Photo by Dennis Hearne
Staff reader Glenn Verdi talks with his former teacher and longtime NER contributor Lori Ostlund about writing close to the bone, the conditions of time within different prose formats, patience, and her novella Just Another Family from issue 44.3.
Glenn Verdi: Thank you very much for taking time for this interview, Lori. I loved reading this novella and am so happy that it will be included in your story collection Are You Happy?, which will be published by Zando in 2025. As a former student of yours, I know that I learn something every time we talk. Can you give us some insight into your writing process in general, and perhaps with regard to this novella Just Another Family?
Lori Ostlund: Glenn, we first met when you attended a reading of mine seven years ago; during the two years that you were getting your MFA at Mile-High, where I teach, we had terrific conversations that have continued into the present, so it is a particular pleasure to be interviewed by you. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
Some might say that I have a very imperfect process because I don’t write every day, but I have come to accept that there is no perfect process, and this is the way that I work best. I think the term that I have heard bandied about for how I write is “sprint writer”—that is, I spend a lot of time not writing directly or avoiding it, maybe sitting in front of the computer putting things in and taking them out or walking a lot, but when I finally figure out what I am doing, I write every day in long bursts. This novella took years to figure itself out: I wrote the initial 7,000 words as a story around five years ago, but I put it aside because I knew it wasn’t working as a story. When I came back to it earlier this year with a different perspective, it came very quickly—in a matter of weeks. I am a very patient writer, and that has largely worked out to my benefit.
GV: Who are some of the writers who have inspired you through the course of your life and writing career?
LO: I always dread this question, so I will respond more generally by describing myself as a reader and how that sometimes influences my writing. I tend to always be reading fiction, nonfiction, and poetry at the same time. I love poetry, and because the pleasure in writing happens for me at the sentence level, I am not good at rushing toward a bad first draft. In order to keep writing, I need to feel happy with my sentences, and when I’m not happy with them, I stop and read poetry instead.
When I am trying to sort through something in my work—to solve some sort of “problem”—I find nonfiction helpful, though I read it because I enjoy it. That said, I’m open to it offering help: a way of thinking about a character or a situation or the world that feels interesting or outside the box that I was stuck in. Years ago, for example, I was working on the ending of a story in which a father is telling his young son that he is moving out, and I was trapped in the clichés of thinking about how a father speaks in such a situation. At the time, I was reading an article about various studies on the way that people think about money. The father happened to be a banker, and when I started thinking about him through that lens instead, I found him explaining to his son, “According to basic economic theory, human beings always work harder to avoid losing what they already have than they do at acquiring more.”
Fiction I read mainly because I love it.
GV: How was the writing of this novella similar to or different from your experiences writing your novel After the Parade and writing the stories in your short story collection The Bigness of the World?
LO: I love this question, Glenn, because writing the novella was such a strange combination of both experiences in that it started as a story, and then it just kept evolving. I had never written a novella before, so I was figuring it out as I went along, but one of the ways that it seemed to draw from both experiences lies in the way that it made me handle time. Like a story, this novella takes place over a short period of time—three or four days right before, during, and after the funeral of the main character’s father. However, each of these days and its activities are built on the fraught ground of the past because Sybil has returned to her hometown, a very small town in Minnesota to which she has a complicated relationship. In this way, the piece felt more novelistic.
Also, novels always seem to be more accommodating of messiness than do stories, which is why I have often thought of myself as more naturally a story writer, but writing the novella seemed an interesting combination of both: messiness and perfection. I recall the moment when I felt that I was plunging into the former. It was when the narrator began to talk about the stories of how both her family and her partner’s family came to be in this country. At that moment, I knew I was no longer writing a story.
GV: There is so much in this novella, probably too much to cover in a brief interview. But did you have all of the various threads that run through the novella in mind when you began writing it (the meaning of “family,” the contrasting of Sybil and her father, the juxtaposition of Rachel’s family story with Sybil’s family story, the importance of memory)?
LO: My first story collection, The Bigness of the World, contained a story entitled “Talking Fowl with My Father,” which also appeared in New England Review, and when Carolyn Kuebler accepted this novella, she noted that it felt like “the culmination” of some of the ideas and characters and humor that that story first introduced. I think that Sybil’s attempt to understand herself and her father in terms of this small Midwestern town but also to differentiate herself from both is an ongoing theme in my work. In this case, the novella format became the vehicle for exploring that, but to get to your question, I did not have all of the threads when I started writing. It took me years to realize that this was not a short story but a novella. I do love novelistic short stories and the novella allowed me some of that same stretching room. When I think of novelistic short stories, I think of time not as horizontal but as vertical: time stacked. In fact, there is a moment in the novella when Sybil and Rachel, her partner, are throwing away Sybil’s parents’ mattress at the town dump, and she has this moment of viewing her whole life through the lens of this dump: it is the place where moments of her childhood unfolded and the place where—she fears—her partner will decide she has had enough. It took me a long time to figure out all the threads and to figure out what the story was about and how to bring them all together.
GV: One thing I have always loved about talking with you during a workshop or just over a beer is your graceful combination of humor and wisdom. Did your natural sense of humor come to the fore as you were in the process of writing this otherwise sad story?
LO: Years ago, when I was first sending work out in the world, I landed a piece in a small journal, and when it came out in print, I understood immediately that I was not yet the writer I wanted to be. I had not figured out my voice, and I realized pretty quickly that if I kept sending work out and getting it accepted, I might never figure out my voice, so for a year or two, I stopped sending out work and just wrote. It was during this period that I figured out that I was a writer who wrote funny, sad work. Maybe this is especially true when I am writing close to the bone (close to home), and this novella is very close to home for me. Kurt Vonnegut said that a writer should write “for an audience of one,” for the one person who understands the peculiarities of their voice. For me, this was crucial advice because it meant that I allowed myself to write with my wife, Anne Raeff, in mind. If she thinks it is funny, then I’m fine. I always say that Midwesterners, which I am, are happiest when nobody else laughs at their jokes. I am not sure that this is true, but it strikes me as another version of what Vonnegut was saying.
GV: Had you written things down in a notebook over the years while thinking “one of these days I have to put this into a story?” (for example, “he had a problem with prefixes,” the “stack of bibles, as if they didn’t all say the same thing,” a pastor with smelly feet, the shooting of a mattress in a dump, the dropkicking of Christmas presents, the “Protestant food.”)
LO: You might remember from our classes and conversations that I always keep notebooks of details, strange character traits, overheard dialogue. When I am stuck, I open the notebook and pick something out, and then I write toward that notebook piece, trying to bring it into the scene or story that I am writing. Over the years, these notebooks have provided everything from the actual “questions” that a story will ask to numerous character quirks and unexpected plot digressions. That said, about half of the details that you list above came directly out of my life, though often altered in some way.
GV: In your lectures you often focus on beginnings and endings. The ending of this novella, where Bettina gives Petra’s drawing of Sybil and Rachel’s family to Sybil is so powerful and touching. Can you describe how you know when you have reached the end of a story?
LO: A friend of mine, the late writer, editor, and teacher Nancy Zafris, came to speak to one of my MFA classes once, and when the question of endings came up, she said, in her usual delightfully intimidating way, “Endings are easy. Just go back and read your piece. It’s in there.” I agree with the last two lines, though not the first. Endings are not easy. What I have learned over the years is that my impulse is to stay at the computer and keep messing with things, but I know now that what I need to do is get up from the computer. Sometimes, the thing that I need to know or the experience that I need to have in order to end this piece just hasn’t happened to me yet, and I need to be patient or go out in the world and do something—take a walk, visit a museum, have a beer at a dive bar.
This novella required years of patience. When I finally realized/accepted that it wasn’t a short story, I put it away because I did not know what to do with it. It took years for me to realize that the story was actually more hopeful than I had anticipated—hopeful in the way that I think about hopefulness, of course, so there is still a lot of dark humor involved. Petra and her drawing allowed me to capture the idea of hope, this idea of redefining family, which is really one of the themes of the novella. Endings often require the top story (the plot) to take a step backward so that the bottom story (what the story is really about) can step forward, and Petra’s drawing became one of the ways to bring that bottom story to the surface. So maybe the answer to your question is not that I know when the ending is there but more that I know when it’s still not.
GV: Thanks very much for your time, Lori, and for a beautiful story.
LO: Thank you, Glenn, for all of the good work that you do at NER and for asking such insightful questions.
Glenn Verdi is a volunteer reader for New England Review. He received an MFA from Regis University in 2020 where he was a student of Lori Ostlund. His short stories have appeared in The Write Launch, Five South, and elsewhere.
Lori Ostlund’s first book, The Bigness of the World, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (UGA Press, 2009; reprinted Scribner, 2016), the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Award. Her second book, After the Parade (Scribner, 2015), was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous journals. Lori is the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award and lives in San Francisco. Just Another Family is part of her story collection Are You Happy?, which will be published by Zando in 2025.