Michelle Ross is the author of the new story collection There's So Much They Haven't Told You. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Common and Cream City Review, and she is fiction editor of Atticus Review. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Q: You noted in an essay about your writing for Fiction Southeast, "What I’m guilty of is honesty, the very thing I strive to
achieve in fiction." Why is honesty your top priority in your work, and
how would you define honesty in this context?
A: My son’s Montessori school teaches and celebrates a new
virtue each month, and this month, as advertised by the marquee sign out front,
the virtue is honesty.
That honesty is the first virtue of the new year is most
likely coincidence, but it strikes me as an apt choice for January. The
beginning of a new year is a chance to shed the baggage, whether it be failures
or disappointments or whatever, of the previous year and start fresh. It’s a
chance to be honest with ourselves about where we are and where we’d like to
be.
It’s my absolute favorite time of the year. I clean the
house, the garage, the yard. I purge. I purchase a new planner. I record new
goals. I feel hopeful, determined to make positive changes.
When I talk about honesty in fiction, I’m talking about a
similar act of shedding and renewal. I’m trying to shed the words that fail or
disappoint because they feel too familiar, expected, or easy. I’m trying to get
at a hidden thing underneath despite not knowing what that thing looks like.
I’m trying to re-see again and again, just as I do when I
declutter the house, so that I can then throw out the stuff that is just in the
way (like I recently did the big box of margarita glasses that has been setting
on a closet shelf in my house, unused, for nearly 10 years).
To be honest in fiction, in all art I think, requires a
willingness to shed again and again until there’s nothing left to shed. It
requires that I listen to that voice that is telling me that despite how hard
I’ve worked and how tired I am, there’s more work to be done. It’s not an easy
task.
So many times I’ve thought I had written an honest paragraph
or scene or story, only to discover later that there were more layers to be
shed. (Sometimes, though much less often now than in the past, I make the
foolish, awful mistake of submitting said story out before it has shed all it
needs to shed.)
Talking about honesty in fiction can sound so enigmatic
because honesty in fiction is instinctual; it can’t be boiled down to a set of
rules the way that punctuation is. At the same time, it’s not an instinct that
necessarily comes easily, like the instinct to avoid foods that smell or taste
rotten. It may require practice and intention.
Despite how many times I’ve decluttered spaces in my house
over the years, still my house becomes cluttered again. Initially this may
occur simply because I’m too busy. But eventually what happens is I stop seeing
the clutter. I feel the stress the clutter induces, but I don’t connect the
dots.
And then when I finally do see the clutter, I realize that
all this time, I’ve just been tuned out, not paying attention. It happens in
writing fiction too, unfortunately.
Why is honesty so important? Because without it, a story just
isn’t that great, even if the sentences are gorgeously written. The story feels
hollow, dissatisfying. Like someone re-gifting you a bunch of junk from their
house so that now it can clutter your house instead.
Q: How did you pick the book's title, and what does it
signify for you?
A: One of my favorite story collections is Eric Puchner’s Music
Through the Floor. Puchner’s book takes its title from a phrase within one of
the stories in the collection. I really like that. I’m not fond of how titling
a collection after the title of one story weights that story so much more than
the others.
There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You comes from the first
story in my collection, “Atoms.” It’s excerpted from a line of dialogue the boy
character speaks to the girl. It’s an invitation, a seduction. I like the way
that line beckons the reader, as if saying “Lean in closer, let me tell you a
secret,” only here what’s being offered seems to be an endless evening of
secrets.
Q: Do you see common themes running through the stories in
this collection?
A: I admit I struggle to talk about theme. Every time
someone asks me what my book is about, I squirm. I have this same problem with
individual stories too.
Maybe this is just my failing, but a Flannery O’Connor
quotation, from Mystery and Manners, comes to mind: “When you can state the
theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can
be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be
embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say
something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the
story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be
inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is
to tell him to read the story.”
The difficulty with talking about theme is that it
simplifies a story. I know that I won’t do the story justice talking about it
in this manner. I am the world’s worst salesperson. Also, I’m the kind of
writer who seems bent toward adding more, more, more into a story. I’ve been
told that some of my stories have too many themes.
So here’s a list of various themes (or subject matter) that
are recurring in my collection. Will I leave some out? Inevitably.
Themes: science, horror films, girlhood, growing up, family
dysfunction, longing, regret, loneliness, betrayal, fear, fairy tales,
friendship, failure, order and chaos, death, faith and doubt, good and evil,
work, hierarchies, heartbreak, loss of innocence, acting responsibly versus
pursuing one’s desires, selfishness versus altruism, injustice, mothers and
daughters, class and education, self-preservation.
Q: How did you select the order in which the stories would
appear?
A: Because my collection is a mix of flash fiction and
longer fiction (eight flash fiction pieces to be exact, the rest of the stories
1,500 words or more, but most 4,000 words or longer), I made sure to avoid
placing two flash fictions next to each other.
I took into consideration a number of other factors as well:
point of view, subject matter, tone, setting, imagery that the stories opened
and ended with, etc.
I wanted to vary the stories, but at the same time I wanted
stories to have a kind of conversation with each other, to complicate or deepen
each other by means of their vicinity.
For instance, “If My Mother Was the Final Girl” and
“Prologue,” the second and third stories in my collection, both invoke the
story of Hansel and Gretel and are told by protagonists who are working with
fractured pieces of their mothers’ pasts. I thought that placing them next to
each other would perhaps add extra depth to each.
“How Many Ways Can You Die on a Bus?” the sixth story, ends
with the word, “sex,” so “Sex Ed.” seemed like an apt follow-up. “Ventriloquy”
ends with an image of two women setting a doll man afloat in a pond, so I
followed it with “When the Cottonmouths Come to Feed,” which opens with an
image of two cottonmouths swimming in the protagonist’s koi pond.
With 23 stories, I don’t think there is one perfect
arrangement, so I tried to keep that in mind. Otherwise, I would have driven
myself crazy.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m writing more short fiction and some creative
nonfiction. I’ve written several stories for a collection that I’m imagining
will consist of all stories that evoke classic horror films, including a story
inspired by the original King Kong (as well as James Whale’s Frankenstein) and
another drawing on James Whale’s The Invisible Man.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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