I first came across Sarah Freligh and her work through her poem “Wondrous,” which was first published in The Sun and then seemed to appear everywhere at once. A line from this gorgeous poem, in which the speaker remembers her mother reading Charlotte’s Web, became the title of her 2015 poetry collection, Sad Math: “my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing / at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math.” The poem exemplifies how a writer can convey life’s enormity of feeling and experience in just a few potent words.
I was at work on my own book, a debut collection of short stories called How to Capture Carbon. Everyday life merges with a touch of the fantastical in my work: a woman’s pie-baking habit helps her build a boat in a natural disaster, a boy flies around the world in a magical coat. When I found out that Sarah was teaching a microfiction class, I signed up to learn more about these short pieces, typically 300 words or less. Her creative prompts and examples of how to create so much in a small space inspired one of the stories in my collection, “St. Lucia Brings the Light.” In this story, a girl and her best friend gain the independence they long for as factory workers during World War I—and then discover the glowing, ghastly consequences of the chemicals they work with. Entire books have been written about the real-life “Radium Girls,” as they are known—but with Sarah’s guidance, I could tell this story in just a few pages. What I learned from Sarah about being concise and focused stayed with me as I revised each story in How to Capture Carbon. I listened to the resonance of each sentence, trying to make each word count.
Sarah’s microfiction forms the beautiful building blocks of her new novella, Hereafter, which follows a mother through the course of her son’s life and early death from cancer. Though Sarah writes poetic realism and I write stories about the uncanny and the magical, together our two books explore parenthood, grief, and the way forward through loss. This month, we had a chance to talk together about our writing and other things we love, including swimming, structure, and how a slow-and-steady writing practice can turn into a book.
+
Cameron: Sarah, all summer long I was loving the photos of water you were putting on Instagram. Sometimes it was a sparkly-looking pool, sometimes it was from the beach at a lake. I get the sense that you swim most days in one of these beautiful spots. I love swimming, and I love the water, and so every time I see one of these photos I feel happy. Could you talk a little bit about swimming and how it’s a part of your life? Does it connect to your writing process?
Sarah: Cameron, thanks so much for the opportunity to talk about the two things I love most in the world: swimming and writing. This summer I swam in two places—Lake Ontario near my home in Rochester, NY, and an outdoor pool at a club I belong to. The pool opens on April 1 and closes on November 30, so I get an additional four months of outdoor swims in. And, yes, some of those have been/will be in snow.
For me, swimming is like walking—it’s not something I have to think about, unless I’m doing drills for speed or form, so my mind is free to wander. Story beginnings come to me in the water as well as solutions to roadblocks I might run into while writing a story. Long, slow swims are especially good for working out the nuances of characters and I often gather material by observing people. Just this morning, a woman was wading back and forth in the lake while talking very loudly on her cell phone. I couldn’t hear all of the conversation, but she was clearly having issues with the person on the other end. She may very well end up in a story, though I’ll be sure to put her through the ever-important fiction filter.
How about you? Where do your characters come from? Do you start with a character or an idea for a story and go from there?
Cameron: It depends on the story. Sometimes it is a character— in this new collection, there’s a story about a boy named Jesse that was definitely driven by the character, this sort of awkward, nerdy, overwhelmed, infatuated teenager who’s always missing the point a little bit, and who I came to love.
Other times, it’s a situation. The story that I wrote in your class, which is about one of the Radium Girls—the factory workers during and after World War I who got radiation poisoning—came more from the situation. I was so interested in these women who had gotten a taste of freedom and independence by working in these factories, and then got sick. The start of that story, “St. Lucia Brings the Light,” was your prompt to find a photo to write about. Once I found the photo, I was interested in that tension—how much are we willing to pay for freedom? I’m not sure that I have the answer for myself, but I feel like Lucy, the character in that story, comes to her own understanding that her freedom was worth the cost.
I was wondering about character when I was reading Hereafter, which follows the main character, Pattylee, across a novella of beautiful micros through motherhood and the loss of her son. How did you decide to have one character as a throughline for this book? Did you start out with her and want to keep writing about her? (I love that she also has a moment of lap swimming at the Y in one of the later stories).
Sarah: Thank you for noticing that! Yes, “Firsts” is the swimming story and I have to say it’s one of my favorites, both to write and to read. There’s a sense of Pattylee coming to terms with her loss, an acceptance, per the stages of grief, but also an acknowledgment that life does go on, as tired as that may sound, and we have to go on with it.
I started these stories in August 2022 when I set a goal of writing a micro a day for the entire month. I kind of flailed around for four days and then on August 5, I was in a McDonald’s in Michigan biding my time until I could check into my Air BnB. I pulled out my notebook and was inspired by a woman cleaning the table next to where a couple of teenaged boys are sitting. They never intersected in real life, but do in the story and that’s the moment the character of Pattylee was born. There’s one story in her son’s voice, but the rest of them are narrated from her point of view. Once I understood who she was and what she needed— to move through grief— the stories fell out from there for the rest of the month. When it was time to order the book, I understood that it had to mimic that journey through grief, through the five stages of loss.
I’m always fascinated to learn how people order their books. How did yours come about? Any tips you can share?
Cameron: I’m not sure that I have good tips, or that someone would want to follow them, because it started out very haphazardly! I wasn’t initially writing toward a collection–it was more that at some point, I realized I had enough stories to make up a book. At first, I spent a lot of time moving them around in a big Word document. Around the same time, I was in a poetry workshop with Tess Taylor, and she said that she was going to teach a class about assembling a manuscript. So I took that—can you tell I love to take writing classes with wonderful writers?—with the idea of using it to think about how to order the short stories.
Some of the things we talked about was having the poems (or in my case, stories) have a sort of electricity or energy when they’re next to each other. Tess also talked about this idea of thinking about the poems as constellations–grouping them by theme, or by some other essential quality so that they make something greater as a whole. So I was thinking about these things as I figured out where to put which stories. I also thought about length—I tried to interweave shorter and longer stories—and also the voice and characters in each story and how they might play off each other. For example, there are two stories that have a first-person narrator who’s a mother—”Star, Fish” and the title story—and I wanted them to be not so close together that it felt like repetition, but close enough so that they seemed connected.
And part of the structure was thanks to my editors! The last story in the book had originally been a different one, a version of “The Little Mermaid” in which the mermaid falls in love with a woman on land. And my editors noticed that it was the one story that started out in fabulism, and then the real world intruded on these characters, instead of the other way around. Most of the stories start out in a world that looks a little more like our own, and then strange things start to happen. So I took that one out and worked to finish a new story, “Shoeless,” which actually made a much better ending for the collection. I had more of that thematic resonance and felt like the new story moved the collection to an ending point—not quite a resolution, but almost a sound that feels satisfying. The last chord in a song.
That’s so wonderful that Hereafter came from your micro-a-day month in 2022. I saw that you were also doing a micro a day this August, too–is that something that you’ve done for a long time? And are there other regular practices that you have with writing micros (or with writing in general)?
Sarah: First let me say how much I love the constellation analogy as a way to order a poetry manuscript. And yes, I’ve found that what applies to ordering a book of poems is always wise advice for ordering a collection of short stories.
August 2022 was actually the first time I did the Micro-a-Day challenge, and because Hereafter came out of that, I thought, why not continue it? I made it three-quarters of the way through August 2023 before my dad died and did all of August 2024. I’m just now starting to see what gold might be in there amongst all the dreck.
My only writing practice is to write for at least fifteen minutes a day. That’s it. “Write” can mean revising a paragraph or a page, or chasing some research, or even sending pieces out into the world. That fifteen minutes can occur at any time of the day, wherever I can fit it in. I’ve found that establishing set times are like going on restrictive diets—it’s fine for a few days and then you eat a piece of chocolate cake and say, what the hell, I’m done with this. You miss a set time on Friday because the kids are sick or work calls and come Monday, you might not get back to it. At some point years ago, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to find time to write so I started making time and fifteen minutes was completely doable. Most days I write much more, but you can get a heck of a lot done in fifteen uninterrupted minutes. Most of Sad Math was written that way, and each one since. Slow and steady.
Let me say, too, that the upside of all that scribbling is that I always have something new to revise, maybe even a new project in the works that, way down the road, might become a book. So, with this book about to fly off into the world, what’s next for you? What are you working on that down the road might grow up to be a book?
Cameron: Oh, I love the idea of 15 minutes a day. That sounds so doable, and really helpful to me right now. I’ve been working on essays related to the short story collection, along with my regular journalism work, and I’ve drifted away from my “project,” a novel that I’ve been revising. I have exactly that chocolate cake feeling you talked about–I get on a roll with working on my novel, I remember how much I love writing, and then I’ll miss a day and think, “Oh, I still feel ok.” And then, a week later, I have chocolate frosting smeared all over my face and feel sick to my stomach and also have made no progress on the novel. And it’s really hard to get restarted! It’s amazing how easily I forget how good it feels to do the things I love.
I think I also have to keep reminding myself that small things really do add up. That’s what happened with this story collection, which was made up of scraps of writing that turned into stories, and then—story after slow story—became a book.
+++
Sarah Freligh is the author of seven books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize, Hereafter, winner of the 2024 Bath Novella-in-Flash contest and Other Emergencies, forthcoming from Moon City Press in 2025. Her work has appeared many literary journals and anthologized in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), and Best Microfiction (2019-22). Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.
+
Cameron Walker is a writer based in California whose journalism, essays, and short fiction have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Orion, and The Missouri Review. She is the author of National Monuments of the U.S.A., an illustrated book for kids, and of Points of Light: Curious Essays on Science, Nature, and Other Wonders Along the Pacific Coast, which won the Tamaqua Award from Hidden River Press. Her debut short story collection, How to Capture Carbon, is forthcoming from What Books Press in October 2024.