By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Teresa Milbrodt didn’t need the onset of a pandemic to write about it.
In her short story collection, “Instances of Head-Switching,” the opening story “The Monsters’ War” captures the mood of the past year and a half. Monsters had invaded the land. Forcing people out of their routines, out of their homes, into isolation. No one knows what those monsters look like still they breed fear and suspicion.
The story was finished and well on its way to print before cases of COVD-19 were detected.
“That situation of the pandemic and that possibility has been with us for a very long time,” Milbrodt said. She mentioned the SARS, related to COVID-19, that swept across the globe, starting in China, but with far fewer cases. And then as a child of the 1980s, she knows about the AIDS epidemic. She deals with the hysteria surrounding that in “The Hostage,” in which a man wanting to kidnap a woman with a mysterious illness instead is held captive by the woman who turns his fear against him.
These stories like all the others in the book, and much of the rest of Milbrodt’s work, are rooted in the real world but blossom with fantastic elements that grow from the writer’s wry, quirky sensibility.
Milbrodt will read from “Instances of Head-Switching” Friday, July 16, at 6:30 p.m. at Grounds for Thought, 174 S. Main St., in downtown Bowling Green.
The book is published by Shade Mountain Press. Milbrodt submitted the manuscript when she heard they were seeking to publish work by women with disabilities, as well as women from other marginalized groups. She’d already started bringing a manuscript together – 14 of the 18 stories had been published in literary magazines – and she made some adjustments to focus it on disabilities.
“I’ve always been blind in one eye, since I was an infant,” Milbrodt said. She paired doctoral work in writing with disabilities studies. Growing up different in a way people may not be aware of prompted her to ponder abilities and disabilities, both apparent and invisible.
“It’s not just one disability community but many disabilities which makes writing out of disability both a joy and a challenge,” she said.
What’s “normal,” she said, is defined by society.
“For me in many ways it didn’t feel like a disability,” she said. “It’s just what is and you get along in life like that.”
Her characters are people who happen to have a disability, they are not “disabled characters,” and that aspect is not the point of the story. This is a change from earlier fiction where the disability is a problem to be solved, and in the end the character either dies or is healed. They’re not allowed to be three dimensional
“Sometimes the disability is one of the plot points, not because the person with the disability has a problem with it but because other people around them have a problem with it,” Milbrodt said of the stories in “Instances of Head-Switching.”
A writer must also, as scholar Petra Kuppers advised, be careful not to celebrate disability without taking into account reality. People can adapt in many ways, but “the world as it is is not built for all bodies,” Milbrodt said.
People sometimes ask her if she’d ever have surgery to get the sight in both eyes, and she says, “no. … That’s just who I am. I wouldn’t want to change it.”
In the final story in the collection, a mother pushes her daughter Jenna to use an amulet to restore vision in one eye, and Jenna refuses. It gives her a headache.
But the mother, who narrates the story, is concerned about skateboarders and other dangers that threaten her daughter.
Fiction, Milbrodt said, is “one of the best ways to process how abstract and concepts fit into a lived reality.”
“The power in speculative fiction is being able to do some level of social commentary that if you tried to do it in realism it would be too on the nose,” she said. “I think that’s the power of a lot of sci fi. Imagining alternative reality and all the what-if spaces you can go into.”
As channeled through Milbrodt’s muse these often have the directness of a fairy tale without the moralizing.
In “Berchta” characters from Berman folklore including an old woman obsessed with cleaning and a dragon arrive at the character’s house apartment. In “The Mirror,” she has Snow White and her prince in exile. Snow White uses the mirror inherited from her evil stepmother to transform herself into an old woman so she can visit the kingdom. She finds she likes being in the old woman’s body.
The stories are laced with humor. That often just comes from the way Milbrodt juxtaposes people and situations. The humor also comes from her sharply focused observations of people and the lives they find themselves leading.
“Often it is a way of seeing and a way of processing the world that lets you see the absurdities,” she said. “And sometimes when thinking about something like disability and how people with disabilities are treated, the best way you can do it is look at it through a lens of absurdity, just to look at the strangeness of it, the wrongness of it.”
That serves to reveal a problem, while making a joke of it. She’s careful never to mock any of her characters, only their actions and attitudes.
The story “Head Switching” has a teacher grappling with how best to deal with students on various levels of the autism spectrum at the same time she’s dealing with the tyrannical principal. One boy constantly raps his elbow on the radiator. He stops when asked, then resumes the behavior. Another attacks others when they do group work.
The teacher has the ability to change heads to get her in the proper frame of mind for the task at hand, but sometimes she opts not to.
The students do not have that option.
These observations are shaped by her own experience in the classroom – she teaches at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. The book has a dedication to the author’s mother, Jane Milbrodt, a retired Bowling Green music teacher and her “head switching” ability.
“Teaching and writing have so much in common. In both teaching and writing, it forces us to always be learning and always reprocessing. … Your understanding of the world should not be static.”
That world itself is not static. That’s evident in the way her students view “queerness … as opposed to when I was in high school,” the Bowling Green High graduate said.
“When I was in high school people were not coming out,” Milbrodt, 43, said. They waited maybe until college or later. “Now I have so many more students in my classes who are LGBTQ-identified.” Students now come out in high school, and even middle school.
“I constantly have to remind myself the world is still not an easy place for queer people. There’s still so many spaces of danger, but the strides that have been made are amazing,” she said. “It makes me so happy we can give them more space to be themselves.”
