Teenage Girls and the Subterranean: A Conversation with Danielle Evans

1 Apr

“Often there's a space in a piece of writing where time collapses a little bit; where the past, present, and future are happening at once – sometimes just even in a short sentence. I think that, to me, is what a feeling feels like.”

I wanted to start with a few general questions about your writing career before we talk about your short story collection. I read that you went to The Iowa's Writers’ Workshop, and I think in the UK there's quite a lot of prestige and mystique around it, so I wanted to ask you about your experience – how did you find it and how did it help you to develop as a writer?

Yes, I think I didn't know what it was either! I went very young; I was straight out of college. So, I was twenty when I started at the workshop, and I think I’d just started reading story collections, and just fell in love with them. I would see these letters on the back when I read the author biography; so, I was like, ‘What's an MFA and also what is in Iowa?’. I didn’t understand why all these writers came from Iowa, so I looked it up and found out there was this really famous writing programme there.

I ended up applying to Graduate School straight from college and I applied to about five schools, and I got in! My sweet father flew out with me to look for a place, and the road from the airport is about forty miles of corn, so he was just looking around like, ‘I guess you better write a book’. There is a city in Iowa, but for a couple of East Coast city people, it was a little bit alarming for the first forty minutes!

But I did write a book and I had a great time there. The workshop has had Sam Chang as a doctor for about a decade now and it's in a really, really vibrant era – not that it wasn't then – but I think that when I try to describe my experience of the workshop, it’s a little different from what people are having now because we were pretty much on our own when we got there. I mean, there was a sort of suggested schedule, but the joke was that it’s very hard to get into the Iowa writer’s workshop, but it's harder to fail.

They were very interested in the idea of nurturing independent artists. I think it was a really useful space for me, both to have the time and to have all those models; I had four different instructors who all wanted a different thing from fiction, which was useful for me because, ultimately, we were there to form our own aesthetic opinions.

Occasionally, someone starts to have a debate about MFA programmes, and I finally said a couple of years ago, ‘Do not talk to me about MFA programmes unless we get universal healthcare, or you come up with a better way to get a bunch of apprentice artists insurance’, because one of the ways to do that in America is to be in school. So, I don't know that there would be such a culture around MFA programmes if we had other kinds of artistic support or just support for staying alive in general.

There's some very pragmatic work that a programme like Iowa does, and that's why I think we have so many of them, because even though Iowa is a funded programme, even the unfunded programmes come with benefits, and sometimes those are hard to get in other places.

Wow, that is so alien to us in the UK, so that's really interesting to know. I also wanted to ask again more generally about prizes - we write quite a lot about literary prizes, and you have been shortlisted and longlisted and have won a lot of prizes! I just wanted to ask how that affects you and whether it is a double-edged sword in the sense that it gives you a certain confidence, while also making you more nervous or cautious when you start writing?

I mean it's always an honour to win a prize and now that I've been on a lot of judging committees, I know how much time and labour goes into actually selecting a prize. So, not that I didn't feel honoured before, but I feel especially honoured now because, first of all, all these people had to take time out of their lives to read a bunch of books and, second of all, they had to agree on something, which is much harder!

I do think that my first book, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, getting so much attention did get into my head a little bit. So, I tell my students, the first thing you have to be able to do as a writer is something that might fail. Revision is a little bit easier; when you’re editing your own work, you can better see what you were trying to do, and you also become more sensitive to the spots that you get wrong, but it's never any easier to start from the blank page because you don't know if you can do the thing you want to do.

I think it took me a while to get out of my own head after the first book because it felt like people were invested in the next thing. You know, you write your first book, and everybody tells you that that your first book is the last time your work will entirely belong to you; it's the only thing you’ll ever do without other people in your head. And you never believe it and then, of course, your first book comes out and it does feel like you have to get back to a place where your next work isn't community property because you can't write from there; you can't write from a fear of disappointing because it just won't get done. So, I think it took me a couple of years to get back to a place where I could get through the draft stage, where everything looks ridiculous, and not imagine my editor and the New York Times and everyone who invested in me reading along with me as I was writing it.

So, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self – amazing title by the way – is a wonderful collection of short stories, so I just wanted to chat to you a little bit about the short story form. Firstly, what drew you to the form? And also, what differentiates them from a longer novel in your eyes? And what other short story collections have really inspired you?

I love the short story form because I think my favourite thing about fiction - and this happens in novels too, but I think a short story depends on it - is a kind of density. Often there's a space in a piece of writing where time collapses a little bit; where the past, present, and future are happening at once – sometimes just even in a short sentence. I think that to me, is what a feeling feels like. I'm also interested in short stories because it is often looking at a pressure point. There's some kind of before and after, and I'm interested in the moments both where that's a really clear before and after, where you have a more classic structure and you’re leading to the break, and also the moments where it's only visible in retrospect – where someone has no idea they're in a moment that's going to matter for a long time, but you get to the end of the story and you can see it.

I think stories really work in the subterranean and, by the time what a story is about comes to the surface, it's usually just about over; I think that's a little different to a novel, which has to do more shape shifting. I think when you think you know what a novel is about, it usually presents something new, and it's a different kind of revelation, a different kind of unfolding. I think a novel has more of its questions on the surface, and it just has more questions, whereas the short story is really working underneath that, and that is what makes both writing one and reading one feel like a bit of an excavation or a mystery to me, and I like that.

I think the writers I am most informed by are probably Alice Munroe and Edward P. Jones. I think they're both just magicians with time. You read an Alice Munroe story and you’re like, ‘How did she do that?’. Sometimes the tense changes alone in her stories – and not in a sloppy way. I think when I read those stories, I didn't know that you could do that. I think other formative collections are Victor LaValle's Slapboxing with Jesus – also a great title – Lauren Goff, Laura van den Berg, and more recently, Jamel Brinkley, who are all writing these amazing story collections that I think have a lot of gravity to them.

I also like anthologies. We do Best American Short Stories every year, and I think when I was first reading short stories, I would just sit and read that anthology cover to cover every year and think, ‘Okay, these are all the things the format can contain’, and it was just interesting to see the different ways writers work in compression.

Totally. I also wondered if I could ask about endings. Our theme for this issue is resolution and one of the ways we're going to look at it is via endings and literary endings and how authors end their books, but also how readers feel about endings of books because there can be quite a lot of disagreement over the merit of an ending. And I feel like that does link into short stories – I'm always a lot more satisfied by the ending in a short story because the story itself feels like a brief moment in time instead of a longer journey that culminates in a big ending; sometimes it can feel like you're reading a novel just to find out what happens at the end, whereas it never feels that way in a short story. Is that something that you agree with and how do you approach the end of the story?

Yeah, I think cautiously, because if you get to the end of a short story and it's not working, you've done the whole thing wrong and you have to start over earlier, so I’m always holding my breath a little when I get to the ending. I think two things: one, I think of endings sometimes in terms of operating questions. I think you want the reader to have a satisfying experience; there's a question, and it doesn't have to be a plot question, but there's a question you promised the reader you’d resolve by the end of the story to make it a worthwhile use of their time, right? And then there's some question or questions you want to leave open to sit with the reader, and so I think of the balance of the ending in terms of, ‘What are the open questions? And what are the closed questions?’ Did I keep my promise in terms of a satisfying answer to something I was teasing the reader with, but then also, did I open up a question that they weren't expecting, or did I give them something in return? So that's one way I think about endings.

The other way I think about endings is that the ending - the ending ending, the very last paragraph - is usually a little bit too late for the story’s subterranean to emerge entirely. It’s like a volta; you want the turn in the story to usually come a page or two before the ending, so sometimes that's where the ‘Oh, that's what I was supposed to be looking at this whole time’ thing emerges. And that is sometimes trickier to calibrate than the actual ending because you don't want it to be a flashing neon sign that takes all the wonder and mystery out of the story, but you also want it to be clear what you want people to look at.

I think often you'll see a short story have a place where it could have ended and it will go a paragraph further, and sometimes that is just editing, but a lot of times like it feels really intentional to me that stories feel like they have two endings; something ends the active plot, and something ends the more emotional plot. And so, I've gotten used to looking at where could this story have stopped? And then why did it keep going? I don't mind a story that keeps going, but I'm often interested in, ‘Why that extra beat?’. I think often that extra beat is going back to the open-up question and not the closing plot question.

That’s such an incredible answer, thank you. So, my next question - I wanted to talk about imposter syndrome. A lot of authors that I speak to have casually mentioned the sense of questioning their place to tell certain stories and their place to embody certain experiences. Is that something that you experience?

Not in that particular form. I think we all experience days where we think we're sort of trash writers and also days when we think we're geniuses. And so, the hard part is getting in-between days to actually edit your work. Generally, you want to draft on the ‘I'm a genius’ day and edit on the ‘I'm a trash writer’ day. And you can do anything on the in-between days, but you’ve got to figure what kind of day it is before you can sit down.

I guess I feel like, if I haven't done the work in real life, I'm not super eager to do it as a writer. If I don't feel like I know a person well enough that I can hear their voice in my head, I don't have any business writing their dialect; but I don't think that's impostor syndrome. It’s like, if I'd never read a mystery or talked to anyone who'd been involved in a crime in any way, I wouldn't sit down and write a mystery novel; I would do work before I did that.

I also think I got lucky in that we all have different tools in our kit and I have a broad palette in terms of places I've lived, and the kinds of people I know, and the kinds of voices that exist in my head, so I feel like if I'm going to sit down with a person, an imaginary person, I can probably get it right, and if I can't get it right, I know somebody who can tell me if I didn't get it right – hopefully before I embarrass myself. And if I do embarrass myself, it's not the end of the world; some people go to work and have a bad day and they kill people, I go to work and have a bad day and I embarrass myself. Like, that's fine, we can do that.

And about the idea of the personal being part of the fiction, I wanted to know how you feel about a specific question that gets asked quite a lot to writers, which is the question of whether you relate personally to your characters? And the constant assumption that your characters or your stories must in some way be autobiographical? How do you feel about being asked that question?

I think I used to be much more defensive about that and it's kind of part of another answer to why I love short stories. When this book came out originally, I was much younger, and I was much more anxious about the assumption that people would think I was just publishing my diary. This happens a lot with all writers now because I think we have a market for gossip, but especially with women and queer writers or writers of colour, or with any writer who's at all marginalised – there's this assumption that your work is either autobiographical or sociological, and it gets talked about in that way. And you'll see that, in a story collection, sometimes the reviews have to wrestle with that, they have to actually talk about craft because you're doing different things. So, I felt like with this book, because it would have a bunch of different first-person voices, it would be harder for somebody to say, ‘Well, all of these things must have happened’, because it would be a very busy life to have all those things happen to one person. I thought they'd have to give me credit for writing fiction.

It's always a little bit of a mixed bag with that question because, on the one hand, yes, you're trying to create something that feels plausible and realistic, so there's a way in which people assume it’s your story - and sometimes people assume in these very personal, intimate ways it's your story because it's also some part of their story and they want to share that with you, so there is something that can be really touching about the assumption that something is real. I think there's also something that can be kind of insulting because like, my literal job is to make things up, and so when somebody seems to think you made nothing up, that can be a little frustrating.

There's something you have to do to get into your characters’ heads; they all have a piece of you, even if they're people who are doing things you would never do, and having experiences you haven't had. I had a writer friend Kyrie Jones who would say, ‘It's like turning being trapped in an elevator to being trapped in a spaceship’; that's part of the fiction work. So, something about the feeling has to feel true or accessible to you, but then you raise the stakes and change the setting and the tone and the consequences. But you do have to be able to access something true about the feeling; the literal things in the stories might not have happened, but I know what it feels like to feel betrayed or ashamed or angry at yourself, and that is often what I'm drawing on, even if it's a character who's very different or a circumstance that I've never lived.

Onto your collection, in which quite a few of your stories explore the coming-of-age period for young women. I read somewhere that you find it important to write characters whose problematic behaviour came from complexity and not a lack of comprehension, which I loved, and I just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about that?

I think that, as a genre, it's not as prevalent as it was when I was in Graduate School, but there was a whole era of cautionary tales about teenage girls, not that they've entirely gone away, but I think they're a little bit more complicated now – the ones that have a mass audience at least. I feel like the thing that bothered me about those tragic cautionary tales was that they were often about trying to protect teenage girls from their own stupidity, and it just seemed untrue of my own experience of having been an adolescent. I think a lot of the worst choices I made, I made quite intentionally and on purpose. And yes, there is a way that, as an adolescent, you can't always see the long-term consequences of your actions, but I think you can know something is not a great idea in the moment and still have an internal logic for why it seems like something you would like to do. And so, I was interested in thinking about what teenage girls’ internal logic looks like. I think even just in the language itself, we talk dismissively sometimes, like ‘the silliest thing to be is a teenage girl’, and the most insulting thing to say to somebody is, ‘You're acting like a teenage girl’.

I wanted to think about that because there's a way in which I also think that teenage girls are among the most calculated people I know. There's so much attention on who you want to be and how the outside world’s perceiving you. I think always, no matter who I'm writing, the most interesting thing about a character is the difference between who they want to be and how other people see them, and the level of awareness of how other people see them. I think teenagers often have a lot of that; there's an active performance going on and an active question of, ‘How aware am I of what other people want from me? What other people see from me?’. And so, there's a lot of room for complexity and a lot of room for exploring the gulf between what's happening inside and what other people see outside, in a way that hopefully offsets that lack of complexity.

You've pretty much answered my next question with that answer because another quote – sorry to quote you back at yourself again – I really loved was when you said, ‘the space between our public selves and private selves is the space of fiction.’ That sounds like that's what you were saying about how there's often a performative element in dialogue with the interior monologue of the teenage girl.

Yeah, I mean, I'm also interested in characters who aren’t self-aware, but I think there's something interesting about a character who's very intentional about that difference between public self and private self, because often there's something there, whether it's a personal desire or a question about power, there's something in that awareness that I can play with.

I saw quite a few reviewers commenting, I think perhaps unfairly, that a lot of your characters in every single story were all ‘outsiders’ in some way. Do you think that's a fair evaluation or does that seem a bit too generalised?

I don't always know what people mean, but there's a language of ‘all short stories are about outsiders.’ I don't know if that exists in the same way in the UK, and it doesn't exist here as much as it used to, but I do think sometimes it's the vocabulary people reach for when talking about a short story in general. A very famous person said, and I can't remember who, that ‘short stories are about outsiders, and novels are about community’, which is one of those things that’s sort of useful to talk about very specific texts, but then maybe not as broadly applicable as people try to make it.

It's useful for me to think about the stories in those terms, and it's not a diagnosis that offends me, but part of what I think the tension of the book is, is that often it's about characters who are part of multiple communities and are not entirely legible in all of them. So, I think of the book more about people who have to move, or code switch, or exist in liminal spaces, than people who are outside; it’s the question of, what does it mean to be inside multiple spaces that don't accommodate each other?

That makes complete sense. What women in your own life or in literature have most influenced your writing?

My mother passed a few years ago and my grandmother actually passed last year, and I think in different ways they both told me how to tell stories. They were both complicated people with big visions and my mother in particular always believed in my writing, both in terms of voice and the idea of what a story can do. There's a believing I personally could be a writer for which my mother is obviously the biggest influence.

In terms of female writers, I do think Alice Munro in terms of what she can do with a short story and also what she could do with a complex interior landscape for a character who might not otherwise be seen as that interesting. You know, I always go back to her story How I Met My Husband, in which you spend a lot of time in the teenage girl's head, and she's so spot on. There are things she doesn't understand, but there are things she very much understands about her place in the household, and what she understands about power and what she can say to who is so fascinating.

Toni Morrison, who also just writes gorgeously about the relationships between women. She also has this incredible awareness of structural forces and the way they interplay with people’s lives. I would say those are the writers that have been the most foundational.

Thank you. I definitely need to read Alice Munro – I feel guilty saying I haven't read her work…

It takes a lot of people a while to get to her. If you go back and read the 1983 review of her book in the New York Times, it's so condescending; it's like, ‘What is this book about housewives?’. I mean, she won the long game, but it's sort of amazing to see just how long it took someone to see the value in reading books about Canadian women on farms. I'm not saying every review was like that, but there was just such a dismissive tone, like, ‘Maybe someday she'll do something about important people’, but she had persistence.

And our final question is something that we ask every author we speak to – do you judge a book by its cover?

I used to. I used to be the person to go to the bookstore and just look at the cover and blurbs to decide if I wanted to buy the book. But I think I've been a writer for long enough that I now know people have lots of different feelings about how a book cover reflects their work and there's a whole bunch of people involved in choosing a cover, and sometimes it's really limited to what’s inside the book, and sometimes the author is like [squirms]. So now I look at the jacket copy, I look at the acknowledgements, and I look at the first two pages before I buy a book, but I do love the visual of a cover.

And I think one of the things that has been most exciting about both books coming out in the UK, especially this one because it's been so long since I've seen it, is to think, ‘Oh, what do I want my cover to look like?’. To see a really snappy new jacket and get a kind of second life is fun! For the first collection that came out in the UK, which is my second collection, I really loved the US cover and thought, ‘Oh, how can I do it any better?’. And then I saw the UK cover and it was like, ‘Oh, it's perfect and completely different’. So, it’s fun to see what a different publishing house does with the material. I think as a writer I get excited about covers because you're getting a small glimpse into how it looks on the outside. But, as a reader, I don't know if I'm as persuaded by covers as I used to be.

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