I really challenged myself to lean into the more difficult, more true results of the building of scenes and characters which had brought me to these points. I began tuning my ear to those moments and knowing when they were arriving and happening. The Rumpus: In an interview for The Collagist, you said something that really resonated with me: “Easy isn’t true.” I was wondering how that mantra played into the writing of Godshot.Ĭhelsea Bieker: When I first started writing, it was really clear to me when I would hit a point in the story where something big was going to happen, or it was a moment of reckoning for the character, and I could feel the tension in myself, wondering, Do I have the skills to actually write this in a true way? Or am I going to go down an easy path, like the character staring out the window of the train and the confrontation never happening? I started to be able to sense the ways that I would skirt around this harder moment in my own work. Currently she lives in Portland with her husband and two children, where she teaches college composition, as well as fiction writing for Catapult and the Gotham Writer’s Workshop.Ĭhelsea was kind enough to talk with me recently about Godshot, knowing the body, and setting the seductions of total faith against the tumultuous backdrop of adolescence. She holds a BS in Journalism from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University.
Her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. Her writing has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Electric Literature, Joyland, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. She is the recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, and the author of two forthcoming books, the aforementioned novel Godshot-out from Catapult on April 7-and a story collection, Cowboys and Angels (2021). She sets out to win her mother back, even as her “assignment”-a bewildering act of violence that changes everything-becomes harder to ignore.Ĭhelsea Bieker hails from California’s Central Valley. But when her mother abandons her after being excommunicated, Lacey May is left to wonder whether Vern’s promises come at too high a cost. A drought has devastated the area so badly that residents turn to Pastor Vern, a cult leader who promises to bring the rain back with his mysterious “assignments.” Lacey May embraces the church, seeing how it brought order to her mother’s whirlwind life of boyfriends and drinking. T Kira Madden describes Chelsea Bieker’s debut novel, Godshot, as “a truly epic journey through girlhood, divinity, and the blood that binds and divides us.” Set in the town of Peaches, California, the story follows fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother.
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