For Aimee Bender, growing up the daughter of a psychoanalyst meant that Halloween was no ordinary festival. Her older sister dressed up with her friends as Id, Ego and Superego.
'I didn't really get it, but I still thought that was so cool,' she says. Bender's mother, a dance choreographer, also nurtured her children's belief in the powers of the unconscious, with her injunctions to 'trust the process'. 'The unconscious was the sixth member of the family.'
So, it's small wonder that Bender became a writer of modern-day fairy tales - warped, darkly satirical stories that trade in the surreal, seemingly random imagery of dreams. With the publication of her second collection, Willful Creatures (Doubleday) - following her debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, and her novel An Invisible Sign of My Own - Bender is the first to admit that she owes a lot to her unconscious.
Her best work flows when she's least aware of it - when her thoughts become non-verbal. 'There's our 'talky' language, or 'thinky' essay language, which is conscious - words like 'ubiquitous', or 'pedagogy',' says Bender. 'Then there's a well of language where we're not forming thoughts formally - words like 'spaceship' and 'magnificent', that won't stick unless there's some unconscious attachment to them.'
Bender rarely has a conscious agenda when she writes. Her themes emerge spontaneously. Job's Jobs was an exception. Bender set out to explore the issue of 'creativity, and how we squelch it'. As she writes, in her usual matter-of-fact style: 'God put a gun to the writer's head. 'I'm making a rule', said God. 'You can't write another word or I'll shoot you'.'
The premise of Death Watch, which opens: 'Ten men go to ten doctors', occurred to Bender after she conducted a joke-writing exercise with her students at the University of South California, where she teaches creative writing. 'It just seemed to me that jokes are so plot-based,' she says. 'They're like fairy tales that way - swift and economical.'
Bender traces her love of metaphor to the experimental dance performances her mother introduced her to as a child. 'I remember responding in such a visceral way to unusual metaphorical choices - a nude woman, wearing an accordion, in a field of carnations,' she says.
