Lisa Slage Robinson is the author of the new story collection Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp. She is a former corporate attorney and litigator, and is a director for Autumn House Press. She lives in Pittsburgh.
Q: What inspired you to write Esquire Ball?
A: When my youngest daughter left home for college, I decided to go back to school to get an MFA. I attended Chatham University (of Rachel Carson - Silent Spring fame), a lovely little ivy-covered college tucked away in between the Squirrel Hill and Shadyside neighborhoods of Pittsburgh.
I was in my 50s and my wonderfully talented cohort of peers were mostly in their 20s and early 30s.
They were writing contemporary essays and stories about their everyday challenges as young professionals, their day jobs as writers, teachers, museum administrators, editors, construction workers, bartenders, bakers, and sandwich makers. And because we were at Chatham, they incorporated landscape and place.
I wanted to entertain my classmates, to be one of them. So, I traveled back in time to the 1980s, and mined my early days as an attorney for inspiration.
I wrote stories about newly minted lawyers, short narratives in which my characters grappled with small, everyday decisions that challenged their notions of right and wrong, the letter vs. the spirit of the law, as they pushed themselves forward towards their notion of success.
I kept swirling around the question: What path would their ambition and inexperience lead them to take?
I set the stories in Toledo because that was where I started my legal career. With Toledo as the backdrop, I could summon the emotions and anxieties of a young associate.
Everything broke open in a wild and wonderful way when I took what I thought would be a brief detour to research a minor detail: how to get a character from her office building to the Lucas County Courthouse. I wondered what route would she walk and how long would it take?
To my delight, I discovered that there is a huge tile mosaic of a frog in the courthouse rotunda (how did I not see this when I worked there?).
There are frogs carved into the exterior of the building as well, in the intricately carved “spandrels” - the triangular panels in between the triumphal arches of the Adams Street entrance - and frogs hidden in the rusticated sandstone at the base of the building.
In the Beaux-arts style popular during the Gilded Age, the architect David Stine incorporated these whimsical details to pay homage to the marshy landscape inundated with frogs and to the city’s nickname at the time, “Frog Town.”
My brief detour turned into a deep dive. I became fascinated with this place that presents as a flat, treeless farmland that was once a swamp, thick with malaria and a forest so dense that day was as dark as night.
As I learned about the Great Black Swamp, the local folklore, mythologies, ghost stories, hardships suffered by the early settlers and the Native Americans pushed into the swamp and then driven out of the region forever by the brutal Mad Anthony Wayne, the financial riches gained from draining the swamp and cutting down the forest, my realistic stories started to veer into fabulism as I began to wonder how this spooky landscape affected the DNA of its inhabitants.
Was there a genetic memory that informed future generations’ actions? I began to explore magical feminism, as I conjured new mythologies and folktales to explain sexism and greed and unfettered ambition.
These questions and a new openness to go follow my weird led to the title story “Esquire Ball” in which Trevor, a young associate, seeks a wife to help him succeed. The Partners see his promise and conspire to help him acquire a helpmeet in the swamp.
“Esquire Ball” was inspired by Italo Calvino’s ‘The Prince who Married a Frog” (found in his anthology, Italian Folktales) and Steven Milhauser’s New Yorker story, “The Visit,” in which a writer travels to upstate New York to visit his old classmate and his new wife, a frog.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: As a young lawyer, everything is riding on acquiring the title “Esquire.” It is the culmination of years and years of education, taking the LSATs, getting into law school, the daily grind of the Socratic method--where’s there’s no hiding, the law professor can call on you at any moment, exposing your incompetence, the assignment you skipped because you had to work late at the restaurant job that pays the rent, your inattention because you are daydreaming about the boy who asked you out, or the heartbreak when it’s over, the competition with your classmates over books (in the pre-internet days – casebooks where known to have gone missing, or crucial cases ripped out) or for class rank or for summer associate positions.
After you graduate, there’s still the bar exam to take; your whole future that you’ve been dreaming of could dissolve if you fail, and even if you were a brilliant student, the exam is an exercise of endurance and standardized test trickery. Only when you pass the bar can you attach Esquire to the end of your name.
In the collection, in the title story, “Esquire Ball,” Mrs. Stash, the wife of the most successful partner of the law firm Strathy, McMahon, hosts a party each year celebrating the firm’s newest associates who have passed the bar. It signifies an ending, the life of a student is over, and a beginning-- the life of a professional and all the corresponding expectations.
As for the subtitle, Stories from the Great Black Swamp: The stories take place in Northwest Ohio, in and around Toledo and Bowling Green, a region known as the Great Black Swamp. While the swamp was drained and the forest cut down, vestiges of the swamp still remain in the landscape and the mythology of the place.
Q: The writer Margot Livesey said of the book, “Lisa Slage Robinson has a great gift for making readers care about her characters; we want what they want; we dread what they dread. And she is an expert in bad behaviour. Many of her women are not as nice as they seem.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love Margot Livesey’s description and her kind attention to detail that led her to this assessment. And what a dream to have Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury, and so many others, care about your characters!
Cissy Armstrong is a new associate who ribbons in and out of the stories, tying the collection together in the vein of Olive in Olive Kitteridge.
She has been saddled with the myth of the good girl, sees it as a curse and at every turn, tries to smash it, in ways big and small. She doesn’t want to be nice. She knows that being mean and emulating the partners’ behavior will be the secret to her success. She swears, shelves her empathy and compassion, engages in risky and predatory sexual liaisons, bends the rules and breaks the law.
In the story, “Salad Days,” Cissy reflects:
“I know from experience that a lawyer’s success is a by-product of a deep-seated meanness. Meanness like exhaust-stained slush as dark and cold and ugly as Main Street on a bitter January afternoon. That’s what prompts the lawyers I know to represent the Almighty Client, right or wrong, without regard for the truth.
Before Mr. Csonka died, before the whole rotten mess stunk so bad that I could no longer ignore it, I cultivated my own little garden of meanness, first planting the seeds of observation and then watering it daily with practice. Without it I knew I would be a failure.”
Q: As you mentioned, the book is mostly set in Northwest Ohio in the 1980s—can you say more about the importance of setting to you in your writing?
A: A few years ago, I had the great pleasure of spending an afternoon with Amy Bloom (author of Away, Lucky Us, and, most recently, In Love). She told me that when she goes to a museum, she only glances at landscapes but she can spend hours looking at portraits because she is mostly interested in character.
She asserted, however, that character informs place and place informs character. The two are inextricably intertwined. How a person responds and adapts to her surroundings – that is very the essence of character. https://www.thefourthriver.com/blog/2019/2/25/interview-the-heart-of-what-i-want-to-tell-you-about-is-not-the-place-a-conversation-with-amy-bloom
In my own writing, I always start with character but I took to heart Amy Bloom’s instructions, especially with Esquire Ball.
Northwest Ohio in the 1980s was both unique and universal. Toledo was experiencing a renaissance which made it an exciting place to live with the newly revitalized waterfront, construction of the gleaming office tower Seagate One, the World Headquarters of Owens-Illinois, Portside, an indoor festival market place, the Hotel Sofitel, an upscale French hotel, concrete promenades along the Maumee River with fountains, and a summer concert series dubbed “Rally by the River.”
The Toledo Zoo, to the envy of larger or more notable concerns, negotiated the loan of giant panda bears for a wild and hot summer, drawing a million people to the region in 1988.
Toledo had this big city energy. You could see yourself as a big fish in a little pond which heightened the sense of self-importance, the romance of being “somebody.”
The ‘80s was the era of big hair and big ambitions, shoulder pads and the “greed is good” mantra of Gordan Gecko. Dallas was appointment TV. Aspirational wealth, over-the-top luxury, and opulence was celebrated in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Robin Leach closing each episode with the salutation, “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”
This was the place and time Cissy found herself in as she began the early days of her career, the zeitgeist that fueled her actions and how she navigated her life inside and outside of the firm.
Northwest Ohio, the region known as the Great Black Swamp, informed the collection as a whole and certain stories in particular.
For example, in “Devil’s Hole Road,” Cissy travels to an old farmhouse to resolve a dispute over poorly installed windows.
The mother-daughter duo who own the farmhouse school her on the prehistoric history of the region and the glaciers that formed the topography and, ultimately, once the age ice ended, the swamp. They also shared the story about a college frat boy who tried to steal their road sign and then disappeared in a bog.
As Cissy examines the windows, a storm brings a moment of darkness which allows her to see her reflection and her soul in the window.
Devils Hole Road is an actual road outside of Bowling Green and was named as such because soldiers and settlers were known to have entered the swamp in this area, never be heard from again. The fraternities often stole the road signs for their dorm rooms.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: There are so many projects large and small percolating in my head right now. Marketing a book feels like a full-time job. It has been a blessing to navigate but leaves less time to write.
I am, however, grateful for the tug of the page. I have been working on small fragments of memoir that explore my relationship with my mom and feminism.
I’m also working on a novel, set in the near future, in the same universe as Esquire Ball. I fell in love with some of the lesser characters, particularly Jenny, who liked to experiment on frogs and bunnies--and her boyfriend. It’s a part Frankenstein, part Wizard of Oz exploration of the changing legal landscape.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Some of the most important lessons I learned about writing and the writing life, I learned from being a long-distance runner. It takes endurance, training (getting the words down on the page), cross-training (reading, reading and more reading, analyzing texts, volunteering time to an indie press or a literary magazine, being a good literary citizen, writing reviews), and a certain obstinance, a refusal to accept rejection.
Coming in last place doesn’t mean it’s time to give up, it means that you showed up, tied your laces and did the miles. It means you’re primed for the next race. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It takes as long as it takes.
I had been dreaming about writing a book my entire life. I was writing stories as soon as I could hold a pencil and, before that, daydreaming them. But I got sidetracked along the way, took detours for myriad reasons, but the itch to create, to write, never left me.
When I finally committed to it, embraced the writing and reading life, the final product, this book happened.
But all the detours, the life that happened, jobs at Bob’s Big Boy and Rizzi’s pizzeria, The Richfield Tavern and Fridays, law school, the law firms, moving to Canada and back, a stint in-house with US Steel, being a daughter, sister, friend and a wife and a mother, the end-of-life caretaker for my mom and other loved-ones and companion to dogs--all of these informed me, made me the writer I am today. It takes as long as it takes.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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