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Q and A

Aug 27, 2015; Pickles Asks:

You feelin' me?

Stacey answers:

No, today I am not feeling you, Pickles. Not even a little bit.

Jun 24, 2015; Korina Apa Asks:

Hello Stacey! I love rock and roll music so I chose your short essay A groupie, A Rock Star for our class assignment. Your story flabbergasted me because it was so eccentric I didn't get it at first. But then it hit me, maybe you were talking about how they seem so different on the outside, so spicy, but then at the back of their facade, they were just like all of us, fragile human beings. I am not sure though if I, as the reader and you as the writer, have the same ideas. If we do, I hope to hear from you. However, I am deeply intrigued on how you come up with such bizarre (I mean it in a good way ) story? Is it because of an experience? Are you possibly the same as these characters? Maybe we all are at some point. Hope to hear from your reply soon! Thank you!

Stacey answers:

Yes and yes. I like your interpretation. There’s never only one interpretation of any story so there’s no specific one that’s right (though I suppose someone could get it totally wrong). I think there’s a part of me in all the characters I write about, just like when you write a story, or even have a dream, there’s bound to be a lot of yourself in it since it comes from you. I was obsessed with certain rock stars from the time I was a little girl (if you count David Cassidy as a rock star), and I’m a big fan of the book I’m With The Band by Pamela Des Barres, a memoir about a California girl’s life as a groupie in the early 1970’s—it’s a book that redeems itself by proving that Miss Pamela had talent of her own, above and beyond the reflected talent of the men she bedded. I just love that. So maybe there’s some of that in the story—the idea that what a woman has might be as good or better than the thing she’s trying to absorb from a man through proximity, or sex, or love, or some combination of those.

Jun 23, 2015; Nicole Anne Asks:

Hi, Stacey. I have never really been a reader of short stories but it was a pleasure to read A Prodigy of Longing. It took me a long time to finally realize what the story meant to me. I just have a few questions in mind. In the story, it talks about Skye’s beliefs in Nephilim, the aliens, and eternal life. How much do you believe in these? Were your spiritual beliefs in life somehow connected to that of hers? Also, I remember the time when the young boy was reading Either / Or by Soren Kierkegaard. I was intrigued by his discussion of the “misery inherent in hope” and I was wondering if this book played an integral part in writing your short story? Did this idea influence you to write this short story? Lastly, I’m curious. What are you reading right now and what book had a huge influence in your life?

Stacey answers:

Hi Nicole Anne. I’ve been hesitant to answer very astute questions because I’m afraid of disillusioning you, but here goes: I do not believe in the Nephilim, aliens, or eternal life. I’m shamefully unspiritual, though I do have a sense of a realm in the universe larger and lighter than myself that I will be forever excluded from, and some envy, therefore, of people with strong beliefs. I do believe in the misery inherent in hope, that’s for sure, but I can’t recall reading Either/Or, ever. There are quite a few Kierkegaard references in the story so I must have at least looked at it, but honestly, I think I mostly relied upon conversations with my local philosopher. Before you decide I’m a total charlatan, let me add that the Kierkegaardian references I include sound like the kind of things I think about sometimes, and their themes of wanting are woven throughout the book as a whole, so I suspect I was using the cover of Kierkegaard to cram in what I wanted to say myself. Those ideas, or parts of them, also sound a lot like Buddhist philosophy 101, so maybe they’re in the air.

Right now I’m reading The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit. The list of books that have a huge impact on my life is a strange one. Essentially, it’s all books that have had a huge impact on my life; books as an agent of enlightenment. Maybe that’s my spiritual belief. Here’s a quote from another book I read recently, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose: “I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely.” It’s a wonderful thing to read a sentence like that and realize it was written by an academic.

Jun 22, 2015; Tanner Bennett Asks:

Hello Stacey, recently I read Blackout for my English class and i was very intrigued. I wanted to ask about Kylie. Did her story really occur to someone in your life or at least a situation in which a harmless person is greatly traumatized and left out to dry?

Stacey answers:

Well, kind of but not exactly. That story was sparked by a trip to Nogales, a Mexican border town about sixty miles from Tucson. At the time, all the pharmacias there did have signs in the windows that said, “NO ROOFIES!!!” and I thought, well, I guess a lot of people come to Nogales aiming to buy roofies. I also lived near the University of Arizona where sorority pledge week begins before school starts, when the campus is still empty, so it’s pretty easy to pick out the Greek girls and the aspiring Greek girls as they flock from event to event in cocktail dresses in the 110-degree heat. It wasn’t much of a stretch for me to put these two observations together into a story. However, I do know women and girls who suspect that they’ve been drugged and raped, though they’re not sure because it’s hard to know what’s actually happened to you when you’re unconscious. The not knowing, but suspecting, is an especially poisonous situation that leads to poisonous, self-recriminating thoughts (did I deserve it for partying, did I say yes and forget, am I bad girl, etc.). That’s why I needed Kylie as a witness. I don’t know anyone who played the part that Kylie did—remaining on the sidelines, with the ability to ponder it afterward. I made that up. You know Tanner, I wasn’t sure which girl you were referring to as harmless and traumatized—at first I thought it was Sandra, the pretty girl, but then I thought Kylie—but in a way, they’re kind of two halves of the same person, one who knows and sees, and one who doesn’t. To me it was satisfying to make up a character who was there and remembered and could therefore learn and be changed by it, even though it wasn’t a nice thing to learn.

Jun 17, 2015; Sam Wilhoite Asks:

Hi Stacey, First I want to say that I absolutely loved reading An Island of Boyfriends. My first questions is why do most of your stories tend to leave the narrators' name out until someone else mentions it? Or leave it out completely and totally. Second, why are 'the boyfriends' okay with the narrator sleeping with all of them? Is it because they just do not know any better? Third, how hard was it for you to write short stories that were so out of the norm? Did you receive a lot of criticism?

Stacey answers:

Hi Sam. The reason I tend to leave out the names of the first-person narrators in short stories is to foster a closer, more intimate point of view. I want it to be as though the narrator is telling their secret thoughts to their best friend—the idea is to make it an outpouring, something with an urgency and familiarity that’s already beyond the moment of introductions. I have to tell you what happened. To add the name, for me, adds a false note. If the narrator’s name comes up naturally I’ll use it, but it doesn’t always come up. People actually don’t say their own names very often in intense conversations, and a lot of people rarely even say their names aloud in their heads, preferring to refer to themselves as “I.”

My fiction actually isn’t out of the norm, I would say. There’s a huge realm of fantasy and science fiction and horror and fairy tales and children’s books, and many, many literary writers who portray a world that has only a passing resemblance to the real. Franz Kafka, John Cheever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Babel, Roberto Bolano, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, even John Updike (in The Witches of Eastwick) create fictional worlds saturated with startling images and fairy tales and genre forms and the thick mire of their own brains. All fiction is a mixture of realism and dreamism. My mix tends to favor metaphor and the warp of perception over the concrete world of the senses, but that may change at any time.

So it’s a kind of fairy tale. The boyfriends are okay with the narrator sleeping with all of them for the same reason that Cinderella is okay with the prince’s willingness to sweep away her evil stepsisters. (This happens in the versions of the tale where the sisters lop off parts of their feet to fit in the slipper; the prince doesn’t realize they’ve cheated until he finds blood all over the floor of the carriage.) I mean, that kind of sucks, that he would go off with the odious sisters and jilt Cinderella, even if he corrects this later. But Cinderella gives him another shot. He’s the only prince in town; no one else has the power to save her. The girl in “An Island of Boyfriends” is like the prince; she has all the power. She can have whoever she wants. The guys don’t really have much choice. What are they going to do? There aren’t any other girls. She might be the last girl on earth. They need to stay on her good side if at all possible.

In any case, I think of my stories as being true and real in their own way. The incidents might be unlikely or impossible, but the emotional tenor is genuine. In the case of "An Island of Boyfriends," the starting point in the real, natural world is with people who can’t love, or find love, no matter where they are and who they meet. I think the fear of one’s own emotional coldness is not an uncommon one among balky young women and men. It’s the worry that no one will ever be right because you're essentially unable to be satisfied with anyone, or a combination of anyones, because you're unfit to love, for all the reasons people end up being unfit to love. Someone like that might end up alone even on an island full of boyfriends.

Jun 11, 2015; Kristen Asks:

Hello Stacey. I have a few questions. About writing, mostly, but maybe about tattoos as well. See, I'm in that cloud of "writer's angst" that is supposedly a universal experience, and I have tried to use it to generate some inquiries:

1. I really admire how your stories don't say no to crazy stakes. Like "My Date With Satan" and "Cavemen in the Hedges." How do you do it? Do you ever worry how other people are going to take your stories--and if you do, how do you get over it? Do you just run with your ideas, or do you find yourself throwing a lot of ideas out? How to say no to the critical inner voice?

2. What inspires you to write? This is a vague question at first, and you can take it as you like- do you keep a journal? People watch? Keep a record of crazy shit that runs yelling through the regular routine?

3. I read your story about "The Chair of the Rejection." How do you keep rejection from curtailing, interrupting, tailoring your work?

4. Do you ever have long periods of time where you just don't want to write, or don't "feel" like you have anything to write about? How to shatter that funk?

Looking back, these questions sound a little bummed out. What about tattoos, then? Could getting a tattoo of a pancake lead to consumptive behavior? Thank you for your time. I love your stories. They stick in my head in full-color.

Stacey answers:

Dear Kristen,

About the crazy stakes: I really can't help it; it's just like that in here (tapping forehead). I do worry about how people are going to take my stories--one of the more horrible responses would be, "Oh, she's trying to be kooky"--but I'm more worried about becoming bored while writing. I really do spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about shit that might be considered strange, if it's strange to spend countless mental hours training dogs to do circus tricks, also rats, cats, ground squirrels, and a great horned owl with a broken wing who lives in my living room and answers to the name Owl Baby. (Is this even strange? I figure everyone has an owl baby in their head.) Anyway, as Joseph Campbell and also bumper stickers proclaim, you've got to follow your bliss. Part of finding the energy and impetus to write is the desire to make a fascinating, beckoning world for yourself. Yes, I throw out a lot of ideas, but I only follow the ones that feel interesting to me and authentic to my brain. I try not to think about other people's reactions. Who are these people? Haters, all of them. When I'm writing I sometimes chant to myself that this is for me alone; no one will ever read it. No one, ever, ever. The feeling of deep privacy is liberating, even if I don't really mean it.

What inspires me to write is anger, resentment, jealousy, bitterness, as well as an inchoate longing for a kind of unfathomable, boundless love that doesn't exist in the real world but still flourishes in my imagination. Oh, and maybe a little twinkle of childlike joy in creation. (Also, the fear of death and shame and grief.) Given this, I often don't feel like writing and often don't for long periods of time. I do always feel like I have something to write about, however, because I'm an essentially unhappy person with narcissistic personality disorder who thinks she knows things other people don't. If I were to translate my inner let's-get-writing thoughts into motivational slogans, they'd go: I'll show them! I'm so alone. Everyone should want to fuck me. Everyone should love me right now. I shall terrify people with my brains and talent. I'm the smartest person in the world. I am a worm.

I'm not proud of my motivational slogans, but I'm glad I can recognize them because if I couldn't, I'd be screwed. I'd be pushing that stuff down and pushing up something false, something chirpy and twee, and that wouldn't work.

About rejection--this part of your inquiry is, I think, tied to the part about worrying how other people are going to take your writing. I don't know how to keep rejection from curtailing my work; it does. But how it curtails it, for me, is an off/on proposition, rather than being about the content. And my mind made a bing at the word "tailoring," at the idea of tailoring your work to other people's expectations. I think there may be an unexamined fantasy lurking behind your question, and like most unexamined fantasies, it is both lovely and wrong. This is the idea (or the wish) that you can tailor your work into something the majority of people will approve of--that it's within your power to be a really good writer, albeit in a certain way, albeit if you actually wanted to write that way--and that this way of writing is in you. That is, really, a lovely idea--I wonder what this writing would be like? Bloodless and competent, with lots of vigorous verbs? Acceptable? Maybe with soothing depictions of the weather and an intelligent, slightly eccentric heroine who frets about her disabled sister?

Because this fantasy is about acceptance, you must be pushing yourself to write from your good, decent self, the part that wants to do the right thing and has compassionate thoughts about other people. But acceptability is boring, in terms of narrative, and trying to please people is a great way to suck out your own soul and turn it into worthless fog. Sometimes, Kristen, you have to say fuck you to your good self. I wonder if part of your writer's angst comes from picturing your work-in-progress as agreeable rather than as yours? Maybe instead of inhabiting the noble and poised parts of yourself, you could try tapping into the nasty parts that you're ashamed of. That's kind of how it's done, I think, now that I think about it. There isn't really any way to give people what they want--they don't know, trust me--and it's always better to try to make work that partakes of the darkness as well as the light. My hunch is that this will help you feel more motivated and less constricted by a mental image of your readers. After all, if you think to yourself that you're already a jackass, you don't have to worry about revealing yourself as a jackass. And jackasses are interesting, even if it's only because we don't know what they're going to do next. Unlike intelligent, slightly eccentric heroines, who invariably sit on trains and stare out the window.

I want to get a sweep of tattoos of Duchamp's readymades all up and down my body. The bicycle wheel, the fountain, and the flask of Paris air. He's my hero.

May 14, 2015; Myles Asks:

Hi. I recently heard a reading of The Minimalist on a radio broadcast which I really enjoyed. Unfortunately Im not sure which programme it was part of or even which station. I wondered know if you know where I might find it as a podcast? Ive checked the NPR website and cant find anything..

Stacey answers:

That was Parker Posey reading The Minimalist for the Selected Shorts reading series and radio broadcast. Click the Art and Artists show on their web page. And thank you so much for asking! I'd sort of forgotten about it and haven't listened to it yet myself.

Apr 26, 2015; Michael Henry Asks:

Stacey! If you had to write a screenplay about your life, what would you focus on? Any must-have songs or bands on the soundtrack? Would you invent new characters and scenes, dip your toes into fiction instead of fact? Which actresses should audition for the role? Is it even possible to make an accurate biopic about a writer? Writers spend so much time alone – reading, writing, brooding, fantasizing, masturbating, daydreaming –this is not the stuff of drama. The only scene I remember from The Hours is Nicole Kidman just sitting alone and staring off into space. I’ve read a number of your responses but there is little autobiography here. It’s as if the posts are in your voice, but you go out of your way to keep personal info off the Internet. Do you identify as bisexual or straight? Are you a loner or social? Will you continue to write and publish personal essays, mosaics, memoir?

Fiction writers can describe the thoughts of their characters, going into great detail about what a character yearns for and remembers. Playwrights and screenwriters cannot describe what a character is thinking about. How can playwrights make up for the loss of going inside a character’s headspace? I’m wondering if a play can have the same impact as a novel. Why has American drama not achieved the same imaginative stature as American prose and poetry?

I’ve been thinking about genre a lot lately. What interests me most here is what compels one writer to work in a particular genre instead of another. Fiction might be categorized into the literary vs. tension-filled works; in the latter, the central conflict moves the narrative forward to the resolution of the mystery, suspense or some other device. In the former, prose rhythm, details, a distinct voice, and a sense that the work is doing something new, all detonate to form the thrust of the book. I used to dismiss conflict, believing that language, word beauty, and sentences were what a writer had to spend time toiling over. But now I'm not as certain.

There are three things I want to know: 1. Why does a playwright write plays and not poetry and how do poets decide they must write poetry instead of essays and memoir? Many writers work in multiple genres, but usually they lean on one particular genre. This observation rings true with fiction writers that write in different forms – mysteries, crime, YA, fantasy, romance. Why does one publish crime and mystery novels and not erotica and romance? The simple answer could be that that’s what they choose to do and that is enough. But I'm not convinced. Your stories show up in all sorts of places – volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Pushcart, Fairy Tale collections, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction (I own and like this one). Do you deliberately set out to explore a specific genre?

“Caveman in the Hedges” is one of your most popular stories and l love the story as it is. But why didn’t you take the situation (cavepersons all around) and write a screenplay version of “Caveman in the Hedges”? That story could also easily be a one-act play but isn’t. Why? What makes a person use this form and not that? Why take the emotions, history, people, ideas and junk you obsess over and become a writer instead of a painter? Why does one person become a doctor and not a philosopher? And why will a philosopher teach, think and write for a living instead of steal, lie and hide in the Shadow?

I no longer like the term plot. Lots of writing advice asks us to figure out what a character desires and then insert the obstacles. While what a character wants matters in the long run, it doesn’t help much in the beginning. Just knowing your protagonist yearns for a glass of water or forgiveness won't necessarily give a writer momentum, right? Maybe the better approach is in the details, the specificity. If details are the life-blood of fiction, then the conflict might come in making those sensory details as conflicting as possible. So two questions: 1. How can I add more conflict to any piece of writing be it an essay, a poem, a monologue or musical? 2. How can writers raise the stakes? How can we amp up the tension and suspense? Stakes can be dismissed as something only hack would ever consider, but raising the stakes in a play, a novel, or TV show is a requirement that can’t be ignored.

I am also not sure if I like the way we talk about voice. For me, saying that a writer has to find a voice is like saying a writer needs a head attached. Every text has a voice – a physics textbook, a prose poem – what we ought to discuss are the parts that make up a literary voice. Voice is an aggregate of word choice, sentence structure, literary devices, figurative language, sensory details, description, formatting, tone, and the stuff that makes up point-of-view—not just who’s doing the telling and to whom but also the spatial and temporal distance. Why discuss something as vague as voice when really we should be diving right into these topics? Agree or disagree? What do you think when a fellow writer talks about finding a voice? Is it harder to maintain the interest of a reader by being especially literary, intelligent, sensitive, weird, lyrical, meta, tricky, hyperbolic, political, contemporary, vampireish?

Should writers even think about genre? Are you conscious of this sort of stuff or is it best to just let the writing happen? Our impulse is to analyze, interpret, make meaning. But there are times when might it might be better to not think about the rules, the slogans (Show, don’t tell!), the contests, the writers that can afford to live in Brooklyn, the publications, the glamor. But that is so hard to do!

There is a much deeper subject at stake here and eventually I would love to address some of these questions. For now I’m happy with any response! I believe at one time you were writing poetry so I’m hoping you will want to comment on this discussion. Your last response to my ranting was great. I want to start a blog now. So my plan is to start on Twitter. I suppose one decision about blogging is deciding what subject to write about. This may not interest you but “666” was included in the ninth edition of Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway. I loved that because I went on and on about my love of creative writing books, especially the Burroway text. I thank you for your advice and wisdom and look forward to hearing from you again!

Stacey answers:

Michael Henry! Thank you for the question! It's long so I've divided it up into five subquestions.

1) What about Stacey Richter, the film?

I will be played by Sean Young on ecstasy.

2) What compels one writer to work in a particular genre instead of another?And how can playwrights make up for the loss of what’s going on inside a character’s headspace?

What compels a writer to work in a particular genre is that she loves reading books in that genre. You cannot fake it; only someone who really loves romance novels, for instance, can write romance novels—it turns into satire pretty quickly if you don’t love the format. Playwrights love theater; that’s why they write for it. You can try to write for money, but even then most people will eventually gravitate to the form and subject matter that means the most to them. Their real desires seep out. Like the Eagles say, you can’t hide your lying eyes.

There’s an amazing thing about plays and movies that makes up for the lack of interior thought, and that’s the presence of actors. We read faces; they reveal shifting emotions. We read voices and body language. A good actor can add an astonishing amount of depth to a script. Janet Leigh’s face in Psycho, when she’s checking the rear view mirror—no words could better show the complexity of her worry, guilt, and exhilaration.

3) How can I add more conflict? How can writers raise the stakes?

I like to think of stories in terms of progression, narrative pleasure, and destination, rather than in terms of conflict, obstacles, and stakes. If you think about conflict in terms of desires and obstacles, you’re doomed. Readers can feel the formula and it’s boring. In fact, let’s just forget about conflict altogether. If you have two characters who each want something, difficulties are inevitable. It helps if your story takes place at a time when interesting things are occurring—that’s why it’s a story. Fiction should be powered by the same impulse you feel when you need to tell a story to your friends at a bar—something happened. It was interesting; it bothered you. Other people were there and they said things. It meant something.

Raising the stakes is something you’re told to do when your story is not interesting. There’s nothing less rewarding than a formulaic plot plodding by with everything getting worse and worse, and I’m especially annoyed by worn devices meant to raise the stakes: the clock ticking relentlessly in the tower. Ugh. It makes me nervous, tick tick. It’s not nice, it feels like a stunt. There’s no need to raise the stakes if the story is already interesting—in fact, it would ruin it. To add a ticking clock to Pride and Prejudice would be an insult to Elizabeth Bennet. A well-formed premise (well, it’s kind of perfect, actually), like that of Pride and Prejudice, can carry a whole novel forward with apparent effortlessness.

4) Why discuss something as vague as “voice”? Is it more useful to break it down into its component parts?

Finding your voice is something you are told to do when your story is not interesting. Writers who publish books don’t talk about voice; writing teachers talk about it to their students. What these teachers mean when they say you need to find your voice is that you’re over-influenced by the books you love and your writing sounds someone else. You’ll always have influences, but once you’ve digested them and can belch out sentences that sound like your own, you’ve basically “found your voice.” It is, in fact, the one thing you can’t really think about or take apart with any success (you do just let it happen). As I’ve said in this forum before, I believe the best way to do this is by finding your truelove subject matter. When you write about matters that are of deadly interest to you, important and fraught and maybe a little unnerving, you have a better chance of sounding like yourself.

However, not everyone has something that means that much to them (or that really bothers them), and not everyone has anything in particular they need to say in art and writing. I’m confused by people like this who want to be writers—I’m not exactly sure what drives them. Writing is not glamorous Michael Henry. Ha! Maybe a few people wring some stature from it, but most of it is like always having homework you haven’t finished and never being quite smart enough to do it right and always being withdrawn into your own little world and finally putting all you’ve got into something and then being confronted by other people’s indifference to it. It can be pretty arduous. It’s nice to set your own hours though.

5) Should writers even think about genre? There is a much deeper subject at stake here and eventually I would love to address some of these questions.

There is. What I read in this long question as a whole is that you don’t know what to write about but want to write very badly, and you’re afraid of doing it wrong. Good. Everyone is. Nonetheless, you have to make some decisions. How much of yourself are you going to have to reveal to the world? How much are you going to have to reveal to yourself? Not just in terms of straight or gay, social or a loner, but what do you love and hate and will you take a stand? And once you choose something—a form, say—does everything else become off-limits or somehow ruined? The answer, Michael Henry, is no. People in their twenties like to torture themselves over life decisions: should I take this internship or that one, break up with someone or not? They can be debilitated by the sense that the smallish decisions of now will have grave repercussions for their future—but you know what? It’s not like that. It kind of doesn’t matter what you do in your twenties, not on the micro-scale of months or a few years (as long as you don’t totally fuck up—but even then, I know people who were heroin addicts in their twenties and are family men today). The things that really affect your fate in your twenties are the things that just happen—you get sick, you hurt yourself, you knock up a girl—events that are basically out of your control. So take it easy. Go ahead and choose; think about genre or don’t. It doesn’t really matter in the way you’re afraid it does. Just start with the sort of writing you like best and see what happens.

Apr 16, 2015; Fiction Class Asks:

What does Pippi do with Ivy at the end of My Date with Satan?

Stacey answers:

She steals her.

Apr 01, 2015; Fuck Mulligan Asks:

I would like to offer my most sincere apologies for what I have said in the past. I have just reread your work with a new mindset. I have found the deeper meanings within them. btw, your writing is not shit.

Stacey answers:

Thanks, Fuck. I appreciate that.

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