Nathan Blum discusses “Big White Tent,” forthcoming in the Fall 2024 issue of Colorado Review, with associate editor Sarah Mullens.
Nathan Blum is a writer from Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. His work appears or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA Candidate in Fiction at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches creative writing and serves as an advisory editor at Nashville Review. He is working on a story collection and a novel.
Sarah Mullens: It’s great to see you again, Nathan! We talked about doing this interview at Bread Loaf, before I’d read this piece. I’m exaggerating not at all when I say I loved “Big White Tent,” which we’re publishing in the Fall issue.
Nathan Blum: I think taste is a matter of effort, so I think the reason you liked it is because you read closely and perceptively, and you understand so much. I’m just grateful to you and to the magazine in general.
SM: The POV of “Big White Tent,” is a close third on Roselle, a fourth-grade girl at synagogue. She has such a strong voice from the first lines, in particular the way she channels what feels like a much older voice of authority as she describes Moses. How did this choice of POV serve the larger narrative goals of the piece?
NB: It’s funny, I’m constantly drawn to children in my writing, and the child’s point of view. In some ways, I think the project of fiction, or at least my fiction, is to bring back and render the world in the way children see it, in all its bigness, terror, joy, and mystery. I think children are wonderful guides in any narrative. They have strange, unique ways of speaking. As you say, they can be super authoritative and confident, and they can be extremely afraid. They can be observational–some people say children don’t miss anything. And that’s true, but they can also miss hugely important details.
They can be so trustworthy and innocent. But they can also be vicious; as we’ve seen, they can also be very dangerous. And most importantly for me as a writer, they are vulnerable and impressionable. They have a great capacity for belief. Children believe in things. And I’ve always identified with that kind of childlike observance and that idealism.
In monotheistic religions, there’s a lot of child-focused language. God is often referred to as the father. Children of God. Children of Israel. I guess for me, belief goes hand in hand with the experience of being a child. That’s not to say that the only people who believe are children, but I’m from a Reform Jewish community where belief was not the central tenet of our religious education. There was a greater focus on secular values.
So, I’m curious as to, for me and people from my community, where that point of departure was. That moment or that point in our lives when a story like Moses going up Mount Sinai became, for lack of better words, a sort of fiction.
SM: I love that point of view. Maybe embodying that narrator- who- believes becomes the way to explore that moment of departure.
NB: Yeah. And I think you can. I think believe is a big word. There’s religious belief, but there’s also belief in the fundamental values of fairness and forgiveness. Some people associate the secular with the cynical, as if giving up religious belief is giving up your idealism or your optimism, as if to have to have secular beliefs is to become cynical. I don’t know if that’s true. I’m curious what kind of beliefs can be maintained as we go through the world, and which beliefs we end up losing because of the world’s violence and unfairness.
SM: We get that Moses on Mount Sinai moment at the beginning of the story, and then, by the end, we’ve got Roselle coming back down off a mountain.
NB: Ha, yes, she goes up the mountain.
SM: The ending feels even more satisfying with that realization.
NB: Well, yeah. With stories in which there’s this kind of allegorical echo, it’s important that it isn’t necessary for the story to work. It can be a layer, but ultimately, I don’t think that it’s where the meaning is. Allegory isn’t, to me, what literary fiction is about. It has to fit within the authenticity of the character.
SM: Speaking of religion and character authenticity, I loved your decision in this piece to use Hebrew words like bimah without italics, which feels like a way to center a Jewish readership, maybe. How do you think about audience and context when writing within specific cultural registers?
NB: In all honesty, I don’t think about audience as much as I think about authenticity. This is something I talk to my students about. I think more about questions of syntax and diction and voice and language that ultimately serve the point of view. Who is this character? Through which lens is the story being focalized? What is her world? What is her relationship to the community?
So, yes, Jews. Jews make up, I think it’s 3%, or less than 3% of America, less than .3% of the world. So, it is likely that whoever picks up Colorado Review is not Jewish. But I think Roselle’s pie is sliced very differently. The important question is, how does she internalize the language to which she is exposed?
I think readers who come to fiction are interested in characters who are unapologetically themselves. An author who tries to handhold or explain risks breaking the surface tension of the narrator’s address. At Bread Loaf this summer, Samantha Hunt said something along the lines of: “I believe in fiction that has ears, that listens to the characters rather than manipulates them.” That struck me as true and it’s something I try to do.
SM: That really strikes me, too. Another element of Roselle’s character that’s present in the story is class. We get these great details: Roselle’s mother working as a paralegal for her classmate Christina Taft’s mother, the fact that Roselle’s dad doesn’t have a memorial bench like some of the other congregation members do, the family swimming in the Taft’s pool while they’re on vacation in Italy. How did you think about class as a characterizing element for Roselle and her family? How does it influence the plot?
NB: It’s a great question. Class is the lens through which I see the world. That probably has to do with where I come from and the communities I’ve been in. Roselle’s community is strange and maybe a little twisted, as is any community where extreme wealth is the norm. And I’m interested in how somewhat homogeneous communities of wealth can really skew people’s perceptions, especially children’s perceptions, of what is normal.
I recently talked to Claire Jiménez, whose book What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez? is wonderful; s. So different from my work, but so wonderful. She was talking about how the terms we use for different classes are very reductive and don’t take into account the smaller differences within them. So, for example, in what we call the working class, there’s a huge gradient and a hierarchy and a politics in itself. And I think the same is true in communities of wealth. In the story, Roselle’s family appears somehow disadvantaged, even though they’re not, not by any means really. It asks questions about whether her feelings of shame and jealousy are justified. Is wealth relative, and what will happen when she inevitably confronts reality beyond her community?
You also brought up plot. I hate the word plot, first of all. I hate thinking of it as its own craft element. I feel like it’s actually a result of every other craft element, but the job of plot is ultimately to push characters into moments of reckoning. For example, Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and sees that his people are worshiping idols. That’s his moment of reckoning. He’s got to go back up and get the tablets again. Classic old-fashioned plot works right there, forcing the character to come to terms or at least to confront the reality beyond what they thought was reality.
SM: How do you think class influences those forcing functions? Or, I guess, a better way to ask: why was it important for the story to have class difference as an element?
NB: When I sit down to write a story, before character, I’m thinking of community. What is the community?
I am rendering, hopefully, the specific kinds of relationships in that community. In this story, it’s the Jewish community at this synagogue. They are grappling with contradiction, is the nice way to put it, but hypocritical is another way. In this discussion about fairness and values, where does the complicity of wealth come into play?
SM: This story brings up such big questions. We have this great ending, and I won’t spoil it for readers, but this moment where Roselle recognizes the universality of God’s forgiveness. The brilliance of the ending, though, is its ambiguity regarding Roselle’s ability to forgive. What went into your decision to end the story this way?
NB: That’s such a good question. This story’s part of my collection, and one thing all of the stories have in common is they are interested in characters trying to distance themselves from the past, trying to reinvent themselves or being told to begin anew. And that idea, I think, is very common and we hear it a lot. And it’s so interesting to me. With “Big White Tent,” I found it intriguing that on the last day of the Jewish high holidays, the final act is a process of asking and receiving forgiveness before the gates close and the new year begins. That’s how I read it.
Because on one hand, any attempt like this feels like a fool’s errand. How can we expect to be unburdened by the past, while we still have memory of it? But it’s ethically murky as well. Roselle, as you alluded, begins to pick up on this. Should we be allowed to become unburdened by the past? Should people be allowed to move on from what they have done? Which is a question being asked in our country and culture a lot now. And yet, I hope Roselle is also seeing what the purpose of traditions like this might be. And let the record show, I think at times these customs can be beautiful and meaningful and necessary, like invoking the names of loved ones who have gone, revisiting our memories, letting go of our grudges, letting go of our anger. I think there’s a reason that these customs have lasted so long and exist in pretty much every culture on Earth. And so, while traditions and beliefs like this can be problematic, they are universal. And it makes me think that there is something meaningful in them, despite the sort of ethical questions that they bring up.
SM: Which brings us full circle, right? Back to that question of belief, whether religious belief is necessary to see some good in these traditions and value systems. It’s such a joy to read stories about these ten-year-old kids and be left considering such meaty topics. It’s really masterfully done.
NB: Thank you so much. I have huge gratitude for you, and for Stephanie, Steven, the whole crew. And I have great hope for short fiction. The work being done at places like CR is important. This form, short fiction, ebbs and flows. But I feel it gaining traction again right now and that’s because of the work that you’re all doing.
Sarah Mullens is a sixth-generation West Virginian living in Colorado. She’s a Hammond-Schwartz and Leslee Beeker Memorial Fellow at Colorado State University, where she’s an MFA Candidate in Creative Nonfiction and an editorial assistant at the Colorado Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in NBCTHINK, LitHub, and elsewhere.