Claudia Smith has had more than a hundred stories published online and in print, in Sou’wester, Failbetter, The Mississippi Review online, and Redivider, among many others. Her fiction has been translated into Spanish, Vietnamese, Farsi, and Polish. She won Rose Metal Press’s first annual short-short chapbook contest (Ron Carlson, judge). The chapbook, The Sky Is a Well, sold out, but was later anthologized in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short-Shorts by Four Women. Her stories have also been anthologized in such places as Norton's The New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories From America and Beyond, Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009, and So New Media's Consumed: Women on Excess. She lives with her son, William Hinson, in Mississippi. The following interview was conducted using Google docs between September 30, 2009 and October 18, 2009.
1. On Realism
MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Claudia. I just finished your chapbook, Put Your Head in My Lap (Future Tense Books, 2009), and loved it. I think it’s safe to say that when it comes to realism, you’ re my favorite very short fiction writer. What does the term “realism” mean to you, and do you consider yourself a realist?
CLAUDIA SMITH: I’d consider myself a realist, but I don’t think I started thinking about my work that way until others called it realism. The writer Matt Briggs once told me he liked how my stories balance syntax/sense and naturalism. It has always been easier for me to talk about other people’s work than my own. I just looked up “realism” in the Encyclopedia and it says something like, “a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or ‘reflecting’ faithfully an actual way of life.”
I do believe that most everything I write involves the problems of ordinary people, and the stories are rendered with close attention to the details of physical setting and to the complexities of my characters’ social and inner worlds. I think that short work, by the very nature of its length, can at times feel abstract even if everything that happens within the story follows the rules of realism. Being thrust suddenly and quickly into a moment, or some character’s intimate thoughts, and pulled right out of them again can give the stories a bright, even magical edge to them. This is particularly true of my shorts that don’t read as mini-stories. Some of the short-shorts in my new collection read like mini-short stories, with a clear plot, and named characters. Others feel cramped, and internal, with very little dialogue. They might take more work to read. I once told Erin McKnight, when she interviewed me for Prick of the Spindle, that when I write shorts, I often feel I am working with negative space. Well, because there is a world outside the small frame, in my work, I try to go right into the moment, which is often emotionally charged and informed by something outside the confines of a few thousand words. That world outside the page is an external reality that resembles the everyday world that is familiar to me.
MG: Why does the short-short form suit you? How long have you been writing shorts?
CS: I guess I’ve been writing short-shorts for about six years now.
I want to write a novel; who knows if I will yet, but I’m working on one, or trying to at least. I found that I was to eager to jump into the moment, and left too much of the rest of the story off the page. That can work in a short-short. I’m not saying it can’t work in a novel, just that I didn’t make it work.
I loved the process of building this collection...as in Sky, I didn’t want the stories to all relate to one another in some obvious way, but I think the emotions and themes carry over from one piece to the next, and, hopefully, they have an emotional resonance when read all together. Seeing them connected like that reminded me of how intensely in the moment a short can be. Maybe that is partly why I’m suited to this form. I like putting on someone else’s skin for a few moments, or letting someone else inside. What is that called? “Privacy of experience”? Short-shorts have a way of feeling terribly intimate, right away. I try to write about something transgressive and make it feel ordinary, or the everyday and hope my readers suddenly feel how painful that everyday can be. That’s what my shorts are often about.
MG: I would enjoy reading a Claudia Smith novel. I can think of a handful of novels that seem to be made up of a series of connected, often chronologically-ordered, short-shorts: Kate Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life, and even Shane Jones’s Light Boxes. Would you try and shoot for something like these, or go the more traditional route (longer, exposition-heavy chapters)?
CS: I don’t know yet. I’m trying to write something more traditional, now. I want to break out of short-shorts, for awhile. I kept finding myself writing glimmering moments every two or three pages when I started this, and it didn’t seem right for the characters. The story I’m thinking of is still working itself out. I think the story itself will decide how I tell it. The kind of book you are talking about, I think I’d like to try. But I don’t think it is right for the novel I have in me, now.
MG: What are some of your favorite novels? Who are some of your favorite novelists?
CS: Oh, big question. I have a hard time answering because I know later on I’ll go back over this and see that I left someone out. The Great Gatsby. Housekeeping. Wuthering Heights. White Mule. I talked to my friend, the novelist James Whorton Jr., awhile ago when I was interested in starting my own. He told me that when he wrote his first novel, he went and read the first novels of his favorite writers. He read Mary, by Nabokov. Structurally, it was less intimidating than say, Lolita. I went and did the same thing. It was good advice.
I just workshopped part of my novel, and realized it is far from being close to finished. My teacher, Rick Barthelme, gave me some good advice also. I think what I had felt to stiff and staged. I was leaving some of my characters behind. He talked about novels with me, and mentioned opening up the story, bringing things from outside into it. For example, hearing a siren outside the window as you are writing, and letting it enter the story. That is the kind of thing I do when I write shorts. I’m going to try it with this.
MG: How do you feel about the differences between short-shorts, flash fiction, and prose poetry?
CS: I’ve been asked this a few times...I’ve had different answers. I think I said once, in a fiction, even if a plot is not there on the page, one is implied. I don’t know. The writer Sherrie Flick said something in The Rose Metal Press’s Field Guide To Flash Fiction that made me smile: “It isn’t a poem,” she said, “because the author doesn’t want it to be a poem.”
The one poem I’ve ever written for publication, Monsoon, ended up in Sou’wester—and wasn’t a poem. Because after the editor, the writer Valerie Vogrin, and I talked about it we felt it read better as flash. Why exactly? Well, with my work I think it has something to do with the narrative, the feeling that however short, it’s a story. Hopefully still evocative, and lyrical, and all that. You know, this is an interesting conversation to me but the more I write shorts, the less I know how to answer. I think whatever you call your piece informs the way it is read. If I had called Monsoon a poem, calling it that would have emphasized different aspects of the piece. Anyway, that was my one stab at poetry since high school and it became a story.
MG: So you were a high-school poet. So was I, and I stunk. Any advice for other high-school poets who might be out there, reading this now?
CS: Oh, I wouldn’t want them to think they stink, even if they do! They’ll figure it out for themselves. They’ll keep at it, if it is what they really love.
2. On Education
MG: Education is clearly important to you. You have a literature degree from Bard, a Library and Information Science degree from The University of Texas at Austin, and a creative writing MA from Johns Hopkins. Now you’re pursuing your PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Who or what influenced you to go to college and beyond?
CS: It is important to me, but it also came about differently that you might imagine. I picked out Bard from one of those college profile books. I loved the name, the pictures of the Hudson Valley in the fall, and the idea of going someplace where it snowed. Of course other things mattered as well, but I went there without having visited the campus. I had a lot of romantic notions of what it would be like. It turned out better than how I’d envisioned, but not for the reasons I expected. I went to graduate school right out of Bard because I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write, but I also had this idea that I would be a writer. My teacher, Mona Simpson, had a lot to do with why I applied. I borrowed the application fee from a friend and now that I think about it, I’m not sure I ever paid her back. I should ask her if she remembers.
Library Science was my stab at being practical. I decided to go at a time when my ex-husband and I were struggling, and unemployed, and just in a lot of financial trouble. We were living in a little town in Vermont and I didn’t know how to find a job there. Going back to school, and taking out student loans, was a way to our future, I thought. I was a librarian for about as long as I was in library school, but I know it influenced the way I look at information, books, and probably had something to do with my fascination with ephemera. I almost took a job with New York Public; I sometimes wonder how different things would have been had I done that.
So perhaps my education has something to do with circumstance. It’s what I do when I’m cornered. I am very excited to be here, studying again, and working towards a PhD. But I probably wouldn’t be here if my marriage hadn’t ended. I came here because I have friends who studied with Rick Barthelme and I know what he has meant to them, as a mentor and a teacher. I wanted to study with him. I came here because I thought it would be a good place for my son. And I mostly did this because I think teaching might be the best way for me to stay close to the kind of writing I want to do.
On paper I must look very educated. Okay, I am. But even now, I sometimes get this strange feeling that I am not really as learned as people think I am. When I put on my corduroy jacket and scholarly glasses, sometimes I feel as if I’m playing a role. I teach freshman composition now, in a building called College Hall. Now this building is the fantasy building I dreamed up for myself years ago—chalkboards, shiny green floors, and it is even called College Hall. It looks like a building you’d see in a movie about college in the 60’s or 70’s, Love Story maybe. I often feel like an impostor. Maybe this works to my advantage when I write. Some have called my stories personal, and asked me how much is memoir. I can say that often what seems real isn’t, but it feels as personal to me as the things that are.
I hope I can do this. I’m still figuring out how to balance school, teaching, and mothering. I have only made it to one PTO meeting and I haven’t written an academic paper in years. Wish me luck.
MG: What’s there to do in Hattiesburg?
CS: Ask me that in six months. William and I have barely made it off Hardy street, I’ve been so busy. I like taking him to Kamper Park, and I’m getting a taste for sweet tea. We like to take our walkie-talkies on campus. I just bought us used bikes and I’m saving up for a bike rack so that we can take them down Long Leaf Trace. My son likes to put on his Power Rangers costume, or whatever his costume of choice is for the day, and ride his bike down the sidewalk in front of sorority row.
There is a big, remodeled old train station here. As far as I can tell, only one passenger train comes through, once a day, from New Orleans. At night it is lit up and shimmery and a little bit spooky. My son and I have walked around it and peered in the windows in the evening. It is just the right amount of magical spooky for a five year old.
I have the feeling the other people I know here have gotten out to more places. Today we had football-shaped French toast at IHOP, and later went to have dirt and worms at Bop’s (dirt and worms: ice cream, gummy worms, and crushed Oreos) but I'd forgotten, Bops is closed on Sundays. Bops and IHOP are both on Hardy street, the main street here. The IHOP is supposed to be one of the oldest in the country. We went to the park, but then it rained. There are lots of pine trees and it smells good when it rains.
I hope to take William to New Orleans soon, to visit my friend, another writer, Utahna Faith and her family. I want to see the Garden District. I want to take him to the zoo. I thought we’d have made it to New Orleans by now. Well, we’ll get there.
MG: How are you and your son adjusting?
CS: The hardest adjustment has been the time we have to spend apart. I have a night class, and he has to be in extended care. On Mondays, I drop him off at school at seven and don’t see him until close to ten at night. That was difficult at first but is getting easier. Today, he had to play quietly while I graded for a few hours. I am having trouble finding the time to get everything done. But he likes living on campus, and we already have friends here. He drew a picture of a teacher robot for me, and it is on the door. The Teacher Robot has tiny hands, and if you look carefully, there is a heart inside the big square body; he colored over it with dark blue markers.
3. On Domesticity
MG: A common theme in many of your stories is domesticity. Your characters exist in homes, not work places; in rooms, not out of doors; with one other, not alone. Most frequently, your characters appear in twos: ex-wife/ex-husband, and mother/son. How do you respond to this?
CS: This is especially true of the shortest stories included in Put Your Head In My Lap. Those stories are more recent than the others. My shorts, over the last couple of years, have become increasingly shorter. I noticed that the stories I wrote four or five years ago were often somewhere between a thousand and two thousand words. Then...maybe it was two years ago, I did a word count on the stories I’d had published online, and they were all around five hundred words. A lot of those stories are about a small family, and are about marriage, and I think I was trying to get right inside feelings of isolation, hope, love, desperation.
The other day, in workshop, Rick Barthelme said that when you write, it’s a good idea to imagine yourself into the role of all your characters. Otherwise you run the risk of writing down to your characters. In longer works, I think I did this with my main characters without considering it, but I sometimes neglected the supporting characters. I’ve imagined myself into these small pieces, especially the ones about two people in a marriage. The stories are fiction, but I have to admit I desperately wanted my small family to stay intact. That severing, and my confusion over the last couple of years...it became a part of this collection. Some of the short shorts in the book were written years ago, and they seem sadder, more bittersweet, to me now.
The first story in the collection, a domestic story, was actually my first published memoir piece; it appeared in David Barringer’s anthology What Happened To Us These Last Couple of Years (So New Publishing). Kevin Sampsell wanted to put it first, but I was ambivalent. I didn’t want the fact that it was published as memoir to carry so much weight over the other stories. In the end we decided to put it first, but without commenting on it.
MG: Bittersweet is a good description for this collection, I think. I’m interested in how you chose to order these pieces for the collection. Tonally, one leads right into the next, and it seems effortless. How would you respond?
CS: When I first put the collection together, it began with an ending, Valentine and ended with a beginning Two and Two....then I showed Kevin Sampsell Submarine Dreams, and after we decided to begin with that, I sent him more stories. I thought Ice should go last. Ice echoes Valentine, in some ways, but it also goes in a different direction, so I like it as an ending. Flirting feels more like a lost innocence, or maybe the other stories cut its sweetness, so I thought it should be somewhere in the center. That is an old story—I think I wrote it at least six years ago. But it felt right in there, and I liked it better when read with the others. I say all of this but those were things I considered after the initial arrangement. I thought hard about these stories, but arranging them was much like writing a story; I fell into a deep concentration, and read them, and they connected. When I sent them to Kevin there wasn’t much discussion about arrangement, if I am remembering correctly, other than the first story. It came together much the way The Sky Is a Well did. Once I had them in place I didn’t take them apart.
MG: The Spiderman costume appears twice in Put Your Head in My Lap. Is there a real Spiderman costume that inspired you?
CS: We talked about pulling Spiderman out of one of them but I’m glad we decided to keep him in both stories. Yes, my son likes superheroes and he just about lived in his Spiderman costume last fall. I had to get a couple of them because costumes from Target wear out when worn day-in, day-out.
MG: I read in one of your Facebook updates that someone stole your laundry from a laundromat dryer. Did you lose anything of great importance?
CS: We live in student family housing, and everyone in the housing shares a laundry building with a few sororities. My son goes to a private school here in Hattiesburg. He wears navy blue shorts and a white shirt every day, with a brown belt, and his uniforms have become very important. In the mornings he reminds me to tuck in his shirt “flatly”. Anyway there were uniform shorts and shirts, which meant after they were taken I had to wash his shirt almost every night. The uniforms were from Land’s End, and not cheap. But then a professor here at USM whose daughter goes to the same school gave me a box of hand me downs, and my mother ordered a bunch of clothes for him. So we ended up better off than before the theft.
I also lost a flattering blouse. But, you know, clothes are clothes.
MG: I wonder if that experience lends itself to the what I meant, above, in using your term, bittersweet. What stands out to me is that your son sort of came out ahead, and you came out with a loss. This strikes me as bittersweet, in the simplest of domestic ways. It brings to mind the idea of sacrifice, a mother’s sacrifice. Perhaps I’m just reading too much into your anecdote. As you say, clothes are clothes. In any case, how does being a mother influence your writing?
CS: That’s funny, I didn't really see it that way. He is so proud of those uniforms, much prouder than I was of that blouse. Which I think a friend gave me anyway.
I don’t know if it makes me a better writer, but it probably influences what I write. I wish I could tell you how it does. I don’t think this really answers your question, but I will say having my son makes me want to try harder at everything than I did before he was born. So I probably try harder, when I write. Also the world is more intense, more what it was to me when I was small. And I can’t imagine feeling the kind of abandon I could feel, at times, before he was born. Things that used to seem sentimental to me don’t, anymore. And some things that once seemed absolutely tough and honest and brutal actually seem less so than they did. So that might have changed how I write in some way. Also really loving someone can’t hurt your writing can it? But I’d write no matter how things ended up, mother or not. It’s just what I do. I will say that before he was born, whenever I blew out candles on a cake, or threw a penny in a well, my wish usually had something to do with writing. Now it always has something to do with him.
Molly Gaudry is the author of We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious Press, 2009), and she is the book reviewer for East&West Magazine, which is based out of Hanoi, Vietnam.