhouses/haunted houses. It is also the rich, sugary, impoverished, decaying place of the Deep South as I have known it. It is the institution of the law, the book of social codes, the suspect history book. It is also the history book rewritten, another version, the pink one.

Q. The family in The Pink Institution weathers very hard times—how much are they in control of their own destinies and how much does their genetic and cultural inheritance trump their individuality?

What is the origin of any family's "curse"? This was one of my questions when I began writing The Pink Institution. When I was a kid, we were told to occupy ourselves by going in the backyard and digging for the devil. A lot of time was spent doing this. And there were moments when we felt close to getting there. We would say to each other, "Whew . . . it's getting hot."

But it is a long tunnel that goes to the devil and things change shape in it. Locating the origin of transgenerational pain becomes less important than considering the poignant arrangements its patterns make. On one level the book is an attempt at seeing how patterns bloom through time, bodies, and spaces. It's about what that bloom looks like.

It's interesting to think of the word "curse"—slang for a woman's blood and also something that is a kind of legacy passed down through blood, through generations. There is familial blood memory, then there is the blood memory you get from a place and all places have it. Blood memory is a sensitive material-it responds to how it is held. It is a question of: can dispositions and circumstances exclude one from accountability? This is one of the questions of the last bloody century and the question we brought with us into the new one. The Pink Institution does not work out an answer to this question. It asks it, again.

Q. How much of the family's suffering in The Pink Institution is predicated on the aftermath of the Civil War?

"Dixie," as a more innocent time and place existing before the Civil War, a place from which some people in Southern culture feel they have been expelled, is a myth. No such Eden existed. The time before the Civil War was not one of innocence.

The tragedy is not that white Southerns lost the Civil War. The tragedy is that people desire obliteration.

Q. How do you perceive the stereotype of the Southern Belle and how does she fit into your novel?

There's Hollywood, then there have been its more curious manifestations. When I was living in Scotland, there was a TV show about these kind of Christian minded vampires, one of whom was a busty blonde from Mississippi referred to as "the Southern Belle" vampire. This kid at a fish and chips shop used to always want to talk about her when I'd go in. He told me when he got out of there he was going to Hollywood and one afternoon he'd get in a big car and drive to Mississippi. He thought Mississippi was probably about an hour away from Hollywood.

The logo synonymous with the town where I grew up is of a woman in a hoopskirt. It is a tourism logo, and what is on tour is the Old South. The woman in the hoopskirt became a visual icon during the 1920s Depression, but this is somewhat inconsequential because the South was in a Depression before the Depression, in every sense. Women put on hoopskirts and for the price of a ticket you could come inside their antebellum mansions and hear about days when life was more charming. They saved the town from economic collapse by creating an industry and became quite powerful. And growing up in a space so informed by them, I didn't think there were "Belles" and then there were other, perhaps more real women. The hoopskirt was incorporated into an existing complexity.

Yet they were selling something. What was it and to whom was it being offered? Putting on the hoopskirt was a way of dreaming. And the act of that dreaming was offered. Slavery was not a part of the dream narrative. It wasn't part of the charming story, but of course it is, literally, the blood and bones of that story. It was story working as a psychological process of forgetting or substituting. The South has taught me a great deal about complexity, and the consequences of how one holds contradictions. I believe caricaturizing identities borders on nostalgia, if in fact it isn't already a form of nostalgia. I cannot think of an example when nostalgia has had a positive effect on anything. Antonio Porchia asks: If you are always telling a dream, when do you dream it? With the The Pink Institution , I was interested in waking in the spaces between the tellings. I wanted the voices of my characters to erupt from those places.

Q. Your beautiful and unusual prose style clearly evokes the gaps present in all of our histories. At the same time, it allows room for the reader's imagination to breathe. Would you talk a bit about how you structured The Pink Institution? Did you have any concerns that the novel's format might discourage a casual browser?

The format of the book reflects the process that made it: it was made from a series of collaged fits and starts. The process that made the book is also one of the subjects of the book: how we deal with our stories and how we tell them to ourselves.

Also, the form is part of the content's meaning. For example, blocks of justified text offer a stable shape and a stable shape can hold a lot of unstable content. But there is also a relationship suggested —that how something appears is not how it is. The negative space around words is also important. It genuflects to decay and silence, which are also languages.

I don't have concerns about casual browsers probably because I experience writing in a profoundly uncasual way, but I am not interested in making work that excludes people or invites them in only to refuse them.

Q. How do you see The Pink Institution fitting into the tradition of Southern American novels?

For me The Pink Institution is a "Southern novel" in so far that the existential experience of Being has to happen somewhere. It happens in some town, in some family, in some place, in the physically manifest world. In this book, it happens in Mississippi. And place affects the experience of Being. Atmosphere is extremely powerful as is memory and when you are born into a place you are also born into others' memories of that place. . . which may in fact be the atmosphere itself.

But "home" is also a place one can never return to. And this phenomenon is larger than geographic-cultural nuances even as those nuances inform that phenomenon in meaningful ways.

The experience of being delivered into the larger web of suffering, a nonnegotiable and apocalyptic experience, is a human one. I see this work as part of an idiom that seeks to respond to that tradition.

Q. You are giving 10% of your proceeds to the Sunshine Shelter for Abused and Neglected Children in Natchez, Mississippi. Could you tell me a little about their work?

The Sunshine Shelter is licensed by the Mississippi Department of Human Services to house children for a limited stay. These children are wards of the state and have been removed from the home because of extreme abuse conditions. One of the things that makes the Sunshine Shelter unique in its region is that it is a diagnostic center. Children have access to physical and mental healthcare they are in desperate need of. The Sunshine Shelter models an alternative to current state procedures. It calls for change within a disturbing system. The shelter staff looks at what is most difficult and what few will look at. It sees and honors children. It is an organization more than deserving of support.

Q. What are you working on now?

The book I'm working on now has to do with an obsession with Rembrandt's painting of the slaughtered ox.