AN INTRODUCTION: "INTERVIEWS WITH A FAMOUS WRITER"

Welcome to "Interviews with a Famous Writer." On this site, we focus on the varied and prolific works of author Lauryn Mutter. However, it is quite possible that we will feature another writer or two at some point. 

Why a site dedicated to the writing of Lauryn Mutter, you may be forgiven for asking? It's a question so ludicrous as to border on the rhetorical -- but for those sad uninitiated few out there who could possibly ask this question in earnest and with a straight face, here are a few things you need to know about Lauryn Mutter. 

She's glamorous. 

She's  rich.

She's an award-winning author, having received the Official Lauryn Mutter Fan Club's prestigious Blue Ribbon of Distinction five years running.

Yes, she's all of this. And she's also terribly famous. Tragically famous. That kind where paparazzi are taking pictures of you when you are pumping gas in your flip-flops.

Here at "Interviews with a Famous Writer," we heart Lauryn Mutter. And hey, guess what?! Lauryn Mutter hearts us right back! 

INTERVIEW: “LIFE GOES ON: MICROFICTIONS” AND “BAD PEOPLE: MICROFICTIONS”

Story: “Life Goes On: Microfictions” and “Bad People: Microfictions” (<-Click there to read the stories!) 
Genre: "Microfictions" 
Keywords: The Bunny Ranch Brothel in Nevada Where It’s Legal; Sell-Out Ghost Towns; Elle Advice Columnists; Viking Invasions 
Trivia: Several of these stories are only one or two sentences long. 

Why did you start writing “short-short” stories like these? 
I was stranded in San Jose on a business trip back in 2008 – at the last minute my flight got delayed by two days (meaning two extra unplanned nights in hotel rooms), but somehow all my co-workers were able to go home on their flights. I had a lot of time to kill, and I picked up an issue of Harper’s at a bookstore. I remember sitting at this outdoor table, I think on the rooftop patio of the store, reading these teeny-tiny stories by Paul Theroux.

I’d never seen anything like them. The instant I saw his stories, I knew I had to try to write some of my own. So I started doing that, and I fell in love with the form. I’ve since seen brilliant ones written by John Edgar Wideman – also in Harper’s, which has become my favorite magazine for discovering new (or, new-to-me) short fiction.

My “microfictions” have been the biggest hit by far out of all the writing I’ve shared with members of the short-fiction workshop I was going to in DC a while back. People were saying that it was imperative that I get them published, and I even got e-mails from two different members who hadn’t attended the particular meeting where I shared my first batch – they had heard such good things about my little stories from the other members, and the people who e-mailed me wanted to read them, too.    

How do you pick a subject for one of these? 
Although there’s no method or criteria I use for determining what will or won’t make a good microfiction subject, I went through this one weird phase during which I cranked out a bunch of decent ones as the result of a self-imposed writing exercise. At a past job, I was put in charge of starting up a blog to serve as a “friendly” mouthpiece for the organization’s president. She was kind of an artsy-hippie type, and she brought in this magazine for me to look at, featuring all of these faux-vintage-photo-centric blogs. You know – the kind with lots of pictures of vintage things (cameras, typewriters, pop bottles) and mugs of green tea and people’s toes standing in their herb garden or whatever, all of it with that gauzy Instagram gloss to it.

I remember flipping through that magazine (it was one of the thick, expensive ones printed on nice paper – the kind that costs $12 instead of $3), sort of gingerly, thinking that everything in it was so precious and corny. So as a strange sort of exercise, who even knows why, I started writing these pieces that delved into why each of those images were so potent to a certain kind of person. Or, I would use the image as a jumping-off point for a story. The answer was usually that these “pretty” things masked a kind of emptiness in a person’s life. Or so I imagined – which probably says more about me than it does about any particular segment of humanity.

But to actually answer your question, I can usually just sort of sense when something will work OK for a microfiction. It can be a moment or vignette that indicates something much larger, or it can be a whole life compressed into a paragraph. My only guideline is really just: Will this be a satisfying little read? I imagine these as highly polished gems, shimmering on the page or the screen. And because they’re so compressed, every word choice has to be perfect – every word is fighting to be there. 

That leads into another question – how does your writing process or style differ when it comes to writing these short pieces? 
In a strange way, it really doesn’t. The process is the same – I get an idea, I write it up. Even the style, I think, is still recognizably mine; I like to think you can still hear my “voice” in these.

The main difference, I think, is that there is necessarily more scrutiny given to every single word in a short-short piece, so again, every word must be perfect. Or, as perfect as a subjective and human-made thing can ever be. The one- and two-sentence ones are my favorite – as a writer, it feels as if I’m doing a circus trick when I pull that off – but also seem to come to me far more rarely. If your story is only one sentence long, it better be one damn profound sentence.

However – you often hear writers say stuff like: “The shortest pieces are the hardest to write.” It’s true that a reader will probably be likely to notice a bad word choice in something that's extremely short, but I don’t think these are necessarily harder to write than longer pieces. In fact, one of my biggest challenges is creating the necessary architecture, the buttresses and such, to support a big ol’ long, sprawling piece – maybe I like to write these so much because for me the short-shorts are easy. 

Is there a reason you prefer the term “microfiction” to, say, “flash fiction” or “short-shorts”? 
True story: For a batch of these that my friend Oliver published on his Moustache Club of America site, we totally used the title: “We Wear Short Shorts.”

I just think "microfiction" looks nice, one self-contained word. “Flash fiction” sounds to me like “flash mob” or “flash bomb," very... flashy, and some of my microfictions seem to occupy a world that’s slow and contemplative even though it doesn’t take very long to read them. For example, I wrote one about my grandmother looking out her kitchen window at a lady scarecrow that my grandfather made. The story focuses on that one moment and her thoughts in that moment, but refers to “his women,” and hints at a whole long marriage’s worth of infidelity on his part. It’s only a few paragraphs long, but it doesn’t feel very “flash” to me – she’s in her quiet house in the country, thinking back on a lifetime of sorrow.

I guess, regardless of what I just said about how it’s fun to pull off the one-sentence party trick – “flash fiction” sounds to me as if you’re saying, “Ta da!” For me, writing these tiny fictions isn’t about pulling a stunt or a prank; to me, a true microfiction could never be anything else. Those stories must be at home in their short-short form. The decision to write them short should be about doing what’s best for the story, not what will look cool or tricksy, or will meet the requirements of some trendy flash-fiction contest. 

Which ones of these are based on true stories? 
“Bunnies” is about something my friend Zack once talked about doing if he didn’t lose his virginity by a certain age; he didn’t do that (that I know of), but I imagined what it might be like if he had.

I wrote “The man with the stutter” after going to a friend’s Greek-myths-themed play, and meeting a guy with a stutter around the same time. I don’t have a stutter, but I’ve always felt tongue-tied and awkward socially, so in that sense, I can relate.

“Calico” is based on an actual disappointing ghost town I stopped at once when I was driving out West.

“Peace pie” was totally my husband’s idea. Or, it stemmed from an idea of his that we both riffed on, and I made it into a little story.

I wrote “Cut Off Your Nose” after reading what Wikipedia had to say about the origins of the phrase “cut off your nose to spite your face.”

“Hang in there, toots” is based on actual answer given by Elle magazine’s “Ask Auntie E.” I love her column, but I found that particular response well-meaning yet troubling.

And as I mentioned earlier, “Scarecrow” is about my grandparents. I wrote a whole batch of microfictions about their relationship; this is just one of them.

INTERVIEW: “ENABLERS”

Story: “Enablers” (<-Click there to read the story!)
Genre: Short Fiction
Keywords: The Drunk-Driving Dream Team; Characters Named “Shamalama Dingdong;” Cirrhosis
Soundtrack: "The Michael Jordan of Drunk Driving" by Andrew Jackson Jihad

Tell us about the genesis of this story.
The friendship and conversations in this story are an amalgam of ones I’ve had with a number of different guy friends. The most obvious one is my friend Ron, who's in the photo with me that's posted at the end of the story. Most of the anecdotes, about him being a playwright and placing third in an Elvis contest and being homeless and going to college in Ireland, are ripped directly from his life.

He’s seen this story, and liked it, which pleased me a lot. (I wouldn’t have used the photo of him and me right there with the story if he hadn’t been OK with all that.) As a writer, he understands that “you” in a story is not necessarily you in real life, so he wasn’t bothered by the parts that weren’t about him.

For example, a key thing: The conversation about drunk driving was actually one that I had with someone else, but heavily fictionalized and "embroidered" for dramatic effect. To my knowledge, Ron doesn’t have an issue with drinking at all, and I can’t recall his ever having mentioned driving drunk. So uh, that’s a pretty big part of the story that I attributed to him but that doesn’t match up with the real-life Ron at all.

How does this story relate to your own issues with alcoholism?
Part of why I wrote this story was because there are certain things you can say in fiction – words you can put in a character’s mouth – that you would be excoriated for if you said them as yourself in real life. For example: Saying that you’re good at drunk driving. Of course, that’s a stupid thing to say, and no one is actually good at that. But some of us think that we are, in that moment when we’re drunk. That’s a shame, but that’s life, and art is supposed to reflect life. People do stupid things. To pretend otherwise would be inaccurate.

I mean, I could have written a story in which McGruff the Crime Dog tells you not to drink and drive – but the reality of drunk driving will probably come across in a more real and poignant way if you have a couple of idiots talking about how doing it is not so bad. 

I also wanted to touch on some of the perceived bohemian glamour that some people associate with drinking – Bukowski writing poetry in a whiskey haze or whatever. I have very talented writer friends, such as my friend Dave, who write very well when they’re drunk. As for me, anything I ever wrote while drunk just looked – later, to my sober eyes – like the melodramatic stuff I wrote as a teenager. I do better with some kind of (literally) sobering filter. I don’t know why that is.

The part at the end about my dad’s cousin Gail is key, I think. (That part’s true, by the way, including what my dad said about how she always seemed happy.) The two characters have been flat-out told that drinking so much can kill them; here's this example in the narrator's own family. And what do they do? They make a toast to Gail, and then they drink. Sometimes when you love to do a thing, you don’t want to stop, even when you know it’s bad for you. In your faulty logic, the pros outweigh the cons, or the cons seem like things you can live with.

What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
That people will tell themselves all sorts of beautiful and self-aggrandizing lies to justify their self-destruction.

INTERVIEW: “LAKE OF FIRE”

Story: “Lake of fire” (<-Click there to read the story!) 
Genre: Short Fiction 
Keywords: Ménage à trois in 1960s Canada; Polygamy; "Militant" Feminists Who Don't Shave
Soundtrack: "May This Be Love" by Jimi Hendrix     

Tell us how you got the idea for this story. 
In the “Adults” interview on this site, I mentioned this guy who’s basically the model for every “older guy” character of mine – a professor with whom I was once involved. (He was 51 and I was 27 at the time; he’s the father of my first-ever boyfriend whom I dated when we were 13 and 14. The dad was my first-ever lover, so hey, a lot of “firsts” in that family.)

At some point my older dude told me just a tiny bit about his ex-wife (that’d be the mom of my first-ever boyfriend). What’s truly weird is that his ex-wife drove her son and me in her minivan to the movies for dates when we were in junior high. OK, that’s too weird to dwell on. Let’s move on.

The dad mentioned that his ex-wife had been a “militant, bra-burning feminist” who didn’t shave and seemed uncomfortable with the idea of sex. Somehow this notion bloomed in my mind into the idea of this trio – a guy who loves his wife but doesn’t get what he needs from her, and this young girl who’s willing to give him exactly what he needs (although the emotional truth of this part of the equation is more complicated than that, as the girl realizes many years later). 

I have no idea why it’s set in Canada, or why it's set in the 1960s other than the fact that I think the ex-wife was at her most “militantly feminist” and bra-burning-est in that era. I wrote the first scene first – I typically write stories in chronological order, almost exactly as you read them – and went from there. I thought of two characters making love in “a bungalow,” or some kind of rustic joint in the woods, raindrops on the window screen, and someone listening to that Jimi Hendrix song about the waterfall off in another room.

I should point out that the older guy in my life bears very little resemblance, physically or personality-wise, to Luke in this story. My older guy was a balding English professor and haiku scholar, and Luke is this virile thirtysomething dude who sometimes gets carpenter gigs. I picture Luke as looking kind of like a poor man’s Brad Pitt. But Beatrice (his wife) – I made her look like the real-life guy’s ex-wife as much as possible, as much as I could remember from her driving me to the movies in her minivan. I’m sure I’m picturing her all wrong, though. 

The story is structured, in some places, almost more like notes for a story – for example, “How it began,” and the “questions people would likely ask at this point.” 
That’s true. Honestly, I think that was mostly just me being lazy – although at some point it occurred to me that the technique that arose out of that laziness kind of worked. It was unconventional, and therefore original. But at first, I had written what I worried was an improbable or sensationalistic story – and the “questions” parts were my dealing with what I imagined were these critical readers with their eyebrows raised skeptically.

My friend Zack, who provided invaluable feedback that changed my story “Adults” for the better, read this one and thought the "questions" section was a cop-out device, but I left it like that. I think it works, of course, or I would have changed it. 

Did you do any research to write about the things in the story that fall outside your personal experience – life in 1960s Canada, for example? 
Only the merest sliver. I felt surprisingly vindicated when my brilliant Canadian writer friend, Dave, said he’s actually been to or near Algonquin Park – a place whose name I grabbed at random from an online map of Canada – and could imagine the story having taken place around there. I think the only concession I made to the story’s being set in Canada was to change one reference of “miles” to “kilometers”! 

There’s some obvious symbolism here – the house with only two rooms, saying good-bye to the bungalow in autumn when the characters are much older. 
Yeah. I like to really hit you over the head with my symbolism. Subtle I ain’t! I think this is partly because I don’t know many writers, so I’m writing for an audience (my friends, my Facebook "friends") who don’t necessarily go looking for symbolism in every little thing. I almost want to put symbols and things in bold, like a vocabulary word in a textbook.

It’s a little bit corny to be that blatant about it – but you know what? Sometimes stuff in real life is corny and almost embarrassingly obvious like that, too. When I broke up with my first fiancé, in college, I gathered up his things he had left in my dorm room and brought them over to him in the only container-type thing I had: a trash bag. He even joked about how it was an apt metaphor. Patterns and themes are there, and it’s human nature to see that stuff everywhere. So I don’t mind the lack of subtlety. I don’t beat myself up over it.  

Tell us about the title of this story – why did you choose it, and what does it mean? 
This is one of my less obvious titles. And I could see it being misleading – “lake of fire” is usually a poetic synonym for hell, I think, and there’s that Nirvana song with that title.

To me, the lake of fire describes the little house in which these three people lived with all their desires and frustrations and storminess. I guess it was a kind of hell, for Beatrice, and for the narrator sometimes, too, although she doesn’t realize how damaging it was to her until she’s much older. It wasn’t hell for Luke, but he was tormented by his desires – for sex, for sex with the narrator – so maybe it’s apt for him, too.

Any Puritanical implications – for example, that the characters are going to hell because they’re living in a sort of threesome arrangement – are unintentional. The title, to me, is more about a private kind of anguish that people go through alone, not some divinely inflicted punishment in the afterlife.

What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story? 
That you can write about sex – or, about a living arrangement based on a sexual situation – without its being porn. At its heart, the story is really about people with needs that aren’t getting met. Everyone is disgruntled; it’s sort of the opposite of my story “Adults,” in which I truly believe Richard and Bess love each other and are, for the most part, happy together. Maybe not for the long haul, but for the duration of the story and the foreseeable future they are.

In this story, everyone’s just sad and alone. They’re those flowers that were once a bouquet, that Luke tosses into the water at the end, floating away from one another on separate paths.

INTERVIEW: “THE LATEST IN BLOOD AND GUTS”

Story: “The latest in blood and guts” (<-Click there to read the story!)
Genre: Short Fiction (based on real-life events)
Keywords: Broadcast News in Florida in the 1970s; Puppets; Nominees for the Bradenton District Office’s Forestry and Conservation Award; the Dateless Wonder Club; Unsolicited Chocolate Cakes
Trivia: This story is an imagined filling-in of details about the life of broadcast journalist Christine Chubbuck, who shot herself in the head on camera in 1974. The story’s title is a phrase she used in that last-ever live report. 
Soundtrack: "You Appearing" by M83

Where did the idea for this story come from? 
My friend Nick posted a link on Facebook to an article, or a Wikipedia page or something, about Christine Chubbuck, whom I’d never heard of. Thanks to his post, I started reading a little bit of her life story, and I immediately wanted to write about her. Or rather – it seemed as if I immediately started writing about her. It was never a question of “Will I write about this?”, weighing the pros and cons – it just sort of happened, right away. Sometimes a subject just grabs you. 

I brought this story to the short-fiction workshop I used to attend here in DC, and we read it as a group (in that particular writing group, someone other than the writer always reads the story aloud, so the writer can see if other people stumble over the words or whatever). I didn’t tell them beforehand that it was based on the life of a real person, with details taken from news clips. I think they all thought it was somehow about me – my real name is similar to “Christine,” I’m a former journalist, I have dark hair, I’m not the most socially suave human being in the world. I think they were worried about me, like it was some kind of not-that-thinly-veiled cry for help.

There was this awkward moment of silence after we read it, and then I told them it was based on a real person who killed herself that way. Everyone kind of went, “Ohhh…”, and something clicked, and then they got it. I think then they could see it as more of an objective story instead of a fictionalized journal entry or something. I viewed that reaction as indicative of a failing on my part as a writer. I intentionally didn’t tell them at first that it was fictionalized non-fiction, hoping the story would stand on its own as a good story.  

But instead everyone kept asking about the real-life chick, and one guy even spun around in his chair – that writing group meets in the computer lab of a prep school – and Googled her right then and there. It was so weird to have her gloomy mug peering out at us during the story discussion. But you know, I think she would have liked that. And I like to think she would have liked my story.  

Why do you think she would have liked your story? 
Because I tried to hold that sensationalized idea of “the latest in blood and guts” up to the light and ridicule it, or expose it for being a hypocritical or at least cynical impulse to have, as a media organization and as a culture. I tried to do that by contrasting this real woman's sadness as well as these fairly noble little endeavors of hers – the little community-news bits, the puppets for the children at the hospital – that aren’t so newsworthy with the stuff that, sadly, is newsworthy. 

And it is unfortunate what's newsworthy and what isn't. I mean, I don’t know about her because she volunteered to cheer up sick kids with puppets; I know about her because she blew her brains out on TV.  

The news stories I found online quoted people saying she had a dark sense of humor. That’s part of what leads me to think she wouldn’t go, “Oh, heavens to Betsy!” at my writing a warts-and-all story about her. Also, I get the sense that she badly wanted to be loved, or at least understood. I think she would have liked to know that – 30 years after her death – here was this little group of amateur writers looking at her picture and talking about her in an after-hours prep school in Washington, DC. More than immortality, it's a kind of love, keeping a person's memory alive.   

You’ve mentioned that you looked at old news articles when working on this story. Tell us about that process – how did you choose what nuggets of information to use, and how did you go about making some things up?
It started out as just my being fascinated with her, and curious, and sort of post-mortem Google-stalking her. It was the quotes from people who knew her, along with these random and sometimes oddball factoids I kept coming across, that made me feel that I had to put it all together in a story. 

It was terribly unscientific – or organic, if I want to put a marketing spin on it. I was pretty sloppy about it – sometimes I used word-for-word quotations from actual people that I’d seen in actual news articles, but my story doesn't have any footnotes or anything. Maybe that would have to change if this ever appeared in a printed book or publication. That would kind of suck, because it’s been a while and I forget where I got everything from. It was all just sort of “out there in the Internet ether.” When you work in obscurity, assuming you'll never be famous and can therefore fly under the radar, sometimes you cut a lot more corners.   

I used to be a journalist, so I like to think I have a decent sense of when it’s OK to simply say “A news article said…” versus when you’re basically stealing another reporter’s work line-by-line and being a jerk. Sometimes it’s OK to borrow facts (to me this includes quotes from sources you’d never be able to track down now), but you never steal another writer’s language – the way they wrote something up. Geez, why would you even want to? Writing stuff up is the fun part.  

What are some things you made up?
Very little factually. There are clearly some scenes – any in which Christine is alone, for example, such as the one in which she’s alone in her house, the part about the creaks in the stairs; apparently she really did have a pink room like a little girl's room, though – that neither I nor any reporter could have known about. And whenever I speculate about what she might have been thinking or feeling, well, that’s speculation; I didn’t do anything like read a journal of hers. 

For those scenes and details, I pretty much just tried to do what I always do when I write a story: make the characters as believable as possible; make them say and do things that are authentic-seeming, that seem like things they would say or do. With the caveat that people are sometimes unpredictable, of course – but even their unpredictable actions (say, blowing your brains out on TV) should make some kind of sense when you look at the whole story. In this story, I tried to use the melancholy mood as a kind of foreshadowing.  

Although there didn’t need to be any foreshadowing, because I started with the scene in which she blows her brains out. I'm sorry if that sounds like a disrespectful or indelicate way to put it – but for some reason I feel as if she would have appreciated that kind of blunt honesty.   

Why did you begin the story with that scene?
In a practical sense, I wanted the reader to clearly know why they were reading this story. It’s sort of like a teaser on TV. Otherwise you might just think you’re reading about this unhappy TV-news chick in the 1970s, like a really bleak and gender-reversed version of "Anchorman," and you might not care. If you know that’s going to happen – you might care to read about what drove her to do that. I just now realized that this style is in line with journalistic-writing standards: you put the lead (some people spell it "lede") at the top; you don't "bury the lead."

What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
I feel compelled to say something pat and cliché here, such as: “Heed this cautionary tale and reach out to anyone you think might be depressed.” But that doesn’t feel quite right; it feels like a Public Service Announcement. There’s a place for PSAs, but I’m not sure their place is in art. That sort of thing seems to make art kind of… corny. 

I think the message of this story might be about something more along the lines of what Christine was so karmically frustrated about – the public appetite for “blood and guts,” and (some of) the media’s eagerness to feed it. Her story is totally a blood-and-guts one, but I tried to get behind that a little bit and look at some of the humanity and nuance behind one person’s act of violent self-destruction.  

Maybe what I want you to take away is: This was a person, with hopes and dreams and flaws and frustrations. Behind every gory news story and statistic you see are people like that.

INTERVIEW: “AFTERLIFE”

Story: “Afterlife” (<-Click there to read the story!)
Genre: Short Fiction; Pre-, During-, and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction; Zombie Stories That Don’t Say the “Z” Word
Keywords: “Holy Sh*t, They’re Here;” Hurricane Katrina News Clips; Goth Clubs of Washington, DC
Trivia: The soundtrack to the preview for the never-been-filmed movie version of this story is the Shiny Toy Guns cover of Depeche Mode’s song “Stripped.”

You’re known for writing strictly realistic fiction. What made you decide to try your hand at a zombie-story-that-doesn’t-say-the-“z”-word?
It was actually my husband’s idea. He said he would like to see a story or movie about a group of characters who were descending (or ascending) into decadence (alcohol, sex, drugs) as a form of escapism during an apocalypse. Or, he said something like that and that’s how my brain chose to interpret it.

Of course, once I started working on the story, I realized that none of the characters would be in the mood for sex, so they just went with alcohol and drugs instead. And only some of them did even that. I didn’t actually hew all that close to his original vision, come to think of it.

I felt pretty sure that I could write about a sci-fi type of thing like a zombie invasion, but do it my way – in this realistic tone that’s supposed to make you trust that the narrator is telling you the truth. I didn’t want this story to be about entertainment, or gore. But then, a lot of apocalyptic stories are more about the atmosphere or aesthetic than anything else – I think that’s why so many of them skip the apocalypse action altogether and put you right there in all this bleakness. It’s almost a style thing for some writers, I think.

The short answer is that I pride myself on being a flexible and experimental writer who will try just about anything. My friend Oliver used to issue me writing challenges – we imagined we were all cerebral and fancy, like Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth in “The Five Obstructions” – to shake me out of my comfortable trance. He’d tell me to write a mystery story, or about sports. And I did it, and some of those writings are among my favorite pieces I’ve created. … That’s not really such a short answer after all. Sorry.

As is often the case in your writing, the characters in this story are based on actual people you know, right?
Yeah – you know how you always see that blurb in books, on one of those terribly official front pages, that says: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental?” If you ever see that in one of my books, know that it’s a lie. Know that some lawyer made me put that in there.

As for the specific characters, the boyfriend who went away to help fight the zombies, or the terrorists or the epidemic or whatever the unnamed scourge is (probably zombies), is my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time I wrote the story. Udo is my friend Kier, who is in love with me. That might sound like a weird or arrogant thing to say, but he will tell you that it’s true. Kiki is heavily based on one of Kier’s former roommates, and Arthur is lightly based on “Kiki”’s friend from her hometown who visited her one time, and about whom I know almost nothing. Donnie is somewhat based on the druggie roommate I lived with briefly in San Diego. And of course, the protagonist is always me.

I was just going to say that your fans have come to expect to find a stand-in for you in most of your stories – a female, approximately whatever age you were when you wrote the story, probably living in the DC/VA/MD region, with many of your characteristics (introspective, atheist, etc.).
It’s true. And this story’s no different. That’s me in there, the first-person narrator. I guess that’s just me being lazy. Nothing feels as natural as speaking in your own voice. Part of me worries about coming across as inauthentic when I write from the point of view of, say, a 70-year-old Hispanic man living in Arizona (I did that for my story “Two skies, one in Heaven and one on Earth”). At least, if I write as “me,” no one can accuse me of having the protagonist do something out-of-character, because I can say, “Hey, that character is me, and I’m telling you that’s what I would do.”

You’ve said that the zombie-story-that-doesn’t-say-the-“z”-word in “Afterlife” is merely the backdrop for what is actually a story about long-distance relationships.
That’s right. At the center of this story is this girl whose boyfriend has gone off to do something noble – and she respects and admires him, but she wishes he were there with her. At the same time, there’s this guy – Udo – who’s right here, right now. He loves her. He’s saying, “Stay with me,” sleep with me in my bed, your boyfriend is not here, and so on. For the protagonist, there’s a tension between her loyalty and commitment – and love – to and for her boyfriend, and the more immediate comfort and companionship – and love – that Udo can offer her right now.

Of course, this dynamic isn’t characteristic of all long-distance relationships. When I wrote this story, my boyfriend (the man who’s now my husband) was working a civilian-contractor gig in Baghdad; he’d been over there before when he was in the Army in 2003. I totally understand why he did this, but at some point while we were dating long-distance he made the decision to stay in Iraq for another six months. The pay was great, the work was interesting, he was working on paying off his house, and working through some other personal issues that were partly why he went out there in the first place. But it made me sad, because I wanted him over here with me.

So I guess the only thing I can say with any degree of confidence is: This story is about my long-distance relationship. But I find comfort in this James Joyce quotation, which I stuck atop one of my blogs: “In the particular is contained the universal.” I tell myself that whenever I’m worried that I’m being too self-absorbed. Hey man, James Joyce says I am universal.

Why did you decide that the goth club in DC – which I believe is based on a real goth club you sometimes go to – would make a cameo in the story?
The goth club is based on Spellbound, which is a goth night that’s held in this spunky little basement bar with cobblestone walls, in the bottom of a big chain hotel. They have lasers for the dancefloor and a fog machine and it’s pretty adorable. I was never really into that subculture, but a friend invited me to it several years ago and I met such good people there. I met Kier there; I met a lot of the people I interact with regularly on Facebook and such at Spellbound.

The Spellbound cameo – and also that of the crepe place, where a lot of us go after Spellbound – was more of a shout-out than anything. It’s a little arbitrary. You could read some deep meaning into it – for example, you could say: “These people used to feign death as a style, as an aesthetic, and now they’re surrounded by rot and decay and it’s not so fun anymore,” or something like that. But when I was writing the story, it was more just a place for the group to go together.

There really is a dude who reads Tarot cards in a red-lit corner. And some of the other specific characters I described there are based on real people, too.

A lot of the scenes in this story are slice-of-life – they describe little moments and details – but it’s a slice of life you’ve never experienced, and that nobody has ever experienced (if in fact the apocalypse in this story is being caused by zombies). How did you make those details up?
I was very nervous about creating fictional-yet-factual details for this story. It’s as if I had a chorus of zombie-fiction nerds watching me type with their arms folded across their chests, saying: “Pfft, everyone knows it wouldn’t happen that way.” Or: “Picking through raided grocery-store produce? That is so played-out.” I don’t read zombie stories, so I don’t even know what is or isn’t cliché for that genre. If I accidentally put in stuff that’s cliché, I feel as if it shouldn’t count against me, because I didn’t know it was a cliché, so it was new to me!

I pretty much just tried to imagine how things might play out if, say, the grid went out. If suddenly there were no government-provided amenities, no media, just people hearing things through word of mouth like in the olden days. I’m sure I flubbed some things. I did my best.

For me, images from news coverage I’d seen of Hurricane Katrina served as a sad sort of guide – such as the footage I describe in “Afterlife” of the young people in the apartment, the girl who said: “We’re a band of merry pirates.” They even had a little flag.

I guess the more direct answer is simply that I made everything up. As usual, I didn’t do any research, beyond the most cursory Google searches. I just thought: “I wear contacts and am legally blind without them; wouldn’t it suck to run out of contacts and not be able to see the stars?” “I bet seeing old ‘normal’ things, such as magazines coming out every month, would make them nostalgic.” I hope that at least some of the details I came up with were fairly original.

What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
That humanity is infinitely inspiring and poignant – to quote myself here like some kind of egomaniacal jerk: “I felt an ache for the fragile beauty of this world.”

INTERVIEW: “THEN YOU RISE, AND YOU’RE PURE”

Story: “Then you rise, and you’re pure”(<-Click there to read the story!)
Genre: Short Fiction
Keywords: Appalachian Escapism; Country-Creek Baptism; “In the movie version I’d have some kind of catharsis.”
Trivia: The town in which this story takes place is Saltville, Virginia. It is a real place.

What was your impetus for writing this story?
The original impulse is obscure, even to me. I had gotten an e-mail from this older guy I was involved with, and it made me sad. He’d just made some offhand comment about some of his conquests in Japan, but – like the chick in the story – it set me off. I guess it triggered my jealousy, but beyond what would have been a normal, rational reaction even for me. That’s the problem when you’re an incredibly introspective person – some tiny little thing happens, and it sends you spinning off into the wild yonder.

Anyway, somehow that feeling led to my fantasizing about dropping out of my life in “the city” – really just a suburb of Washington, DC – and going off to crash with my grandparents in the country. I saw the country as somehow purifying. It was linked to this nice image I kept having of getting baptized – hard-core baptized, in a little country creek like in the olden times. As I acknowledge in the story, it’s a bit absurd for an atheist – like me, like the me in the story – to daydream about getting baptized, but the power of that ritual and symbol goes beyond just the religious significance of it, I think.

Speaking of “yonder,” your family is from the town that the story is set in.
They are – Saltville, Virginia, holla! Both of my parents were born there, although my mom will point out that her family moved one town over, to Glade Spring, when she was a baby, so my parents’ high-school football teams were actually rivals. Weirdly, my folks didn’t meet until they got set up as a blind date in college.

Unlike my depiction of Mexico – I should really put quotation marks around that; “Mexico” – in my story “Adults,” I didn’t make up much of anything here. For example, there really is a small-town paper whose editor – I think her name is Loretta, not “Lottie” – wrote all the articles and took all the photos and did pretty much everything else. And my dad’s best friend from childhood, Rocky (“Ricky” in the story; I’m barely obfuscating these people at all), was both the newspaper’s editor and the town mayor (though not at the same time). It’s a small town, so people have to take on more roles.

I should point out that I never once got a creepy vibe from the real-life Ricky – that part was something I added because it felt right in the story, and I would be mortified if my dad or the real-life guy ever found out I wrote that. For some reason there had to be a potential suitor for the protagonist there in town, and the girl had to say: “I hope I leave before I have to break his heart.” But you have to really believe she wouldn’t want to be with the guy – otherwise the story turns into some godawful rom-com and the girl falls for him and stays in town and they have a bunch of kids and a tractor.

You’ve mentioned that Amy Hempel’s writing style was an influence on you around the time you wrote this story.
It was, and it still is – she broke my brain, man. I read her “Collected Stories” and liked it so much that I started copying her style, even when I wasn’t explicitly trying to. She’s probably more known among short-fiction enthusiasts for her spare, minimal (she calls it “miniaturist”) style – but what I picked up from her and put into this story was more this sad tone, almost like a trance that a survivor goes into just to get from one day to the next.

The older man/professor character makes an appearance in this story, too.
Yeah, that’s the same guy as “Richard” in my story “Adults,” and he’s in a bunch of other stories I wrote around that time, too. I hate to be unimaginative and always cast him in these professor/teacher roles – but that really was our dynamic, which was sometimes frustrating to me. He taught me a lot – mostly about sex; he was the first person I ever had sex with – but sometimes I deeply disagreed with stuff he said about writing, and with certain life decisions he made, or that I made and he critiqued.

Yeah, that’s the guy. I’m sure he read this story, too. I think he sometimes held back from defending himself – after I’d make him look like a jerk in one of my stories – out of a belief in artistic freedom or something. Or maybe he just didn’t care all that much. The last few times we spoke were times that he drunk-dialed me from some bar in the French Quarter near where he lives. Maybe he drank too much beer and pickled his brain; what do I know.

What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
That sometimes stories – just like real life – don’t have any kind of obvious resolution. This story doesn’t end with one, and yet I feel it has a proper story arc. Or at least, it seems to me that it ends on a kind of resolution-y tone without really resolving anything. … I get the feeling most writing teachers would cringe at that last sentence.

The resolution, to me, seems to hinge on this sentence near the end: “I’m lying to myself if I say it’s getting better.” Hey, an acknowledgment of stasis is something. An acknowledgment of stasis can lead to action.