Copper Nickel contributor Amy Stuber is a widely published writer of literary fiction. Her upcoming book of short stories, Sad Grownups, is being published by Stillhouse Press on October 8. Contributing editor Robert Long Foreman met with her to ask about her writing process. 

The narrator of your story “Doctor Visit” tells us: “This is something I think about: mattering.” It strikes me as a writerly thing to think about, as we’re always trying to make what we write matter. Or maybe it’s just me, as I tend to be pretty frivolous. But do you, the author, think much about mattering? How do you make a story matter?

A: In the story “Doctor Visit,” thinking about mattering is on one level about life and futility and making meaning but on another about me wondering whether I should be spending time creating stories or, instead, spending time doing something more overtly helpful for other people.

I know art does matter. I’ve been greatly changed and helped by art over the years. But it’s easy to become convinced that the world doesn’t need another short story collection and maybe time would be better spent working at a shelter or going to protests or whatever. Of course, if everyone thought that, we wouldn’t have as much art in the world, and that would be a problem. So, the whole “mattering” question can cause one (me) to spiral!

To make a story matter, I think you must make the reader empathize or connect emotionally with one of the characters. A great plot or pretty language is good, but I think a story matters when the character affects the reader.

From the first story, “Day Hike,” which is interspersed with parenthetical judgments or opinions from a writer friend, speaking to the narrator, to the end of “Doctor Visit,” in which the reader is addressed directly, the narrator anticipating their disappointed expectations, this book seems to be in tension with what readers expect a story to be and to do. Am I making too much of those two moments? Do you find that you sidestep readers’ expectations; or, rather, do you seek to evade those expectations in your work?

In writing these stories, I kept finding little ways to subvert the traditional story arc when I could—not just for the sake of experimenting, but more because I wanted to see how the feelings and characters could expand when I layered other elements into stories after finishing an initial draft.

The Denis Johnson story, “Emergency”—I reread that a few years ago, and I was struck again how it could have just been the hospital scene (a man walks into an ER with a knife in his eye, and then there’s chaos, absurdity, a kind of absence around the main character). But then Johnson put in a whole second part of the story that took it to an entirely different place physically but also in terms of tone, style, and subject matter. It all coheres, but it takes you far beyond what you maybe thought it would be.

In NO WAY am I comparing my writing to Denis Johnson’s, but I love the idea of finishing a draft and looking for other places and ways to inflate a story. Some of this layering for me is my own feeling of duality as a very introverted person or as a person who has lived two very different lives (thrill-seeker turned parental nervous wreck). As a writer, lately, I’m often feeling that split in perspective or vision, and it tends to add another point of view or meta elements to things I write.

Your stories often have distinct settings, which are integral to the work, the way settings probably always ought to be. I’m thinking of the one set partly in Arches National Park, for example. Does the setting come first in stories like that one, or do you feel your way into a setting as you write? And would you say the Pac-Man board functions as a setting in “Ghosts?”

Ha, yes, the Pac-Man board is its own little setting within the setting. For a little bit, I thought I was going to write a whole book of stories set in the town where I live: Lawrence, Kansas, which is a weird, interesting little college town in the middle of a pretty conservative state, and the contrasts here are fun to observe and write about. That’s what “Ghosts” was, a part of that grouping of those Lawrence stories, but then I moved it into this collection. Anyway, I always hope a story’s setting can function almost like a character in the story. I think setting is integral when I’m thinking about a story. My kids and I talked a lot this summer about how Midwestern-ness can shape your sensibility—a kind of expansiveness and isolation that can infiltrate the way you look at things. I think that’s in this book.

I tend to get hung up on sentences. I like a good sentence, and your book is full of them. “All the sex I’ve had has been strategically obliterating.” “When the Italian actors kissed for what felt like minutes, we laughed and laughed, until we were coughing and breathless, because love was, really, as preposterous as anything.” Do you know, in the process of writing, when you’ve put down a really good sentence? Does that affect the writing process, and if so, how?

First: thanks. That’s so nice. And next: I am really into the rhythm of sentences, and I think when a sentence is working, I can read it out loud, and the rhythm feels exactly right. Like I’m hearing the syllables and beats almost more than the words. So, in that sense, I guess I know if one works versus doesn’t work. But sentence-level writing, precise writing, poetic phrasing, that can make a book—I can and will read a story that’s about nothing if the language and sentences are striking and beautiful, but I know a lot of people do not feel that way.

You write, in the story “People’s Parties,” concerning its protagonist:

She’d put together a few monochromatic uniforms, and she cycled through them every week. And she’d stopped watching men. She’d stopped reacting to their reactions to her. She’d reached an understanding of their fundamental envy of women. It was a relief not to care about them anymore.

As a man, this has stuck with me ever since I read it, in part because I suspect that it’s absolutely true, that men fundamentally envy women. But is this your hard-won wisdom, embedded in a story, or is it a fictional character’s passing thought? Does the difference between those things even matter?

I think I wanted it to be true when I wrote it? I wanted to come up with a nicer reason for the way so many men treat women than maybe more troubling options or explanations. Envy seems more palatable than resentment or hatred.

I don’t want to sound like I’m making generalizations about men. Still, I do believe that American society milks women for their sexual power and encourages them to use their appearance as power while also telling them they are powerless or undeserving of power. It’s a weird position to be in, really. To be coddled almost by the male gaze but also denied basic rights, like healthcare. (What do you even want, American men!?) But then a lot of this doesn’t apply to me anymore because, at 55, I’m often totally outside the gaze’s range at this point, which is mainly a relief.  

“Cinema” is about someone who is caught between two vastly different seasons of her life, with a scene from her past bleeding into the one she inhabits in the story’s present. It works wonderfully, and it makes me wonder if the story arose from that confusion between scenes, if the genesis of it was the pursuit of that effect, or if it started elsewhere, and you found that multi-synchronous approach to the story once you’d already begun writing it.

I conceived of this story as having a before and after before I wrote anything down. I knew it needed both parts to work, and they needed to weave in and out of each other.

This story—about postpartum psychosis, violence, and trauma—grew out of my own experiences with the much milder postpartum depression but also out of my own feelings about my children aging and their previous versions of themselves essentially disappearing as they did. (In the story, the narrator keeps seeing her children who have died appearing in front of her at different ages, toddler, teenager, etc.)

I wrote this at the time when I was preparing for my older child to leave for college. Every video of her from childhood, every photo, at that time felt so weighty, and I kept thinking of all these iterations of her, all those people once there and now not. I know this sounds hyper-melancholic or melodramatic probably, but that “now and then” feeling and the loss of past times was with me solidly like a metal cloak (and maybe still now), and so it really affected how I thought about and built out this story.

When I was in my twenties, and thinking about writing seriously, I would get upset whenever someone suggested that there were things young writers could not access, that I couldn’t sustain certain emotional depths, or whatever, until I grew up more and increased my emotional lung capacity, or whatever. Now, in my middle age, I see passages like this, from “Wizards of the Coast”:

It was one of those moments she’d found herself having regularly in her forties: looking at a man, thinking “he is cute for an older guy” and then realizing he was her age. Each time, it was this weird soft slap.

It’s a moment when I think, No one under forty would ever write that. I recognize in that passage one of the defining disorientations of middle age. I actually don’t know how old you are, Amy; maybe you’re twenty-eight and wise beyond your years. But I’m curious how long you’ve been writing, how your writing has changed as you’ve continued to do it. This book is very much about the passage of time and how it affects your characters, and maybe you never think about that as it applies to you, their inventor. But maybe you do.

Oh, ha, yes aging is so fucking weird! It’s just the strangest thing and it never stops being strange. You get old. If your parents live a long life, they get really old. All the things you want or wanted, either fulfilled or not, stack up alongside the accumulation of memory, the way you were alongside the way you are now, the way people in your life carry all their old selves with them, too. Most of us go through this if we are given the luxury of aging, and it’s such a weird mixed bag!

I published my first story in 1993. It’s taken me a long time to get a book accepted. Lots of pitfalls and lots of self-doubt. For a while I was sending out a collection (not this one) comprised of stories that had all been published in “good” places, and it was rejected everywhere. It was hard to understand that just because the individual stories worked didn’t mean they all worked together!

I am mainly glad to be in my 50s, except for the issue of having less time. I was a mess in my teens and 20s and plagued by bad habits, insecurities, and addictions. This is a calmer time, but it’s sad, too. The roof is off, and the reality is you’re just careening toward an end. And things do move more and more quickly the older you are. That sounds depressing, but it’s also maybe a little liberating. Things that mattered, that seemed so essential and important, can sort of fall away? I feel less frenetic and desperate and care a lot more about small joys now than I did twenty years ago. I think that’s what a lot of these stories are about.

I was struck by so many parts of this book that seem to be greater than the sum of their parts, for lack of a better way of putting it. They are positively pregnant with meaning. One is from “Dead Animals”:

People are erasable. Or, better yet, people are what we think they are at any given moment. Or if you want to get annoying about it, people are random assemblages of matter, ticking time bombs inching at every second toward disassembly, so catch them while you can, make of them what you will.

Is this what we do when we write short fiction—catch random assemblages of matter in the form of characters, and make of them what we will? Does that sound like what you do in your stories?

This is what I think I do, yes, try to pull a bunch of sometimes disparate things together and make them into something. I usually catch sight of someone who fascinates me and then start thinking about the person and then pull some emotion possibly from my own life to give to that person or imagine their version of it and put it all up against a location that’s also gotten my attention, and suddenly it’s maybe a story. The best aspect of this is finding the humanness in a stranger I’ve seen maybe in passing. I mean, I’m totally making up their life and their history, but it’s still fun to do.

Do you enjoy writing? If so, why? If not, why not?

I do enjoy it, usually. I mean, sure, during some months it comes much more easily than others. But, generally, I love story writing, both drafting and revising. I don’t love novel writing, I am not a daily writer, so I have found sustaining a longer work challenging. I’m a very compulsive writer and like to write a story draft in a few days and then revise it in a few days and not look at it again for a few months. Still, I keep trying to write a novel because everyone says you have to, but so far, I’ve written two unsuccessful ones and have a third in progress. We’ll see.

Like everyone maybe, I’ve basically got a ball of self-loathing and insecurity, a little sad child at my core, that writing temporarily shrinks, and then it grows back in the non-writing times. So, I like both the practice and the results. I wish I could do it more!