I was introduced to Louise Marburg and her writing via the rejection contest my friend Reneé Bibby runs. The contest started out as a way for Tucson writers to encourage each other to submit, as well as to lessen the sting of rejection, by awarding a trophy to the writer who earned the most rejections over the course of the year. In 2019, Reneé expanded the competition to writers outside of Tucson, and that’s when Louise joined. I won the rejection contest that year, with 177 rejections, and Louise came in second, with 146. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of publishing one of Louise’s short stories “Outrageous” in Atticus Review. “Outrageous,” as is every story I’ve read of Louise’s now, is funny and sharp. The stories in No Diving Allowed (Regal House Publishing), which I had the pleasure of reading this summer, are no exception.
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Michelle Ross: Congratulations on No Diving Allowed, Louise! I greatly enjoyed these stories. They’re linked by their each containing pools — mostly more traditional swimming pools, but there’s also a resistance lap pool, the ocean, and in one story, the swimming pool is cracked and drained and so becomes a place where the teenage protagonist smokes pot with a neighbor boy. Did you set out from the beginning to write a collection of stories united by swimming pools? What drew you to swimming pools?
Louise Marburg: Thank you, Michelle! I love swimming in pools, and I love to look at them as well, but I did not initially set out to write a collection of stories linked by swimming pools. I just wrote a few stories and realized they all, oddly, contained swimming pools. So I continued on with it to see what would happen, and there turned out to be a lot more swimming pool stories waiting in my subconscious, or wherever stories come from. Swimming pools are beautiful and represent ease and fun, but also danger — a pool can be a place to fear, particularly if you don’t know how to swim. The experience of swimming in a pool varies. Beneath the surface is quiet, the sounds from above muffled; you can feel alone there even if there are other people in the pool. Swimming at the surface can be social, noisy and active, or calming and restorative. But always a swimmer is weightless, and that fact is most appealing to me. Physically, movements that are impossible out of the water become magically easy. In a pool you can be a gymnast, a dancer, a fairy, an astronaut. On land that flexibility is lost.
MR: Do you think that weightlessness makes other kinds of movement easier as well? I’m thinking here especially of your story “Play Nice, Be Good.” After a harrowing, also funny, dinner scene in which the tension between the sisters comes to a head, the women find themselves in the pool together late at night. Diana asks Penny to be nice to her. Penny says she’s just not a nice person. When Diana points out that Penny is being nice now, Penny says “Well, what do you know. And I’m not even trying.”
LM: In the case of “Play Nice, Be Good,” the pool represents a cooling of the anger between the sisters. The weather had been unbearably hot, but after the peak of their anger the weather changes and they meet in the pool where they literally and figuratively cool off. In pools swimmers are weightless, relaxed; it’s a place of pleasure. Have you ever known anyone to have an argument in a pool? I don’t think I have.
MR: Right. Perhaps also, though, it’s fitting that a collection of stories linked by swimming pools are also to some extent about social class, status, envy, and jealousy. These themes play out in relationships between siblings, spouses, friends, and neighbors. Are these themes you’re often drawn to in your fiction?
LM: Yes, absolutely. I am fascinated by people’s need to classify themselves and to judge others according to origin and economics. Many people care deeply about their social status, and with that comes envy — someone is always “above” you, no matter how fabulous you think you are.
MR: How was writing or putting this collection together different from writing and assembling your first collection?
LM: I have always thought the stories in The Truth About Me have little in common beyond the fact that I am their author. Others have disagreed, including the book’s publisher. I put that collection together over a number of years, writing new and stronger stories with which I would replace older stories I no longer loved. No Diving Allowed took about two years to write, and I only wrote a few stories during that time that I didn’t use in the book, not because I didn’t like them but because they weren’t appropriate for the collection.
MR: I’m always interested in the process by which short story writers collect and order the pieces in their collections. What guided your sequencing of these stories?
LM: Perhaps I should be embarrassed to admit that I didn’t have a clue how to order the stories. I was too close to them, and even now I don’t clearly see the logic in their order. So I handed the manuscript over to my cousin, who is an avid reader of my work and a theater director, and he put the stories in order for me. It wasn’t a random choice: he is one of the smartest and most intuitive people I know.
MR: Your dialogue is such a pleasure to read. It’s natural, witty, and full of tension. Many writers struggle with dialogue, but reading your work, I imagine dialogue is perhaps one of your favorite things to write. Is that true?
LM: I do love writing dialogue. How a character speaks can say so much about them, and I think dialogue can move a story forward just as skillfully as action or exposition. I recommend eavesdropping for authors who have trouble with dialogue and listening rather than talking. Even “boring” people are interesting for the purpose of crafting dialogue.
MR: I also really admire your endings, Louise. Sometimes they catch me a bit by surprise in that at first some of your endings feel abrupt, but then I realize that they’re satisfying, too. You end stories before their energy fizzles. Although I’ve been told that my stories often end abruptly, I know that I also have a tendency in the drafting to go on too long, to write past where the energy of the story reaches its peak. I recently cut the last third of a story after realizing I’d done that. What’s the process of ending stories like for you?
LM: I too am surprised when my stories end! I will feel certain I need to write many more pages and then, bang, the story is over, it ends itself and I am able to recognize that. People have occasionally said my endings are abrupt. I don’t agree, but I admit I am not one to belabor an idea.
MR: In an interview in Fiction Writers Review in 2018, you said that you think you write short stories because they’re short: “I get to spend a limited amount of time with some very interesting people, then spend time in the next story with a completely different set of people. A novel takes years and the characters, at least the main ones, stay with you all that time. I’ve written novels, failed ones, and I think they failed because writing them bored me to death.” I relate to this so much. I’m kind of a restless writer who always has many stories going at once. Sometimes I might be faithful to one for weeks at a time, but other times, I jump around from one story to another to another in a single day. Do you also have multiple stories going at once? Or do you tend to finish a story through to the end before beginning a new one?
LM: I am true to a single story from start to finish, and then I’m in agony until I begin the next.
MR: What do you look for in a short story?
LM: Accessibility, emotional honesty, wit and intelligence without pretension.
MR: What are you working on now?
LM: I’m not working on anything in particular, just writing stories and looking forward to the October launch of No Diving Allowed and the future publication of my third collection, You Have Reached Your Destination, much of which I wrote in the early months of the pandemic. But I am starting to see a connecting theme in my most recent stories, so I suppose I could say I’m inching toward a fourth collection. We’ll see.
MR: Congratulations on You Have Reached Your Destination! Also, Whoa! You were productive in the early months of the pandemic. You say you write one story at a time, start to finish, before beginning a new one. You must finish stories relatively quickly then? Ridiculous question, I know, but how do you do it? What’s your secret?
LM: Thank you! A story will take me a month to six weeks to write, then I send it around to my readers and see what else I need to do to it. I am a feedback junkie! My secret is I don’t have school age children in the house or a full-time job, so I have plenty of time to write. I am very focused, rarely distracted; in fact, I have a hard time coming up for air once I sit down and write. And I have a wonderful husband who doesn’t care if I forget to grocery shop or whatever. He is an artist, a painter, so he understands.
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