In the Spotlight...
An interview about my essay "Reconsidering the Sunflowers":
In the piece, you cultivate such intimacy with the family moments you share—the father character hitting golf balls in the yard, his scribbling "I am lost" in the assisted living facility. Just devastating. I'm wondering how, in general, you think about complicating and humanizing characters on the page, especially when they're family members?
Ha, yeah, especially when they're family. I think about this a lot. Well, complicating is not hard, especially where my dad was concerned. Humanizing at times was difficult. In general, though, I would say for any character, what I always think about is finding that one scene that kind of says it all about a person. When I taught beginning fiction, that was always my first assignment to students: a 500 word scene that featured a parent, a grandparent or some other parental figure. Someone who raised them, who they obviously have a complicated relationship with, as we all do with our parents. I'd ask them to find that scene anybody could read and say, "Ah, yeah. I get that. I know that person."
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And an interview about my story "Blue":
Smoking With Stephanie Harrison
This story is, essentially, written in one sentence, and I love the rhythm it creates. I've seen pieces try to utilize this method before. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Here, it works. How hard was it to get the pauses just right?
Pretty hard. I've written quite a few one sentence stories, and after the story is there it's an exercise in punctuation. A little like flower arranging, I think. Getting it to fall just right. It should be written so that the reader doesn't notice that it's all one sentence.
Distance plays a large role in this story. Characters are nameless, communication reserved, emotions withheld. And yet we, the readers, feel close. How does this work?
I wish I knew. Some of it is achieved by using very particular details, but there's also something about the music of an extended sentence that invites closeness. It's not something I know how to do—it's something I notice after it's on the page. And something unique to the form. You could take the idea of this story and turn it into a traditional 5000-word story and it could be good. But the compression of a short-short gives the music a lot of pedal that you would probably lose if you expand it.