Hypertext Magazine asked Erica Plouffe Lazure, author of Proof of Me & Other Stories, “Your debut collection tells a series of interconnected stories following the tradition of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but set in or related to the contemporary fictionalized town of Mewborn, North Carolina. What does the linked-story form allow you to do for these characters in these communities that another form might not?”
By Erica Plouffe Lazure
Something I’d experienced as a small-town newspaper reporter is the “mosaic” quality in which a story is both told and heard. When crafting an article, I’d spend my time piecing together different voices and story threads (“gathering string” to quote one of my editors) and eventually (and on deadline) stitch them into a story.
Given the fragmented nature of storytelling, the entirety of a topic can never be fully known, but rather experienced in different contexts, based on what you hear, what you think, who you are, and what you want to know. You learn that some people don’t want to share their stories, while others have stories to tell but no one’s ever asked. I came to understand that, to tap into the underpinnings of a place and a topic, I needed to just listen to the people I was interviewing tell their stories, even if some of them never made it into the paper.
And yet, the stories people tell do find a home—lodged somewhere in the mind and memory of the listener, contributing bit by bit to a larger understanding of a particular place or person. With that in mind, my efforts to “gather string” as a reporter translated well into my approach to crafting and revising Proof of Me & Other Stories. It is my hope that, in an effort to better understand the parameters of this imagined terrain, readers would listen carefully to my characters’ stories, to witness how their grief and joy and insecurity bubble up at the farmers’ market or in the stands of a demolition derby, and how those stories might interconnect or overlap.
You asked about the effect of the linked story form, and I have to say that earlier versions of this collection didn’t emphasize the characters’ connectedness or their shared geography, and it was only in the past few years that I’d been able to see how to take a more cohesive approach to making that happen, to imagine into these stories as a body of voices coming from one place.
I took such pleasure in developing a stronger through-line for this collection, anticipating that another version of Becky Barker or Fred Burns would reemerge, that an interconnectedness would surface because I made it so. Each story was conceived of and written independently, but, kind of like living in community, also relies on their neighbors to enhance and connect each other into something bigger than the standalone experience. It was intriguing to discover, for example, in both the first and final stories in Proof of Me, we hear from two very different characters who are grappling with the death of someone important to them, alongside the guilt and grief that accompanies their loss.
My newspaper days are long gone, but I am convinced that it was the reporter in me who found the potential connections from one story to the next, and who recognized the importance of listening deeply to what my characters had to say, and to honor their voices by highlighting their interconnectedness to each other and their deep attachment to a place they call (or once called) home. It is through their voices and experiences that the story of Mewborn, North Carolina (imagined or not), emerges.
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Related Feature: Excerpt: Erica Plouffe Lazure’s PROOF OF ME & OTHER STORIES
Erica Plouffe Lazure’s debut short story collection, Proof of Me & Other Stories, was awarded the New American Press fiction prize in 2020. She is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Sugar Mountain (2020) and Heard Around Town (2015). Her fiction is published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Carve, Greensboro Review, Meridian, American Short Fiction, The MacGuffin, The Southeast Review, Phoebe, Fiction Southeast, Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine (UK), Hippocampus Magazine, The Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Exeter, NH and can be found online at www.ericaplouffelazure.com.