I’ve loved Michelle Ross’ writing since I first encountered her stories during our MFA fiction workshops at Indiana University. Since then, Ross has published There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the Moon City Short Fiction Award, and her second collection Shapeshifting, winner of the Stillhouse Press Short Story Award, was published in November of 2021. In Shapeshifting we see Ross zero in on the experiences of motherhood with the sharp intelligence, originality, and dark humor that informs all of her writing. The stories in Shapeshifting reject the sacred joy of mothering that women often feel obliged to perform, and instead explore the dangers, fears, failures, and monstrous transformation becoming a mother often entails. Ross explores the difficulties of mothering and womanhood with humor, a generosity of spirit, and a wry frankness that refuses sentimentality of any sort but always allows readers to marvel at the strangeness of what it means to be a mother in this world. Since our days in workshop, I’ve participated in a long-distance writing group of sorts with Michelle and writer Kim Magowan, which often entails participating in crazy, but productive, six-hour “flash-a-thons” and have been grateful for the work, conversation, and inspiration this group provides. It’s with great pleasure that I take on the role of interviewer to talk with one of my favorite short story writers about her new collection.
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Yasmina Din Madden: I wonder if you could talk about how writing and putting together this Shapeshifting, your second collection of short stories, differed in process from your first collection There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You?
Stillhouse Press, 2021Michelle Ross: My first story collection, There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, is less thematically unified than Shapeshifting. There are recurring themes, for sure — science, horror films, mother-daughter relationships, feminism, etc. — but I wasn’t so much writing toward a particular project at that time. Shapeshifting, in contrast, was more deliberate in its construction. I knew early on, not quite halfway into writing these stories, that I wanted to write a collection of stories centered on mothering and motherhood, as well as about how the mythology and cultural expectations of motherhood affect women and girls regardless of whether they want to become mothers. At that point, I considered the stories I’d already written that could be candidates for the collection and what was missing. For instance, I knew I wanted to have at least one story in which the female protagonist refuses motherhood. That’s how “Keeper Four” was born.
YDM: This collection’s exploration of motherhood, pregnancy, and the female body often center on the fear, dangers, burdens, and sacrifice demanded of women, most of whom are also mothers. “Play it Safe” explores the complexities of mothering, but it also combines so many of the tensions the entire collection explores — what it means to exist in a female body, the power dynamics between men and women, the presumptions women make of one another, and even the power dynamic between young girls. Could you talk a little bit about your approach to this story and its varied tensions?
MR: I love this question, Yasmina. In writing these stories, I was thinking a lot about how the cultural expectations and pressures of motherhood are intimately tied up with the way our culture views and controls and restricts the freedoms of women and girls in general. Whether or not they want or intend to become mothers, women and girls rub up against the same restrictive notions of what their bodies and lives are intended for. I didn’t want to write a book that attempted to isolate the particular sexism mothers face from the sexism all women and girls face.
I was interested, too, in internalized misogyny and the incredible tension between women and girls who make different sorts of choices about how to be in the world.
I agree that these things come into play especially in “Play It Safe,” a story about a mother, Jessie, who is attacked by a man while out running and then, after, like a ricochet of the initial attack, is inundated with annoying comments and questions from men and women alike about how she defended herself, what she should have done differently, and what she should do differently in the future to keep herself safe. The PTA committee member, Sharon, who is in charge of the carnival for raising funds for new, safer playground equipment at the children’s school suggests to Jessie that if she wants to be safe, she should run indoors on a treadmill from here on out, and Jessie retorts that there is no space in this world in which women are safe from men, certainly not in a country that elects a man as president of the nation despite, or perhaps partly because, he’s caught bragging on video about groping women.
And, importantly, Jessie, though self-aware, is not free of internalized misogyny, either. Later in the story, she catches herself sexualizing and judging her daughter’s friend, Sloane.
YDM: The stories “Keeper Four” and “The Mouth is a House for Teeth” are clearly in conversation with the rest of the stories in this collection in that they explore the fears, dangers, burdens, and sacrifice that come with motherhood (or in the case of “Keeper Four” caretaking). However these two stories also stand out in that they can be classified as speculative. How do you think moving into this speculative territory allowed you to further explore the themes and tensions of motherhood/caretaking?
MR: I appreciate how speculative fiction can reveal truths about the real world that may otherwise be difficult to encapsulate. I’ve been a longtime horror film fan for the same reason. I’m not so interested in the movies that are just scary or gory for the sake of being scary or gory. I admire the horror films that reveal truths about the world we live in, films such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
Moon City Press 2017In “Keeper Four,” the protagonist works at a facility that is researching interspecies bonding relationships. In particular, the facility seems to be interested in why some animals will mother individuals of other species while others will not, and the protagonist, Keeper Four, believes this research may be in service of developing a drug that will induce maternal instinct. The government in this world in which she lives is, paradoxically, promoting motherhood, while simultaneously killing off a huge portion of the population as a means to combat an overpopulation crisis. The world we live in operates by all sorts of paradoxes like this too — state governments outlawing abortions while simultaneously promoting gun rights, for example — but approaching these things too straight on in fiction can feel overly polemical. Speculative fiction offers a kind of distance that is freeing.
“A Mouth is a House for Teeth” began as a feeling or a mood I wanted to capture — that feeling of how motherhood can be so incredibly isolating, disconnecting one not only from the rest of the world but also from who she is, or used to be, before her servitude to motherhood subsumed so much else. Another story in Shapeshifting, “Three-week Checkup,” also explores that feeling, but in that story, the mother is only three weeks into motherhood; the feeling is new and, presumably, temporary. The mother will soon enough return to work, and she will be once again connected to the world outside. Also, while that woman’s partner is not particularly present or supportive, he is at least physically present in the evenings and on weekends when he’s not at work. In “A Mouth is a House for Teeth,” the mother is isolated in a much more extreme manner. In the world of this story, mothers are not supposed to leave their homes ever. They sacrifice their lives nearly completely in the service of keeping their children safe. So, for five plus years, this mother has been alone in that house with her daughter. The husband works away from the home for months at a time, and this mother is the only mother in Shapeshifting who doesn’t even have a friend she can commiserate with. I felt like I couldn’t really do this feeling of incredible isolation and disconnection justice without going a little bit into the world of speculative fiction.
YDM: “Lifecycle of an Ungrateful Daughter” is one of my favorites in the collection. The story offers such a vivid portrait of a mother who demands total loyalty, openness, and gratitude from a daughter who always remains just out of her reach. I loved the way this story gives us a sense of the mother’s neediness and insecurity, but simultaneously offers a distinctive sense of the daughter’s need to keep a part of herself untouched by her mother. It was interesting to see that need come from the child in this piece as it’s often a desire that I think informs several of the mother characters in the collection — a need to keep something back, something private from a child, a partner, or someone else in their community. Can you talk a little about how privacy and boundaries come into play in this story and how you see this need for privacy or boundaries informing other stories in the collection?
forthcoming 2022MR: It’s interesting how one of the most painful things about family is how they know too much about you, while one of the other most painful things about family is how wrong they get the story of who you are. It’s well recognized by us adults that young children tend to see their parents as parents only, not as fully human. But I don’t think it’s as well recognized how many parents tend to see their children as children only, not as fully human, either. The other day I was on an airplane to Orlando and I overheard a mother telling her young son all kinds of ridiculous lies to scare him into doing what she wanted him to do: “If you don’t buckle your seat belt, we’re going to get kicked off the plane;” “If you don’t sit down, they’re going to turn the plane around;” “If you don’t behave, Micky Mouse isn’t going to let you into Disney World.” I can’t stand adults treating children like they’re idiots or using their power over children to manipulate them like this. I remember all too well how enraged I felt when adults treated me like I was less than because I was smaller and younger. The mother in “Lifecycle of an Ungrateful Daughter” is one of those kinds of mothers, only her daughter is not so easily manipulated. She won’t play to the script her mother has written for her, and the mother resents her daughter’s refusal. She resents her daughter for not needing her enough, for not being as vulnerable and dependent as her other children. I do see this as partly a story about a daughter fighting to preserve boundaries, but I think the primary boundary her mother betrays is that of not allowing her daughter to be her own person. This is a mother who cannot see or accept her daughter for who she really is, who seems to feel threatened by her daughter having an inner life, strong convictions, willfulness.
YDM: I am always curious as to whether writers of short story collections have, in keeping with the themes of this book, “a favorite child.” Do you have a favorite story in Shapeshifting? And is there a black sheep, a rebel? Which of the stories here gave you the most trouble?
MR: “A Mouth is a House for Teeth” is one of my favorites. I think that has something to do with the way in which so much of the story came to me in kind of a waking dream the first time I floated in a sensory deprivation tank. It was also just a lot of fun to write.
“Lifecycle of an Ungrateful Daughter” is kind of a black sheep in that I drafted it long before any of the other stories in the collection, but then for whatever reason — lack of confidence? the closeness of some of the material? — I put it aside and forgot about it for years. I don’t just mean I was trying to get distance on it. I literally forgot about it. A good friend of mine who had read it all those years ago mentioned it, as in whatever happened to that story? Why haven’t you published it? I dug it up and discovered that it was a lot stronger than I remembered. It needed tightening, and I needed to make it more clear that the narrator is the daughter — that the second-person is kind of a first-person in disguise.
I don’t know that any of these stories gave me a great deal more trouble than others. Most of the stories I write give me trouble. The ones that don’t are the rarities.
YDM: A handful of the stories in this collection are flash fiction and the rest are long form stories. How does your writing process change, if it does, when you approach a flash piece versus a longer story?
MR: I think the main way in which I approach the two forms differently is that in flash fiction I’m more focused on digging as soon as possible toward some central word or image or other unifying idea. With longer fiction, I have more time and space to wander.
YDM: How does your work as a science writer inform your creative work?
MR: Science is a reliable source for various fiction fodder, usually metaphors or images. I also generally think science and fiction writing are similar pursuits insofar as they’re both ways to try to understand ourselves and the world we live in.
YDM: In addition to your first collection There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, and this second collection, Shapeshifting, you also have a third story collection, They Kept Running, slated for publication in Spring 2022. I often joke with you about your insane productivity, but I know you are prolific for a reason. Talk to us about your writing practice. What does it look like?
MR: I write every morning before work. I try to get up by about 4:30. This typically allows me a minimum of two hours of writing; some days I can stretch that to 4 hours. Weekends are usually the same, except if I don’t have any concrete plans, I might write later into the day. I feel like a very slow writer. Even flash fictions usually take me many, many months to finish. But I’m never really working on just one piece. At any given moment, there may be a dozen or so stories in progress in my files. And so over time, as the hours add up, pieces do get finished.
YDM: Finally, as the author of three short story collections, I think we can safely say you’re a fan of the form. I love the short story form and hesitate to even ask, because I don’t want to undermine it in any way, but I’m going to: Do you think you’ll try your hand at a novel?
MR: I don’t know. When I first started writing, I wanted to write novels. Novels were mostly what I read back then. But now my writing habits make me nervous about the idea of trying to write a novel. For instance, I have a bad habit of constantly rereading and revising stories before I’ve written an ending, or in many cases, even a middle. Also, like I said, I tend to work on many different stories at once. That’s partly due to me being kind of a restless and frantic writer. On the other hand, there’s no right way to write a novel, right? Some of my favorite novels are fragmented, more like short story collections disguised as novels. Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad come to mind. One of the projects I’m working on now is a collection of linked stories that all take place in the same fictional Texas town, all involving students in the town’s high school. I’ve been pondering the blurred lines between linked collections and novels and what choices would push this project toward one or the other.
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