The Head

Shelly Kawaja talks to Robyn Braun about her debut novella, The Head, Great Plains Press, 2024

Shelly Kawaja (SK): Congratulations on your debut novel, The Head. What inspired you to write a book about a disembodied, but living infant’s head?

Robyn Braun (RB): It came to me as an image of how gross we can feel. Or how gross we imagine other people find us. I just had this image of a young woman with this utter horror hanging from her. I liked the image for the way it gave heat and weight to shame.

SK: The Head is as disturbing as it is fall-down funny. How important is humour in this story, and how did you balance that with the more serious messages in the book?

RB: I like to try to be funny. I hope that the humour in the book points to the absurdity of the situation Trish is in. The situation is absurd, not Trish. Though of course, she’s not perfect. I guess I hoped the humour would point to the impossibility of her situation.    

SK: Trish Russo, the main character, turns to the people in her life for help, but when they see what she is carrying around they always run off. Why is an infant’s head so scary? And what does this say about resistance to acknowledging trauma?

RB: After I finished The Head, I found the short story by Bora Chung called, “The Head,” and it’s so good. In that story the head is in the toilet and is formed from waste–excrement and blood—and what’s creepy about that head is its nature as partially complete. I recently saw a film called Stop Motion in which a stop motion filmmaker makes this really creepy figure out of wax, and it was the incompleteness of the figure that made it so scary. So, is that it, maybe? This “not quite complete” nature of the thing? How is that resonant with trauma? Well, maybe it’s an unformed, or half-formed aspect of yourself that’s just slightly out of your control and which can do a lot of damage. I don’t know.

SK: This is a quick and easy read that clocks in at 144 pages How long did it take you to write this book and how many stages or drafts did you take it through?

RB: I wrote it as a short story for an MFA class in early 2021. It took me another year to turn it into a novella-length work that I submitted as the thesis for my MFA in the spring of 2022. I re-wrote the whole thing twice more before I began sending it out to publishers in January 2023.

SK: What was the most satisfying aspect of completing The Head, and how did know when it was finished?

RB: It’s satisfying just to complete something, I think. I need to explore and experiment so much that I create significantly more than I ever finish. It’s nice to be able to polish something. And to see that the stuff that’s brushed off, well that was a worthwhile sacrifice. Several of my friends read several different drafts and so talking to them helped me know how best to do what I wanted to do. 

SK: What writing rituals do you follow in where, when, or how you write? Are you able to write while listening to music?

RB: I like to free write in the dark with coffee in the morning. When I need to get weird, that’s where I go. When I just need words on the page, then I’m pretty good about setting random assignments for myself like a thousand words a day. I am also pretty good about allowing myself to do the weird creative work that will get you unstuck, like switching to handwriting or dancing in the kitchen. I do like to listen to music when I write, but I can’t listen to anything with words.

SK: How do other people contribute to your writing practice?

RB: I am grateful for the friends I made during my MFA. They’re central to my writing practice. It’s nice to have people to affirm the importance of the practice, you know? Without that, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you have to write best-sellers and be famous on TikTok. My son is also very creative and is constantly making—drawings, videos, music, writing—just to fulfill the urge to create. He’s not precious about it. And that helps me sink into that space of making for its own sake, which is where I am most productive and happy. 

SK: How is your writing practice informed by a sense of writing to or for others? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?

RB: Yes, I try to keep an audience in mind. I feel like it’s an obligation. So many books and writers have fished me out of so much that I want my writing to be that for someone. I’m probably working with the notion of my friends as my audience without being aware of it. I guess too I try to keep in mind the writers I admire. Somehow there’s a little internal sense of whether something’s my best effort to meet them.

SK: What specific book(s) inspired your recent work?

RB: I love Yoko Ogawa. I love Vladimir Sorokin, Ottessa Moshfegh and Lauren Groff. I love Kafka and Nabokov. My all-time favourite writer is Kazuo Ishiguro.

SK: What’s next for Robyn Braun? What are you working on now?

RB: I’m not sure what to call the thing I’m working on now. It’s a love story set in a laboratory at the turn of the 19^th/20^th centuries. There are all kinds of weird things happening in that lab. The rats talk, the people dissolve into purple distillate, human hearts ride tricycles, and a girl’s withered ambition makes a paradigm-shifting discovery. There’s a lot of free writing in the dark with coffee happening these days.

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