Author Vera Nazarian talks to Elizabeth Allen about her recent novella, The Duke in His Castle, in metaphors explosive, sexy, and downright weird.

What originally sparked the idea of The Duke in His Castle? What did the rough draft look like when you were in college?

Oh Lord, what a fun question. The first draft sucked. I didn’t know where I was going with anything, and it was very different, childlike, naïve. All I had in that draft was a faux goth meeting of Life and Death. They couldn’t be together because of their fundamental opposition, despite their attraction and repulsion for each other. This was the original premise of the story.

I had the misfortune of sending the story out to almost every major short fiction market out there, and of course it got rejected. Most people would have trunked this monster permanently, but there was something about it, and I had to keep on fixing it. It was like slowly and painfully paring away at a piece of wild driftwood that had in its fundamental curvature and shape the shadow of elegance… something potentially powerful and beautiful lurking there.

I finally took out the story again two years ago. I rewrote the whole thing and expanded it to almost twice the length with new subplots and a really mind-blowing idea that finally explained some things to me about all the characters. Things clicked, and I knew with my gut I finally had it.

You have an energetic, impish style in personal essays. Your fiction, however, has a stately, formal register. In fact, The Duke in His Castle is particularly laden with intricate prose. Why did you make the choice to tell this story in a particularly opulent manner?

Another fun question! I love foul language and use it with gusto. When people are cussing, they are in a way most true to themselves, sort of shocked into abandoning artificial status quo decorum. So yeah, I like casual colorful speech. It’s raw and expressive of truth, and easy and friendly and relaxed. And in certain kinds of storytelling (such as my Grant-Williams High YA stuff, and expository essays such as this one), I write it too, not merely speak it.

But, for the most part in writing, I prefer high language and poetic prose because I am drawn to express the element of beauty and thought and control. Writing to me is a form of control over those wildly running herds of free-range thought-buffalo that fill my head (and all writers’ heads, I venture to guess). And you cannot control and cuss at the same time. It’s like trying to hold in a sneeze. So I leave my funny casual expression and silliness to the real life and online blog posts. All of that’s practice, while writing is the final performance, when I have the chance to line up my thoughts into armies of elegant soldiers in neat formations marching toward the final destination along an intricate story arc—or so one hopes.

So getting back to The Duke—I went all Gormenghast and old-fashioned and verbally ornate because it’s what I envisioned would best express the sense of being in control. The Duke in His Castle is a story about control. It is also a story of contortion, so the intricate language helps me frame the extremely intricate plot and character development into its closest linguistic parallel.

Quoting your Website: “Vera is a native speaker of Russian and Armenian, is fluent in Spanish, and has studied Mandarin Chinese and German. And yet, English is her language of choice when it comes to writing.” So what factors made you choose English? Do you use the different languages you know for different purposes?

I’ve said elsewhere that, to me, English is a sort of alienating and therefore liberating thing, allowing me a measure of emotional distance. My native Russian feels too much like a confession of that innermost sacrosanct self…the one that houses farts and boogers and dirty old underwear. But when I say the same things in English, I can admit to them easier, and they don’t feel so much “me,” if that makes sense. To use an erotic metaphor (because language is always your lover), English is like a sensation-deadening condom over the raw erection of my mind. Russian is more like being hit in the balls—if I were a guy and had any.

Tell me some more about your Armenian-Russian background, emigration to the U.S., and the effects of these experiences on your writing.

I often say that I am a permanent alien wherever I may be, because of the early-age relocation and refugee wandering over the world. Formative years were spent in fleeting places—from Russia to Lebanon to Greece. As a result, I never really imprinted upon a place, feeling instead like a citizen of the world. That could be both a good and a bad thing, I guess.

Just as any writer does, I tell stories from a psycho-cultural well that springs deep within me. But my personal well is a multi-stranded plumbing line connected to a great subterranean sea blending together many cultures and mores, past and present. Hence, my resulting stories are just a little bit “different,” timeless in setting and flavor. Or maybe they are just a little bit “old”—going to the earliest roots of things, to the underlying classic archetypes and the core of what makes us human—past borders of culture, ethnicity, chronology, and place.

Thus, an alien out of place and time—dealing in the essence and not the trapping—I bring this strange universal brew to the forefront and share it with my readers.