Brittany Micka-Foos is the author of the new story collection It's No Fun Anymore. She also has written the poetry chapbook a litany of words as fragile as window glass. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories in your new collection?
A: I started writing the first of these stories in 2020, during the early days of the pandemic. Like many of us, I had a lot more time on my hands and nowhere to go.
A wonderful writing organization in Seattle, Hugo House, started offering writing classes over Zoom. I enrolled in a class called “Phantasmagoria: Writing Monsters and Myth.” One of our first assignments was to take a noteworthy personal characteristic and anthropomorphize it (inspired by the Gogol story “The Nose”).
I thought I might take my anxiety disorder and portray it as a two-headed monster or something clever like that. But when I mentioned the assignment to my husband, he said, without hesitation, you should write about your weird thumb.
It’s actually called brachydactyly type D (aka murderer’s thumb, aka clubbed thumb—among several other unflattering names), and it’s a genetic trait that occurs in approximately 3 percent of the population.
Anyway, that idea eventually turned into my short story “Thumb Stump,” which was first published in Variant Literature back in 2020. That story means a lot to me, as it motivated me to continue writing short stories, and it marked the beginning of what would later become It’s No Fun Anymore. It’s wild that this collection has been in the making for five years!
Q: The writer Alexandria Faulkenbury said of the book, “Alternating between poignant, grim, and sometimes haunting stories, It's No Fun Anymore cuts to the core of all our deepest fears about being a woman in the 21st century.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think Alexandria sums it up beautifully, and I’m so grateful for her insightful read of my book. I often call my writing “domestic horror” or maybe “suburban horror.” It’s a reflection of the uncomfortable, inhospitable spaces that women inhabit in everyday life.
I think a lot about safety as a psychological concept. What does it mean to feel safe, and how do the institutions around us contribute to, and even profit from, our fear and vulnerabilities? We don’t like to admit that safety can be elusive, especially for women, people of color, individuals with mental illnesses or disabilities, and other marginalized groups.
And it’s contextual, it’s nuanced, it’s not always this big, terrible event; sometimes it can be a collection of small, embedded things that just chip away at you. It can be woven into the framework of life. Alexandria’s blurb encapsulates this feeling perfectly.
Q: How did you choose the order in which the stories would appear in the book?
A: This was an incredibly fraught decision! There are so many considerations—themes, length, variety, tone—and it feels crucial to appropriately frame how the reader moves through the collection.
Ultimately, I decided to start with “The Experiment” because it’s the longest and most in-your-face story. It sets the tone for the world the collection inhabits: gritty, bleak, menacing.
But then, I wanted to end with “Border Crossings” since that story in particular contains at least a grain of possibility and hope. I didn’t want readers to feel entirely bummed out by the end of the book.
Q: How was the book’s title--also the title of one of the stories--chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The title is a recognition that women in the world are constantly up against everyday forces that render them commodities rather than individuals. Oppression, male privilege, run-of-the-mill sexism—none of which are “fun.”
And this is especially true for mothers. That’s where the “anymore” comes in: we discover that caregiving, parenting, running a household—this is all work that is not recognized or compensated in the same way as, say, the work of a software developer or a professional athlete.
The collection’s title is an acknowledgment that we live in a capitalist society that champions traditionally male-dominated fields and endeavors. This status quo contributes to women’s sense of alienation, exhaustion, and depleted self-worth, and it speaks to a larger societal problem of the kinds of work we value and prioritize.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on my first novel, and I’m really excited about it. It’s still in the infancy stage, but it will center on a high-masking autistic woman rediscovering her identity amid the medical bureaucracy.
I was diagnosed with autism at age 38. I think about how my identity has shifted over the years in response to sea changes in how the psycho-medical community understands and diagnoses individuals. Ultimately, I am whatever I am, but those labels impact how I am treated by others, who in turn shift how I understand myself.
I’m not trying to give a diagnosis undue power, but it is a form of meaning-making. It’s how society organizes and categorizes people. We need to be very cognizant of the institutions that label and define us. And what better way to explore that sort of meaning-making than through fiction?
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’d like to give a shout-out to my publisher, Apprentice House Press, and all the small presses and independent literary journals that provide a space for writers like me. They make it possible for authors to experiment and publish work that might not find a mainstream audience.
My writing career would not exist without small presses, and I am so grateful to all the staff and readers who are champions of these publications. They make the world a more vibrant and creative place, and we need them now more than ever.
You can connect with me on Instagram @brittanymickafoos or read more of my work at www.brittanymickafoos.com.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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