You began by writing nonfiction. How did you come to write short stories, and what does writing fiction offer you?
In graduate school, I fell in love with literary journalism, with telling true stories with all the nuance and style of fiction. I worked with Caryl Rivers and Mark Kramer, and Mark in particular taught me how to look at every word in a sentence and get it just right. He also taught me how to look for stories in everyday life, and once I began to see stories in everything, it made transitioning to fiction very natural.
I first started writing fiction because I had a full-time day job in New York, was freelancing a lot to make ends meet, and had little time leftover for the fieldwork that narrative nonfiction requires. If I was going to write, I needed to do it in short bursts: on the subway, during my lunch hour, for a few minutes before bed. So, quite simply, since I couldn’t tell true stories, I began making them up — and I had so much fun with it. Most of my stories stem from moments or people that intrigue me — seeing an interesting person on the street, watching two people interact, reading a bizarre news blurb. With nonfiction, you’d research, interview, and report a story; with fiction, I envision it and bring my own imagination and curiosity to it.
Several of your stories are set in far-off locales. What is the importance of place in your work? How do you talk about place in fiction?
For me, place is important mostly for what it reveals about character, which for me is what drives a story. In Forgetting English, place is obviously essential — these stories look at how being out of one’s element can actually bring certain things into a sharper focus — how we see things more clearly, for better or worse, once we’re away from our usual routines and distractions.
But I think that sometimes place will play a role in a different way. For example, one story I wrote, “Water Children,” which isn’t included in this collection, is about twins, and where they live in the story isn’t as important as the fact that they shared the same physical space before they were born. So “place” can mean a lot of things in a story, and emotional space is often more important than physical space. But I find it’s always fairly central because that’s where a character is truly coming from, and if we want to understand our characters — and if we want readers to connect with them — we need to find this sense of place in a story.
Forgetting English is a small book, some might say, with eight stories across 116 pages, and you’ve published far more stories in journals and magazines. How did you shape this particular collection? And, given that your manuscript won the Spokane Prize, I wonder how it changed after you submitted to the contest.
When I first started writing stories, I thought I’d be able to simply put them all together as soon I had enough for a collection — and what I ended up with was so completely random that it just didn’t work. So I knew I had to find a common theme, that I needed a thread to tie the pieces together, even loosely. I published my first story in 1999 — and here I am with my first collection ten years later. Although the stories in Forgetting English were all written in the past five years, it took me that long until I had enough stories that fit well together.
So when I found myself with several stories about Americans abroad, discovering things about themselves and about their relationships that likely wouldn’t have happened if they’d been at home, I knew I had a theme that would work. During this time, I wrote many stories that don’t appear in the collection, but if I found myself with a piece set outside a character’s usual setting, I’d finish it with the collection in mind. And eventually it all came together.
After it won the contest, the individual stories didn’t change much, but the manuscript as a whole took on a more graceful shape. The editors suggested omitting one piece, changing the title of another, and re-ordering the stories, which worked out really well. They had a fresh perspective and were able to see, in ways that I hadn’t, how to arrange them in a way that would flow better. The Press’s managing editor, Pamela Holway, is an amazing editor and proofreader, and she had some wonderful suggestions, all of which I feel improved the book as a whole.
What are you working on now? More stories, or something longer?
I’m always working on stories! I have a couple of new pieces in the works, but I’m also working on a novel. I’m in the very early stages, which is a rather stressful place to be — getting to know the characters, doing a lot of research, figuring out where it’s headed. I enjoy writing stories at the same time because it’s nice to tackle something smaller and more manageable when I feel overwhelmed by the book. It’s like returning to a friendly and familiar place that, at the same time, still allows you to lose yourself a bit.
