By Christine Rice
For me, a brilliant piece of writing often shatters what I thought I knew, dumps it out – messy and unrecognizable – before rearranging the pieces in a way that shifts my perception. That perception might be nudged significantly or incrementally but after reading the last page, I almost always see more deeply and with more generosity. Lynn Sloan’s most recent collection of short stories, This Far Isn’t Enough, is one of those collections I tumbled into, and when I came up for air, emerged changed.
Her stories crack open the lives of a wide range of characters and her writer’s eye seeks out a truth – quite masterfully and economically – about each one of those characters’ situations.
Christine Rice: You are a fine art photographer and teacher. You have published short stories in a number of publications. You have written one novel. This Far Isn’t Enough is your second book.
Can you talk about your journey as an artist? What did you create as a child? When did your interest in visual art begin? When did you start writing?
Lynn Sloan: When I was a girl, I wanted to be a ballerina and a spy. Doing different things seemed like the way to go. When I hit college, I had no idea how to limit myself to one major. When I was forced to declare, I chose English Literature—the fun reading—but I took all the courses required for majors in Film and Art History. With such a heavy load, essentially three majors, I had only one real elective and in my last quarter, on a lark, I took photojournalism. The shooting assignments weren’t interesting—you’re kidding! A basketball game?—but working in the darkroom was magic. Two years later I enrolled in a grad program in photography. My first weekend in grad school, I was so stunned by what was asked of me, I stayed in my apartment for three days and read War and Peace cover to cover. Reading was solace. After grad school, when I worked as an editorial photographer, then when I taught photography, I wrote about art exhibitions for various art publications. Writing to explain tricky ideas was a challenge, and it helped me understand what I wanted to do as an image-maker, but always I read literary fiction and poetry, as I had in college. I so admired the writers who made me see the world in new ways that one day I thought I’d try to write a story. It was terrible. For starters, I didn’t know that it’s a cliché to begin a story with your protagonist waking up in the morning. My writer friend who pointed this out suggested I take a course. So I did. I studied with Fred Shafer, an extraordinary teacher, who teaches private workshops in his home. Part of what he teaches is how to read like a writer, not like an English major.
CR: Yes, that is a huge and important lesson…being able to read like a writer. There is a world of difference between those two approaches.
Nice transition to my next question.
In her essay “Reading as a Writer, The Artist as Craftsman,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote:
And yet, inspiration and energy and even genius are rarely enough to make “art”: for prose fiction is also a craft, and craft must be learned, whether by accident or design.
What have been the most formative events for you as a writer (and visual artist)?
LS: Who could argue with Oates? Art is a made thing, requiring skills, tools, and craft. Recently I heard Stuart Dybek speak at a writers’ conference. He began by saying how good it was to be in a room full of writers, adding, “Note, I didn’t say a room full of story tellers. All human beings are story tellers.” He went on enumerate the countless ways we all tell stories to each other, at work and with our friends and families, how we gossip and repeat the news, but when we write a story, we create an object using tools and tactics and we deploy strategies.
Stories are objects, as are photographs.
Visiting the art and design school I ended up attending for graduate school, I was shepherded around by an enrolled student who took me into their gallery. On display were Emmet Gowin’s photographs, b/w prints of his wife, Edith, and their family, that he’d taken in their cabin and surrounding woods in Virginia. These pictures stopped me cold they were so beautiful. “How did he do this?” I asked. My guide answered, “He does it right.” Doing it right—I wanted to learn how to do that. Learning to do it “right,” I found out, meant more than simply mastering the mechanical, chemical, technical tools; it had everything to do with studying what had been done before, using curiosity to probe ever deeper, discovering and honing a personal sense of the beautiful and the meaningful. The same thing is true when learning to write. Looking at great photographs led me forward. Reading great books and stories led me to writing fiction.
CR: It always floors me when writers admit to not reading contemporary writers’ work. Reading others’ work is a compass pointing me onward. In other words, if she’s doing that, I’d better step up my game too.
There are a number of stories in this collection that really shook me to the core. “Safe” is one of those stories. It’s a story about a mother welcoming home her estranged son and it touches on so many issues…how we can lose a person – a child – and at the same time, want that child back…and then want him or her to disappear again? Can you tell me about the genesis of this story?
LS: For me, too, “Safe” is a killer. In 1997, a news story broke about a San Diego cult whose thirty-nine members committed mass suicide as Comet Hale-Bopp sped past the Earth believing that the comet would carry them into space. A few days later I heard a radio story where a reporter followed up on this tragedy by locating the mother of one of the men who’d committed suicide.
The reporter had recorded the ringing of the doorbell, the sound of the door opening, her own voice asking, “How do you feel about your son committing suicide?” How could the reporter ask such an indecent question? The mother replied, “You must understand, he left us twelve years ago.” “You must understand,” spoken with heart-breaking gravity but no heat struck me and stayed with me. I didn’t understand. The next year when I witnessed up close a dear friend’s family come apart, I remembered that woman’s words. When stories are told about estrangement, they’re told usually from the younger person’s point of view: the lousy parents, the neglect, the intolerance, but there can be another side. I’m drawn to writing about the less-told side of the story.
CR: The “less-told side of the story” is a great way to put it.
“Lost and Found” was another story that rattled me. What scope for a short story! It covers so much time and space. Can you talk about how that story took shape? Was it one of those stories that took you by surprise or did you have a sense of what the situation was all along?
LS: “Lost and Found” began as a romp, and became something deeper, darker, and more complicated very quickly. It began with high heel stilettos. In Nordstrom’s, I picked up a five-inch number designed by Jimmy Choo, and thought, You could kill yourself in these, and imagined a story titled, “Jimmy Choo Killed My Mother.” This title gave me an indefinite mother; a mother meant I had a child, who had to be a daughter, because it’s more likely that a daughter would know the name of the shoe designer; she would be an adult daughter. The daughter who disapproves of her mother’s shoes, became a daughter who disapproves of her mother in every way. With the speed of switching slides in an old-fashioned slide projector, these notions, daughter, mother, took on shapes as individuals with names and histories. Since most of us, and the characters I’m interested in writing about, think they are doing the best they can, this meant that the mother had to have more to her than her daughter could see. Now as I describe this process of coming up with a story or a plot, it sounds pretty logical. If A, then B. But that’s not how it works for me. I doodle around, imaging the characters, in this story, Lauren, the daughter, Frannie, the mother, their jobs, their ways of thinking, how they act toward one another. With the kind of serendipity that comes when you put your mind into your work, good things come. Or as Louis Pasteur said it better, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” In this case, Frannie’s back story and her secrets came to me quickly. And the title that got me started, “Jimmy Choo Killed My Mother” promised a funny story, not the one I ended up writing. It had to go, although I liked it too much to jettison, so it became a line of dialogue.
CR: The movement was so swift and complete. Any thoughts about movement in short stories?
LS: Up to now, we’ve been discussing where stories come from and how they develop, which is about the events and the characters in the story, but this question about movement is about craft. Craft is, I think, where the art of writing resides. How to make the story become a felt experience—that’s what craft is about. In the first draft, I try to puzzle out a plot, and, of course, a plot becomes the plot as I write successive drafts. As I come to understand the developing story, I envision it as something like a photographic time-exposure of a dance where the movement of the dancer is rendered as a long blur with dense sections where the dancer held the moment, spinning in space, with streaky and faint sections where the dancer’s movement was swift. When you look at a story like this, you want to cover some ground and you want variety. At some parts of the story, I want to cover lots of ground fast, because fast is exhilarating. At important emotional parts of the story, I want my piece to be dense, to take on weight that a reader will feel. What kind of an ending do I want? Fast or slow, heavy or light, forward aiming or backward looking, figuring this out is hardest part of writing for me. Which means I love it. And I’m never satisfied.
CR: Many of the characters in This Far Isn’t Far Enough are so wildly different and yet they’re sketched with such generosity and understanding. For example, Ollie is a chef who’s been double-crossed by his now-jailed lover. Michelle is a single mom with a developmentally challenged son…and a drinking problem. Bonnie needs ‘some distance’ from her family and moves to an island.
LS: Chris, that’s very kind of you to say that I write with understanding. I write about individuals who aren’t like me, it’s one way for me to live a larger life. While I don’t have enough experience to write authentically about the marginalized in our world, in recent years I’ve written about characters who are overlooked in the ordinary way. To most they just aren’t that interesting. Ollie is one. I love him, but I set out to write a story about a guy who wasn’t smart. I was fed up with the notion of the meritocracy. Why should only the smart or talented or the weird occupy space? With Michelle in “Grow Animals” I wanted to dig into how having a severely disabled child can isolate a woman. Michelle has become invisible to her former friends. Bonnie in “Nature Rules” is truly tired of being a mother. Such a woman would be shunned in our world. These explanations for why I am drawn to certain characters sound as if I have a social agenda. What’s closer to the truth is that I like to explore what I haven’t explored before and characters that I think have gone unexplored by others.
CR: That’s why short stories are so wonderful. They are nimble enough to explore worlds that have been ignored.
How did this collection develop? Over many years? Or in a shorter time period?
LS: A few summers ago, when I was stuck on the couch with a broken ankle that I was told to keep elevated above heart-level, and having no energy to think creatively, I cleaned up my computer files, and discovered that a number of my stories, written over about twenty years, with varied characters and situations, shared something: the past, often which the character has tried to outrun, determines how the character must act. This became the axis that collected the stories in This Far Isn’t Far Enough. In the words of Eudora Welty, writer and photographer, “Never think you’ve seen the last of anything.”
CR: Are certain characters in this collection still nagging at you? Do they demand further investigation?
LS: No character nags me after I’ve finished a story. Finished means finished for me. But there are themes or concerns that are still alive for me.
CR: Francine Prose wrote in her essay “What Makes a Short Story”:
Some stories have huge amounts of plot–it has been said that Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Marquise of O.” was used, unedited, as a shooting script for Eric Rohmer’s full-length film (of the same name) based on the novella. And some stories– John Updike’s “A&P,” Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” – have, by comparison, almost no plot at all.
I found that your stories fell somewhere in the middle – in a wonderful way – where I could identify a (short story) plot but the story never seemed beholden to it (my stories fall in that same category too, I think). Your characters and the situations never seemed contrived to fit plot.
Can you talk about how you use plot in your fiction? Was plot more important in the writing of a novel? Or is it just one other element, equal to all other elements of story?
LS: If my stories hit any of the same sweet spots as yours, I am really flattered. In your novel Swarm Theory, you pull off what I have only dreamed about: you created an ensemble of characters, all heartbreakingly engaging, with complicated stories woven together, in a community that lives and breathes.
[Thank you, Lynn!]
LS: For me plot is a series of events that reveals character, and the series of events has to be interesting and realistic. That’s the same for the story and the novel. I figure out the plot when I make my character act. Plot in a novel is much harder for me to manage than story plot, there is so much more of it. How to keep everything ratcheting up, yet staying real and true is tough, until at some point the elements begin to hold together of their own accord and then you glide along happily to THE END.
Odd as this may sound coming from one who spends her time creating plots and characters: what I remember about a book is never the plot, and often not the characters. What I remember is how it feels to be held in the author’s take on the world. Bizarre, right? When I finished reading Alice Munro’s The Moons of Jupiter, I was so sorry to leave her created world of insights, concerns, and emotional tone that I immediately turned back to page one and started reading again. This sense of regret when we come to the end of a novel we love comes, I believe, from leaving a world that matters to us and whose values we yearn to live within. For me plot is the engine that runs that world.
CR: So many of your stories are absurdly humorous. “Call Back,” and “Lost and Found,” for example, struck me as so funny and so terribly, terribly sad (and tragic). That those two emotions can exist so seamlessly in life and on the page is a wonder, isn’t it?
I’m curious about that combination…is that something that you’ve always been able to identify? Or is it something you’ve grown to see? For me, I’ve grown to see it…that life can be so ridiculous and tragic all at once. What about you?
LS: Life is funny and terribly, terribly sad. This is simply a fact, or so it seems to me. How we see the world is what we bring to our writing. It’s so inherent to us, so basic, we scarcely recognize it as distinctly personal. Funny, touching, sad, cruel, glorious, all this and more is what life is. In writing, I often start with absurd or funny actions or situations, but soon I cut out the jokes and keep the funny. So much in life is funny and so little of it is a joke. When I started out, I wrote social satires. I loved poking holes in the pompous and the absurd. I wrote stories in the form of crazed office memoranda, shopping lists that reflected devolving mental states, transcripts of lunatic voice messages, personal ads, helicopter parents’ instructions to babysitters. No more. Now I write about what I care about.
CR: Of all of the characters in This Far Isn’t Enough, do you have a favorite? If so, why?
LS: When I re-read my stories, I love all my characters, but—psst, don’t tell the children—I love some more than others. But it wouldn’t be fair to tell.
CR: Then I won’t press!
Virginia Woolf, in Diary, 21 April 1928, wrote:
And yet the only exciting life is the imaginary one.
What does that quote mean to you? True? False? Some where in between?
LS: Virginia Woolf nailed it––for stories. Always the story I imagine is much better than the one I write. That doesn’t stop me from keeping at it. As for life—she overlooked the pleasure and excitement of sensory perception.
Lynn Sloan is a writer and a photographer. Her novel Midstream (Fomite, 2022) was called “luminous” by Foreword Reviews and her Principles of Navigation was chosen for Chicago Book Review’s Best Books of 2015. She is the author of the story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough. Fortune Cookies, her flash fiction using fortune cookie fortunes, was produced as an art book by Lark Sparrow Press in 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshare and included in NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work can be found at www.LynnSloan.com
Pick up a copy of Lynn Sloan’s This Far Isn’t Far Enough (FOMITE PRESS) at your favorite indie bookstore or order it HERE.
Christine Maul Rice’s award-winning novel, Swarm Theory, was called “a gripping work of Midwest Gothic” by Michigan Public Radio and earned an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award (finalist), and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup: The Best Books of 2016 So Far. In 2019, Christine was included in New City’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago’s Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk*, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of the literary nonprofit Hypertext Magazine & Studio and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University.