New England Review

Behind the Byline

Rob Ehle

NER staff reader Evgeniya Dame talks to Rob Ehle, author of “A Bus as Big as a Bus,” about children as protagonists, striking the balance between funny and sad, and the importance of sharply focused curiosity.

Evgeniya Dame: There are two wonderful things going on in your story—it takes us into the mind of an eleven-year-old boy and in a smart, understated way it engages with one of the greatest, most enigmatic works of existentialism, The Stranger by Albert Camus. What came to you first? Was it the desire to write a story in Joe’s point of view or to create a commentary on Camus’s novel?

Rob Ehle: I wrote this story a long time ago. It was actually a sort of assignment for a reading at Litquake, the San Francisco fall literary festival, and the theme was “Failure to Commit.” I don’t remember how I got to be part of a group of writers much more accomplished than I. I just remember that a failure to commit felt like one of the central themes of my own life. As the deadline loomed, I realized that not getting assignments done on time was as good an example of that as any. Once that thought came to me, the first page wrote itself—just as the first page of a school assignment could, once I finally got the idea. And just as in school, I hadn’t completed the full story by the night of the reading. Anyway, each of us only had five minutes that night to read, so I didn’t really need to have it finished.

The Stranger came to me because I had recently reread it, and remembering my consternation the first time I’d done so, I started thinking about what it would be like if a very young person read it. The difference would be that the kid would feel no need in an essay or book report to disguise his complete bafflement and boredom. I don’t think there’s much of a parallel between Joe’s story and Meursault’s in The Stranger. Unless, I suppose, it’s that there’s a point somewhere around fourth or fifth grade where the universe appears disturbingly indifferent to a certain kind of kid.

ED: Do you often read fiction written from a young person’s point of view? What kind of things ring true to you (or not)?

RE: I don’t know if I read it more often than anyone else. Classics like Huckleberry Finn, or some of the Faulkner stories—“The Bear” comes to mind, The Reivers; in contemporary fiction, there’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and certainly Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. What all this writing has in common, of course, is young people’s experience being treated with as much curiosity and seriousness as adults’. Their problems and challenges are often—at least for middle-class white kids—simple; but for the child, the problem is always new, and therefore always huge. In the case of Jesmyn Ward’s characters, the problems really are huge—for anyone, no matter what age—and that’s another layer, but the point is that a child’s perspective can often distill the confusion and despair and delight common to any life. There’s a difference between distilling experience, though, and just using an innocent’s perspective for easy emotion. Whether it’s one or the other in any particular story is what people will argue over.

ED: While Joe’s struggle with his reading is the center of the story, I loved the quiet background drama—the tension in his parents’ marriage, glimpses into Nathan’s home life, and the growing chasm between the two boys. How do you approach secondary characters in your work?

RE: I think it’s obvious that one first of all—in psychological realism, anyway—gives secondary characters as much effort in the telling as one does a primary character. I mean, that person isn’t going to get as many brushstrokes, but the ones s/he gets are going to have to be deft. I don’t know if in your own writing you’ve ever had the experience where there’s a character you’d thought of as secondary in the beginning eventually becoming a primary character in their own right, but it can happen now and then. And if sometimes it just means the story’s become ungainly, other times the current has actually found a different course. That opening up of possibility, unpredictability, which is the strength of a good story, comes partly from rendering each character with sharply focused curiosity.

ED: Could we talk about the tone of this story? It’s incredibly funny, but there is a darker tone underneath, especially once Joe begins to realize that the rules of his life have changed and things may not turn out for the best, either at school or at home. Then there is the emotional moment at the end between Joe and his mother. Do you find yourself drawn to his balance of the comic and the tragic, and how do you know when the combination is just right?

RE: Comedy gives a breeze to a story and moves it along. For better or worse, when people’s attention these days starts to flag at the 241st letter, elements like humor take importance in just keeping readers’ eyes on the page. Some people bemoan this, and for the most part I’m with them. I don’t usually write stories with quite this many laughs per line. I expect some of the tone is due to the fact that, initially, I knew I was going to be reading aloud to a crowd of folks in a bar.

On the other hand, there’s an interesting balancing act in writing about kids: they’re naturals for comedy, but they can also seduce a writer into sentimentality. And of course, as I said, their experience can sometimes distill the human condition: their challenges are magnified because it’s the first time they’re being experienced. I remember breaking something once at a summer day camp, and trying to figure out how I was going to live on nuts and berries after I ran away to live in the woods for the rest of my life. A fugitive from justice. I think I was eight. That’s a funny story, but not at all funny in the moment. There are so many times before you’re even ten years old that you are terrified or desolate. Even the most carefree child. For myself, I’m not usually thinking about balancing the comic and the serious. I’m thinking about what life is like. And if you render that truthfully, the comic and the serious and occasionally the tragic are all there.

ED: Present throughout the story is a subtle dissatisfaction—cynicism, perhaps—with the way schools promote reading habits. Were you yourself a “mathy skateboard carnivorous plant person” like Joe once? How do you think engaging with literature really happens for children?

RE: That description of Joe’s book report assignment on the first page is almost verbatim an assignment my son had when he was Joe’s age. It was given by a teacher who wouldn’t have been able to write her own way out of a paper bag. Frankly, she was probably a mathy person, but she had to cover the full curriculum, so. My son’s best reading teacher was the one who had everyone start the day reading anything they liked—story books, comics, skate magazines, whatever. She told parents how much her own father had hated reading as a child—or said he did, even though he gobbled up comic books. One would hope a child might grow up to read more than comics, but if you can’t get them to look forward to reading in the first place, they’re not going to read anything. I hope I’m not cynical about reading education, but it’s true it can be done well or poorly. I wasn’t particularly mathy, but unlike many adult writers, I wasn’t an especially voracious reader, either. My sister was “The Reader.” I was hanging with friends, riding my bike, watching television, drawing . . . and reading when there was something worth my time. Which for some reason was less often for me than for my sister.

ED: As an art director for Stanford University Press, you design book covers, and you are also a photographer. How does this interest for the visual coexist with the writer in you?

RE: My sister was The Reader (and writer), and I was The Artist. I’d draw dinosaurs, horses, planes, would copy cartoon characters, etc. My enthusiasms evolved, though, and I was an English major in college. Many years later, I sort of slipped into book design through the back door—as many people do, actually. It’s too long a story. I will say that in scholarly publishing, I find design more fun than editing, which I have never done, and which has never tempted me (all due respect to scholarship). I’ve done surprisingly little interior book design over the many years I’ve been working at the Press. The most significant has been the Pritzker Edition of The Zohar, the body of medieval Jewish mystical scripture upon which Kabbalah is based. I put the page numbers in the middle of the outside margins, that was the extent of my creative contribution pretty much. I’d like this feature someday to be referred to as “the Ehle folio.” Except I don’t think I was the first to think it up. I’ve done hundreds of cover designs, maybe thousands by this point. It’s not quite as glamorous as it sounds when you’re doing them for books about the Brazilian hemp trade from 1847 to 1863, and you know they’re going to sell only a few hundred copies, but as I say, it’s still fun. And the best thing is that my head isn’t filled with anyone else’s prose when I sit down to write.

ED: What are some of the projects you are working on right now?

RE: Other stories, certainly, and I’m writing a historical California novel that begins with two boys and a mastodon.

ED: Thank you very much!

Evgeniya Dame, a fiction reader for NER, is a Fulbright scholar and a 2020–2022 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Her fiction appears in Ploughshares, Subtropics, Southern Review, and Joyland. Her nonfiction and interviews have been published in Electric Literature and New England Review online. She grew up in Samara, Russia, and currently lives in Northern California. 

Meet the Readers

Evgeniya Dame

“I like stories that have no fear. They are not afraid to be misunderstood or to do things maybe not the way things have been done before.”

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER? 
I was born in Samara, Russia—a city known for its chocolate factory, river pirates (back in the day), and its connection to space industry. We made the engine that was inside the spaceship that Yuri Gagarin flew. Since 2014 I’ve lived in Maine with my husband, writing and working odd jobs. Last year I received the Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, so there was a lot of coast-to-coast moving during the pandemic. I plan to spend the next year in Northern California working on my first book.

What made you decide to be a reader for NER, and how long have you been on staff?
Some time after I finished my MFA, NER was looking to bring on a few new readers. A professor I worked with passed my name to Carolyn Kuebler. This was in 2014, I think. I’ve been reading submissions ever since.

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication? 
There were two, some years apart. The first one was “The Relief Pitcher’s Mother,” by Perri Klass (NER 38.1). It’s strange how things work. I knew nothing about baseball when I read it, but the story really spoke to me, it transcended this terrible ignorance on my part. The second story was published in 2019. It’s called “Sweat a Wormhole,” by Andrew Gretes, and it deals with a father who comes back to his family after death as a chicken. And everyone is playing this video game based on Thoreau’s Walden. I was crazy about this story. I wrote Carolyn a long note about it and I remember looking up the game to see if it was real. I’m glad it ended up in the magazine (NER 40.2).

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission? 
My reading process involves lots of hot beverages and a comfortable chair! I don’t really have a process, but generally speaking, I don’t look at the cover letter until I’ve read the story. If the author has a book or an impressive previous publication, or if they are unpublished—I don’t want that to influence me.

The more I read fiction, the more I begin to see that there are no rules. Over the years, the stories that blew me away have been structured and fragmented, witty urban and straight naturalistic, funny and nostalgic, with any number of characters and points of view, the shifty ones and the ones that stuck to the story at hand. I like stories that have no fear. They are not afraid to be misunderstood or to do things maybe not the way things have been done before. They are not afraid to bore you, because they know what they are working towards and will do anything to get there. In a good story, there is a sense of honesty and desperation. Honesty, because the author is telling the truth, maybe not the truth, but something vital they’ve discovered simply by being alive. And desperation to me means letting go of things that don’t serve the story. Desperation sounds like a very emotional state, but I think it’s a wonderful state in which to edit. When you are desperate to tell your story, you won’t waste time on things that don’t help it become what it needs to be.

Of the pieces you’ve read at NER—whether in the magazine or among the submissions—which was your favorite or most memorable to you personally?
There was a story by Lindsay Starck that NER published in 2020. It’s called “Baikal” and it’s about a marathon race on the frozen surface of Lake Baikal. I loved this image and later, when I got the chance to interview Lindsay, she shared a video with me of a female runner participating in the race. It was a real thing! It was beautiful and very otherworldly.

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits? 
It is very hard to remain part of a writing world, a community of writers. It’s competitive and has few rewards and many people simply can’t afford to live this kind of life too long. Eventually, you need something stable, a plan. One of the best things that NER did for me is that it allowed me to remain part of the writing world during the years when I didn’t know whether I’d ever write a complete short story. I’d come home after working in a student writing center or a museum gift shop and read a few submissions. It was nice to know I was still connected to the publishing process that way.

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading at the moment that you would recommend? 
My reading is a mix of classics and contemporaries, and your high school books, and rereads. Since I left my home country, I try to read in Russian every year because there aren’t many people around me who speak the language. So every year I read a few Russian novels, mostly nineteenth century. I love to recommend the same novel, which is Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. This book is incredible. It’s excruciatingly boring for the first 200 pages, but those who survive are rewarded—what follows is the finest, most psychologically nuanced love story in Russian literature. Oblomov is sometimes called the novel of laziness, inertia, and that is true. Goncharov suffered from procrastination and only wrote four books in his (rather long) life, one of them a travel journal. I think of him often when finishing a story seems like an insurmountable task.

One of the best collections I came across in the last year is Marshall Klimasewiski’s Tyrants. It moves swiftly between centuries and continents, and the author has this amazing capacity of going into the mind of any character, anyone at all—a young Korean mother who just lost a child, a Swedish explorer, a bored teenager from Connecticut, or Joseph Stalin.

Last year, when I kept moving, I kept lugging the same two books with me—Aleksandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles and Andrea Lee’s Interesting Women. I’ve read both before, multiple times, but I always want them near.

NER‘s staff readers, all volunteers, play an essential role in our editorial process and in our mission to discover new voices in contemporary literature. A full list of staff readers is available on our masthead.

NER Authors Selected for Pushcart Prize

Best of the Small Presses 2022

Two stories from the New England Review have been selected for inclusion in the next Pushcart Prize collection: McKenna Marsden’s “Suffering in Motion” (NER 40.4) and Lindsay Starck’s “Baikal” (NER 41.4). The XLVI edition will be published in November 2021.

McKenna Marsden, a current MFA candidate at the University of Maryland-College Park, grew up in Oregon and spent the majority of their adult life in greater Boston. “Suffering in Motion” was their first publication. Marsden talks to NER staff reader Laur Freymiller about “Suffering in Motion” in our Behind the Byline feature. The story is also read aloud by Madison Middleton in the latest episode of the NER Out Loud podcast, followed by a conversation between reader and writer.

Lindsay Starck was born in Wisconsin and raised in the Milwaukee Public Library. She went on to study literature and writing at Yale, Notre Dame, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently teaches at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. Starck shared the story behind “Baikal” in her recent “Behind the Byline” feature with staff reader Evgeniya Dame.

From the publisher: The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections.

Behind the Byline

Kate Petersen

She said: that’s the first line to something you should write. And she was right.

Kate Petersen, author of “This event occurs in the past: an aubade,” talks with NER editorial panel member Evgeniya Dame about form and character in fiction, the troubadour song that inspired her story, and the importance of “staying naïve to aspects of craft.” 

Evgeniya Dame: Could we start by talking about this word, aubade? At what point did the word (and what it stands for) make it into “This event occurs in the past: an aubade” (NER 41.3), and its title?

Kate Petersen: I thought of this as an aubade fairly early. The aubade, or song to a lover departing at dawn, has a long poetic tradition stretching back to the troubadours of the Middle Ages. And while I, a mere fiction writer, must step into such a tradition with some winkingness (or at least a sense of humor), the story’s concerns align with many elements of aubades as I understand them: not just the ache of parting, but the sense that one has overstayed, missed or overslept a warning. I was interested in the narrative spark embedded in the form: that parting is always a decision, and morning requires it.

ED: A story that admits to traveling “in rough reverse” presents a challenge: was there a particular entry point? Did you play with the structure, reordering, as you went along?

KP: The door to this story was the first line, which I carried around until I said it to a friend; she deserves the credit. She said: that’s the first line to something you should write. And she was right.

To the rest of your question, yes: order and structure were paramount, and I revised toward them. Asking the reader to move across so many lanes of time in quick succession required a structure that would make this easy for them, or at least not too harrowing. Refrain is a kind of guardrail, I suppose.

ED: “No one wants to put their people in peril,” the protagonist comments, “but they must.” How do you define peril for your own characters? What are they most likely to suffer from?

KP: That’s an excellent question. I don’t know if I can generalize about all my characters. But certainly a large subset of female characters I have written suffer from taking a picture of the book instead of taking the book. They discover, too late, that they have been a polite observer to a chapter of their own life that required further action. This is not unrelated to a social conditioning I believe is gendered: the pressure to be “a good person with a second-hand coffee table”—often at the cost of one’s own desires.

The peril for these characters, and the rest of us, is that the clock is running down. We each hear or see the clock differently at different points in our life, and I think figuring out what clocks a character is attuned to—and which ones she’s not—is one of the central ways I come to understand what a character’s story is about.

ED: The fiction writing students are another sort of character here, their unspoken practices, habits, concerns forming a part of this story. Did your teaching experience affect your own writing, and if so, in what way?

KP: Yes. How could it not? Teaching young writers was such a big part of my life for such a long time, I can’t imagine it not getting in. And I’m grateful for that.

Teaching has probably affected me in all sorts of ways that I can’t recognize. But among those I can: teaching invited me to articulate why we believe the things we do about how stories operate, to try to shape those ideas into questions that are relevant and pressing to students who begin as strangers to me, and then to challenge those “rules” or customs together (“What if we’re wrong, and fiction doesn’t have to do this?”).

Away from the classroom, I’ve found myself engaging in this sequence alone, writing stories that could fairly be labeled “grumpy pedagogy” tales. This is one.

ED: Your fiction appears to alternate points of view, including working in third-person omniscient. Do you often write in first person? What are the rewards and considerations you usually think about when settling on a point of view in the story?

KP: As a teacher of fiction and a member of a writing workshop, I’m acutely aware of point of view strategy: how it’s shaping or torqueing the story, serving it or not. But when I’m writing, I try to stay naïve to aspects of craft. Then, I am just listening to my narrator’s voice, trying to stay close enough for long enough to channel them faithfully.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t ever changed the point of view of a story in the course of a workshop or revision. But I think of such moves as etudes, lessons one undertakes to strengthen some muscle.

ED: The quarantine, and the general lack of stability people have experienced this year, have affected so many aspects of writing, reading, and publishing. Could you talk a little about your daily routine, your writing practice and whether it has been changed?

KP: Well, there’s what we came to call quarantine which, for many, is effectively over: movie theaters and restaurants near me in Arizona have re-opened, college football is being played against all public health recommendations. And then there’s the pandemic, which still rages on in the US and is worsening elsewhere in the world. The week I e-mailed this to you, the US hit a new record of reported COVID-19 infections: more than 83,000 new cases in one day. But to listen to the news, leading with clips of maskless blather from various stumps, one understands that science writer Ed Yong’s ninth error of intuition that will keep us locked in a pandemic loop—habituation to horror—has, in many places, come to pass. “The US might stop treating the pandemic as the emergency that it is,” he warned. “Daily tragedy might become ambient noise.” I worry that to put my writing practice up against this daily tragedy is to participate in that habituation.

I finished a book (of epidemiology fiction, oddly enough) that was sent out before the pandemic, so my writing practice this year has operated in various states of suspension—first, waiting to hear about the book, then, in the suspension of life-as-planned that occurred for many of us in the US in March. I manage communications and outreach for an ecosystem science research center, and I am grateful for work, and for work that feels urgent. The writing goes on, though it is not what the moment calls for.

Kate Petersen’s work has appeared in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Paris Review Daily, Epoch, LitHub, and elsewhere. A former Jones Lecturer at Stanford, she has been the recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Minnesota and lives in Arizona, where she writes about the science of our changing climate for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University.

Evgeniya Dame is a Fulbright scholar and a 2020–2022 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Her fiction appears in Southern Review and Joyland. Her nonfiction and interviews have been published in Electric Literature and New England Review online. She grew up in Samara, Russia, and currently lives in Northern California. 

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