Alix Ohlin Gathers Wool

In the ninth in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Alix Ohlin, author of Signs and Wonders (Vintage), reveals the source of one of her stories and expresses her preference for working anywhere but at a desk.

What made you want to become a writer?
I never really wanted to be anything else. I grew up reading, and the world of books was always where I felt the most at home, so it made sense that I’d try to find my own place there. 

What obstacles have you encountered in your work, and what have you done to overcome them?
My biggest obstacle is always self-doubt, the voice in my head saying this is no good. The only way I’ve found to overcome it is to write a lot and often. It seems to take the pressure off—if what I write today is not good, then I know there’s always tomorrow, and the day after that.

What's the shortest time it has taken you to write a story?
A day. A couple of my stories (like “Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student,” from my first collection) have appeared complete in my head, and it felt like all I had to do was write them down.  I hasten to add that this doesn’t happen very often.

What's the longest time it has take you to write a story?
Ten years. I wrote a draft of my story “Edgewater” and set it aside, then came back to it a decade later and tried again.

It's a long story...

If you've ever written a story based on something another person told you would make a good story, what were the circumstances?
I usually hate it when somebody says to me “this would make a great story!” I just automatically rebel against being told what to do. But one day I was getting my hair cut and the hairdresser started telling me this long story about one of his other clients, a woman who was just about to divorce her husband when he became extremely ill, so she had to stick around and take care of him. And the whole experience, though it was tragic, made her happier in the end. It was an elaborate, twisty story—my hairdresser is a long-winded man with a real talent for anecdote—and very dramatic and moving. At one point we were both choked up. I changed the details, but the overall arc became the title story of Signs and Wonders. So be careful what you tell your hairdressers. They may not keep it to themselves.

What's the worst idea for a story you've every had?
It’s hard to pick just one, as so many of them are terrible. I’d say my worst ideas tend to be stories that are meant to be written by other writers and aren’t moldable to my voice or strengths. This year I tried to write a story inspired by Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, because I love that book, but what’s lyrical and mysterious in his prose became muddied and pretentious in mine.

Where do you do most of your work?  
I hate desks. I write on the couch or in bed or very occasionally at the dining room table. I get a lot of ideas when I’m not at a workspace (i.e., in the shower, on a plane), and I like to let them live in my head for a while before I write them down. I once read an interview with Alice Munro in which she talked about idleness and woolgathering—sitting around the house in her robe and slippers—as a crucial component of her work. I’ve taken this to heart, perhaps excessively so.

What story by another writer do you most wish you'd written?
Probably Jean Stafford’s “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” which I have read a thousand times. It’s about a woman named Emma whose life in New York has gone seriously awry. She goes to the Metropolitan Museum and forges a tentative, alcoholic alliance with an acquaintance named Alfred Eisenburg, who’s also a mess. The story is so acutely observed, pitiless and yet heartbreaking. In particular there is this sentence toward the end: “To her own heart, which was shaped exactly like a valentine, there came a wing-like palpitation, a delicate exigency.” I’ve puzzled and marveled over that sentence for years. The words sound uplifting, but they come at a moment of downfall for the character.  And I love that her heart is shaped exactly like a valentine, which is both funny and sad. The whole sentence is complicated and mysterious and beautiful—everything I aspire to in writing.

Johanna Skibsrud's Simple Requirements

In the eighth in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Johanna Skibsrud, author of This Will Be Difficult to Explain (W.W. Norton), discusses origins, inspiration, ideas, and obstacles.

What made you want to become a writer? 
Being read to as a child. I became aware very early on, thanks to my mother, of the infinite—and very real—possibilities that fiction offered. Later, when I started to write poems and stories of my own—and again, due to the sympathy and support offered by my parents and teachers—I had the privilege of feeling that my attempts were worthwhile. That my writing communicated something beyond the simple arrangement of the words on the page. Just the hint of that possibility—and its reward—was enough encouragement for me to keep on trying.

What writer or writers have you learned the most from? 
In order of appearance (in my life): Virginia Woolf, Knut Hamsun, Vladimir Nabokov, Carson McCullers. These writers have acted not so much as influences but as revelations. Each of them opened up for me, at different stages of my own development, whole new realms of possibility for writing.

What story by another writer do you most wish you'd written?   
“The Track Meet” by Delmore Schwartz.

Where do you do most of your work? 
We’re moving next month so I’ll have a brand new room to write in soon. It’s at the back of the house, with a big window that looks out onto a small cactus garden. Where I write is very important to me, and it was a big consideration when we were looking for a new place to live. But really, my requirements are fairly simple. Natural light and a door that closes.

Where do you find inspiration? 
I think inspiration comes from combining the simplest and most particular details of everyday life with bigger questions about the world, and our place within it. For me, an idea strikes when for whatever combination of reasons a certain concrete moment in a life or a relationship seems, suddenly, to be asking one of those big questions.  Then—even if very briefly—offering some suggestion of reply.

How often does an idea for a story occur to you, and what triggers those ideas?
Sometimes two or three in a day, one after another. Other times, whole months will go by without a single idea. That’s usually because I’m working on something else: poetry, or a novel. If I turn my attention back to the short story form—either through reading, or through my own efforts—the ideas come back, too. They’re everywhere. It’s just a matter of noticing them.

A Lofty Accomplishment

If you've ever written a story based on something another person told you would make a good story, what were the circumstances?
When I was nine years old my sister—two years older—suggested that a good story would be about Siamese twins who have to undergo a separation operation. I wrote that story and entered it into a National short story competition for kids where it won first place. It was later published in book form and tucked into the seat pockets of Air Canada flights—my first published story.

What's the shortest time it has taken you to write a story?
Approximately 9 hours.

What's the longest time it has take you to write a story?
Approximately 9 years.

What's the worst idea for a story you've every had?
I don’t think I’ll tell you, because I keep thinking about it and am not totally convinced that—if I come up with the right way to do it—it might not also be my best. 

What obstacles have you encountered in your work, and what have you done to overcome them?
Knowing where a story ends. The struggle for me is to find the balance between the initial impulse with which a story began and a potentially endless revision process.

K.R. Sands on Breaking Free of the Emotionally Controlled Voice

In the seventh in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, K.R. Sands, author of Boy of Bone (Siman Media Works) discusses getting a late start as a fiction writer.

When people ask why I waited until I was nearly sixty years old to begin writing fiction, I usually flip back “If it was good enough for Daniel Defoe, it’s good enough for me.” Defoe, like me, spent his middle years writing nonfiction, although I freely admit that his pamphlet “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” is a lot funnier than my scholarly articles. Defoe, like me, was nearly sixty when he began publishing fiction: first Robinson Crusoe (not a bad start!), followed by eight more novels within the next five years.

I’m not sure what possessed Defoe to switch from nonfiction to fiction. But I do know what possessed me to do it: I was incredibly tired of the emotionally controlled nonfiction voice. I had taught university writing courses for nearly four decades. Regardless of the name of the course (composition, expository writing, technical writing, business writing, whatever), the voice I taught my students to write was always the same: calm, logical, open-minded, authoritative, mature, blah, blah. And of course I wrote in the same voice for my own nonfiction projects. This voice was particularly important for my two history books on demon possession in Elizabethan England because many people were so suspicious of the subject (“Do you really believe in demons?”) that they doubted my authority before they even cracked open the books. (My answer to that question was “If I wrote a biography of Napoleon, would you ask me if I was really an imperialist?”)

Between the teaching and the writing, I got very good at the calm, logical, open-minded, authoritative, mature voice. I could whip out whole paragraphs of it in mere minutes. I could knock off a chapter of it during my lunch break. In the tub. During commercials. Waiting at red lights. In my sleep. (Truly—at least twice that I can remember!)

I never consciously thought about getting away from this voice. I’d written it forever, earning paychecks and prizes along the way. It was just the thing I did. But then something terrible happened: My wonderful brother John was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

I’d seen cancer deaths before, and I knew it was all down to waiting. But I didn’t feel I could stand the wait for this one—and I didn’t see how I could help John stand it. I rocked in a dark corner for a few weeks. My daily talks with him ran along the lines of “How are you feeling today?” and “Any news?” and other unhelpful bromides. The talks were excruciating for both of us.

Then I spotted an ad for a continuing education course in writing short fiction, and things began to happen very fast. I took the course, turned out to have a knack, hired the teacher as my writing coach, published a bunch of stories in magazines, and said yes when a publisher offered to make a collection out of them. This was all well and good, but the biggest benefit was that my brother and I had something else to talk about for his final nine months: fiction. We read and discussed stories by Max Apple and Aimee Bender. John made suggestions for improvements to my draft stories. We talked about the handouts for my course. Our daily conversations improved a thousand percent.
It was only after John’s death that I realized why I had glommed on to writing fiction so desperately: because I didn’t have to use that damned emotionally controlled voice! Instead, I wrote voices for a young woman who doubts the value of her work in a vivisection lab . . . for a mixed-race boy struggling with his prejudice against a Native American man . . . for a doctor overwhelmed with erotic love for a medical device . . . for a Civil War surgeon hiding the identity of a female soldier . . . for a tired Marie Curie as she smokes a cigarette with Marcel Duchamp. These voices were anxious, angry, heartbroken, frustrated, self-deluded, manipulative—and they sounded far more believable to me than the nonfiction voice I’d been writing for decades.

So I finally understand the art-as-therapy-for-grief idea. Maybe Defoe’s switch from nonfiction to fiction had something to do with his huge debt load, his nasty stint in the pillory, and his imprisonment. I hope the switch worked for him. It seems to be working for me.

Andrew Malan Milward's Lightning-Strike Moment

In the sixth in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Andrew Malan Milward, author of The Agriculture Hall of Fame (University of Massachusetts Press) tells how he fell out of love with basketball and in love with writing fiction.

I never wrote fiction in high school. I read a bit—Beats mostly—and composed my share of angsty teen poems and songs, most of which began something along the lines of: “My heart, wrapped in barbed wire, wants only to love.” But mostly I was concerned with playing basketball, which was what I went to college to do. I was a pretty unremarkable student—and an absolutely horrific test taker—and despite my interest in English I didn’t place out of the remedial Comp class.

So there I was my freshman year, slogging through Comp with the rest of the academic preterite, when a strange thing happened. Through a mix-up at the registrar I found myself in a senior-level Post-Vietnam fiction class. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I’d never read much contemporary literature in high school and as a result I’d formed the bizarrely elitist opinion that anything good had to be old. I practically wore a monocle. (I was the absolute weirdo on the team bus, reading Kafka as my teammates blasted Tupac over the speakers, trying to get fired up for the game—I was kind of a team novelty). You can imagine what a barrel of laughs I was to hang out with. Anyway, it was in this class, that I never should have been in, that I was first exposed to writers like Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Joyce Carol Oates, and Andre Dubus. It’s inadequate to say the experience was revelatory. It was a lightning-strike/knock-me-on-my-ass kind of moment where I knew exactly what I wanted to do with a clarity that was kind of frightening.

The professor was an old baller—he’d grown up in NYC, had played against Lew Alcindor and Jim Carroll—and perhaps because of this he tolerated me. I began to seek him out after class, in office hours, and by appointment, and we’d talk about basketball and literature. Finally I worked up the nerve to ask him if he’d mind reading something I’d written and to my surprise he agreed. So began the period when I’d show up with a few pages of O’Brien rip-off and he’d read it thoughtfully, critique it, and somehow summon the grace to encourage me to keep at it. It was an amazing act of generosity and I don’t know if I’d be a writer today if he’d said what would have been most convenient for him: “I’m busy, kid—aren’t you late for practice?”

This coincided, or more likely precipitated, the period when I was falling out of love with basketball. I was burned out, spent, tired of having every minute of every day, in season or not, planned by assistant coaches. And there was writing and reading. So I quit the team right before the start of my sophomore season and got to experience college like a normal student. I remember leaving class one day and being amazed that I didn’t have to run off to workout or to a team meeting. I could just go home. What a strange feeling that was. I responded to this newfound freedom by smoking a massive amount of pot, during which time I mostly thought about all the great things I’d write while I was high, but when that grew tiresome I actually did begin to write. I transferred schools and was fortunate to have more teachers who read my crappy stories and told me to keep at it. And so I do.

Natalie Serber's Acts of Empathy

In the fifth in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Natalie Serber, author of Shout Her Lovely Name (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) talks about where her stories come from.

What made you want to become a writer?
I can’t remember a specific moment of wanting to become a writer. It seemed that writing was something I always did. As the only child of a single mother I spent great stretches of time by myself. I read to escape loneliness and when I wasn’t reading, I was pretending to be the characters in the books I loved, continuing their stories in my bedroom. I carried an onion as a pretend doll, just like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I eavesdropped on neighbors and took notes like Harriet the Spy. Sometimes I wrote my stories down. I guess it was my own version of fan fiction.

Blank slate inside

My mother had two jobs when I was a girl. She was a schoolteacher and a cocktail waitress. Both jobs required that she wear nylons and I remember being delighted when she opened a new package because the hose came wrapped around a thin piece of cardboard. She would give the blank cardboard to me and I wrote out the stories I’d been making up. Of course we had plenty of paper in the house, but I felt the cardboard elevated my stories to something very special.

What's the shortest time it has taken you to write a story?
The second story I ever had published I wrote in one sitting.  It is only about 1000 words and it’s called “The Day You Stop Being A Cat.” It’s told in second person, but really it is the point of view of a girl who is pretending to be a kitten, meowing and rubbing up against her mother’s bare legs. The mother tells the girl to stop. She tells her girl that she’s been up all night, contemplating suicide. The only thing that prevented her from taking her own life was holding on to the girl’s first grade school picture, as a tether. On hearing this, the girl stops pretending, stands up and goes into the kitchen to make them both toast. It came out of me in rush and I think I only revised once or twice.

If you've ever written a story based on something another person told you would make a good story, what were the circumstances?
My best friend is a wonderful storyteller. Right after her first child was born, when she was in that state of afterglow, wanting to be a mother to the world, she found herself on a long flight with a caterwauling baby (that was her word choice). It drove her to tears, both because she worried about the baby’s discomfort and because her milk let down and wouldn’t stop, long after her own child was sated and sleeping in her arms. Finally she handed her infant over to her husband and went marching up the aisle to see what was going on. She came upon two nuns who were beside themselves—unable to comfort a baby they were bringing to his adoptive parents. My friend offered to nurse the boy and they agreed (this was long before HIV was a worry). I remember thinking, oh yeah, that story is now mine.  It became “This Is So Not Me.” It was the first story I ever published.

What writer or writers have you learned the most from?
In my early twenties I was somewhat lost. I really wasn’t present or thoughtful in my decisions or choices; I just jumped into the fray. The stories of Lorrie Moore, Ellen Gilchrist, J.D. Salinger, Deborah Eisenberg revealed to me, without a shred of judgment, characters making the same sorts of mistakes. I felt understood in a way that I was incapable of understanding myself. What I learned was to maybe go easy on beating myself up, and I learned to strive to write without moralizing. I learned that writing is an act of empathy.

Rob Davidson on Overcoming Every Day Obstacles

In the fourth in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Rob Davidson, author of The Farther Shore (Bear Star Press), discusses obstacles he's encountered, writing quickly, writing slowly, and what triggers his ideas.

What obstacles have you encountered in your work, and what have you done to overcome them?

"Obstacles include..."

Frequent obstacles include fatigue, anxiety, self-doubt, pride verging on hubris, teaching, debt, exhaustion, my ongoing attempt to be a good husband and father, my 1939 Gibson L-00, ambition, lust, anger, occasional insobriety, a great new book by someone else, my obsession with rock music, and a general sense that life is filled with many wonderful things that don’t involve me isolating myself in my studio with the door shut. What have I done to overcome them? I’ll paraphrase Isak Dineson: A writer should work a little bit every day, without hope or despair.

What's the shortest time it has taken you to write a story?
I wrote “The Student,” which is in my new book, The Farther Shore, very rapidly. The germ of it was told to me by a good friend, to whom something very similar happened (as a graduate student, he slept with an undergraduate who feared she’d become pregnant). Immediately after my friend told me his tale, I knew it would work as a short story. It seemed like a gift dropped in my lap. I asked him if I could use it, and he wished me the best. I wrote the core of the story very quickly, in just a week or so—light speed, for me. I tinkered with it for a while after that, but the final version stayed pretty true to that initial draft.

What's the longest time it has taken you to write a story?
I wrote several failed versions of “Criminals,” the long story that concludes The Farther Shore, before writing the version that is in the book. I began drafting the story in 2004 and worked fairly steadily on it for the next two years. Howard Junker accepted it at ZYZZYVA, then proceeded to give it a good, old-fashioned hard edit, cutting it by almost a third. After that first publication, I revised it, restoring much that Junker had cut, and sent it out to the Camber Press fiction award. To my delight, Ron Carlson selected it for the prize. I revised it a third (and final!) time for The Farther Shore—so there are essentially three different “finished” versions of this long story. Faulkner had something like four published versions of “Barn Burning,” and of course Raymond Carver was known to fiddle with his work after it had seen print, so I guess I’m not alone.

How often does an idea for a story occur to you, and what triggers those ideas?
A story can be triggered by almost anything: an overheard bit of conversation, an image or detail from life around me, a line in a book I’m reading. Once, I was distracted from reading a book in my back yard by the low, steady drone of a single-engine airplane moving slowly across a brilliant, blue sky. I wondered, Who is on that airplane? Where are they coming from? Before I knew it I was at my desk, writing the first draft of “Barnstorming,” a story in my first collection, Field Observations. Years later, I was reading The Routes of Man, by Ted Conover, and a line leapt up off the page: “It’s much easier to make a roadway dangerous than to make it safe.” I copied it into my notebook, carried it around in my head for a little while, found I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that single sentence might mean or suggest, and now I’m hip-deep in drafting a novel, The Road Builder. Triggers for stories are everywhere; it’s just a question of paying attention. Henry James said it best: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”

Sharma Shields on The Little Disturbances of Monsters

In the third in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Sharma Shields, author of Favorite Monster (Autumn House Press) discusses her dark subject matter.

In my graduate school workshops, inserting Polyphemus into a literary story would likely—and astutely —have been decried as a gimmick. And I admit it: monsters are gimmicky. No doubt the monsters in my collection sprang from supremely dorky childhood interests—D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, for example, and epic computer games like King’s Quest—but, origin-stories aside, I most likely employed them because they offered a tired narrative a bit of fun.

Some of my monsters are quite literal: a Cyclops working in a Seattle PR firm (“The McGugle Account”); a snake-haired playmate that turns a little boy to stone (“Brains and Beauty”). Most of the true monsters in the collection, however, are figurative: a teenage girl who would do anything for her new friend (“Sunshine and the Predator”); a mercilessly controlling wife (“The Chirp of the Cricket”). My collection is filled with regrets and misapprehensions and terrible, terrible mistakes. In many ways, these stories reflect my own desire to mature and forget and forgive. I am not one of those people who bellow absolute confidence, declaring she has no regrets in life. I believe almost anyone with a conscience carries within them one or two major regrets (and several more tiny ones) – the horrible way we treated a friend in seventh grade, perhaps, or that one awful act we committed when feeling insecure. Reading back on Favorite Monster, I can see my own fears and regrets surfacing, leviathans carefully obscured with a heavy fog of make-believe.

Amusingly, despite my dark subject matter, I have always found incredible joy while writing. There’s something about the complete dissolution of my conscious world that I find mysterious, thrilling, and yes, disturbing.

Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son

I don’t think these joys and disturbances are mutually exclusive. I’m reminded of the three trips I’ve taken to the Museo del Prado in Madrid – all at very different times in my life (two of them with my Aunt Eusebia, who was born and raised in Spain, and once with my friend Sarah, who I met while studying abroad). I always visited and revisited El Prado, in particular to admire the paintings of Francisco de Goya. Wandering through the museum’s front rooms, I would marvel at his light and airy paintings of the aristocracy, some of them filled with a summery innocence, a joining of hands in a pastel meadow, for example, expertly rendered…but how much more I loved The Black Paintings in the museum’s dim basement—paintings of violence and despair, of monsters and witches, of demonic goats, of a drowning dog. I descend my own staircase, I think, when I explore the multifarious rooms of my own museum of creation, from well-lit, pleasant front rooms to spine-tingling, shadowy basements. And unearthing any of it is both joyous and frightening. Perhaps joyous because it is frightening.

Two awesome examples of this combination of joy and fright are Etgar Keret’s Suddenly, a Knock on the Door and J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand. These story collections are funny and dark, terrifying and amusing. And, as disturbing as these stories can be, you always get the sense from them that their authors enjoy writing. That joy is fantastically contagious.

Like any other person who attends a horror movie, shrieking with lusty agony at the final bloody scenes, or who buys a Stephen King novel, hoping it’s as freaky and demented as his last, I enjoy being a little scared. Writing allows us myriad emotions: joy, terror, frustration, satisfaction, whathaveyou. Just so long as it’s not boredom. Good grief, anything but that.