Summer 2023 Author Mini-Interviews
To give authors a chance to talk more about their process and craft, or just to give us a little more insight into their piece, we provided them with a list of questions from which they could pick one to answer. We hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain!
Zoë Däe
Q: How did you land on this title?
A: Though she is only mentioned briefly, this story is very much about Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, the third woman in the world. I remember when Tam O'Shaughnessy was referred to as Ride's life partner publicly for the first time. This was in Ride's obituary in 2012. Before reading an article about this "reveal," I hadn't realized Ride had been "closeted." Tam was her life partner? Yes, of course she was. At 16, with limited exposure to the world of LGBT+ culture, it was still so obvious to me that Sally Ride had loved women.
"The Third Woman in Space" is a story about all the women who were not surprised by the "news" of Sally Ride's sexuality. It's about women who love women and our ability to identify each other based on the smallest, most abstract traits. I want readers of this story to imagine Val in her 30s or 40s reading about Sally Ride's death. She is devastated, of course. But then she reaches the part of the obituary that says, "Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy." What happens next? What do you see?
Kristian O’Hare
Q: How did you land on this title?
A: As I write this I'm about to head out on that yearly trip back home to Michigan to which this piece is based. I'll see my grandmother (who is now 92?!), and a couple of my aunts. We’ll eat lunch and stare at each other a little too long, to see if we can see even a glimmer of her in the face, to recognize some part, in the eyes maybe, or her smile, how she didn't cover it with a hand, or keep it hidden in a closed-lip grin. Or her laugh, that unstifled joy. I know the butterfly will come up. It brings comfort, that reminder, that possibility of her visiting, to check in on us. Maybe I'm just envious. I want to believe in spirits and ghosts. Someday I won’t consider it a delusion. Someday I will see it as a sort of hope. Someday I'll give in, or give up, and see the butterfly as just a symbol of that letting go, to seek comfort in the butterfly as a symbol (not a spirit), a reminder, a memory, any memory of her love.
Joel Hans
Q: What is your favorite part of this piece?
A: The embedded fairy-tale-as-a-memory. I started the story after taking my five-year-old daughter sledding for the first time—schlepping ourselves to the top of a small hill in Flagstaff, yelping and giggling as we trundled down the hardpack snow—but it only found true form when I re-read the short Grimm fairy tale “The Star Talers.” In the fairy tale, a child, having lost everyone they love and given away all their possessions, finds themselves alone in a dark woods, much like the one my daughter and I sledded through, and looks up to see the stars falling and turning into gold coins as they land in their palms. I gave that story to the father, as something he used to tell his daughter, and found the story took on a far more interesting shade when I shifted the point of view to his daughter. How do we discern between memory and magic—especially regarding our parents—when all we have to access them is retelling or time? I think this narrator would argue our best memories are actually fairy tales, the magic eroded by time, until the stars we once believed to be more were just stars all along.
Chelsea Stickle
Q: How did this piece begin? What was its seed idea?
A: This story started from a Nancy Stohlman prompt in her Pop Lit workshop. The ask was to write about a reality show contestant. Me being me, I started to think about those photos that sometimes run when they're introducing someone. The story sprung from there.
M.E. KopP
Q: Tell us about the place/conditions under which you do your best writing.
A: Summer mornings in Minnesota, the sun rises before five thirty and doesn't set until after nine. Winter days, the sun doesn't seem to rise or set at all . . . but there is a room in my house that regardless of the sun's proclivity, lies in constant and comfortable twilight. For one sacred hour a day, I brew myself earl grey with cream, work myself into the same scratchy sweater, and descend into a room of my own.
It's a basement nook I've carved out for myself by arranging bookshelves to act like walls and pulling in misfit furniture and random antiques—a wicker loveseat found in the alley, a shoeshine kit that belonged to a grandfather, a 1930s fan, a kerosene lamp—until my room has the comfort of a farmhouse parlor. Also, hundreds of my favorite books line the walls or build in piles.
This is where I spend that single precious hour a day that being a mother and wife and sister and daughter leaves me with. In this space that is always the same twilight despite the hour or season, I write.
L. Richardson
Q: How did you land on the ending?
A: In the end, Bobby was always going to be pulled into the house, but the final image was initially much different—a series of animal metaphors as a comment on the twins’ relationship with their home:
“Sometimes the sprinting rabbit, fleeing from a diving hawk, finds a hole in the earth just before the talons reach her. Sometimes the octopus retreats into her coral palace, matching her skin to its peppery greens as a shark swims by. Sometimes the lizard hides in the prickly pear, protected by its spikes from the bats and the blue jays.
We light the candles every day.”
Ultimately, I wanted to make their connection to the house more ambiguous and to keep Bobby a complicated but sympathetic character—someone developing into a predator, but who’s not there yet. I got some good advice to bring the metaphor into the briefest of scenes while also finding a way to answer the “why now?” question, hence the nail that has fallen out of the board. I like this ending much better since there’s a sense of closure and a telling metaphor, but also an undermining concern for the future—what will happen to these twins when the door slides out again from the belly of this old house? How often do these things need feeding?
Special thanks to the Thirsties, Super Draughty, and LSD writing groups.