[Interview] Barbara DeMarco-Barret Pool Fishing

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett knows there are all kinds of ways to get by.  She’s been a semi-conductor inspector, auto parts runner, and Avon lady, a baker, a waitress, and a housecleaner.  Also, a restaurant manager, crisis intervention counselor, and bookseller, not to mention a voice-over actor and television publicist. No mystery, then, that she’d wind up writing about the darker side of The Golden State. DeMarco’s debut short story collection, Pool Fishing, published by Kelp Books, is a compilation of 15 tales spanning the California geography from Orange County to San Francisco and Palm Springs.  Her characters are unravelling misfits.  They’re dreamers you’ll find loveable or despicable, or, you may not be sure which.  They’re people just like people you know, some who drive you crazy even though you can’t get enough of them.  Their troubles get worse the harder they try, but there’s that something about them that you can’t stop cheering for.  They’re barely making it, and when they seem the most unhinged is when they just might get away with murder, literally.  DeMarco’s stories are quirky, fun, and funny.  They’re sexy, and dark.  Overall, they leave us with hope, and maybe that’s another reason why she’s become a quintessential California writer.

(KELP JOURNAL): Somewhere, I read that as a child, you discovered your father was a bigomist.  And I thought, Wow, it makes sense she’d turn out to be a crime writer.

(BARBARA DEMARCO-BARRETT): When did I find out?  As long as I can remember, my dad had a girlfriend, but I wasn't born when it first happened.  He wasn’t home much, and she had my brother, and their relationship just kind of fell apart.  I’m told he had ties to the western Pennsylvania Jewish mafia, even though he was Italian Catholic.  He had a new Cadillac every year and I just thought, oh, he's a shoe designer, he makes a lot of money.  We had a slot machine and a pinball machine in our basement that were covered up because I guess they were illegal at the time. There were always things going on that I never made sense of as a child, but in retrospect, it’s like, of course.

(KJ): Quite some time passed between when your mother found out, and gave him an ultimatum, and actually remarried him when he left the other wife.

(BD-B): My brother was an infant and somebody called her anonymously and said, “Your husband has another family in Forest Hills, New York.” He admitted it, and she kicked him out, and went back to her little town in Pennsylvania with her parents.  He divorced his wife of 25 years and remarried my mother, and then I came along some years later.

(KJ): So they had an unconventional love story.

(BD-B): A little bit.

(KJ): And there is a lot of unconventional love in your stories.

(BD-B): Yeah. Isn't that funny? I mean, you probably experienced this. You never know what you're writing until people tell you what you wrote, and you think like, oh, that's what it's about.

You know, my parents had a hard time because he was 30 years older. She was the age of his children, and he had grandchildren. He had money, and he took her out of her little town and gave her, you know, diamonds and furs.  And she had no skills. She left school in the seventh grade.  So did he, but he was scrappy and he developed skills  

They weren't really happy, but they stayed together a long time. Maybe they shouldn't have.

(KJ): People didn't think so much about being happy in marriages then, right? And I promise I'm not going to pin you down by drawing connections between your past and your writing.

(BD-B): No, that's fine.(KJ): Okay, so it is an interesting coincidence that in your stories, there are women with men very much older, or men dramatically younger. And there is a bit of an ongoing question of what makes the better lover, the older man or the younger man, which I find hilarious.

(BD-B): That's interesting.

(KJ): Yeah. And one situation of walking a particularly slippery slope of like a 33-year-old teacher with initially a 16-year-old student.

(BD-B): Right. Yeah. You know, that's interesting because I'm working on a novel with those characters, except they're not those exact characters anymore, but, you know, the same kind of Mary Kay Letourneau kind of teacher with a young student.  With the short story, nobody ever, ever gave me any trouble about the fact that they got involved when he was underaged. But with my novel, I've had agents tell me like, “No, no, no, his age needs to be at least 18.”  Is there more latitude with short fiction? I don't know.

(KJ): What basic elements are mandatory in noir?  And what rules can be broken?

(BD-B): Well, there's the noir of the 40s and the 50s, right? Dark alleys, femme fatales, and stockings with the seam up the back, right?  When I wrote my first short story, “Crazy for You,” I didn't know I was breaking a rule with sunshine, and a swimming pool, and a different environment.  The thing (with noir) is that usually the main character makes bad choices. They may want to do better, to improve, to have their dreams realized, and yet they just keep making choices that dig them deeper into whatever they're trying to escape.

In, “The Water Holds You Still,” Greta makes some bad choices with her ex that she catches with another woman on Instagram, and the brother, and then the pool guy.  But she's not really trying to dig herself out of anything. She's there helping her mother. But her bad choice is revenge, right? Instead of forgiveness.

(KJ): Well, first, it’s falling for the pool guy.  Those kiwi-colored eyes.

(BD-B): (Laughs) Yeah, that was kind of the first misstep.  But then, definitely revenge.That story was very much my mother and brother.  She was declining, and he’d taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from her, and I thought, if I am holding a grudge, that's going to eat me up, right? It's not going to do anything for him. He's going to be gone.  So before he died a few years ago, I opted for forgiveness.  But with the story, Greta can't forgive him. And so, of course, she digs herself into a hole. Who knows what's going to happen with her now, right?

Rules are a little flexible, I think, with noir. Sex, greed and murder; that’s basically noir.  Is it noir if there isn’t a crime of some sort?  I don't think so.  Environment, or setting, can be all sorts of things now, whereas it used to be with all the old noir, you could just glance at it and you knew it's noir, like the movie, “Double Indemnity.”  That's one of my favorites.

(KJ): You really like “M,” also.

(BD-B): Well, I had an assignment to write a horror short story for an anthology called Becoming Nosferatu, which came out earlier this year. I'd never written horror, and it had to be based on a German expressionist film made between 1919 and 1931.

So I sampled different films from that time and I found “M,” and I was familiar with Fritz Lang, the director, and Peter Lorre appealed to me, as did dealing with a pedophile in 1931, where nothing happens on screen.  You know, it’s all off screen. And then I brought it to where I lived in Corona del Mar, and that’s where the story, “Sandman,” came from.

(KJ): Do you feel it is more challenging -- or is it easier -- to write a short story when you have an assignment? 

(BD-B): I think a lot of writers do well with constraints, you know, a prompt that gets you thinking in a way that maybe wouldn't have occurred to you.  That's how I got started with noir. I was at the LA Times Festival of Books, where I’m usually a panelist or moderator. I was standing at the buffet table with T. Jefferson Parker and Susan Strait, and Susan told me that Gary Phillips was looking for contributors for an anthology.  And I thought, great, I can place one of my essays. I got a hold of Gary, and he’s like, “Yeah, it's an Orange County noir anthology.  Why don't you take Costa Mesa?” I had no idea!  I mean, I was familiar with film noir, and some noir novels like James M. Cain, but I spent the summer studying noir fiction, and I wrote the story.

With my students, I give prompts a lot, like the Chinese menu exercise, where you have a list of characters, a list of situations or conflicts, and a list of settings.  And then you pick one from each column, not necessarily straight across, and go for it and see what happens.“Pink Aviary” came out of a free write with my students. I have this little box (holds up a small tin) and I fill it with little slips of words and phrases, and I pick a few at the beginning of class. And the words were “pink” and “aviary.” I didn't go, I want to write a story about a dancer who can't get a company and becomes a stripper. I free write and let come out whatever comes out. I do another exercise with my students with postcards as our prompt. “Sea Change” began with this (holds up a black and white image).  She's on a beach with her dog, staring at the sun, and he needs goggles because he's getting cataracts. This is what I chose, and the story came.

You know, we all have different ways of working, but if I sit and try to plan something out, I end up just like getting up for a snack or something. But if I set the timer and have a prompt, and make myself stay there ‘til the timer goes off, sometimes good stuff comes out. And then of course, there's a lot of crafting and revision and refining and all of that has to happen. But just to get that rough draft is, I think, the hardest thing.

(KJ): You’ve said that when you wrote literary fiction, you felt you poured your emotions on the page more. And it seems your writing now is craft driven, but it's really a convergence of craft and what inspires you, or where your curiosity takes you, is that correct?   

(BD-B): Yeah, I think that's true. That's well said. I like to quote the fiction writer Richard Bausch, who says when you're writing a rough draft, just let yourself be stupid.  It really works for me to just kind of release the emergency brake, to just go with it and see if you have anything. You don't always. And craft has to come into it at some point because, you know, you could have a mess on the page, and you can't make sense of it until you start crafting the piece.I get inspired when I'm just like letting it riff and when I see like, oh, I didn't know that was in there. I get inspired by titles too, like, “51 Winfield.” We were in a restaurant in Hilo, Hawaii, celebrating my son’s high school graduation.  The waiter put down the tab, and it was number 51, and he wrote his name, Winfield, on it.  And I said to Travis, my son, “That's a title.”And I held on to this for years. And then one day, here comes this character, this woman whose husband was killed on a boat, and she doesn't know how, and usually free writing is what gets me started.  Because otherwise, aren't we thinking too much? I mean, you sit there and think 51 Winfield, what could that be? Instead of just writing and just letting it come out, letting it riff.

(KJ): Speaking of riffing, there’s a lot of music in your stories. Just about every story in this collection seems to have a soundtrack, and they play so powerfully in the setting, almost as though one is indispensable to the other.

(BD-B): Now I have to look at the stories and what I did. Because see what I mean? You never really know until you talk to somebody, and they tell you what you did. But music is a big part of my life.  My husband and son are musicians, and I studied music and flute.  I also have tinnitus, so I like background sounds playing.  I don’t write to music with lyrics, but there's usually music on, like right now, it’s K-Jazz. And I have a Blue Martini playlist on Spotify. I was working on a memoir that will forever stay on the shelf, and I always had “The Godfather” soundtrack playing as I was writing because it was an Italian family memoir, right?

(KJ): With Pool Fishing, how did these stories become a collection?

(BD-B): Stories tend to take a long time to get to a collection, because most of us don't write a short story a month, right? I mean, it's over a number of years, and you don’t just throw everything in.  They have to be connected in some way.  I had other stories, non-noir, non-dark stories, but they weren't connected well enough.  I put the project aside until I had more noir, and then I took out the literary stories that didn't really connect, or that took place in other parts of the country, and then I had this collection.  But again, it was like over a long period of time.

(KJ): You’d been through the auction process in publishing with your previous book, and you know how that could work.  And it seems these stories could have been with a big publishing house, yet you deliberately chose a smaller press in Kelp. Is that true?

(BD-B): Yeah, it was very specific that I thought this would be for Kelp, that they would like it, and want it, and respect it. I like small presses because you are very close to the publisher, and if I need something from them, it’s possible.  This is where so much good publishing is happening.

(KJ): You’ve said, “Blue Martini,” is the story you most believe in. And now, it’s part of your novel by the same name that’s being pitched to publishers.  Would you say there are some stories or some characters that you're just not quite ready to let go of?

(BD-B): I guess so, huh.  The novel, “Blue Martini,” came from three stories that I conflated, taking parts of the stories and going from there.  “The Water Holds You Still,” has the setting and the mother, and there’s the café in “Blue Martini.  And in, “Crazy for You,” we have a teacher and a student, but they don't get together in the novel until he’s 18 because of this problem I mentioned with age, which didn’t happen with the story.  Like I said earlier, Mary Kay Letourneau was the teacher in Washington who got together with a 6th grader and ended up going to jail. She was from Newport Beach, not far from where I've lived most of my time in Orange County. And I always wondered, how would that happen? Like, why?  The novel is different from the story.  But yeah, I wasn't through with them.

(KJ): In addition to maybe those reiterations of characters, you have other obsessions that I've heard about, like with typewriters and fountain pens, which are most definitely things of the past.

(BD-B): They all work! I had 30 at one point.  I've always had a typewriter, at least one, but after my son and I saw the documentary, “California Typewriter,” we got way into them.  I have a few pen pals, and my son, even though he lives local now, we have this pen pal thing going. I don't know, I just love the history, and how they look, and the sound they make.

Same with fountain pens.  (Holds one up).  I have a bunch. I have four on my desk right now.  I love how words look when you use a fountain pen. It's also ecological, you know, you have a pen, you fill it with ink. All these plastic cylinders that we just throw out!  Fountain pens are refillable forever.  I have one that was my dad's. I don't really have anything of his except cocktail stirrers, and some shoe forms that he used at the shoe factory.  And a fountain pen.

(KJ): You’ve mentioned a few novels gathering dust in your garage.  It’s hard to hear your memoir won’t see the light of day, because with your dad and your family background, it seems it's got to come out at some point.   What do you see coming next?

(BD-B): Well, yeah, I very much hope my agent places my novel, Blue Martini. I'm working on another one called, Night Kitchen, which is mystery slash literary.  In the first chapter, my protagonist's best friend has been murdered, and it takes place in Newport Beach.  Lots of water, lots of boats.  And I wrote another story for Kelp called, “Hitchhiker,” which has water in it, and a female hitchhiker getting into trouble.

(KJ): I can't wait to read it!  I've heard characterizations of your anthology as thriller, suspense, noir, and domestic noir.  But I like to think of it as feminist noir because it says so much about the options women have or don't have, and the choices they make.

(BD-B): Well, like we've been saying, I just wrote down feminist noir because that never occurred to me. It's never a conscious decision, but these characters are women that interest me, with things I’ve been through, or things women I know have been through, and women I don't know have been through.  I love how you're categorizing it because I think it's just so true. And I don't want to write those characters unless they're trying to break out of what limits them.

(KJ): Because we've been so serious, let’s talk about a fun thread with your female characters throughout these stories, that their sexual choices are really amusing.  It's a kick that these women, who have such limitations in life, are kind of calling the shots sexually.

(BD-B): They are, aren't they! I mean, this is what I mean! We write, and then you find out what you did later. There's so much that I'm not aware of when I'm doing it. I try to be myself wherever I am.  I don't think in the way of market trends, or because this will be popular. I don't sit down with agendas or like, this is the theme of what I want this story to be, no. I mean, there might be a constraint, right?  And I've never felt characters talk to me, but I think sometimes they may appear and want to be in a story like, “How about my story? Put me in a story.”

(KJ): Well, I won't call you on it, but I wonder if that’s how it happens that a female protagonist sees a guy with kiwi-colored eyes cleaning her mother's pool and ends up on a tangent of sexual interludes with him while her poor mom is in the house with dementia.  That was pretty crazy.

(BD-B): She was sleeping, the mother was sleeping.

(KJ): Right.  Well, okay then.

(BD-B):  I was not involved with a pool maintenance man with eyes like that, but I used to do writer's retreats in Palm Springs every summer until COVID.  I might do another one this summer.  And so in 2019, I also signed the contract to put together Palm Springs Noir and to write my story for it called, “The Water Holds You Still.” And I was staying at that house.

(KJ): So back to those eyes.

(BD-B): Well, a pool maintenance man showed up when I was staying there.  In this lovely outfit, whatever they call uniform. And he had those eyes. And I was like, he's going in a book.Yeah, those eyes.(KJ): There is another character in the book who evidently finds UPS men in their uniforms irresistible.  So you’ve got these fun threads kind of woven in throughout. (BD-B): Yeah, they happen, you know, UPS guys. Yeah.

(KJ):  But this is not just a book that only women will enjoy. I think men will be especially curious to know the answer to a burning question that comes up a few times in this collection: Who makes the better lover, the old guy, or the young stud?(BD-B): Yeah, the jury's out.

Barbara DeMarco was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her short story, “Rowboat,” which first appeared in Kelp Journal in December 2023, and is included in her debut short story collection, Pool Fishing, published by Kelp Books in September 2025.  She is editor and a contributor to Palm Springs Noir, Akashic Books, and has work included in Akashic’s Orange County Noir, and USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series. Her stories have appeared in Coolest American Stories 2022, CrimeReads, and The Dark City Crime and Mystery Magazine.  Her first book, Pen on Fire, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. She created and co-hosts the award-winning podcast, “Writers on Writing,” since its KUCI-FM inception 25 years ago, now boasting a repertoire of over 1500 authors, agents, and poets. She has held writers’ retreats since 2013 and teaches at Gotham Writers Workshop and Saddleback College. A former journalist, her essays and articles have appeared in The Ocotillo Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Orange Coast Magazine, The Writer, Writer’s Digest, and Poets & Writers.

Betty-Jo Tilley is a Los Angeles-based writer and graduate in fiction and nonfiction of UCR’s Low Residency MFA Program.  Her nonfiction essays have appeared in Eclectica, The Keepthings, and Opposite of Nihilism, and her flash fiction has been in Scavengers Literary Magazine.  The Coachella Review has featured her critical work and author interviews, including of Deepti Kapoor and Belinda Huijang-Tang, and she has interviewed novelists Ivy Pochoda, Flynn Berry, Alex Espinoza, and Nicholas Belardes in previous issues of Kelp.