Mini-Interview with Anne Sanow

How early in the process did you know that Triple Time would become a collection of connected stories, and what did you learn about this form?
I always knew that I was going to write a collection set in Saudi Arabia, but the stories weren’t initially connected. I was experimenting with the style and form of the short story by trying different things: first-person narrators and a more grand and formal third, contained set-pieces, various prose structures and rhythms, sections and longer sustained momentum, and so on. Just having fun as a writer, seeing what I could do within each piece and what kinds of story arcs I could create. What happened is that three very strong characters emerged in the drafts: Gus, the WWII pilot who has a relationship with the son of a Bedouin chief; Thurayya, a Bedouin girl; and Kimberly, an expatriate from California. I knew then that these characters needed more space to be heard, and the idea of linking the collection by showing characters at different points in time and from different perspectives just felt organic.

But I also knew that I wasn’t going to switch to the novel form. Yes, I was conscious of trying to tell a larger, historical story about people in this country (and as a writer I tend to think in terms of big projects, things or themes I’m obsessed with). Larger stories are so often thought of as being told in novels, but why is that? I think that you can put worlds into short stories—like Alice Munro does, like Andrea Barrett or Katherine Anne Porter or Alistair MacLeod. So I felt a bit stubborn about sticking to the short form, actually. Not all of the stories are what I’d consider to be epic, but I hope that the cumulative effect does a little something like that for the reader.

American writers who write about other countries are sometimes accused of being “literary tourists,” with the implication that they can never know what life is really like in other cultures, other worlds. Were you conscious of this mindset while working on the book? Did it seem riskier to write about Thurayya than to write about Jill?
In the beginning I was overly conscious of that mindset, and thought I should abide by the “write what you know” adage. This led to early drafts wherein various Western expatriates went about their lives spouting pithy, jaded remarks. These were terrifically boring stories. “The Date Farm” was the first completed story that I truly liked, and because Jill’s experience was closest to my own in Saudi Arabia she was fairly easy to do. I didn’t want to keep writing the same story, however. From that point it was about continually daring myself to delve underneath and write what I didn’t know at all. I buttressed my confidence with a lot of research, but then I just had to let go, and the deeper I got the more nuanced and complex the situations and characters became. For me, nuance is honesty, and every writer owes that to the reader no matter where the stories are set.

Thankfully, when you get to a certain point in the writing your strongest characters just won’t let you disappoint them. That happened with Thurayya, a minor walk-on character who ended up taking over the narrative in “Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time”—the shifts into first-person and plural first-person are hers, and I think she in effect owns the entire piece. She also proved herself strong enough to narrate a story of her own, as an adult (“Rub al-Khali”). So while she is farther from me than is Jill, I think I grew to love her more, and that made writing about her (and in her voice) so satisfying that I just stopped worrying about how she’d be perceived.

Ann Patchett, who selected your book for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, said: “This is the kind of manuscript that reminds me why people want to become editors and agents, and why writers are willing to judge contests: you hope that among the bad manuscripts and the good ones and the very good ones there will be one that is great. This book is great.” It is a great book, larger in theme than “regular” collections of stories, with a subject matter that has perhaps never been timelier for American audiences. So why did it have to win a big prize to find publication? Had you approached agents with the project before submitting to the contest?
Can we insert wry laughter here? Ann Patchett’s comments are lovely and generous, and perhaps if she’d been an agent instead of a best-selling literary writer when I was submitting this book to agents a few years ago, or the market for short stories were better at the time, or . . . who knows? I did try that route and it just didn’t work out, and I won’t pretend that it wasn’t more than a little frustrating. (One question I got a lot was, “why isn’t this a novel?”) Having worked in publishing myself, however, I at least had a little insight into that process and therefore understood how subjective it can be. Winning the Drue Heinz was wonderful: I’d looked to that prize for years and thought, wow, this is part of what holds up the tradition of short-story telling in the United States. I see myself as a fairly traditional writer, so it feels just right.

Mini-Interview with Holly Goddard Jones

The stories in Girl Trouble are longer than average. Has this always been the case for you, or have your stories grown larger as you’ve learned more about structure and your own interests as a writer?
I didn’t always write long stories. As an undergraduate, I generally wrote around 12 pages a story, and my first workshop submissions at grad school were probably 16, 18 pages. It’s funny, though, because when I started finding my voice—when I started doing my own thing instead of impersonating writers I admired, or writers in Best American Short Stories—the stories immediately grew longer, and their pacing changed. I think this is also because my prose style adapted. I began my adult writing life pretending to be Bobbie Ann Mason, but that voice wasn’t ever natural for me. Take the present tense, for instance. Bobbie Ann Mason uses it so well, but that immediacy isn’t the right mode of expression for my point-of-view characters, who (like me) are worriers, dwellers, with a tendency to analyze their own situations. I realized that my characters, the types I’m drawn to, often have a heightened self-awareness; they don’t delude themselves. If anything, they wallow.

A possible exception in Girl Trouble is Theo from “Life Expectancy.” He’s a high school girls’ basketball coach who gets his star player pregnant. He’s the closest I come to a character who’s kidding himself, and you might notice that the story, though still longish, is one of the most compressed in the book. When you have a guy like that who chooses not to delve too deeply into himself, you just don’t need as many words.

Reviewers often praise a male writer’s ability to write from a woman’s point of view, but less is said about women who write from a man’s perspective. Since this is something you do well (“Life Expectancy,” for one example), can you share your thoughts about this aspect of writing fiction?
I hadn’t thought about this issue as a double-standard, which is interesting. If anything, it’s a compliment that I’m used to getting about the stories, and I appreciate it one-hundred percent, though that over-analyzer in me wonders if there’s a subtext to it. For instance, sometimes men react to the book’s title in a strongly negative way, because they don’t think it represents the stories, which are dark and violent and often male-driven. I understand the argument, and I struggled, along with my publisher, to decide if this was indeed the right title. But my niggling doubt is that what people are bristling at is the “girl” part, the suggestion that a girl’s trouble is less significant than a man’s. The irony, of course, is that the whole concept of “girl trouble” is lodged in the male perspective.

But I’m not answering your question. I think I write so often from the male perspective because, for this book, I wanted to look at these conventional acts of violence and aggression—but I didn’t want to always take the conventional victim’s perspective. The project rose out of intellectual curiosity first and foremost—not because I wanted to front an agenda or grind an axe. On the simplest level, it’s also just a really fun challenge. Can I sound like a man? Think like a man? You know, though, I generally just think of my characters as humans, first, and I figure out what they have in common with me, and that’s the foundation from which all else springs. And my husband won’t hesitate to tell me if I’ve gotten it all wrong. In this novel I’m working on now, I was writing recently about a thirteen-year-old boy whose girlfriend is kind of toying with him sexually – teasing him, tempting him, scaring him. I felt like I had a lock on her motivations, and I’d intellectualized his, but I relied on my husband to help me revise for some of the finest points—not language, of course, but motivation, physicality—in this one pivotal scene between them. There’s a lot of guesswork involved. You’d be surprised how far guesswork gets you.

When you sit down to write a story, how conscious are you of your past experiences at the desk? How do you try to separate what you’ve done before from what you’re writing now?
It’s not something I think about consciously, that’s for sure. I’d be paralyzed. My husband, who’s in the visual arts, works in series. He’ll do sketches, then he’ll focus on an aspect of a sketch and do more sketches of that, then he’ll do a sketch model, then he’ll build a more polished model. And one finished work prepares him for the next finished work. I can’t compare writing to that directly, at least in the sense that I don’t do the little exercises and journal entries and character profiles that some do, but I can identify with that belief that every work you create teaches you how to begin the next piece. I couldn’t have written “Proof of God,” the story of a murderer, without first writing “Parts,” the story of the mother of the girl murdered. I couldn’t have embarked upon the novel I’m now writing without first having written the stories in Girl Trouble.