An interview with Melissa Pritchard, author of "The Odditorium"

In her new book, "The Odditorium," Melissa Pritchard melds the historical with the fantastical to create seven stories and one novella of intrigue and mystery. Pritchard's collection explores the minds of real-life characters whose lives are shrouded in mystery.

The Daily Nebraskan caught up with Pritchard to discuss the many facets of her creative process in "The Odditorium."

Daily Nebraskan: How did you find the inspiration for the story "Ecorché: Flayed Man" that appears in your collection of stories, "The Odditorium?"

Melissa Pritchard: On a trip to Florence, Italy a few years ago, I had a small guidebook called something like, "The Secret Places of Florence." It suggested visiting La Specola, the city's Museum of Natural History, specifically the eighteenth century wax anatomies in glass cabinets. If you were a parent, this would be a great excursion for your bored 10-year-old. Well I'm very much a bored 10-year-old, so I shot right over there, found the wax medical anatomies — rooms and rooms  of them — and was horrified, enchanted, intrigued and the only living, non-waxen person in there. During subsequent visits to Florence, I returned at least three more times to see these famous anatomies, buying up all the books related to them in the museum's little gift shop. Eventually, I worked up the courage to write what became "Ecorche: Flayed Man."

DN: You have done quite a bit of research on each character discussed in "The Odditorium." At what point in your research did you begin to formulate the fictional situations and stories included in your book?

MP: That would require a separate answer for each of the eight pieces in the book but generally, I was drawn in first by the main character around whom the story forms. Robert Ripley, for instance, was someone whose "Believe It or Not" cartoons in the Sunday newspaper had always frightened and enchanted me as a child. At a certain point a couple of years ago, I decided to find out just who he was. As a plump tomboy in Oak Park, Ill., I dressed up as Annie Oakley in chaps, a fringed vest, cowboy hat, two pop pistols with a leather holster. I also collected a few kitschy Native American and cowboy gimcracks from dime stores. Later on in Arizona, I spent six years or so involved in Navajo and Lakota cultures and, at one point, learned about Sitting Bull and his friendship with Annie Oakley. "Pelagia, Holy Fool," came from my reading a non-fiction book about women mystics, and when I came upon the story of Pelagia and the tradition of the Holy Fool, I knew I had a story (or the story had me). Kaspar Hauser came through another non-fiction book, Jeffrey Masson's "The Wild Child," a study of a nineteenth century German feral child. In each case the person preceded the research and more importantly, my obsession with the person gave me the energy to pursue the research.

DN: The common thread of the eight stories is mystery and intrigue, and they certainly seem scary. If people thought of them as "scary stories," would this be taking a shallow view of the tales?

MP: I think fear, wonder, terror, curiosity and an instinct for the sublime are all mixed in us. I was very aware while writing these that I was appealing to and gratifying my own love of mystery and the bizarre; following the hidden child-self who wants to be thrilled, terrorized and found peering over the precipice. These stories, aside from the last, are all set in history, yet I find conventional history unreliable, doubtful and too often, dull. The best stories are not on stage but behind the curtain; human life is far more exciting, unpredictable, magical and ultimately, mysterious, than we are socially conditioned to believe.

DN: In an interview with Sativa Peterson of the "Phoenix New Times" you said, "In this collection, I posed an ethical dilemma, unanswerable, ambiguous, reverberant, at the core of each story." Is this ethical dilemma continuous throughout the book, or is it specific to each story? In what way does the book challenge the reader to answer difficult questions? Do you as the writer seek to answer the ethical dilemmas in "The Odditorium?" Do they need an answer?

MP: I think the foundational question I'm asking is about human cruelty. Why are we cruel to ourselves and to one another? Why do we too often lack the empathy that would bring understanding, forgiveness and peace to our homes, to our communities and cultures? Why is our connection to the earth so broken? For me, it never works to write a story from the perspective of, or because of, the ethical question. I try instead to let the depth of the story reveal itself to me, to wait for the moment when I realize, "Oh, there's that question arising again: why do we harm one another? Why do we, at critical times, lack the courage to be empathetic, to forgive, to love and to love ourselves?" Honestly, I didn't realize I had this question running through all the stories until I was finished with the collection and took time to think about what connected the stories, besides history. I haven't answered that question, by the way. I am simply posing it in different, historically inspired fictional guises.