Colleen Burner’s Sister Golden Calf is a strange, gorgeous debut novel about two sisters, Gloria and Kit, who travel through the desert with their jars full of “invisible things for feeling and knowing.” It’s about grieving the death of a parent, about isolation and longing, and it features an eight-legged taxidermied calf, a ghost town, and a nude ranch. Reading Sister Golden Calf, I was moved by the propulsive, sometimes breathless sentences, and the quiet, meditative moments where Gloria and Kit find space to grieve—a space that is a car, a body, a sister willing to travel to the ends of the earth.
My first interaction with Colleen was in their role as editor for Shirley (now Surely) magazine when I received an acceptance email for my short story “The Fox Face” in 2018. Since then, it has been a delight to become more acquainted with Colleen and their writing. When Colleen and I realized that we would both be debuting novels at the same time, both travel narratives about grief, and both with indie presses—Sift with The 3rd Thing and Sister Golden Calf with Split Lip Press—we used it as an excuse to talk more.
I was honored to chat with Colleen about their process of writing Sister Golden Calf at length over email in the winter of 2024, after some of our book events had died down. This transcript was lightly edited by us before publication.
Sister Golden Calf is a wonderfully strange novel. It’s a world that is recognizable, yet slightly askew. I’m wondering what kind of joys or challenges this presented for you—whether in the writing process (understanding the logic of the world) or in sharing or talking about your work.
“Joy” and “challenge” are good identifiers. There is of course joy in creating—in the world-building, the decisions about what will be included or invented, possibilities opening up and leading to more—but there is also challenge in sticking to these decisions and feeling them solid enough to create a logic specific to the story. What rules beget new rules? So many times with fiction we create problems for ourselves to untangle later, ultimately arriving at a time where the story must be reworked or a new rule must be made (and must be convincing enough that it can be pulled off without looking like a ‘fix’). I don’t always write linearly, so that can cause snags, too, even just with the physics of the story. I think the biggest challenge with the world of Sister Golden Calf was figuring out how the capturing of invisible things works—problem #1 is figuring out how to describe something invisible without being repetitive in language; the next biggest problem was probably trying to embody how these things are captured. Gloria has doubts over the ethics of what they do, and I found myself with doubts about how they do, and I found myself getting bogged down with those insecurities—“will this make sense to anyone reading it?” “is this believable enough that a reader will suspend their disbelief enough to let it carry so much weight throughout the story?” I still don’t know if I was successful about that element, but I’ve also gotten more at ease with allowing a book to be imperfect, to allow it more freedom as a piece of art.
Did the insecurities get in the way of writing? What did you do to keep writing?
I put other things in the story that distracted me enough away from that issue (writing invisible things) —“Ok, we aren’t quite sure about what we’re doing over here, but over here we definitely know how this other thing looks.” I think your insecurities have to get in your way, at least a little. Otherwise it’s a big risk of only looking at things one way, not pushing against things, right? For instance, a common insecurity is dialogue (and I say this with zero claim that I’ve mastered dialogue in any way). If that doesn’t get in your way, you probably avoid dialogue altogether or settle for stilted, awkward lines that don’t feel authentic. You can make the rest of your writing work around that, if you mold your style. Or you can study it more, read more, watch more, eavesdrop more and consider all the different ways people really do converse and see that you’ve probably been limiting yourself in terms of what Good Dialogue looks like. Things expand, your writing gets more breathing room. Maybe our insecurities are rooted in what we want to pay attention to, deep down.
I think the biggest joys were also when I found myself swept up in these moments of unseen elements or emotions (also invisible). There are moments throughout the book where Gloria reflects on what figuratively propels her and her sister on the road, what big emotions or motives bring them into the future, and there was a lot of pleasure in writing from a place of propulsion and momentum, that heady, charged feeling where you get to rush from one sentence to the next, surefooted and less concerned with creating logic and rules.
Familial relationships are a big part of the book, especially the relationship between siblings. Gloria and Kit seem so close, yet there is an important section in the book where they split up and travel separately. Can you talk more about your choice to have them be apart for a while and what it means for their individual journeys?
I haven’t told anyone this (!), but I realized shortly after I made the decision to have the sisters go in different directions for a bit that it was a reaction to my sister becoming pregnant with her first child. She and I have very different lives, and a lot of the time we didn’t get along when we were growing up, but we ended up having a very secure bond. There’s a part toward the end of Part II where Gloria’s thinking about her relationship with Kit and how “they could have been the same.” There’s a feeling that when DNA is shared and the way you’re raised is shared and you’ve known each other your whole lives, your sibling is something of an alternate universe version of yourself, on some level. I have never wanted to have children of my own, so when my sister was pursuing that in her own life, it was a new sort of underlining in how our life paths have diverged. So I took Gloria on her own for a bit, but knew pretty quickly that of course they would re-unite. They’d be changed, but they’d still want to share their lives with each other. (I’ve got two nephews now, and they’re great.)
I love knowing this! I think it articulates how elements of our lives slip into the fiction, sometimes in surprising ways. I’m curious about your thoughts on the road narrative. I know, for me, growing up in a small town, I was particularly drawn to stories about travel—On the Road, Travels with Charley, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I would fantasize about hitchhiking, but it was understood that I, a young woman living in the United States in the 1990s, could never do what the men in these novels did because it would be too dangerous. Recently, though, I’ve read a number of travel narratives, many written by women. They have less to do with the individual quest or the “freedom” of the open road, and more to do with a type of reckoning with the past. They are also all grief narratives. In writing Sister Golden Calf, were you thinking about the tradition of the road narrative?
I’m so curious about the road narratives you’ve been reading! Please share with me.
Oh, I’m thinking of Fugitive Assemblage by Jennifer Calkins and Ice by Anna Kavan, but also recent books, like Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over and Raki Kopernik’s No One’s Leaving, which will be out with Unsolicited Press in 2025.
Adding all of these to my list! I don’t think I read too many while I was writing the book; I tried to watch more road movies, especially from the ‘70s.
What road movies did you watch? It’s an ‘80s movie, but did you watch Vagabond?
I love Varda, but I haven’t seen Vagabond yet! I watched Easy Rider and Thelma and Louise several times—so many parallels between those two and again examples of how men and women can be viewed as outcasts in different ways but meet the same end, in a way. I watched Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop, and the ending of Deathproof was always good motivation, too. I also watched a lot of woman-in-landscape and female friendship movies—Badlands, Kamikaze Girls, Daisies, Hausu, and Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains were also inspiring. One road book that really stuck with me was William Least Heat Moon’s (non-fiction) Blue Highways, where he’s just cruising around America’s back roads and meeting people along the way for some slice-of-life writing (I don’t know how much or if any of it is not-quite-non-fiction). He doesn’t really have an aggressive aim and it’s quite romantic, even if he starts things off by telling you he’s recently divorced.
Really, reading Vanessa Veselka’s essay “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters” was enough to get me going. Around the same time, I read Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, which also goes into how narratives, especially Bildungsroman’s, get the shaft when they’re written from a female perspective. What also comes to mind is that passage from Sylvia Plath’s diary: “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. […] Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars—to be a part of scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night …” So that is what I let Gloria do: meet people, travel, hitchhike, walk freely at night, sleep outdoors. It’s not wholly without danger or risk or fear, but she is allowed to do these things and survive, and no one tells her she shouldn’t dare.
I think at the outset, I wanted it to be a story of these sisters having some sort of nebulous quest—and maybe they would discover what that quest was at the end—more or less unconcerned about whatever past they came from. The road narrative is an excellent place to dig into a past and history and context, of course—so many examples portray this; the road as a landscape is a place where so often it can be just a solitary person seeing themselves in the context of the world, looking around, falling back into the natural (I think) impulse to reflect on how they fit in the world and why, the choices they’ve made or that others have made that landed them there. So it makes sense that this puts a spotlight on other big emotional experiences, like grief, as well. The things inside ourselves that can’t be outrun come to the fore, undeniable, demanding to be experienced or understood.
Right, but in Sister Golden Calf, the sisters are grieving in a way that is both solitary and together. So I guess this is another reason why I think the book is doing something different than some of the iconic road narratives I mention. It’s more relational, maybe. Though there are some solitary moments, the sisters are always in relationship with one another.
Right—I think that gets at one way a sibling relationship can be defined: you and another person went through an ultimately lifelong experience in tandem (not necessarily in sync, but together in your own way).
I think there’s also something, which I’ve been trying to unravel, about grief that can make one want to leave their home or familiar setting. Grief in response to death is so powerful for many reasons, but mainly I truly think our human minds are incapable of fully accepting and realizing the absolute finality of death—something about it remains impossible to us, the living. And maybe something about being flung into that new reality—with a new loss—sends us running. This rang true for me when I was reading Sift, that there is, aside from the urgency brought on by staggering effects of climate change, a grieving of the end of the world. Something we are even less equipped to grasp with our human minds, in so many ways. The earth has been dependable for us for all of our history and even before that—how could it be coming to an end? How could we have done that? Maybe that is something grief does—so often it gets mistaken for only forlorn cries of “Why?” when really it’s so often a bewildered asking of “How?”
Yes, exactly. I wanted to ask you about the sentences in your book. They are strange and unsettling in the best ways. I especially like the long, gangly sentences that are strung together by semicolons. Do you have an approach or theory for editing and/or revising sentences? In general, or in particular with this book?
I think it has a lot to do with a tendency to over-explain. In an effort to try to pin a thought down with the most exact language possible, it gets carved away at, clause by clause or fragment by fragment; maybe it’s also like when you go to the optometrist and—if you need corrective lenses—they swing that mask-like device (a phoropter) in front of your face and lead your sight through the lenses, asking “better 1, or 2? 2, or 3? 2, or 4?” as you judge how clearly you’re seeing the letters on the wall; writing is a means of discovering what we’re trying to mean with our lives and what is that but trying to find a clearer way of seeing things, trying to get as sharp as possible? So why not arrive at that sharpest place and only keep that? I like to see the way I arrived at the sharpness, generally. Do you feel like you leave that exploration on the page? I think there are some writers who think it’s best to do away with that evidence, but that feels like shame.
Right. I try to leave some of those exploratory traces on the page. It feels like an authentic engagement with language, underscoring the full extent of the thought process. So, I also wanted to ask you about Gloria and how she often struggles to feel at ease in her body. At one point in the book, she is reflecting on how tense she feels. It’s here where she says, “I think of how a body is an abstract container. For organs, thoughts.” Can you talk more about Gloria’s relationship with her body? Is the restlessness she feels the grief? Something else? Is this somehow connected to her fondness for the taxidermied eight-legged calf?
I had a great therapist for a handful of years but he would sometimes ask me where I felt emotions in my body; I immediately hated that question—because I hadn’t felt connected to my body in that way or I didn’t feel specific sensations in that way. I wonder if you think it’s possible not to project your own body onto your characters? Because I’m sure that I did that with Gloria. She has a feeling of needing to keep racing forward, a body that can’t settle down, lungs that can’t breathe in big enough—a feeling that has been familiar in my own body since I was a teenager and probably an effect of anxiety (which I didn’t even know I could name for the longest time). It translates into grief, fear, anger. Or if we don’t project our bodies onto our characters, do we hide behind the characters somehow? Use them as a way to experience a sort of body freedom in their actions or just in the ways they get to show awareness about their bodies. That moment you point out where Gloria’s thinking of a body as an abstract container does, importantly, take place at a nude ranch, where Gloria is nude, surrounded by her nude sister and nude strangers—the context and the confrontation is bodies but in a way they aren’t normally experienced. This is something you can experience if you take a figure drawing class, too—here, look at this naked body that’s holding fairly still, and your job is to look at the way light falls on it and don’t think too much about how a person is inside that body. Let it become an object. Can you then let your own body become an object while you’re still a person inside it? Does that make it easier to be in your body? If you look at different bodies long enough, they all look normal. I think in some ways this is as much of a discovery for Gloria as the eight-legged calf is. Look, Gloria, how your body can be as ubiquitous and special as anyone else’s, how you can still feel as restless and undone inside your body without actually physically falling apart, how you can see this animal with twice as many legs as most other cows and how that can look like an embodiment of this wild feeling inside of you, how here it is existing as an object inside of which you can try to see the creature.
Do you think Gloria taught you something about yourself? So, I’m thinking about what Catherine Lacey wrote in a recent Substack: “In order to write fiction a writer must first believe she is writing fiction, and thus armored in the belief that she is writing fiction, she can pass some hours believing she is doing nothing more than making things up—yet if all goes well the writer will write something that is not quite fiction, some personal item or admission she would not have written if she had known any better, something she could have only written under the safe delusion that she was writing fiction, and it is in this way that the writer tries and fails to hide from herself, and it is in this way that she realizes the futility of trying to write fiction, and after this realization some hours or a full night’s sleep must pass before she can forget this recurrent self-betrayal in order to again write fiction.”
I think it can be hard to write without that awareness, sometimes—thinking especially of when the writing slows down a bit and you can see where you’re going a little more than when you’re just swiftly, joyfully chugging along. I think there’s a bit of a superstition around this, a pressure that for art to be elevated it should come from within but not be about the within; I see this in the conversations around the validity of autofiction (was this conversation happening before it became a style of writing done more and more by women and non-binary writers?). Am I being cagey? I think Gloria taught me about this awareness, and probably taught me that that very act of revealing is possible, and there’s some safety in drafting. I spent several years writing in Gloria’s voice in the first person; the “I” in my mind was always being borrowed by her (gladly given). At the very least, doing that will teach you about how you see your limitations and hesitations about what you let yourself write, what you think you can do.
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