my friends need to be punished

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/26/the-big-idea-bernie-jean-schiebeling/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59632

Like blue eyes, height, or left-handedness, how much of our temper and ill manners can we contribute to our genetics? Author Bernie Jean Schiebeling explores the breakage of inherited anger, and what it’s like to fall victim to the temperament our parents passed unto us in the Big Idea for their newest novel, House, Body, Bird.

BERNIE JEAN SCHIEBELING:

My great-grandfather was not a good man.

Without getting into too many details, he was angry and abusive, so much so that my great-grandmother was able to divorce him in the late 1920s without too much trouble. After the divorce, my great-grandfather left—possibly fled—and then committed a string of burglaries across Kentucky and Tennessee while working as a door-to-door salesman. Many years later, my father met one of his ex-colleagues, who said the man had been incredible at sales. Less so at stealing, since he kept getting caught. “And,” he said, pointing at my dad’s breakfast plate, “I can tell you that you take your scrambled eggs the same way. So much pepper.”

Dad never met my great-grandfather (even Grandpa hardly knew him, since he was just a toddler during the divorce). But they both liked peppery eggs, and so do I.

Other echoes persisted too. Anger sometimes exploded from my grandfather, though less than the previous generation. My dad is calmer than his father, and I am calmer than him. Still, rage sometimes rises in me with the inevitable force of a king tide. I hear the ocean rushing in my ears—

—And I breathe through the impulse. I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to continue this tradition that—I hope—none of us wanted. 

Inheritance is never clean. We gather too much over the course of a life, too many objects imbued with too many memories, to ever pass on an uncomplicated story to our descendants. In most cases, this is a gift, the last we give to our loved ones. Sometimes, however, it is a weapon, sharp-edged and dangerous to hold, and we have to figure out how to carry it anyway, or how to put it down in a way that hurts no one else. This is the big idea of House, Body, Bird. 

The idea was larger than I expected. I didn’t mean for this to be a novella; I thought it would be a short story too long to sell to most markets, like most of the work I have in my drafts folder. I was about 15,000 words deep by the time I realized I was writing a book. 

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been that surprised. Stories find their ideal length through their subject matter, and the more I thought about House, Body, Bird’s family and their home-slash-haunted-dollhouse-museum, the more I realized that the sheer amount of stuff in main character Birdie Goodbain’s inheritance—both dollhouses and the history behind those dollhouses—needed to show up on the page. I started including imagery wherever I could: descriptions of dolls, of difficult memories, of how haunted the body becomes from those memories. In the story’s earlier scenes, I wanted to crowd Birdie, make her tuck her elbows in as she navigated the rambling, watchful house.

Of course, this is only the first half of the difficult-inheritance-problem, the “Someone has willed me a weapon” half. I still had to find a good way to explore the second half of “Thanks, I hate it.” Birdie couldn’t stay scared. Thankfully, I had a solution; I just needed to reorganize some clutter.

When I first started writing the would-be short story, I had alternated between two point-of-views for Birdie, third-person limited and first-person. This created emotional whiplash as Birdie went from a meek third-person POV ruminating on the house’s creepiness to a furious first-person POV bashing through the walls with a meat tenderizer. By grouping all the third-person scenes together and following them with the first-person ones, Birdie had much cleaner character development. It’s relevant that the switch in perspective happens once Birdie commits to escaping and seizing her freedom. In that moment, she moves from third-person, where an unseen narrator observes and objectifies her (like a doll!), to first-person, where she narrates her experiences. While imagery had pushed up against the margins in the third-person section, Birdie’s opinions, observations, and memories pepper her own telling of the story. She gets space to breathe. 

In keeping with the novella’s spirit of excess, Birdie’s sections are interspersed with ones from the haunted house’s point of view. Originally, this was useful because it allowed me to reference the previous Goodbain generations with a level of detail that wouldn’t have been possible for Birdie, but the house eventually became the story’s second emotional heart. Although I worried about overwriting throughout the drafting process, a maximalist approach to storytelling was what I needed for House, Body, Bird. 

It’s funny—early on in the story, Birdie’s messed-up dad tells her, “We build, and build, and build.” The Goodbain family built and built and built their house as a way to create a family narrative worth passing on, as an attempt to build livelihoods and lives and love, and I did the same thing. I built and built and built the story to understand how Birdie’s family history loomed over her, and how she could create a new, more loving life in response to it. 

House, Body, Bird: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/26/the-big-idea-bernie-jean-schiebeling/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59632