By John Mauk
In northern Michigan, we have bears, cherries, waves of tourists, and a vibrant literary community. If you walk or swim in any direction for very long, you’ll collide with a poet—a genuine and serious poet who studies hard and commits to the craft—and that person will know several fiction writers who hang around various memoirists who cavort with playwrights or songwriters. It’s an ecology of practitioners. Given our abundantly long winters and slow-motion springs, we have time to workshop, revise, confer, publish, and grind ahead no matter what.
With so many writers chopping at manuscripts, a formal organization was bound to develop. Michigan Writers has been a steady force in the region for decades. It hosts workshops, supports scholarships, distributes news among members, and publishes The Dunes Review, a longstanding and beloved print journal. For many members, an annual highlight has been the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press chapbook contest, which began in 2005. As in other contests, the process involves a round of volunteer readers across genres, then an outside final judge for each category: poetry, CNF, and fiction. Past outside judges include widely hailed writers such as Fleda Brown, Diane Seuss, Andy Mozina, Patricia Clark, Stephen Dunn, Thomas Lynch, Patricia Ann McNair, and Stephanie Mills. In 2023, Thisbe Nissen, the outside judge in fiction, selected Sharon Bippus’s This Blue Earth. In her estimation, the stories resound with “wondrous turns of phrase” and “plainspoken truth.”
While the announcement came in June, Sharon Bippus is still sailing along, carried by the muster of affirmation. As most—perhaps all—writers know, drafting and revising can become terrifically lonely. Even with a community around us, the work can turn our writing spaces into self-loathing echo chambers. We long for any response, some howl in the distance that acknowledges our effort. Winning a chapbook contest is often a first formal acknowledgement, an elemental christening that declares our worth.
In light of Sharon’s achievement, I asked her to consider her stories, to discuss them beyond the lens of chronic effort. In short, I asked her to indulge and theorize, to detail what makes them work, what makes her continued efforts worthy of her community.
Your stories are driven by characters’ needs, whims, and uncertainties. Can you explain how you see the relationship between character and plot?
Well, first off, I often think about a story for a while before I write the first word. I play around with what unique elements might fit together to put a spin on the story that might make the reader want to hang around a bit. Nuance in setting and character often call to me. The juxtaposition of the normal or familiar paired with the unexpected sets the story up for all kinds of unpredictable possibilities. Characters that explore the world from a lens a little different than the average person add a level of intrigue.
As an example, in my road trip story “Blue Earth,” my narrator, Sharona, follows an exit sign into the town of Blue Earth and then discovers a 55-foot-tall Jolly Green Giant statue in a downtown park. (FYI, the town and the statue belong to northern Minnesota.) Sharona and her best friend and travel mate are already in a state of wonder when they meet two girls riding their bikes near the statue. The giant statue becomes a hardworking vehicle: it joins the girls and the women in conversation, the knowing and unknowing, and seals the sense of wonder in the moment.
During the drafting process I decided to make one of the girls autistic, something, as a former special education teacher, I know a lot about. I also decided not to label her autistic and to describe her without judgement. This character, K.T., is comfortable giving all kinds of specific information that proves quite amazing to Sharona. K.T. is fascinating, and her nuance in behavior, especially the acceptance of her neurodiversity, offers all kinds of story options.
One way to look at this story development might be: Two young women go on a road trip and take an exit to a town with a strange name. They park their car near a giant statue of a man in a toga. Two girls on bicycles ride near them. What happens next? These elements start my head spinning. A story in almost any genre could arise from these elements.
The initial idea came from a section of an unpublished novel I had written years ago where two women were traveling together out West. I had looked at a map for interesting sounding towns along their route and then googled the towns to see what they might be known for. Jumping ahead a few years, I got the idea for a road trip out of Chicago with two different characters. I already knew about the town and the statue.
Since we’re talking about process, can you say when a Jolly Green Giant comes along for you? If you think about a story for a long time before the first word, does something like a giant come early? Is it generative in nature? Does it make your brain spin, rocket forward, or drill into the nature of place?
I just finished writing a story about a man who chooses to live in an empty apartment yet is fixated on eating a chocolate cake. Originally the story was about a man who bragged about choosing not to furnish his apartment, not even silverware or a shower curtain. His ex-wife shows up and begins sleeping on his living room floor. The story sputtered a bit until I started thinking about cake. I wondered what would happen if she brought him an entire chocolate cake and just left it on the counter. Would he ignore it, or would he finally let himself give in to this pleasure? Could the cake symbolize the comfort and indulgence that he has been avoiding? I described the cake in great detail, the dark chocolate ganache, the truffles on the top, the odor of the chocolate sweetness filling the air and also that the cake sat sealed in clear plastic container. What a temptation! I got a lot of mileage out of that cake.
In the drafting process I look for elements that seem to be recurring, or at least more interesting than others. I ask myself, “What is this story really about?” The answer might be obtuse, more like a feeling that I want to shroud the story with—joy, mystery, angst. And maybe that is what subtext comes down to. Charles Baxter, in his book, “The Art of Subtext,” says that subtext is the art of showing what isn’t on the page, “the implied, the half visible, the unspoken.”
So after a story is up and running, you find yourself asking what it’s really about. How does your answer to that question impact drafting or revising?
At this point nuance and subtext do a tweaking dance. I’ve messed around with ideas and know the angle the story will take. I include more opportunities to focus on the emerging strength of the story, the part of the story that starts to hum and vibrate. And as I edit, those parts that don’t seem to fit anymore fall away. As an example, when writing the first few drafts of the Chet story, I thought it was about a mythic kind of creature that visits a farm family. After editing and revising, I discovered the story behind the surface was about a woman’s love for her mother. That discovery guided me into including comments about the mother throughout the story, especially in relation to Chet. Chet becomes the vehicle to demonstrate the mother’s love. Over the years I’ve often seen writing advice along the lines of “don’t insult your reader.” This could mean something like “don’t explain the obvious” but it also encourages writers to rely on subtext to get a point across.
Let’s talk conflict. In your stories, it’s sometimes subtle, very subtle. For instance, “Blue Earth” relies on a barely perceptible tension, a whiff of trouble. Contrarily, “Amber Alert” keeps emotional trouble in the foreground. How do you think about conflict or tension? How does it figure into your approach?
I’m uncomfortable with conflict. I’ve written some dark stories, and my current novel-in-progress would certainly count as one. “Amber Alert” is a story that felt draining to write. In conflict rich stories I tend to piece it out steadily, to lay it out carefully. In “The Way A Person Moves,” the conflict is softened when detailed by my twelve-year-old narrator. If the story was told from the mother’s point of view about her child’s father appearing after abandoning her, well, that conflict would seem a lot sharper to me. Adults carry baggage that children have not experienced.
This is a stunning admission: You don’t like conflict! (It reminds me of a great poet friend—widely published—who openly loathes the physical act of writing.) If conflict drives plot, does your antipathy for conflict help you to usher characters through their problems? I imagine, for instance, you—writer—implicitly say to your characters: Okay, let’s get you through all this trouble.
Maybe. I treat conflict from a sideways angle, rather than straight-on, giving focus to word choice or subtle action. A fighting couple won’t have an all-out brawl in one of my stories but one of them might serve the other food that is barely palatable. My antipathy for conflict helps me develop my story lines because I’m thinking about how my characters will resolve their issues over time. Along the way I’ll include small details that together demonstrate strife. The last thing I want is to have my characters endlessly sit in their trouble. I want them to find a way out, to get through conflict; my stories do have resolutions. I grew up not talking about problems but trying to move through them. My childhood was traumatic and unresolved issues linger with me. Just stating that makes my stomach tight. My ideas about conflict model my own experiences.
It’s a distinct idea because fiction writers are told to embrace conflict, to keep it at the narrative center, and here you come with an impulse to steer around it. Except for “Amber Alert,” maybe your stories keep conflict on the edge of awareness, so it gnaws at the reader or murmurs from the margins. Is that fair to say?
That’s a great insight. In our lives, many of us don’t like to get up in the face of conflict. Life has moved far from the old West days of meeting up at noon in the center of town to have a gun fight, or even meeting up after school for a fist fight. Socially, we are taught to think about other people’s feelings and the consequence of our actions, but in contrast to that our world is rich with problems related to how we interact with each other. In Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx’s modern western, there is tons of unspoken tension or ‘side stepping’ to get at or infer the crushing love between the main characters. That story stayed with me for days; I think that’s a masterful piece of writing. A story like that appeals to me much more than a story with overt conflict.
Let’s get into some thickets, the stuff that keeps writers up at night: Choosing the right POV, the narrative vehicle, can make all the difference in a story’s success. In This Blue Earth, first-person narrators give the book its tone and sense of wonder. Did you find your way to first-person or did the stories emerge from the voice of these characters?
The stories with Callie in them were always first person and I never veered from that idea. Recently I thought of rewriting them into a novella and wondered what would happen if I took the mother’s POV, which automatically seemed like third limited. Those stories would probably take on a much more serious tone. Callie doesn’t know much about the world and as a result, her views on her family and life in general are simple and straightforward. It’s as adults that everything can turn kind of gray.
And yet there’s plenty of complicated subtext in her narration. Callie’s way of describing her life implies a great deal about the pressures beyond her. In this case, the innocence of a first-person narrator carries suggestions about socio-economic tension (for instance). Savvy readers know what Callie doesn’t. Can you talk about that—how you omit, or stay silent on, the difficult issues parading just beyond narrative?
When you ask about issues just beyond narrative, I think about poverty, lack of family support, or just the things that are lacking in a person’s life. My leaning is that people don’t think about their troubles in that way. A character doesn’t ask why he only has five dollars in his pocket, but what is he going to spend that on. In “Amber Alert” my sleeping woman isn’t asking how she can change the subjugation of women, but how she can move through it. My background is very working class; both of my parents did assembly work in factories. For a while my mother did the laundry outside using a wringer washing machine. In the two Callie stories, “The Way a Person Moves” and “Real Life Story Problems” I don’t directly address social issues like the challenges of being a single mother. My characters don’t step far enough from their lives to think about societal issues.
For the novel I’m working on, I’m going with third person limited from the perspective of the two main characters, following both the injurer and the injured, the agent of harm and the victim. Each chapter will be from one of their perspectives and when they are together, which won’t occur often, it will be on neutral ground. So that’s also a carefully thought-out angle. I want to clearly show the cause-and-effect relationship between these two people. The reader will almost always know more than these two characters, which I think will pump up the conflict even more.
One way to think about plot—how the story moves forward—is a function of who knows what. In this sense, every story is a mystery. Characters and readers are trying to learn what they do not, or cannot, know. Does that idea operate in your stories or the current novel project?
It certainly operates in my novel. The character I have referred to as the agent of harm seeks to rationalize his secret addiction. He wants to explore just how far he can take it and still tell himself that there is no harm in his behavior. And when he steps over the line, he blames circumstance rather than himself. I think readers will think deeply about his choices and maybe need to reexamine preconceived notions. When I think about who knows what in this novel, the reader will certainly make guesses about what is going to happen next, but I hope to offer some surprises and insights along the way. The reader might imagine a bad ending for my character, but he, unfortunately, will not acknowledge his descent into peril.
It’s clear you have writerly momentum. You’re motoring ahead, and I wonder if the chapbook publication has helped. In short, how has the publication of This Blue Earth impacted your efforts? How has it shaped your plans or processes?
So much has changed. I had been published many times in the past, but a pretty small crowd reads literary journals, so most people I knew had no idea about my writing. It has been so affirming to have friends and people I don’t know read the chapbook, and now my blog and share how much they have enjoyed reading it.
The people in my hometown have been amazing. The local newspaper interviewed me, our independent bookstore has This Blue Earth propped up by the checkout counter, and my friend who runs an orchard market hosted me for a book signing. The contest win has bolstered my confidence and I’m applying for residencies and just received a grant to fund a future conference. I have a website and a blog now, both things I’ve thought about for a long time. I somehow feel worthy now. Someone with credentials, in this case Thisbe Nissen, has deemed me worthy in a very public and official capacity. I’ve been writing for quite a long time and the dreams I had early on haven’t come to fruition: I didn’t write a novel that got featured on Oprah (didn’t everyone secretly want that?), and I didn’t get a story published in any of the top literary magazines. The two novels I wrote didn’t get published and now, years later, I can see problematic areas I was originally blind to. I’ve learned that the excitement I feel when finishing a story isn’t the best barometer for how good it is. I’m also protective of showing my finished drafts to other people. My husband will always tell me what I’ve written is amazing, but finding people that are willing and able to give a good critique is challenging. That’s one of the reasons that winning this chapbook contest makes me feel worthy: A person who clearly understands literary fiction has determined that I do indeed know how to spin a story. And I also feel compelled to get my novel finished in the next year or so. Like just maybe, having a chapbook and winning a contest will boost my chances of selling that book.
This is great news. The affirmation is a kind of engine for motoring into the next endeavor. Can you say anything more about the novel? I mean, without dousing your writerly flame, can you explain what aspect of the novel keeps you awake at night? In short, what’s hard right now?
One of the issues I grapple with is my central character’s behavior which I call an addiction. It’s disturbing and it’s only in writing groups that I explain what it is. I haven’t met anyone yet who hasn’t had a first response of repulsion for a character with this behavior. I want my reader to understand him, rather than villainize him, at least for the first half of the novel. But as I write, I find myself unconsciously shading many of his unrelated actions negatively and grappling with that during editing. How much of his addiction bleeds into the rest of his life? As a writer, it’s my duty to explore him fully and with dimension, but knowing how his mind works, I wouldn’t want to be in the same room with him in the real world. So that’s tricky.
Another issue is telling the story with narrative summary or scene. I’m seeing a lot of new novels coming out that are heavy on narrative. My personal taste is that scene interests me much more. Tone also keeps me up. I’ve been hearing about books that are called domestic thrillers and perhaps the book I’m writing could fit into that category. My story is primarily literary fiction but has a plot that can easily be sensationalized. So I think about how I’m spinning my story out, carefully, consciously, and with a goal of it still being character driven.
Sharon Bippus is the 2023 winner of the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press chapbook contest for her short story collection, This Blue Earth. Her work has been published in The Bear River Review, Dunes Review, Green House Literary Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She lives in rural Michigan where she is at work on a novel. Find her at sharonbippus.com and @sbippuswrites.
John Mauk hosts Prose from the Underground, a free video series featuring writers of fiction and nonfiction. His first story collection, Field Notes for the Earthbound, was published by Black Lawrence Press. His second collection, Where All Things Flatten, will be available in 2024. For more information, see johnmauk.com.