Erin McGraw’s seventh and most recent book Joy (Counterpoint, 2019) is a collection of flash fiction or “short-shorts.” Despite its cheerful title, Erin McGraw’s Joy is about anything but. In fifty-three pieces of sudden fiction, characters find joy hard to come by. A fifteen-year-old girl hears a news report of a local rape and knows her father is the perpetrator; a paraplegic changes her identity to hide from the fans who read about her in her mother’s memoir; Ava Gardner brings Frank Sinatra to her hometown for a visit after his career has slowed; Patsy Cline continually forgets to pay her professional dresser. These stories are about celebrities, nobodies, has-beens, and wannabes all united by the idea of their failed lives and their desire for joy. Prior to this collection of short-shorts, McGraw published the novels The Baby Tree (2002), The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (2008), Better Food for a Better World (2013), and the short story collections Bodies at Sea (1989), Lies of the Saints (1996), and The Good Life (2004).
In The Good Life, a collection of eleven stories, McGraw prods at her characters’ happy existences to expose the shaky foundations upon which their happy lives are built. From a dieting priest who thinks no one notices he’s steadily gaining weight, to unsuspecting women who gloat in the perceived perfection of their marriages, to an activist husband who’s bullied into a makeover on a talk show, to a couple who retire and buy a Bed and Breakfast only to end up working harder than they ever imagined. McGraw takes characters who think they know it all and teaches them something new, shaking them out of their comfort zones and their perceptions of what their good lives entail. Standing in stark contrast to these stories of somewhat doggedly oblivious characters is McGraw’s historical novel The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, whose protagonist is only too starkly aware that the underpinnings that hold her life together are fragile and tenuous.
Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, we follow the life of young Nell Presser, a fifteen year old girl on a farm in Kansas whose usefulness is questioned first by her father and then by the family into which she marries. Nell can’t cook, is ungrateful, has no maternal tendencies and is not in love with the soil. She tells her father and her young husband that she “likes to sew,” which is an understatement if ever there was one. Nell lives to sew: “Even when I held no cloth between my hands, I thought about the problems posed by a line and a measurement, and I could lose myself for an hour thinking about ways to gather a waistline” (66). Like an architect looking at a building, or a painter looking at a masterpiece, she looks at fabric, stitches, and women’s clothing with the keen and appraising eye of an artist, finding challenge in taking dreary things and beautifying them.
What seems to others as simply a penchant for sewing, Nell’s preoccupation with sewing signals her hunger for self-improvement and her desire to refashion herself, to undo the badly stitched seams of her crude life and sew new clean straight lines in their place. Unlike everyone else in her Grant Station, Kansas town (with her father being the exception), Nell looks over the flat, dry, farming lands of her hometown and dreams of something better: an ocean, orange trees, and California. Discontent with her life, she strikes out, leaving her Kansas life where she is a seventeen year old married woman with two children and a third grade education for life in Los Angeles, where she can be reinvented as a modiste.
Her desire coincides exactly with that of many other young women leaving their rural homes for the promise of California: “I was not unusual. Girls who came to Los Angeles understood — or learned — that they had made a bargain with rough fate. By running away from towns where the only building with glass in its windows was the bank and where mail arrived grubby and fingered, once every two weeks, girls who came to California knew that they were embracing nothing but hope, nothing but ambition, nothing but the clear, empty air” (144). Once Nell arrives in Los Angeles, she becomes a shopgirl, or a “shoppie.” Living in cramped quarters in a rooming house, sharing a bed with two other girls, forced to spend more than half her weekly salary on room and board, it takes her months to save the trolley fare to travel to see her first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean:
The salt in the air surprised me. All that time back in Kansas imagining, and I still hadn’t imagined well enough to conjure the stickiness coating my skin or the sharp breeze that teased hair into my mouth. Gentlemen and ladies strolled the promenade, the sand crunching under their feet, and the little brim of my hat was insufficient; I shaded my eyes like a field hand as I stared at the ocean, sunlight glittering across its greenish back. Languorous as an immense cat, the brilliant water smashed over the bright sand in low, rolling waves. Behind it stretched the expanse I had dreamed of, green fading to blue, flatter than farmland. All the sacrifice, all the sorrow, the nights without sleep and the furious days, in order to see this: a long line to the horizon. Not much different from Kansas. Except, of course, it was beautiful (104-5).
McGraw makes the view well worth the wait. Necessary Fiction spoke with Erin McGraw about issues of craft, including the different forms of fiction, the challenge of very short fiction, the importance of place, and the research involved in the writing of an historical novel.
Amina Gautier: How does one decide to write/compile a collection of flash fiction? Please tell us about the construction of Joy.
Erin McGraw: It isn’t glamorous. I sat down on the floor of my office with 53 stories spread out around me and started trying to put them in conversation with each other. “Can’t put these two side by side — they both have to do with mothers.” “Nope. Too many parties in a row.” “This is a lot of sorrow. Isn’t there a funny story here somewhere to leaven it?” Meanwhile I had to keep the dogs from messing up my order. But I think your larger question is what brought me to write this book of dinky stories, and the fact is that I came to it by not admitting what I was doing. I had written a couple of very small stories and liked the way they came out, so after I found myself creatively beached, having written two novels back-to-back and finding myself sick of the long form, I started writing tiny pieces just to entertain myself. I didn’t admit until I had something like 30 of them that I was writing my next book.
AG: Which term do you prefer — short-short, flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, smokelong — or are the same to you? Do you see them as imparting subtle differences?
EM: I usually call them “very short stories” specifically to bypass terms that have been created intentionally. The stories in Joy are nowhere near as short as a lot of flash fiction, and I think I’m just writing stories that happen to be shorter than usual. I do think the different terms impart subtle differences, and I don’t know what those differences are. I’m staying in my own lane, which might just be a turn lane.
AG: What are the particular challenges and rewards of writing and assembling such short stories? What, if anything, do people get wrong about writing flash?
EM: I’m an easily bored reader, and few things bore me more than fictional connective material. I start twitching as soon as a character starts thinking. This little form appeals to me because it moves fast, and readers are left to infer what characters are thinking by seeing what they do. In that, the form resembles drama. A lot of the movement is allusive, and in that, the form resembles poetry. I always wanted to write poetry, but I do it very badly. This is as close as I get. My only rule to myself is that I’m not allowed to put merely pretty language on the page. Something has to happen. A character’s situation in the world needs to have changed by the end of the story. In that, the form is fiction all the way.
AG: You are adept at multiple forms of fiction — novel, short story, and flash. In which form do you feel the most comfortable and why? What are the joys and challenges of each form?
EM: Flannery O’Connor, who taught me many important lessons, says in her letters that writing a novel is like being lost in the dark woods, and writing a short story is like being set upon by wolves. That pretty much sums it up, with the addition that writing flash is like stepping on fire ants. Novels allow exploration and a deep, rich immersion in world and situation that no other form can rival. Traditional stories allow for a wallop of surprise when a character is revealed to be something other than what we had thought. And flash, as I understand it, goes off like a flashbulb and illuminates an image, as a flashbulb does. But for me the sheer weight of a novel becomes wearying, and in stories I’m constantly trying to create newness in the form so that the story won’t be predictable. Flash and I are still new enough to each other that we haven’t gotten on each other’s nerves.
AG: Several of the stories in The Good Life seem to echo one another. For example, although both “The Beautiful Tennessee Waltz” and “Lucky Devil” feature wives who feel smug about the perfection of their marriages and then learn they don’t know their husbands as well as they think, the women take drastically different actions. Or in “Ax of the Apostles” and “Appearance of Scandal” we have two priests who are hiding different secrets, which their parishioners can guess at. Were these stories written as diptychs the way the three flash fictions about the shooting in Joy seem to be triptychs or were they conceived independently? Also, the flash piece “Ava Gardner Goes Home” seems like The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard in reverse. Do you ever work on a story’s idea and revisit it in a different, later, story?
EM: Constantly! As you just pointed out. Once a subject gets its claws into my imagination, I usually need several different takes to exorcise it. But none of those stories was written as a conscious response to an earlier one. Whenever I start something, I labor under the delusion that it is a brand-new idea and will result in a brand-new exploration of material. Only later, sitting on the floor with the stories spread out around me, do I realize how often I repeat myself. The Ava Gardner piece came about because I had just read James Kaplan’s superb and very long biography of Frank Sinatra, and I had some opinions. But I wouldn’t have read the Kaplan if I weren’t basically interested in celebrity and performance, issues that hold Seamstress together.
AG: Speaking of priests, there’s a plethora of priests in your collection The Good Life. What is the role of faith in those stories?
EM: Faith is something I’ve been writing about all my life, and I haven’t stopped being interested in it. I don’t know any other force so capable of improving a life, or so capable of distorting a life. The things we believe in, whether they’re a higher power or sobriety or astrology, shadow the things we do, and therefore they’re worth examination. There’s no other force I know of that drives so much interesting human action except love — which could be called another kind of faith.
AG: The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard follows a young girl from Kansas to who has never seen an ocean to Los Angeles, where she’s always surrounded by water. In her case, place has a profound effect on her, but this is not the case with others. She looks at the ocean and sees possibility, but her lover Pete sees hopelessness. I love the way you convey their different takes on the same thing. “The tart, fishy air was tonic, and looking at the infinite reach of water made a pressure around my chest spring loose. Before me, the sea extended without a single wall or limit, a thrilling sight” (126-127), but when her lover Peter looks at the same water, he feels “hemmed in” and calls the area “No Hope Point” 127. Also, in The Good Life, stories take place in California, Maryland etc. We see a couple move from Pittsburgh and hope for a better life by settling in the woods of Maryland. How and why is place/setting so important to your fiction?
EM: The first thing I want to find out about somebody I meet is where the person hails from. Place tells me a great deal of what to expect about somebody, especially, to quote O’Connor again, about manners. I don’t mean the How-do-you-do kind of manners, but what the person is likely to value, and what they might find funny. The last one is important to me because I like to make jokes. Those things are essential to building character. If I’m writing a character who comes from the Upper East Side, he’s going to have a frame of reference quite different from the guy who hails from Missouri. (For the record, I have never written a character from the Upper East Side.) In part, this is about authenticity, and wanting to create a characterization that rings true. But also, immersion in place opens doors to the imagination. The world and its possibilities will look different to my Upper East Side guy to somebody from Byelorussia, and those differences are what create possibility and tension, and those things create story.
AG: And what about California specifically? It shows up in many of your books.
EM: I grew up there, and it’s still the place that haunts my dreams. I’ve thought more about California than any other place, and now that it’s on fire and looks like an incarnation of Day of the Locust, I grieve for it, even though when I’m there the place drives me crazy.
AG: The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard reads as if it required an extensive amount of historical research. What inspired you to write a novel set at the turn of the twentieth century and what were the challenges of completing the research to write such a novel?
EM: The book is based on the life of my paternal grandmother who married young, had two kids, ran off to California to begin another family, and was eventually discovered by the daughters she had abandoned and had to make a hard peace with them. The book is a novel, so it does not faithfully follow my grandmother’s life, but the first part is the closest re-creation I can imagine to what the family knows to have happened. We talked about this story incessantly when I was a kid, and it’s drilled deep into my imagination. Writing the book was as close to a no-brainer as any book I’ve written. As to the research, I did less than you think. I started by reading a couple of books about the period and what was going on in the country, and after that almost all of the work was ad hoc. Need to find out how to make a bustle? Look it up. Need to find out which streetcar a person would take to get to the beach in 1920? Look it up. A few books on 1910s and ’20s fashion didn’t leave my desk for two years, but otherwise, I mostly just kept going to Google. Once you start to get a feel for a period, it’s fun. I was sorry when that book was over. I hated to leave a pre-Freudian world.
AG: In both The Good Life and The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, we frequently encounter characters who fail to notice important things about the people in their lives with whom they are intimately connected. Could you speak a little about the importance of observation in fiction?
EM: Am I the only one who consistently misses important hints and details about the people around her? I love to imagine myself the Jamesian one on whom nothing is lost, when the truth is that tons of things are lost on me. I guess the answer to your question is that all of my characters are self-portraits, which is largely true. In life I’m constantly finding myself having to re-comprehend reality, as I find out that somebody isn’t, one way or another, what I thought. This is a big part of my understanding of the human condition. We thought he was honest, but he’s not. We thought they were happy, but they’re not. We thought we were happy, but we’re not. That one’s devastating.
NF: You’ve taught creative writing at various institutions, including DePauw University, University of Cincinnati, and The Ohio State University. How has your teaching informed your writing practice and how has your practice changed with retirement?
EM: For a long time, teaching writing formed a nice biorhythm in my life — what I learned at the desk I could bring to the classroom, and what I learned in the classroom I could bring to the desk, and each was the better for the other. Gradually the two waves started to get out of sync, but that’s natural and not a terrible thing. Still, as the years passed, I more and more felt that each was robbing from the other. That’s when it was time to step away. Retirement has made me far less disciplined. When I was teaching, the only way I could possibly write was to work in the morning and reserve that time with ironclad discipline. No reading or email writing of any kind before 9:00, by which time I’d been up for four hours. I did that for years and years. This wasn’t a sacrifice; I like early mornings and work best then. I still get up at 5:00, but I’m lazy about when and how and how often I write. Sometimes days go by and I don’t touch anything. I suppose this also has something to do with why I’ve lately been writing so many different stories about so many different things. I’m not training my brain to think down certain corridors every day when I get up, so I’m more open to possibilities.
AG: Who have been your main literary influences?
EM: O’Connor, as you might have gleaned. Flaubert. Tobias Wolff, for his dialogue. Bernard Malamud, for his spookiness. I would love to say Toni Morrison for her grandeur, but nothing I’ve written can approach her grandeur. Still, I read Song of Solomon annually.
AG: You published your first novel The Baby Tree in 2002 and your most recent book Joy in 2019. What have you learned about writing fiction that you wish you knew when you first began publishing?
EM: Relax! And have fun. If you allow the prose to have some swing, everybody can dance.
+++
+