An Interview with Claudia Smith By Erin McKnight
"These succinct stories practically shake with underlying tension and energy." —Abigail Beckel & Kathleen Rooney, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness preface
As Rose Metal’s 2006 winner of their first annual short short fiction contest, Claudia Smith’s The Sky Is a Well is reprinted alongside the chapbooks of Kathy Fish, Amy L. Clark, and Elizabeth Ellen in the press’s newly released anthology, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness. As a prolific, award-winning, and anthologized writer of short shorts—as well as the author of memoirs, short stories, a novella, and Crumb Island, her in-progress novel—Smith’s inclusion in this remarkable quartet of collections makes for resonant, commanding reading.
EM: In considering your numerous publication credits, it is clear you have a proclivity toward short short stories, or flash fiction; can you explain the form's appeal, and whether you intentionally sought to style much of your writing this way? When I was in high school, I wrote poetry. I also wrote short shorts, because I checked out the first Sudden Fiction anthology, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas; I believe it came out around 1986. Then I went to college and wrote short stories and attempted novels. About six years ago, a writer named Kim Chinquee got me interested in writing short shorts. I began workshopping with her and a group of other writers online, through an online workshop called Zoetrope. I went through a few years of writing short shorts almost exclusively. I think shorts can be terribly intimate, and, in some ways, I think they have as much in common with, say, fat Russian novels as they do with short stories. Time isn't always linear in my short shorts; it often loops around. I think I can get away with things that might seem gimmicky in a longer short story. For example, in my story "Colts," so much depends upon the last line. But my hope is that it doesn't seem like a punch line. I want it to feel inevitable; I want it to invite the reader to go back and read the story again. I became a better writer when I started writing short shorts. I learned so much about structure, and how to get inside a story. I think it worked for me much the way people have told me that learning a second language has worked for them: learning a second language can teach you how to learn a third. I'll never tire of writing short shorts, and I think I'll always write them. I think there are many ways of approaching short fiction. What I was doing when I wrote the stories in The Sky Is a Well, I believe, was working with negative space much the way a visual artist, a sculptor, might. I was cutting into something larger. About a year ago, I began to work on a novel, and for me, it's a very different process. I had to resist the urge, at first, to sprinkle shimmery moments every few pages. Yet in some ways, I feel that the novel has more in common with shorts I was working on years ago than it does shorts I am writing now, because it deals with longing, loss, girlhood and sexuality.
EM: Do you believe the short short form lends collections combining the works of multiple authors, like A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness, a greater sense of cohesiveness than groupings of longer pieces of fiction? Amy Clark's, Kathy Fish's, and Elizabeth Ellen's collections work so beautifully off of one another’s, and mine. In some ways, I think the stories work off one another in conversation, in much the same way they do within the framework of the individual collections. I don't know if I'd make the assertion that they have a greater sense of cohesiveness, but I do think they work off one another in a special way; Ron Carlson said something in the blurb for my chapbook when it was first published: "each story unfolds like a song on a concept album—the pieces can stand alone, but together they blend into a seamless whole you'll want to hear again and again." He was talking about The Sky Is a Well, but I think something like that happens in the way the collections in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness work off of one another.
EM: Do you approach each piece of writing with a target word count in mind, or are you more apt to allow the story’s revelatory process to dictate its length? I don't sit down with a specific length in mind, although I do sit down with a specific intention to write short shorts, or short stories, or work on my unfinished novel. For example, if I sit down with a particular song in my head, or a feeling, I might think "blue," or "red." I'll write a short piece, and the word “red” might never appear in the story, but an overall feeling or mood will emerge. I haven't been able to write a traditional short story this way, and I can't imagine starting a novel with "blue," but I've probably wrapped a few flash fictions around that color. With short stories, I daydream about the characters; I go to sleep wondering about them, I think about them while waiting at bus stops, or when I'm driving in the car. With very short pieces, I almost always finish a first draft in one sitting. Sometimes the piece will go through several revisions, and a couple hundred words will be shaved. Sometimes, the piece will get fleshed out later.
EM: Every short in the chapbook boasts what I consider a "power sentence." These inclusions slice through your prose and find me like a blade, yet manage also to feel like heavy blows. Are their insertions consciously placed as intersecting points of ephemerality and brutality, or do they sneak up on you in the same way they do the reader and induce a similar dissonant perception regarding their physical contact? They sneak up on me. And when they do, I get such a rush. It's smug, I know. But one of my favorite feelings in the world is the feeling I get when the right image, the right sentence, comes to me when I am in the groove, the zone, whatever you want to call it. When a line comes to me and I know, absolutely, that this is the right line, in the right place, the line that feels inevitable and yet, not contrived. This happens to me when I write short shorts; in short stories, and my novel, they are more deliberately planned.
EM: I have read about your flash fiction writing technique which calls for a list of words that are the focus of a piece’s crafting, or are then woven into its structure. Can you please explain how this process came about, if you have revised it, and whether you foresee its inclusion in your writing process over, say, the next twenty years? I learned this technique from the writer Kim Chinquee, and I've used it for years. Most of the stories in The Sky Is a Well were written this way, and many were written in Hot Pants, the online flash fiction workshop she created. I was using the technique almost exclusively a few years ago. I'll probably continue to use it. I wrap my mind around images and just start writing around them. When I first began using this technique it seemed fun, a kind of word game. Now, the words other writers in the group throw out at me often disappear into the text. Months or days later, I often can't remember the words that were provided. My story, "Cherry," began with a word list that included "cherry"; I thought about the word, and it got me thinking about virginity, and what that can mean, and what it meant to me when I was a teenager. And then that took me to the field in the story, and to the two girls in that field. I don't know if I could start a novel, or a longer story, with a word list. But it works very well for me when I write short shorts. I know others in the workshop have used this technique for poems and longer works. There are many writing prompts that work for different people. This one happens to work very well for me.
EM: What are your thoughts on the interface between flash fiction and the prose-poem? Does one exist? Does your particular writing angle remain constant? This is a great question: one I've thought a lot about, and talked over with other writers. I believe there are no hard and fast rules. I don't know if I've ever really written a prose poem, although I've tried. When I write flash fiction there is often an implied narrative, even it if isn't spelled out. I don't think this is necessary for prose poems. Some of my earlier flash fiction pieces were compressed stories, often with traditional plot structure, third-person narratives. I've veered away from those the last couple of years. It's hard to say where my writing will go, if my angle will remain constant. I've surprised myself as a writer lately. I gave readings for The Sky Is a Well and for A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness. It was a dream, the first real series of readings I've ever done. I read with Kathy Fish in Portland and Seattle, and it was beautiful. We—I should say Kathy's husband—drove through a fairytale landscape and we read in front of people, had coffee, and after-reading beer. I also read in Buffalo, and in Texas. I realized, as I read, that the stories I was reading, although close to me when I wrote them, were not what I was writing at the time. I understood what it must feel like to be a musician, asked to sing or play old favorites. I felt my readings were livelier when I mixed up fresher pieces with the old. I felt closer to the text when I took a break from certain pieces. When I came home, I realized that I can't say that any genre or form is my "thing." I may be writing ballads someday, or plays.
EM: “The Sky Is a Well,” the namesake short short story of your chapbook, is emblematic of a recurring abutment of childhood innocence and adult realities. Do you believe that just as the symbols of water and secret-keeping are in some way repeated by way of your chapbook's tropes, that your depictions of men belie a danger which unites (even tenuously) the restorative nature of water with secrets better left tucked away? Yes. This gives me something to think about. I do think that many of the stories are about the isolation that follows hurt, and how that isolation can be as painful as any physical blow. The fathers in these stories are often outside the page; children are waiting for their return, or wondering if they will return. Husbands are sleeping or turning away. When I first thought up the title for "World of Men," I thought it was maybe wrong for the story, too over-the-top, overblown. Then I thought of one of my favorite titles, The Great Gatsby, and I decided, okay, this is the right thing to call a story that is so much about every man this character has loved. Ending with the small boy seemed right. But, I'll confess something: often, when I look at that very last word in the story, I'm tempted to just take a pen and cross it out. I wonder if the "fire" was too much. This consideration brings me back to what we were talking about, how collections are grouped. I think some of the other stories surrounding "World of Men" are quiet, and those whispers give that story more room to shout.
EM: Your narrators are recognizable as "familiar strangers"; their representation of youth is exquisitely raw, viscerally honest. Does your rendering of these young women ever feel like a redemptive act: their bold existence on the page an incantation that prevents them from growing into the often-weak women with whom they share space in your stories' small rooms? I don't know if I'd considered this until you asked, but, yes. There was some of that, when I wrote many of the stories in Sky. When I was a girl, I loved the book Little Women. It's been a long time since I read it, so I might get some of the details wrong, but I remember how immersed I was in Jo's childhood, and its vivid details. The peppermint ice cream at Christmas, the shadow of the absent father, the childhood fantasies, the games the girls play together . . . once they grow up, their adulthood seems pale by comparison. I felt the same way about the Anne of Green Gables books. Redheaded Anne, getting into her scrapes, constantly having to prove herself to the town and Rachel Linde, creating friends for herself inside mirrors—she's so compelling, and never pathetic. Somehow, her life as a doctor's wife in the later books seemed muted. Of course, that doesn't end; the end of childhood is not the end of a fairytale, but it isn't the freedom I imagined for myself when I was a girl. I know people often use the term "puppy love" for childhood crushes, but I think it is dismissive. The feelings and yearnings, the worlds that children create for themselves, are as intense and real as anything felt in adulthood. At least, for me they were. Watching my son as a baby brought back the intensity of my own childhood. I think the feeling had a lot to do with the things I was preoccupied with when I wrote many of the stories in that collection. And the childhood stories in Sky, they are freezes; they are often moments suspended in time, informed by what happened before them and what will happen after. I think that is what makes them resonate.
EM: How has motherhood changed you as a writer? Are there now gaps in how a piece might materialize, or do you generally find your writing emotionally deeper and exhibiting a precision that can only come with the time constraints of motherhood? When my son was a baby, I didn't have long stretches of time to sit and write. I found that I could get through a first draft in about twenty or thirty minutes, and I felt I worked best this way—I could focus right away. There were no concerns about the perfect mood, the perfect music, the right pen, or the right frame of mind; I just wrote as much as I could, when I could. I'd nurse my baby, and in quiet moments I wrote and I read. I think I read a lot that year, although it kind of feels like a lovely milky blur when I look back on it. I can remember every moment I wrote, but not exactly when those moments happened. My writing has changed as he has changed. He's four now, and more independent. What hasn't changed is how differently I feel and experience the world since he arrived. I'm not the same person I was, and I'm sure this not only influences how I write, it changes what I write about. I notice the change of seasons, and mark them for him. Ritual and ceremonies seem more important to me. Even my favorite books seemed to shift and change. I have read Charlotte's Web about five times since he was born. I feel more afraid, yet more forgiving, of the world. I vote and I feel good about voting. Putting candles on a cake or stringing lights on a porch . . . these things matter more to me than they have since I was a child. I don't write all night or drink all night, or cry as long or as hard these days. I can't imagine feeling the release and abandon I felt in my twenties ever again. But things also seem to matter more and it probably surfaces in my stories.
EM: Can you speak a little as to your vision: where you expect yourself, as a woman, a mother, a writer, and an artist, to be in the next decade or two? I want to get back to my novel, Crumb Island. It is about a pregnant woman in her early twenties, and she's telling stories to her unborn child. Of course, she's really telling stories that she will probably never tell a walking, talking child. The world in the novel I'm writing is self-contained. And when I look at some of my older stories, I see now that I was often writing about an aftershock, or the in-between moments of daily life that we don't always talk about. I realized, after sharing some of the novel with a couple pairs of trusted eyes, that much of the telling of its story, where there is a very horrible event at the center, is just finding a way for the speaker to get it out. So my novel, much of it, is like a big stone thrown into a lake, and those shorts I wrote a few years ago are the ripples around the point of impact.
Quotes from A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness printed with permission from Rose Metal Press. More information about Claudia can be found at Claudiaweb. A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness
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