What can Novella-in-Flash writers learn from Something in the Potato Room (2009)?

Something in the Potato Room, by Heather Cousins (Tucson: Kore Press, 2009), pp.69

Subject Matter – A somewhat hypochondriac museum administrator, who is also a collector of Victorian cutlery and reader of rare books, moves house and discovers a mysterious hominid hiding in a small room under the stairs. “A chief of the Inner Station”, Cousins writes, parodying Heart of Darkness.

Structure/Style – The presentation of this book is unusual, with large margins, and paragraphs as thin columns running down the middle of the page. The language has the strangeness, intensity and compression of poetry – although it has a narrative impulse, it’s clearly calling attention to itself as out of the ordinary. The book was classified as poetry by the publisher, but there’s surely a kind of novella-in-flash here, in all its quirky glory, with a clearly defined central character moving and acting through time and place in a linked sequence of narrative fragments. Something in the Potato Room might be categorised as a ‘novella-in-prose-poems’ – and a magnificent one. The book’s central crisis taps into that universal, childlike fascination: the possibility of a creature lurking in the dark of the wardrobe.

What can novella-in-flash writers learn from this book?

(1) Prose Poetry: Something in the Potato Room is full of unusual prose, more akin to poetry. Cousins is a fan of the quirky, verbless sentence that teeters on the verge of logical sense: “Wasn’t I just ‘stuck in a rut’? A standard pattern? A Federalist? A Simple? A Plain?” (p.11). And again here, in a passage that is broken into lineated verse: “What has been placed / here // has been placed here // to DORMANT. / to STILL. / to STULLIFY.” (p.44) This style of writing makes sense in a more intuitive way. Meanings are forged through the interplay of unusual sentence structure and word choice. And even amidst the more routine syntax and vocabulary, the descriptions still make metaphorical leaps: “Dr. Paul stood behind my desk. Looming. A reconnaissance balloon. A zeppelin.” (p.29)

• Invitation: How might the flash fictions in your novella adopt some of the rich language strategies frequently used in poems: metaphor or simile, musicality, strange sentence structures, surprising word choices?

(2) Illustrations – Something in the Potato Room is also made strange by being peppered with odd, Victorian-style illustrations: extravagant moths and butterflies, a woman downing her head in a bowl of water, a detailed display of teeth, rows of kitchen utensils. Each one is captioned in a way that associates the picture with the ongoing story, yet the images themselves feel only tangentially relevant. This adds to the eerie atmosphere – a feeling that something is out of sorts. The visual experience is further estranged by the prose poems being presented in very narrow columns, centred on the page, surrounded by an expanse of blankness.

• Invitation: How might you express your visual imagination through your novella? Is there an opportunity to do something unusual with layout or spacing? Might photographs, illustrations or diagrams appear at any point? (This won’t be relevant to every novella, of course, but these questions might spark ideas for some writers…)

(3) Off-kilter/quirky style: The narrator’s voice is delightfully off-centre, expressing anxiety and a quirky perspective, and the story itself is wilfully unpredictable. An increasing pressure on her job at the museum alternates with scenes at home describing the encounter with the hominid. These domestic scenes are creepy and fantastical, revelling in macabre sensory detail. The narrator adopts a stance towards her house guest that is maternal, forensic, and apparently sexual, all at once. “I called and called. We had so many more things to discover. To unearth. I yearned to rub his mandible.” (p.63)

• Invitation: Would it be interesting to shift your novella into unsettling genre territory – for example by introducing magical realist, horror, Gothic, or fantastical elements? In what other ways might your novella grapple with elements of strangeness?

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