AIMEE POKWATKA TALKS ABOUT WRITING ACCUMULATION ON ABOUT THE AUTHORS TV

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:05]I like to say that um accumulation is a haunted house novel about the horrors of having to feed your kids every single day.

[00:00:12]So, Tennessee Cherish is a documentary filmmaker. Her husband has taken a job.

[00:00:18]They're moving their whole family from North Carolina to New York.

[00:00:21]The house that they move into is a big, weird, old house.

[00:00:25]It's very much based on my own house.

[00:00:27]And in the shuffle of all this, she has kind of given up her own work. Um she's had a lot of early promise and then uh has had to put her work aside uh in order to focus on her family.

[00:00:42]Uh she's mostly been doing wedding videography in the past, you know, the most recent stretch of time. So, she finds herself kind of thrust into the role of stay-at-home mother.

[00:00:52]And the repetitive domestic labor and the carrying of the mental load is really what starts to take its toll on her. This book is actually, I would consider to be the most personal thing that I've written. And um the state of feeling trapped, I think, really came out of the pandemic more than anything else. Um my family moved about 6 months before the pandemic started and I had been teaching and I gave up those gigs.

[00:01:19]And then all of a sudden there was no hope of getting another teaching job. Um but I had a book under contract. And I think that, you know, for creative people, especially if you are the flexible parent, then things often fall on you. So, during the pandemic, I was managing my kids' remote learning, which was ex- hard because their teachers were constantly emailing me, "This one doesn't have his camera on.

[00:01:41]This one came into the Zoom 3 minutes late."

[00:01:44]And I was sitting there trying to write my second novel under contract, on deadline, um but having to be interrupted every 5 to 20 minutes to deal manage something with the kids, whereas my husband was upstairs in his home office with the door closed. So, it was really kind of feeling that kind of acute unfairness of being the flexible parent. Um, and you know, as a writer, I I think through writing. Writing is a thinking process for me. Writing is how I process what's happening around me.

[00:02:17]Sometimes I don't even know what it is that I think until I've written my way through it. So, to lose that outlet, um, really is like a loss of self-identity, you know, you kind of uh I lost my ability to be myself in some ways.

[00:02:33]It was a very fine balance because, you know, part of what we're seeing is the haunting is kind of a metaphor, right?

[00:02:41]It's a physicalization of things that are unsaid. It's, um, the accumulation of like expectation and resentment that's kind of coming out physically into this world. But, at the same time, we have an unreliable narrator. So, it's I wanted to make sure I kind of maintained that, um, that line for the reader as well. I wanted the reader to be as disoriented as the main character is and questioning whether things are happening are real.

[00:03:10]So, I really tried to lean into like the more mundane forms of haunting.

[00:03:17]Um, and the the attic door slamming shut, like the everyday things that the uh dish the uh faucet in the kitchen running on its own. Um, the dishwasher that seems like it's always full. Those kinds of small things. And then when it comes to the kids, I try to think of what would be scary to me as a mother. So, one of the kids starts drinking excessively.

[00:03:42]Um, and you [clears throat] know, that's something that is kind of a classic sign of haunting when you read haunted house stories or like ghost manuals, excessive thirst is like a sign that you might be haunted. Um but it's also could be a very scary medical diagnosis. So I tried to kind of um toe the line of is this real or is this a haunting?

[00:04:05]So we have two kids, Ashlyn um and Anders. They're starting a new school.

[00:04:10]They're seven and nine. Um it's that's a hard age to be uprooted from your life and have to be thrust into like a whole new environment. Um Ashlyn is very much like her mother and I was really kind of leaning into this kind of matrilineal haunting.

[00:04:30]Um so this is something that women are particularly sensitive to.

[00:04:34]Um so she's kind of seeing the same things that her mother is, which is I think necessary to have some sort of validation for that. Um >> [clears throat] >> you know, it's not just the the mother character who is seeing these things.

[00:04:48]And then Anders is one of the kids, the kind of kid who just is deliberately creepy for fun, which is really like both of my own kids combined. Like I have drawings that they made around the same age that is like a book of ghosts that they saw and it's like a little pony in a field that we always drove by.

[00:05:07]So um I think and that was another thing where I was like is he is he just having fun being the creepiest kid possible or is something real happening?

[00:05:20]I'm someone who is not naturally good at plot, so I do outline pretty extensively when I start writing.

[00:05:26]Um and I will typically look at like I will use other um stories to help me frame my own. So I looked at haunted house stories and I kind of looked at what are the main plot points and then I outline and then by the time I get to the first draft everything is totally different. I have to kind of uh I consider my first drafts to be discovery drafts, exploratory drafts, because I can plan the plot as much as I want, but the characters kind of make themselves known in the course of writing a first draft. And then usually that changes the entire plot. So, [laughter] it's not an efficient way to do it, but yeah, so in this case, you know, there was a lot of stuff that got cut out because Ten is a documentary filmmaker. At one point, I had a lot of scenes where there were just camera footage.

[00:06:13]Um and that was actually kind of a guiding structure for the for the book. Ten thinks she's going crazy. She's seeing things around the house, and she does what a documentary filmmaker would do, which is put cameras all over the house, so she can see what's really happening.

[00:06:28]So, it it early on in the writing, I would have these scenes that was just like camera one, and it would show, you know, one of the kids asleep in bed, and like the doll has moved in their room since the last time we saw it. Um but I felt like it was just giving too much away, basically. I you know, I ended up cutting those out because I felt like the the story had more tension if we stayed closer to the unreliable point of view than if we were getting objective con- confirmation all the time of exactly what was happening.

[00:07:01]Uh we have a human tooth found in the floorboards, which So, I actually live in a house, the main part of which was built in the 1750s, that it really is the basis for the house in the book. And so, um something that happens early on is that Ten has to go from room to room with tweezers and pull out all of the errant uh medication and things that have are stuck between the floorboards.

[00:07:23]So, um I thought, what's the creepiest thing that you could find between your floorboards? Because I was finding a lot of like earring backs and Q-tips, but she finds a human tooth. Um we have the attic door that slams shut on its own.

[00:07:37]And then the creepiest thing, I think, that is just like a classic haunted house uh image that I really had fun with was the doll, which is based on a real doll that we found in our own yard. So, we moved into this house, my husband found this doll that's like really actually very creepy >> [laughter] >> in the yard.

[00:08:00]And as one does upon finding an obviously cursed object in your yard, we started hiding it for each other. So, he would put it in my underwear drawer and I would be like, "Well, now it's my turn." And then I would put it in, you know, the console of his car or some place for him to find. And that was actually the first seed of the story was thinking, "What if a family moved into this house and were so busy playing this little game with the doll that they failed to notice that the house was actually haunted." So, the doll itself became a kind of my favorite piece to move around.

[00:08:35]One of my favorite haunted house stories ever is the story by Kelly Link called Stone Animals. And she talks about she has a little um piece that she wrote about it and she talks about repetition as a kind of spell casting. So, that idea has always really stuck with me and I'm just obsessed with repetition in general. So, you know, the repetition serves multiple purposes in the story. It's about the repetition of the mundane kind of mindless soul-sucking chores that you have to do when you're a parent. Um but it's also about the characters um rep not being able to stop doing the same things over and over again. Like we we have the same fights over and over again. We do this we fail our partners in the same way over and over again.

[00:09:22]Um but the so the repetition starts to take hold in the story and that was a real challenge to write because I wanted it to again, I was trying to create the sense for the reader as the same sense as the character has. Like, did it did this already happen? You know? So, it was it really came down to a lot of like fussing around with details because each new iteration had to be a little bit different. It had to escalate a little bit, but I also wanted the reader to be questioning what was really happening. If they like lost their place in the book or what was going on.

[00:09:59]I think I knew the source of the haunting fairly early or at least I knew that this was not just about It's not just ghosts, right? It's not like um we're going to have a classic haunted house story and she's going to discover this person died in her house and she has to figure that out. Um to me it's much more existential. She's trying to figure out how she's going to live with herself.

[00:10:23]Um and I think, you know, I have a I think I have a lot more tolerance for ambiguity than than some readers.

[00:10:30]And so, I didn't want to um you know, the way that we get ourselves out of difficult situations is usually not just one dramatic episode. It's something that is like, okay, we're going to start to try to do things differently. And so, I was I really wanted it to be um you know, the sense that the work is not done. We have not solved the problem magically by the end of the book.

[00:10:54]Um we're we're starting to solve the problem by the end of the book. Um but yeah, the I have a really great process for um figuring out the climax of a book which is uh just being like, "And then yada yada yada, they solve the problem and everything's great." Um so, that's usually like by the time I get to that point in the writing, I hope that I have left myself enough seeds that I can figure it out. Like my subconscious is leaving me breadcrumbs in the process of writing.

[00:11:23]Um so, for me I knew I had these elements already in place. I had a house that was on jacks.

[00:11:30]I had um cameras. I had, um, all the things were already set up. So, it was really me just kind of connecting the dots that I had already drawn for myself as to how she, uh, solves the problem. And to me, it was the biggest thing that I wanted to show was, you know, we have a character who is struggling with mental health.

[00:11:54]Um, and she's unreliable. We don't know if what she's seeing is real or is she crazy?

[00:12:01]And I hate stories that string the reader along the entire time and is like, is she crazy or is this supernatural thing happening? You get to the end and you're like, no, she's just crazy. You know, um, so I didn't want to have that be the resolution. I wanted it to be okay for a character to be mentally ill and right.

[00:12:21]To struggle with suicidal ideation, but also understand when something is profoundly wrong in her life. So, to me, the biggest thing that I needed to do by the end was to have people believe her.

[00:12:34]Um, yeah, so that was kind of I thought what I was really working toward was I think that you want a a haunted house novel to continue to haunt the reader after they're finished. Um, and you know, I think there's a trend where like the heroine burns it all down, right? Or there's a there's a possible ending where that she gets swallowed whole by the house and that's it. But neither of those felt uh, true to the story for me. You know, this is a character who kind of builds her own cage and I wanted her to be able to break herself out of it. Um, and I think that's the thing that I would like readers to kind of hold on to the most is this idea of this woman essentially becomes complicit in her own unhappiness, but she's not helpless. She keeps trying to figure things out and eventually she does because she is a competent person even though she's forgotten that about herself.

[00:13:42]>> Mhm.