LP: In early 2017 when you were the Selecting Editor for the Wigleaf Top 50 you wrote a brilliant introduction where you pose a question: would Donald Trump be a better person if he read books? You go on to encourage writers to press on in dark times and "[tell] the stories that humans need to hear." This particularly stood out to me. I can't help but feel that the stories in your most recent collection, The Unfinished World, are stories that I needed to hear, yet they are also stories that I would never have imagined hearing. I mean, digging up Lancelot and a werewolf hunting tradition? It was these wonderful quirks that sparked my imagination and caused me to devour the book. So how do you go about creating such stories—ones that people need to hear right now? How do you gauge those needs in your readers?

AS: I guess I don't look at "need" so much as proscriptive, but rather nourishing. I don't mean that in a feel-good-way, but rather in a way that feeds the soul in some essential way, rather through recognition, beauty, delight, pathos, originality, newness. That's why I've never been a big fan of I guess what you'd call alt-lit (I don't know what you call it now); I don't see how a flattened diary entry feeds anyone's soul, especially in times like these. That doesn't mean, by the way, that a writer has to WRITE for anyone's benefit — but rather when the reader is choosing something to read, they choose something that will nourish them in some small way. I'm not a big fan of the way the term "self-care" — originally a radical concept for women activists of color — has been perverted to mean bubble baths and massage, but I do think it can apply to fiction. I think when people have so little time, and so much of it is necessarily spent in resistance or basic survival, the story should fill that radical notion of self-care in some way.

That said, I'm not sure I know how to create a story like that, or even what that would look like because it's different for everyone. A story about torture would not nourish me but it might feed someone else's soul. I guess all that I can do is create stories that do something for me, as a creator, and hope that they'll serve readers in some good way as well.


2.

LP: Your stories take us to so many different places in so many different time periods. We're in the future, the far past, and alternate realities—sometimes in the same story. Is balance an issue for you as a writer in terms of this? How would you describe the experience of playing with time in your stories? 

AS: Oh lord, I don't have any balance at all, I suppose, when it comes to time in my writing. It's rather like death — I accepted years ago that obsessions are obsessions and they're not a bad thing for a writer. Some writers write the same story or poem over and over again for a lifetime. That said, time is wonderful for play — because it lets you reverse, erase, take back, change things, jump around — all things that are playful and delightful in fiction. Linear storytelling can be wonderful but I find it awfully limiting for me, because I'm an extremely playful writer. I don't like being tied down to a timeline. I like the ability to say "let's see what she's doing in thirty years!" or "I don't like that beginning, let's change it," right in the middle of the story.


2 ½.    

LP: Sentence? Phrase? Paragraph? Story?

AS: Since we're talking about time, here's one of my favorite writers on time, in one of my favorite books — Woolf, from Orlando. "Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second."



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