Goals, Detours, and Persistence: A Joint-Interview with David Borofka and Caitlin Hamilton Summie

Caitlin Hamilton Summie: David, we have known each other a long time, meeting when I was handling your publicity for your novel, The Island (MacMurray & Beck, 1997). Before that, though, you had published a story collection called Hints of His Mortality (winner of the 1996 Iowa Short Fiction Award). Now your latest collection of stories, A Longing for Impossible Things, will be published in March 2022 as part of the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction Series. We both can take a lot of time to write our stories and novels, something like 25 years. I know why I end up working at a slow pace, but what in your process takes you a long time to complete your projects?

David Borofka: I don’t know if I really work that slowly… Sometimes, I feel as though I’ve been a victim of my own laziness and sloth, and other times, subject to life interruptions—parents who were dying, children who were growing, a teaching schedule that became more demanding. Maybe I was subject to a mind less able to juggle disparate obligations and assign them their proper place. There were too many days, weeks, months, and years when the writing wasn’t being done at all, at least not on paper. Thinking, yes; writing, no. (Sometimes even that thinking made me preoccupied, much to my daughters’ or my wife’s frustration. Then again, my wife named the upstairs room where I work “Clarissa” [after Clarissa Pinkola Estés], as though every time I climbed the stairs, I was going to visit a mistress. Maybe I was…) I also know that I’m not the most fastidious writer in the world. If it’s a question of sending something out before it’s ready or revising overmuch, I’m guilty of the former more so than the latter.
You have a collection of stories that came out in 2017, and now you have a novel, Geographies of the Heart, coming out in January of 2022. That’s a gap of only five years, but before the collection came out, you were a student in an MFA program and you were working in the publishing industry before you branched out as owner of your own publicity and marketing agency. Were you writing that whole time? How much of your time was spent in your various “day jobs” or family obligations as opposed to writing? What about your MFA experience—was it solely dedicated to writing fiction, or did you find you were distracted by other obligations there as well?

CHS: I began writing pieces of this novel in my MFA days so with breaks and years spent doing other things, it has been a twenty-seven-year journey to see this novel into print, if my math and memory are correct.
I wasn’t writing that whole time. I was writing between work and parenting, all of which I celebrate. Even during my MFA, I couldn’t write the whole time because we students had to pass a comprehensive literature exam before defending our theses, so I was taking literature courses and reading.
The MFA at Colorado State is three years long, and it was a wonderful three years. I’d majored in Middle Eastern History in college and was not as well read as some of my colleagues in the program, and I’ve often thought that I landed at exactly the right school for me, pursuing the best MFA for me.
Also, during my MFA, I made time for fun, hiking or eating Sunday brunch out at one of the lovely small restaurants in Fort Collins on the weekends. Things like that. A favorite memory is riding down Poudre Canyon on the back of my friend, Dave’s, Harley.
Do you think our work benefits from our pace? If so, how?

DB: Seeing one’s work from a distance of time is an odd experience. That telescopic perspective can be a reminder of how much historical as well as personal time has passed; it can also be a reminder that the writing that one did so many years earlier had something of value, a little like looking at a snapshot of yourself from twenty years ago and being shocked to realize that you thought you were fat then. I like some of the writing I did twenty-five years ago. I like it much better now than I did then. All that stuff that went into the drawer? Pull it out… It may not be as bad as you once thought, just written by a younger you.

CHS: Would it bother you if, after spending decades working on a book, it was not published? I ask because the marketplace is so tough, even tougher lately, and it is a real possibility that some beautiful books may not see print. I know it would disappoint me if my dedication and time did not merit publication.

DB: My honest answer? I know myself well enough to admit that I’m craven. I want publication and I like (no, love, who doesn’t?) external validation; there’s nothing like the thrill of someone else telling you that your work has value. However, I also know how cringe-worthy it can be to see something in print that is not one’s best work.
I had a novel manuscript that I finished around the year 2000. On the strength of that manuscript, I got the attention of an agent with an outstanding track record. However, I don’t think we were a particularly good match. She liked the novel well enough to take me on, but she didn’t like it as it was; she wanted the book to resemble another recent bestseller. Without getting too much into the specifics—the agent’s name, the subject of the book, etc.—I will say that I never felt comfortable making the changes that she suggested, nor do I feel that I was very good at turning the story from what I had originally envisioned into the story that she felt would be more marketable. After about a year and a half of mutual frustration, we parted ways. But for several years after that I kept trying to repair it. I took what I thought were the best parts of the revision and the parts of the original story that I was loathe to discard and tried to stitch them together. Did it ever work? Not according to the publishers that she sent her version to and not according to the small presses to whom I sent my cobbled-together version, subsequent to our divorce. Finally, I stopped tinkering and submitting, but it was a tough project to let go and let die. Was it “beautiful”? I don’t know, but I am still fond of the story I was trying to tell, and I still grieve the fact that it didn’t see the light of day.
That’s probably the biggest reason why I’ve continued to churn out stories as opposed to working on novels. I’m a chicken at heart, and while I can stomach the cost in time of a story that goes sidewise, the thought of investing a decade in another novel that turns into quicksand scares me to death.

DB: How quickly do you send your work out? When do you know it’s time? What does it take to convince you that a story is ready to be sent out to journal or a novel manuscript out to an agent or publisher? Have you ever talked yourself out of submitting work that you later decided was publication-worthy?

CHS: I don’t send much out anymore because I don’t have stories I want to share right now, but when I was younger I talked myself out of sending out some pieces. Later, far later, I decided life was short and if I was going to try to publish ever again (I had had some acceptances in my twenties), I needed to try again. I started submitting and had a handful of stories accepted, which inspired me to revisit my invitation from Marc Estrin at Fomite Press to send him a story collection for consideration.

DB: Given the length of time before you published To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, what is the time span of your writing life that the stories represent? What do you think of the writer who was responsible for those earliest stories?

CHS: I spent 25 years on To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, from beginning to end, with breaks and distractions (all happy ones). I think the writer who was responsible for the earlier stories unwound her stories faster, but then again, they had clearer conflicts as well. I think my later work shows more clearly the messiness of life, the way conflicts can multiply.
After such a long time away, how do you feel about the publishing industry of today?

DB: Gosh… after being away from book publishing for twenty-five years, it feels like an alien world to me. Does it seem that way to you as well? In the early- to mid-1990s, most everything was printed manuscripts, snail mail, and postage for return envelopes. Now nearly every facet of the submission process is conducted online, which is easier but also even more impersonal. What we don’t have to pay to the post office or Kinko’s, we’re paying in contest fees and Submittable charges. I have to confess to a slight case of masochism; I miss going to the mailbox and seeing what’s there. Emails are not the same.
The marketplace that writers, editors, and publishers are collectively facing also feels significantly tougher to me, and it’s not as though the 1980s were a book paradise. Forty years ago, we were bemoaning the dwindling numbers of readers and the nearly impossible business model of publishers and booksellers. Has that improved in any way?
You, on the other hand, know publishing from several perspectives: author, a small publisher’s marketing/publicity director, a Big 5 imprint’s marketing/publicity director, and for eighteen years as owner of your own marketing agency. What do you think of the publishing world that first-time authors are hoping to enter? What about the grizzled veteran, who is hoping to rejoin the party after some time away?

CHS: I think in some ways this industry is harder to be a part of than ever before, and in some ways it is more welcoming than ever before. I’d tell any writer to be strong. Publishing a book is not easy and takes a lot of perseverance and grit and hope.
As a former writing professor, what advice did you give to students who also wrote at a slower pace?

DB: For about the last twenty years of my career at Reedley College, I taught mostly online. (It is an abiding irony to me that I retired and then a year later the entire world was online.) I told students in my online classes of the past that they had the opportunity to know truly what writing is like—you’re alone in your office, nook, carrel, or closet, and you only periodically come up for air. The real world does not give a shit if you can crank out a 500-word essay in forty-five minutes—that’s an artificial skill that only academia seems to care about—but readers do care about whether or not you are willing to think hard. In an online class, the students had the opportunity to manage their time in the way that was most workable for them. Life always hands us deadlines of one kind or another, but you have the autonomy to do the work that needs to be done and the timeframe in which it must be completed. If it takes sitting at one’s desk for three weeks in six-hour chunks, then do it.
During our grad school years, my wife made cross-stitch samplers as a way of relieving stress. She made me a small one that still hangs over my desk; the message is simple: “Never work quickly but always work.” It seems as true now as it did then, maybe more so…

CHS: Your new book is due out in March. Can you tell us a bit about it? How long have you been working on it?

DB: In one form or another, I’ve been working on A Longing for Impossible Things for about twenty years. A collection of thirteen stories, Longing has gone through several iterations. Under the title My Life as a Mystic, it was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and under the title Christmas in Jonestown, it was a finalist for the inaugural Donald L. Jordan Award. That last near-win forced me to reconfigure the book one more time. I took out several stories and added several others. Rather than taking the title from one of the stories, I found a passage from Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet to use as an epigraph and took the title from that. The passage is as follows:
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
In one form or another, it seems that I keep coming back to this notion: that sense of longing for, yet never finding, that transcendent “thing” that hovers on the edge of perception. The word that refuses to swim to consciousness.
When did you begin writing Geographies of the Heart? Before or after the publication of Ghosts? What was the gestation process for the novel? Do you feel as though you have a better idea of navigating the publication process now as opposed to when you were writing the stories in the collection?

CHS: Three of the stories in the collection inspired the novel, made me want to finish the character’s stories, but one chapter was written long before the story collection. “Cleaning House” was written in 1994 or so, and I revised it to be chapter two in my novel. A number of other pieces not included in the collection were written before I decided to pursue the novel. I’ve spent half of my lifetime to date writing Geographies of the Heart. A heck of a long time, but I was compelled by these characters.
The novel is about how much of an anchor family is in the life of my main character, Sarah, and what happens when family stress and loss develop. It’s about how our hearts guide us, and fail us, literally and figuratively. It’s also about getting overwhelmed and resentful and learning to let that go, to forgive others and oneself.
I think what taught me about the publishing process has been work more than publication. I have been a book publicist for nearly two decades. That experience has certainly helped me navigate publication. My publicist is my husband and business partner, Rick, and that has been wonderful, having someone else handle my campaign. It lends perspective and also is a great support.

DB: What new projects are you working on currently? Do you set yourself anything like a timetable for a project’s completion? How do you measure a good writing day’s work?

CHS: I’ve never had the privilege of having time to write each day, and because my writing takes ages to complete, I never have a timetable. Right now I have a middle grade novel which I have worked on for ten or eleven years that I hope to revise again and send out. But other than that, there is nothing in the hopper and nothing in my mind, and I am enjoying the silence. We are finally getting some household projects done. That feels great.
How about you: what's next, and, if I may, how long do you think it will take to complete?

DB: What’s next may be a relative thing… Since my retirement in 2019, I’ve written another novel (Wanting) and a slew of other stories, all of which are currently making the rounds. Who knows what will become of them? Now, I’m starting to dance around the next novel idea. I have to be careful though; I’m Medicare eligible, and I don’t have the time (nor do I have the energy) to extricate myself from the sinkhole of any further failed projects.

Degrees of Difficulty: An Interview with Julie Justicz

Jan English Leary: I met Julie in 2011 in a novel workshop we both attended and since then we have continued to exchange manuscripts. I learned that years earlier we’d just missed overlapping at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where we both received MFAs. Over these past years, I have watched this novel grow and deepen. Julie is a brave writer, who throws out pages I would be proud to claim as mine, someone who digs deep, always challenging herself to find rich insights, compelling situations, and beautiful language. Her work is both dynamically plotted and psychologically complex, her characters appealing yet flawed, utterly believable. I am thrilled that her beautiful novel is at last coming out. It is all the more rich for the long gestation.

Your novel brings to mind the Tolstoy line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This book is about a family coping with the very specific challenge of a disabled child and also about how all parents struggle to raise children and allow them to grow up and individuate. I know that you originally wanted to focus on the four humors of the blood: air, fire, earth, water as indicators of personality. How did this concept inform your novel?

Julie Justicz: Jan, thanks so much for your kind introduction here. Our friendship, as you note, started in a novel workshop in 2011 and has continued over the past eight years in our own small writing group. Most of our time together has been spent discussing manuscripts and/yet I feel so close to you! In sharing our writing—especially early work that is vulnerable and raw–we serve a part of our soul. Thanks for being a caring and smart editor and a trusted friend. And thanks for doing this interview.

The early version of my novel was, as you remember, structured around the Four Humors—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—which according to Hippocrates and his heirs governed a person’s temperament—sanguine (upbeat, adventurous), phlegmatic (calm and unassuming), melancholic (quiet, depressive), and choleric (angry), depending on the balance/imbalance of humors. I’d started my novel in the first-person perspective of Ivy, the only daughter and oldest child in the Novotny family. But after writing several chapters in her voice, I found she came off rather angry, a bit brash and dismissive of her family. I wondered about her parents, her brothers . . . how would their experiences differ from Ivy’s? So, I experimented with the humors: that is, I wrote through four point of view characters, each dominated by a particular humor. That helped me complicate and then complete the story. In the end, I kept the four different voices—two parents and two kids—but tossed out the Four Humors as a structuring tool; they’d become unnecessary scaffolding by the time I finished the novel.

Leary: Your novel has four points of view: the two parents, Perry and Caroline, and two of their children, Ivy and Hugo. You did a great job of balancing the points of view, of making the novel focus on a family’s response to having a child with severe developmental issues. Was it hard to find that balance? Was one point of view harder to find and to maintain? Did one character fight to take over?

Justicz: I wrote in Ivy’s first-person perspective in the beginning; I had several chapters in her voice before I tried any other point of view. So, it’s probably understandable that she dominated the narrative through three or four drafts of the novel. I had to push her back, toss out some of her scenes, even a few chapters, and then rewrite her sections in a third-person perspective to get the balance I was seeking. Perry, the father, came quickly; I understood his “game face on and best foot forward” attitude. Caroline, the mother, and Hugo, the middle child, were harder for me to capture and to give full expression. I needed to find a way to show the mother’s melancholia, thwarted career desires, suppressed anger and still make her sympathetic. I felt judgmental about her and I had to go deeper into her character to find empathy and fully humanize her. And Hugo remained a cipher through many rewrites—the quiet middle child, not rocking the boat, perhaps a little too perfect to be true? How then to make him real? That took some time.

Leary: There are four points of view but five major characters. Benjamin, the youngest child, being almost completely non-verbal, appears on the page but doesn’t have a point of view. You do a beautiful job of describing him, giving him humanity and beauty. What were the challenges of creating this character?

Justicz: Benjamin, a boy born with profound disabilities, only makes one sound—“guh,”—which he uses to communicate with his family. I experimented with finding a narrative voice for him but what I wrote seemed too lyrical and didn’t jibe with his lived experience. Nonetheless, wordless Ben is the heart of his family and the needle in the heart of his family. I tried to show his needs, idiosyncrasies, desires; he is someone who literally jumps for joy, screams with delight, and gets frustrated when he cannot share his excitement or express his anger. He also feels happiest when he is with his beloved brother, Hugo. Because he doesn’t speak, I had to use Ben’s family–the four point of view narrators–to reveal his complexity. Ben’s parents and siblings live with him, care for him, and love him. They also have the responsibility of finding their own way in life, fulfilling their wants and needs and dreams, apart from Ben. If they can. What does this cost?

Leary: Having seen earlier drafts of your novel, I know that you wrote and then discarded some really wonderful material. I admire that nerve to shed what is both beautifully written and compelling. Is your process generally one of writing big and cutting back or was that particularly true of this novel?

Justicz: Because this is my first novel, I was learning a great deal as I wrote—through trial and a lot of error. I didn’t know anything about structure—I was putting ink on paper and persevering. I needed a lot of material to make a book and I plugged away. Turns out that many of the pages did not do much to advance the story. But I didn’t know what story I was telling—and what I could chuck out—until I reached the end. I also had the privilege of working with a smart editor, Marc Estrin at Fomite, who told me several times to rework the final section of the novel. I kept offering him minor changes that were not enough. Keep at it, he’d say. When I finally lopped off the last 100 pages and rewrote the ending entirely, I had what I needed.

Leary: I love the title Degrees of Difficulty. Everyone in that family faces a very specific level of difficulty. I also know that you considered other titles. How did you come to choose this one?

Justicz: I decided on Degrees of Difficulty after living with another title for several years. My editor pushed me to find a new title that referenced diving and somehow referenced the family. “Degree of difficulty” refers to a rating scale of the complexity of an athlete’s maneuver. Hugo is a champion diver, who channels his emotions into a strict and rigorous training regimen. So, the title is a direct reference to his sport and his physical achievement. The title is also a play on words, referring to the various struggles that every member of the Novotny family encounters. I like the notion that a degree of difficulty in athletics—a quantitative rating—is always multiplied by another number . . . a qualitative assessment of performance. So how hard are the various challenges each family member faces—and how do they manage these challenges? With humor? With anger? With grace?

Leary: Not to dwell on the influence of your own life, but I know that there are similarities to your family of origin, that you had a brother with disabilities. What are the challenges of writing fiction that is based, in part, on your family? Did you feel that the desire to tell a good story competed with a need to get the facts straight? How did you free yourself to write about people you know? Is it in the act of embellishing that you find the freedom or are you anchored by the kernel of truth?

Justicz: Wow, there are so many thought-provoking questions you’ve raised here. Yes, the novel had its roots in my family of origin. My fictional Ben has the same disabilities as my youngest brother Robert, who was born with partial monosomy 21. One of the first stories I wrote for my MFA program was about a young boy with disabilities and his relationship with two siblings. I tapped into some of my own feelings as a sibling—namely a profound sense of family loyalty, an incredibly deep and abiding love for my disabled brother, and, to be honest, a good deal of resentment, too. The resentment shone brightest in that story. Coming back to it years later as a starting point for my novel, I realized that I would need to add the voices of the other family members to give the story more breathing room.

Apart from Ben—who was based on Robert, the other characters in the novel are amalgamations. I used personal experiences and emotions to feed the fiction, if that makes sense. I had to give myself permission to embellish, exaggerate, make things up—and I had to ask my family to try to understand that my writing is not about recreating our experience or laying blame; it’s about me exploring the emotional truth that I carry, that may be nothing like their truth. What’s that saying? All of it is true; none of it happened.

Leary: How did you decide to have diving be a major activity for Hugo? And when did you land on the idea that Ivy would become an endocrinologist? You do a great job of showing people at work, a builder, an academic, a physician, a lifeguard. What is the importance, for you, of showing work in a character’s life?

Justicz: I knew I wanted Hugo to be an incredibly skilled athlete whose physical appearance would differ dramatically from Ben’s. I’m not sure why I settled on diving except that I swam in high school and I remember being fixated by the incredible feats of our divers. We swimmers were all about endurance, a group of knuckleheads packed into six lanes and churning out lap after lap after lap while staring at the black line. The divers, though, were athletes and artists.

You asked about jobs. I suppose I wanted/needed each of my characters to have a gravitational pull away from homelife. I made Ivy a reproductive endocrinologist because I liked how it would highlight her reluctance to have children of her own even as she spent every minute of her day helping other people conceive. For Caroline and Perry, I found jobs that were, I suppose, inapposite—one deeply cerebral, one much more physical. I analyzed late Shakespearean plays for Caroline and explored new home construction for Perry. That part of writing fiction is fun for me. . .it allows for digression and exploration and yes, procrastination.

Leary: Could you talk about what you’re working on now?

Justicz: A second novel—I’m thinking of calling it the The Time-traveling Crawdad’s Wife.

This Far Isn't Far Enough: An Interview with Lynn Sloan

We met at a faculty retreat, Lynn Sloan and I, quite a number of years ago. Lynn taught photography at Columbia College Chicago, where I teach creative writing, and I still remember her speaking about the potential for narrative in series of photographs. (I wonder if she really did talk about that, or if I have revised that memory in order to encapsulate both her evocative photographic images and her deeply engaging fiction?) Our paths cross often in Chicago, this remarkable literary city, and each time we meet, I am reminded of her kindness and curiosity, two traits a writer of any merit should have, I think.

We had the chance to talk story a bit, on the eve of the release of Lynn’s new short story collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough from Fomite Press. These stories—full of “powerful yearning” (her phrase, not mine, although I wish I could claim it)—are so smart and so masterfully crafted, it was delight to hear her talk about how they came to be.

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Patty McNair: Your stories are populated with characters we readers feel we might know. They could be our neighbors, our colleagues, a friend of our mother, a customer, a family member. These are people engaged in the daily business of their lives, but often at a moment when a choice must be made, an action taken. And therein blooms the drama. I wonder, Lynn, what comes first for you? Character or dramatic moment?

Lynn Sloan: I suppose that it’s dramatic moment, in this sense: what comes first for me is a question: Why? I overhear a conversation, I encounter a situation, I read an item in the news, and I wonder, Why? Or, What’s behind this? For example, “Ollie’s Back,” the first story in my collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough, started with a feature story in the paper about a food critic who’d amassed a vast cookbook library, and who hosted a series of dinner parties, cooking from those books. Afterward he insisted that his guests take home armloads of books until finally his library shelves were bare. Why? The article said he was moving to a smaller apartment. That didn’t explain it for me. Naturally I came up with lots of possible reasons, all of them springing from his desire to move away from his past. Someone connected with food wanting to move away from his past, that was the beginning of “Ollie’s Back.” Ollie, my protagonist cook, does give away much of what he owns, but this gesture is connected to his future, not his past. Where I start when I start a story is seldom where I end up.

McNair: How do you find these characters? What sparks their existence for you at the writing desk?

Sloan: I like to write about characters who, in life, would be easy to overlook, those who are neither successes nor exquisite failures, people on the periphery of the middle. The lonely mother of a disabled son who can’t get a date in “Grow Animals,” the aging actor who plays second fiddle to his famous actor wife in “Call Back,” the old woman who feels imprisoned in the retirement home, the feminist in “The Collaborator,” who is regarded as a tedious bore—she might look different in this #MeToo era—these characters engage me. I make them up. My secondary characters are sometimes based on people I know, but my protagonists start with an idea, then, as I write, whoosh, they become round and full, the way those little capsules, grow animals, dropped in water, become something else.

McNair: While these stories are not linked in ways that some collections are—no recurring characters or obvious settings repeated—there do seem to be certain emotions that connect them. Your characters face loss and longing, a certain kind of aching love, regret. And the tug of these emotions often leads your characters to a desire for escape, a desire that they give in to in a whole variety of ways. I wonder if you were aware of these emotional threads that run through the stories, or if they emerged as you wrote them, as you collected them, as you considered which of your many stories should be part of this collection, which should be left out?

Sloan: Joan Didion said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” Me too. After I’d written and published a few stories, I looked back and discovered that no matter what I thought I was writing about, it all came back to yearning. I thought I was exploring very different characters and situations, men and women, young and old, clever and not-so-smart, sophisticated and earthy, and yet, what is central is their powerful yearning, their unmet desires. My editor at Fomite, Marc Estrin, a brilliant writer and editor, remarked that all my stories revolve around the character failing to outrun their pasts. He’s right, although I hadn’t seen it that way. You say, and you’re right, that my stories are about seeking to escape. But for me, the thread is one of yearning.

McNair: One of the things that I particularly admire in these stories is that your characters are not young. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the young protagonist, my stories are full of teenagers. I think that might be—for me—because there is a certain ease in creating characters who face moments of change, and teenagers are ripe for it. In this collection, your characters are often on the threshold of something, and you masterfully allow them to face this with a depth of knowledge and experience, and yet—each story feels as though your characters are discovering something entirely new. This collection put me in mind of some of Tessa Hadley’s short stories, and of Roddy Doyle’s collection Bullfighting. Stories that are a kind of “coming of middle-age.” Why do you think you are drawn to this life stage in these stories?

Sloan: What a smart observation! I hadn’t realized this. I have written a few stories about children and teenagers, but they are all flash pieces. I wonder why. You’ve given me something to think about, maybe you’ve even given me a challenge. What I know is that I like reading about the young and I’m grateful to writers like you, who write so well about growing up, in your story collection, The Temple of Air, and your recent non-fiction collection, And These Are the Good Times. But adult life just holds my focus. When I was a kid, I had no interest in books like The Secret Garden or The Chronicles of Narnia. I preferred James Michener, Herman Wouk, Daphne du Maurier. My parents did not approve. I sneaked these books, and others with racy covers. Adult life is so interesting, and, it seems to me, that it’s always about coming-of-age. “Coming of age” isn’t one stage or several stages of life, it is life. At every age, more is demanded of us than we are prepared for. Each of my characters confronts a moment, a situation, a series of situations that are particular to the “now” of the story, and this “now” is different than previous times because the character has lived through those earlier times, and has, in fact, come to a new age.

McNair: “Safe,” a story that is rather quiet on its surface but hints at a violent history between a mother and son, depicts a brief and tense reunion between the two after a long estrangement. Karen, the mother, says to her son Ben, “I tried to take care of you.” When I read that line, I couldn’t help but think how many of your characters in these stories could say the same thing to another character. It implies both good intentions, as well as possible missteps. There should be a question here, but I guess there isn’t a precise one. Maybe you can talk a bit about that dynamic—characters trying with one another, and characters failing. How does that help to create momentum in the narrative and/or complication in the story’s psychology?

Sloan: Failure is, I think, what drives stories. Succeeding, never failing, might be what we want in life, but in stories what we want, I want, is to fall into a world where characters are faced with troubles. I’m not interested in cataclysmic events. I don’t care about runaway trains, avalanches, murderous villains. What I want to write about is what happens when basically good people need what can’t be given or are denied what they want. Then what happens? That’s what I want to discover as a writer, and as a reader. “Safe” is story that has elicited responses that surprise me. At one reading, some of those listening argued heatedly that the mother was a bad mother, and others that the son is a sociopath. I, the person who made up these characters, couldn’t make sense of either opinion, which makes me think that this story hits some people hard in a place that hurts. It’s not a safe story.

McNair: Lynn, when we first met, I knew you as a photographer. You still are that, and I was delighted, after reading these stories, to skulk around a little on your website, see the visual art there. I was particularly attracted to the collection of photos called “Abstractions” where you have taken pictures of ordinary objects through fascinating vantage points that reduce (or perhaps elevate) the objects to shape and line. Also, there is a collection called “Carnival World,” that shows realistic images of carnival rides and attractions, but they are infused with other images that are altered in some ways, making the real and the dreamlike intermingle. To me, each of these collections remind me of things you are doing with your stories—shifting vantage points, merging the real with the imagined, the dreamed of, seeing the familiar in new ways. Does your work in photography inform your fiction writing? Do you see these creative practices as interwoven in any way? How do (did) you move from one art form to the other?

Sloan: Oh, this opens up so many angles! Photography, I love photography. I love how the world looks. I made photographs that I believe hinted at what lay beneath the surface of the world. All of what was included within the frame of the picture was held in suspension to be examined as long as necessary until it yielded its facts and its deceptions. But after a time, I wanted change and movement and time. I wanted not just this one moment depicted in the image, but the before and then the after. I wanted people doing things and feelings things. As a photographer, I was frustrated by what I couldn’t reveal. I couldn’t reveal what was underneath the visible. As a writer, I’m often frustrated that I can’t bring everything together at once.

On a practical level, I have to guard against my love of the visual. I can spend paragraphs describing the way the reflections dance on the surface of coffee. Reader alert—I cut out those paragraphs! As Elmore Leonard said, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

McNair: This Far Isn’t Far Enough. What a wonderful title. How did you find it; how did you choose it? What are you hoping we will understand about the collection because of it?

Sloan: I’m so glad you like it, author of And These Are the Good Times and The Temple of Air, two great titles. Titling is hard for me. My story collection was accepted for publication under a terrible title that my editor said had to go. I made long lists of titles, all of which were terrible. A friend suggested that I skim my stories for nice phrases, but I got caught up with reading. I tried again, starting from the back pages and moving forward. This Far Isn’t Far Enough came from near the front of the book, so I had to read backward a lot of pages before I found a title I liked. This Far Isn’t Far Enough says something essential about this collection: in each story, the characters believe they are free of their pasts, and they aren’t.

McNair: Let’s talk endings. You know how when you go to a classical concert, and they ask that you don’t applaud immediately after the last note has been sounded, but to wait until it entirely dies away? That is how I felt reading your endings. It wasn’t as though you used them to conclude anything, to bang a final downbeat, but instead to create a sense of resonance, a vibration that would play out long after the last note. Some of this has to do with your final sentences themselves, to the way they employ both rhythm and breath in their syntax. Some of it has to do with the possibilities your characters understand—in these final moments—are still ahead of them. A bear may or may not be waiting in the woods and shadows outside a woman’s house. A mystery lover appears in the doorway of a lonely, exhausted mother. A mother and daughter sing what they remember of a hymn as they spread the ashes of a loved one. “Neither one of us knows the words to what comes after,” the mother says, the final note. Wow. Do you write with an ending in sight? Do you discover it along the way, polish it once you do?

Sloan: I’m going to save your comments, so that next time I’m agonizing over an ending, I can re-read your words and . . . No, bad idea. I will feel even more intensely that I’m not up to writing the ending that I want to write, the ones you are describing.

When I start a story, I don’t know where I’ll end up. About halfway through the first draft, I’ll get an idea, often an idea that I know is lame, but I aim toward it trusting that as I draw close, I will figure out what must happen. Once I’ve figured this out, figured out the facts of what happens, then I try to find the words, the rhythms, sometimes suggestions of the unspoken, that reveal these facts and also will evoke emotions. An ending must ring like a bell, the sound and its aftermath, the facts and the feelings. You described this perfectly, “after the last note has sounded” waiting for it to die away. Thank you.

McNair: This collection is your second book, the novel Principles of Navigation your first. Does your process for writing short form differ from what you do when you are writing long form? And do you know right away if a story wants to be short or novel-length?

Sloan: Before I begin, I do know whether I’m starting on a story or a novel. When I start with a puzzle, the question of why that I mentioned earlier, I’ve got a short story in the works. If I begin imagining a large social landscape, then I’m on to a novel. Within that large landscape, there will be lots of why questions. I’ve never had a story that wanted to go big, although I’ve seen that happen with some writer friends. With novels—I’ve got several novels in boxes that should never be opened—I begin with a vast muddle and write, toss out, write more, toss, until I discover a lean story that makes sense. This is the first draft. Then I start again.

McNair: What’s next, Lynn?

Sloan: I’m finishing the first draft of a novel. Now that I understand what it’s about, I’m eager to revise. But I might pause on that, and take a short break. I believe you challenged me to write a story about a young person.

Skating on the Vertical: An Interview with Jan English Leary

Jan English Leary and I met in the mid-1990s, in Fred Shafer’s short story-writing workshop in Evanston, Illinois. Week after week, we’d sit next to each other and compare notes: about writing, about reading. We drank lots of coffee. We talked about our kids. Jan had already been working with Fred for a few years, and as her classmate, I was immediately struck by — and inspired by — the assurance of her prose, which combines evocative description with a clear, direct voice. These qualities are abundantly evident in her new collection of stories, Skating on the Vertical (Fomite Press), a sympathetic exploration of what it means to be a teen, the connections (and misunderstandings) that exist between the generations, and the very human quest to find one’s place in the world. Jan and I chatted recently about the book, its themes, and her caffeinated beverage of choice.

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JD: Your new collection, Skating on the Vertical, draws together stories from different points in your career. The stories’ themes—connection, belonging—are timeless concerns; do you think your perception of these themes has changed in the years since the first of the stories was published?

JEL: Yes and no. Since I’ve matured as a writer, my writing has changed and, I hope, deepened. On the other hand, connection and belonging, as you say, are timeless. I just think I’ve found new ways of exploring them in my writing. I like to think that I’m always learning about myself and about the world. Plus ça change….

JD: You taught writing to high-school students for several years. You are a parent to two boys, now grown. Jan, you have an uncanny sympathy for what it means to be a young adult; how do you think your experiences as a teacher and parent have informed this understanding, and thus the work?

JEL: Of course, my experiences have shaped my writing. My entire career was spent teaching high school. I enjoy that age and am drawn to situations involving someone on the brink of adulthood. We all pass through adolescence, and the strong imprint of that formative period stays with us for life. But my fiction also deals with issues such as marriage, infertility, infidelity, and miscarriage. I sometimes find it easier to explore a character whose experience is different from mine: an infertile woman who paints graffiti on the windows of her town, a man who has had an affair, a woman who cuts herself to ease her psychic pain. I think that my life experience as a teacher and as a mother has fed my writing, but I also think that being witness to the dramas of life around me has influenced me just as strongly.

JD: Your stories are distinguished by powerful, insightful endings. Do you generally know the ending when you begin a story, or do you “find” your way to it while writing?

JEL: Endings are hard and absolutely crucial, obviously. I tend to have an idea of the ending early on. That’s how a story often occurs to me, but I also think it gives me an anchor. The ending sometimes changes, but I like to know where I’m going, even when I don’t necessarily know how I’m going to get there. And I have to be open to changes along the way; otherwise, the whole thing can feel too determined and therefore rigid and lifeless.

JD: The book’s title, Skating on the Vertical, is drawn from a story of the same name in this collection. What prompted you choose this as the book’s title?

JEL: For a long time, I planned to name the collection Frequent Losers after a story I particularly liked. I thought it reflected the losses and missteps of life. However, that story left the collection and was revised to become a chapter in my novel. I needed a new title, and I toyed with Eunuchs because I also like that story, but my editor, Marc Estrin, didn’t think it represented the collection as a whole (and he was right). Besides, I wanted my husband, John, to give me one of his paintings for a cover image, and I don’t know what he would have done with Eunuchs! So I chose Skating on the Vertical because it evokes disequilibrium, movement, and energy. And it’s a title I’d never heard before.

JD: What was it like to revisit stories you wrote earlier in your career? Did you revise those earlier stories for this collection, and if so, what do you think informed the changes you made?

JEL: It was both satisfying and dismaying. There were things I liked which pleased and surprised me and other things I found clunky. I did what I could to hone the language while still keeping the original feel of the stories. I didn’t want to undertake major overhauls. That seemed both overwhelming and unnecessary. With practice, every writer improves in terms of craft. I tried to bring what I’ve learned into the older stories. And I removed some stories I thought didn’t quite work anymore. In that way, the stories felt fresher, and the process allowed me to re-engage with the material more deeply.

JD: Preparing this collection has brought you back to the short story form, after a recent focus on the novel (Jan is the author of the novel, Thicker Than Blood, published by Fomite Press in 2015, and is currently working on a new novel). How did that feel? Does working on short stories versus a novel demand different habits or approaches, in your view?

JEL: The short story is still my first love. I like the process of working on a novel, of having a big mass of material that I can stretch and manipulate and into which I can thread strands. I like the task of building a world and populating it with more people than I can comfortably put in a short story. However, I also love the tautness of a short story, the intense payoff of the shorter time frame, the small dramas that have large consequences. I like being able to hold the arc in my head and tighten the elements, the language, and the rhythms. They say novels take longer to write, but I spent about seven years on the novel while the short stories span nearly 20 years of writing.

JD: What is your writing routine at this time? And I’ve got to ask: coffee or tea when you’re writing?

JEL: Chinese black tea only these days. Too much caffeine is no longer my friend. I am a morning writer, almost exclusively. I can revise in the afternoons, but the mornings are my best times for generating material. I mostly write at the Writers Workspace, which is a cooperative space three blocks from my house. I am lucky to have that resource nearby. It’s a great quiet atmosphere where I can really concentrate, unlike my home where I’m easily distracted.

JD: Can you tell us a little about what you’re working on now?

JEL: I am working on a novel with two alternating points of view: two women who grow up in the same rural college town. They exist on parallel tracks due to social class, but their lives intersect over a shared experience. I am interested in the ways in which two people can grow up in the same small town but because of income and family expectations, their lives take very different paths. There’s been a lot of attention lately given to the “Two Americas,” and I want to explore this theme in a “town-and-gown” setting. I enjoy research, and this project has allowed me to read about the Iraq War, homeschooling, and the anti-vaxxer movement, as well as Caribbean literature, Greek mythology, and massage therapy certification programs. Ultimately, it’s a novel about forgiveness and what constitutes home and family.