Staff Spotlight: Paulla Estes

Staff Spotlight: Paulla Estes

Interview

What do you write?

Twenty nine years ago when I grad­u­at­ed with a B.A. in English Lit, I thought my ability to write aca­d­e­m­ic papers qual­i­fied me to write fiction, though I had zero cre­ative writing expe­ri­ence. I smugly typed out twenty-five pages that I believed was the begin­ning of a novel, and sent it off to my alma mater’s MFA program. I wasn’t accept­ed. But I kept writing and learn­ing. I wrote short stories for years, and several essays and arti­cles. Only in the last ten years or so, did I realize that most of what I wrote was based on real life stories, and then I turned to memoir. But I still have an idea for a novel I’m kicking around.

Is there an author or artist who has most pro­found­ly influ­enced your work?

John Stein­beck and Marge Piercy were my biggest influ­ences as a young writer. Steinbeck’s East of Eden is the one book I’d choose to have with me in the age old ques­tion about being strand­ed on a desert island. Any­thing by Stein­beck, really. More recent­ly, I’ve fallen in love with Mary Karr. I can read her books over and over and every single word is perfect. Other favorite influ­ences are Barbara King­solver, Terry Tempest Williams, and E.B. White.

Why did you choose Stonecoast?

When I began research­ing pro­grams, I knew Stonecoast res­i­den­cies were held only twenty minutes away from my front door, but I looked at pro­grams as far away as Cal­i­for­nia. Deter­mined to make a deci­sion not based on prox­im­i­ty, I sought a program with a sense of com­mu­ni­ty in addi­tion to high stan­dards of writing instruc­tion. In the end, regard­less of loca­tion, every­thing pointed me back to Stonecoast. Now if I were to climb a tall enough tree, I could almost see the Har­raseeket from my house…

What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?

As a first semes­ter student, I’ve only attend­ed one res­i­den­cy so far, and I was in a sort of bliss­ful and over­whelmed fog through much of it. There are so many answers to this ques­tion, but the one that stands out was the Open Mic night where first semes­ter student Amy Dempsey per­formed her list essay on dating in the twenty-first century. It was hilar­i­ous and so accu­rate. It brought the house down.

What do you hope to accom­plish in the future?

Well there’s that novel swim­ming around in my head. But also I’d like to finish the memoir I’ve been working on for years now. And I’d like to get better at essays and figure out poetry. I love poetry, but I feel totally igno­rant about it, like being able to write it requires entrance into an exclu­sive club and nobody will show me the secret handshake.

If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?

Mary Karr’s Lit or Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Tie for first.


Featured Work

The Screaming Thing

The fol­low­ing is an excerpt from Paulla’s upcom­ing memoir exclu­sive­ly for Stonecoast Review.

I fid­get­ed on loud, crinkly tissue paper wrapped slick over an exam table and I smelled some­thing clean and sharp. Soap maybe. Or alcohol from the clear, round can­is­ter where Dr. Shea kept tools that looked like sil­ver­ware. In the chair oppo­site, Mom crossed her slim, stockinged legs. Her shiny black sandal jiggled to a tune playing in her head that only she could hear. 

“Will I have to get a shot?” Shiv­er­ing in my panties and under­shirt, I cocked an ear for the thump of Dorothy’s shoes outside the door. Her grand­moth­er­ly smile and white nurse cap, didn’t fool me. Too often she came in with a hand behind her back until she, Dr. Shea, and Mom could hog-tie me face down on that table, yank down my panties, and stab my skinny butt with a long, sharp needle. 

“I don’t know.” Mom didn’t look at me. Curling back her lips so as not to mess up her lip­stick, she licked the tip of her finger and flipped the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal she’d brought in from the waiting room. “But either way,” she said, “Dorothy will give you a sucker when we leave.” 

That was the payback. No matter what they did to me in that exam room, when Mom ushered me out the door, dressed and snif­fling, Dorothy sang out that it was time to open the “trea­sure chest.” The prize was always a Dum-Dums sucker, usually pineap­ple or some other gross flavor. Never cherry or grape. Much like when I craned out of my boredom on the hot leather back­seat to see the lady in the drive-in window at the bank; if we made eye contact, she sent me a sucker in the cylin­dri­cal box with Mom’s cash. Also pineapple.

The injec­tions were heavy doses of peni­cillin for the ear and throat infec­tions I was prone to. But rather than shoot me up with more antibi­otics, Dr. Shea arranged to take out my tonsils when Kinder­garten let out for the summer.

“But I don’t see them,” I told Mom the next morning. Mouth stretched open, elbows prop­ping me up on her bath­room counter, I strained to peer down my throat in the mirror over the sink.

“They’re hard to see, but they’re in there.” Mom sat nearly naked on a cush­ioned swivel chair at what she had dubbed her dress­ing table. There, Mom had set up a table with a gold-framed mirror on the wall behind it. On the table was a smaller, mag­ni­fied mirror, and lots of jars, tubes, pots, com­pacts, and atom­iz­ers with which she trans­formed herself each day. She Scotch taped hand­writ­ten notes to herself on the wall mirror with mes­sages like, “Hello Fatso,” or “Stop Stuff­ing Your Face.” Mom was tall and slim and regard­ed by others as a beauty, so I never under­stood the notes.

I poked my head around the corner from the bath­room and scratched a smudge of minty tooth­paste that had smeared on my arm from the edge of the sink. “Will it hurt?”

“No, you’ll be asleep.”

“But what if I wake up?”

“They’ll give you med­i­cine to make sure you stay asleep until they’re fin­ished.” Mom’s words garbled from the pinched frown she wore when­ev­er she combed mascara onto her eye­lash­es. I watched, mes­mer­ized. Then, she stood up wearing only a pair of panties, breasts jutting out over my head like two bulbous eyes as she walked into the closet to get dressed.

“And I won’t have to get any more shots?” I sat on the chair that was still warm from Mom’s bottom and peered at my own mag­ni­fied face.

“I don’t think so.”

When I woke from surgery, I saw glit­tery orange snakes slith­er­ing over the walls of my hos­pi­tal room. When I cried out, Mom and Dad appeared, unfazed by the snakes. 

“There’s nothing there,” Mom said, holding my hand and brush­ing the hair off my fore­head with her fingers. But I could see them behind her, wrig­gling across the walls as thick as maggots I’d once inspect­ed on a cat that had been run over. When I closed my eyes, I still saw them. A nurse came in and offered me red jello, but my throat hurt too much to think about swallowing.

“I thought it was sup­posed to be ice cream,” I whis­pered. Keith Little from school said when he got his tonsils out, they gave him all the ice cream he could eat.

“Do you want some ice cream?” asked the nurse.

I shook my head. I just wanted the snakes to go away.

The fol­low­ing week I recu­per­at­ed on our family room sofa where Mom covered me up with the black and red afghan an aunt had cro­cheted for us. Mom hovered, offer­ing me a con­tin­u­al smor­gas­bord of soup, jello, ice cream, and other soft foods I refused to let past my lips. Just swal­low­ing my own dry spit felt as though I was throw­ing back a whole handful of thumb­tacks like the one that once buried into my bare heel from the carpet near Dad’s desk.

When I went back to sleep­ing in my pink painted bedroom, I peeked over the quilt at the dark brown closet doors. Some­times Mom forgot to slide them shut after she kissed me good night. Usually I just closed my eyes and pulled the sheet up over my nose, breath­ing in the flowery smell of fabric soft­en­er. But if I sum­moned up the courage to fix my eyes on the closet, it stretched away from me, my whole room growing longer and the ceiling higher, until I could see the closet far off at the other end of the house. It felt like some­thing or someone was in the room with me, making me smaller as the room grew. I opened my mouth to call out for Mom but my voice wouldn’t make any sound above a whisper. Some­times I glimpsed the same orange snakes from the hos­pi­tal out of the corner of an eye, but when I turned my head, they were gone. I told Mom about the snakes and my room stretch­ing all out of whack, but she said it was only a bad dream. When I assured her I was awake, she said I couldn’t have been because the things I saw weren’t real. It only felt like they were real.

One night I woke up in my thin pajamas and bare­foot on our cold, covered front porch. The yellow porch light was on so I could see the front door I was leaning against, as well as the white wrought iron bench and chairs off to one side. But the inky night with the north end of Col­orado Springs and the fields and the moun­tains in the dis­tance hovered just beyond the edge of the porch. I could hardly breathe. The con­crete step felt like ice. I banged on the locked door, gasping and whim­per­ing, looking back over my shoul­der into the dark unknown. There were no street­lights on our quiet street, but a few porch lamps glowed meekly in the dis­tance. Some­thing rustled in the bushes at the edge of the pool of yellow light. A breeze maybe. Or the neigh­bors’ cat. Dad had said there were coyotes around. Mom had warned me about kid­nap­pers that lurked in shadows, waiting to snatch little girls away from their fam­i­lies. Pushing the door­bell over and over, I could hear it ring some­where in the house, but my pleas were met with eerie silence. Even­tu­al­ly Mom opened the door and the memory ends. I figured it was a night­mare like the snakes and the room stretch­ing. Years later, I asked Mom about it.

“Yes, I put you out there,” she said.

“What? Why?”

“You were doing that scream­ing thing again.”

“Scream­ing thing?”

“You’d gotten in the habit of scream­ing out in the middle of the night. It always woke us up and I was tired of it.”

“Wait,” I said, “Was I awake when I screamed, or did I do it in my sleep?”

“I’m pretty sure you were always asleep.”

“Jesus, Mom, do you know how scary it was to wake up on the cold porch with the door locked? I was just a little kid.”

“I imagine it was. But we needed to do some­thing drastic to break you of the habit and you were only out there for a minute or two. I had tried every­thing else, but putting you out there that night finally seemed to do the trick.”

What else, I won­dered, had she tried?

Maybe the scream­ing was some kind of after-effect from the anes­the­sia I’d been given in the hos­pi­tal during my ton­sil­lec­to­my. Like the snakes and the room stretch­ing. I’ve since won­dered where my screams went off to after that. If some­thing in my brain roused up nightly screams from my uncon­scious, did the stint on the cold porch really do the trick? Or did it stuff down the screams, only to have them return years later as ulcers, headaches, or some­thing else? 

For a long time I saw snakes slith­er­ing on the night­time walls of that pink bedroom, either in sleep or awake, I was never sure which. And reg­u­lar­ly the room stretched out into the dis­tance with the closet growing smaller and farther away. Tip­toe­ing out of my room breath­less, I crept down the hall to silent­ly climb in bed next to Mom in the wee hours. Too tired to protest, she scooted over and made room for me while Dad snored on the other side of her.


Paulla grew up out west and was dragged to the East Coast by her husband’s job. Twenty years later, she loves Maine and thinks of it as home. She is the mother of three grown chil­dren, two of whom moved to Arizona, while one is still in Maine. Her back­ground includes bouts as an editor, a sub­sti­tute teacher, a non­prof­it fundrais­er, and a home­school mom. Paulla’s writing has appeared in the now defunct Writer’s JournalThe Class­mate Mag­a­zine, and Antiques and Col­lectibles, as well as the very much alive Prov­i­dence Journal. Now she is working on a memoir. When she’s not writing, Paulla can be found hiking with her German shep­herd, Dinah, on the trails that meander through the Maine woods. Paulla is a first semes­ter student at Stonecoast and a reader for the Stonecoast Review.



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