New England Review

Meet the Readers

Malka Daskal

“When reading a story critically, evaluatively, it’s difficult to get lost in the narrative and experience an emotional shift. I know a story has got it right when, despite myself, I stop analyzing and start feeling transported, immersed in the story’s reality.”

What made you decide to be a reader for NER, and how long have you been on staff?
Participating in writing workshops taught me how much I love engaging with work that has not fully solidified yet via publication. The challenge of determining merit in a story that is first seeing the light of day is exciting, and there is an intimacy in receiving the words directly from the author. I knew I wanted to continue evaluating these freshly incubated stories and find a way of delivering them to readers who could fall in love with them as I did. Reading for NER allows me to be a part of the that process of discovery. I’ve been on staff for a year and half and the thrill of finding resonant stories produced by talented writers keeps me coming back for more.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do when you’re not reading for NER?
When I’m not reading for NER, or working on my own writing, or reading for pleasure, or reading about the craft of writing, I’m arguing with my sons over their iPad usage. Just kidding. (Not really.) We’re fortunate enough to live in the beautiful state of Arizona so when we have the chance, we pile into the car with our one-year-old lab and explore the diverse natural landscapes on offer. The pine-scented Coconino Forest and the glorious red cliffs of Sedona are two of my family’s favorites.

What is your reading process like? What do you look for in a submission?
If I come across a story that I believe has potential, I will usually wait a few days and then come back to it for another read through. That second (sometimes third) read often either confirms the story’s assets or reveals its fault lines. It then takes a few more close reads before I can formulate my impressions of the story into a concise critique.

At the most fundamental level, I look for stories that move me, stories that elicit an emotional response. In order for a story to achieve this simple goal, many rather complex elements must come into play: the prose must be fresh and lyrical enough to engage but not so overwrought as to distract, the characters, dialogue, and plot require precision and originality to attain the authenticity necessary for emotional investment, and the story as a whole must reveal something about the world that is undeniably true and yet so wholly unexpected as to have impact. No easy feat!

When reading a story critically, evaluatively, it’s difficult to get lost in the narrative and experience an emotional shift. I know a story has got it right when, despite myself, I stop analyzing and start feeling transported, immersed in the story’s reality. It’s a lot like the Magic Eye books of my childhood; first, all you see are the component parts—the drips and drabs of pixelated paint—and then all of a sudden, perception alters and there it is! A 3D image of an elephant balancing on a ball. The assorted parts fade entirely, supplanted by a new reality. The magical act of transcendence.  

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?
“I Love You, Dr. Rudnitsky” by Avigayl Sharp (Vol 41.2) is one of those stories I’ve pressed my friends, family, neighbors, and random woman sitting next to me at the hair salon to read. It’s dark comedy done spectacularly right. The story stands on its own merit as a skillful example of a voice driven narrative, but my attachment to the story is likely also due to personal resonance; the story’s exploration of how the Holocaust’s traumatic legacy reverberates through the generations resonated with me as I have witnessed the phenomenon’s bitter effects in my own family.

I also think often of “A Cool, Dry Place” by Tyler Sones (Vol 41.4), a story whose ending is so tormenting, the final sequences have imprinted themselves indelibly on my brain.

Have you ever read a submission that later got selected for publication?
Yes! I believe the story is still in revision stage, but I was fortunate enough to first read “Past Perfect” a beautifully told story by Alice Greenway about an NGO volunteer teaching English to an Afghani refugee family. Look for it in a future issue of NER! [Note: this novella will be published in 42.3, fall 2021.]

How has reading for NER influenced your own writing/creative pursuits?
Reading stories critically and training myself to identify and articulate a story’s weakness has certainly helped me recognize and try to avoid those same weaknesses in my stories. In my own writing, I have a habit of indulging in “clever” prose. Reading similar prose in other people’s work, unblinded by emotional investment in the work, is an incisive lesson in how such writing can weaken the narrative. Conversely, I draw tremendous inspiration from the authors who submit works of great ambition. Their reach inspires me to demand more of my own stories.

What do you read for pleasure? Is there something you’re reading at the moment that you would recommend?
I’m on a serious Margaret Atwood kick at the moment. I enjoyed her oeuvre as a teenager but reading her novels and short stories as an adult has given me a much greater appreciation for her talent in crafting story and her ability to blend all the elements into something that is irresistibly captivating. For lovers of short fiction with a classic narrative structure, you can do no better than “Stone Mattress,” and for those who want to be engrossed for a lengthier stretch, “Alias Grace” is the historical novel perfected.

A new favorite of mine is Sigrid Nunez who garnered much acclaim and well-deserved attention with her recent novels, The Friend and What Are You Going Through. Both novels are weighty explorations on death, aging, and the limits of friendship, delivered in the intimate tone of whispered confidences shared over mugs of hot cocoa.

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.

Behind the Byline

Matthew Lansburgh

Matthew Lansburgh talks with Malka Daskal about nonlinear narratives, friendship, and the inspiration behind the characters in “Hasina,” published in NER 42.1.

Malka Daskal: “Hasina” opens at a remove of “two-plus decades” from the events of the primary plot, which allows Stewart to consider his relationship with Hasina from a detached distance, one with the benefit of extensive therapy. Was this story always structured as a retrospective narrative? At what point did you determine that Stewart’s and Hasina’s paths would cross again via social media?

Matthew Lansburgh: The basic structure of the story—as well as the use of the retrospective narrative stance—did provide the spine for the first draft. It was one of those wonderful, rare instances when a story came to me (more or less) fully formed. As is quite common when I write stories, the initial draft emerged quickly during a feverish spell, and then I put the pages aside for several months and came back to them with fresh eyes. This allowed me to see areas where I’d rushed through scenes and needed to flesh things out, and other areas that needed revision. I tend to work on writing projects iteratively: I write in bursts, put drafts aside, then return with—hopefully—a new perspective. This process can take years to complete. The final section of the story always included the interaction via Facebook, but the ending was much shorter and less developed than it is in the published version.

MD: The principal characters in your story, Stewart and Hasina (not to mention Stewart’s mother, Heike), are so meticulously rendered, they seem to spring fully formed off the page. Where did you find inspiration for these convincing characters and how do you decide which details to include and which to omit when writing for authenticity?

ML: I’m so glad you think they’re convincing! Stewart and Heike are characters I’ve worked with, on and off, for a long time. On the other hand, Hasina isn’t a character I’ve worked with before. She is, I suppose, an amalgam of various people I’ve known over the years.

My goal in writing the story was to explore the ways that friendships can evolve over time. I’m interested in how people can form incredibly close bonds and then grow apart (and, in some instances, reconnect years later). One of the best things about growing older is that I’m now able to see the trajectory of my life—and my relationships—in a way that I couldn’t when I was younger. I used to think about friendships in binary terms: X person is a close friend, or X person isn’t a friend; I love Y, or I dislike Y. Over time, I’ve come to realize that most friendships are complicated and multifaceted. X can be a close friend in some, but not all, circumstances. X can be someone I can trust to keep a secret and look to for support if I’m going through a period of work stress, but if I tell X about a fight I had with my boyfriend, I need to watch out, because X will probably try to hook up with him behind my back! Friendships can be the source of so many emotions we experience: love and joy and passion; frustration, disappointment, and anger.

I’m guessing most people learn this early on in their lives. This is often how people feel about their siblings or other people in their family. But I grew up as an only child and my relationship with my parents was defined by extremes. I tended to categorize the world in simplistic terms: things were either good or bad, safe or dangerous, trustworthy or untrustworthy. I suppose that, as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to accept that most relationships are complicated and can’t be seen through a single lens.

MD: One of the most intriguing choices made in the crafting of this story is your divulgence of major plot points out of sequence—Hasina’s alleged betrayal, Geshna’s suicide, Hasina’s casual abandonment in Baja. These events are disclosed nonlinearly and then expanded upon later in the narrative. The effect makes for a hypnotic manipulation of time as well as compelling reading. Can you tell us more about your process of revealing and withholding information to create narrative momentum?

ML: This question fills me with tremendous excitement and joy! Thank you for asking it.

Like most writers, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to generate suspense and narrative momentum; and, like most writers, I find it hard to pull off. I’ve studied and taught many stories with this very question in mind—especially Alice Munro’s “Runaway,” in which she creates mystery and suspense out of small (seemingly insignificant) facts and narrative elements. From the first paragraph, she withholds key information to great strategic effect.

I’ve probably studied that story twenty times, and each time I’m in awe of how Munro turns the mundane into something mysterious and electric. Part of the way she achieves this effect is through her masterful use of time. I’m quite certain that—even if unconsciously—“Hasina” is borrowing some of these narrative tricks. Having you comment on my use of time and the way I withhold information to create narrative momentum is thrilling for me, because these are techniques I admire not just in Munro’s work but in the work of many of my favorite writers.

MD: At the heart of “Hasina” is the power dynamic between Hasina and Stewart. In the final paragraph, Stewart chooses not to Google Hasina because it would “give her more power than she deserves,” but, of course, the choice not to Google her gives her power as well, as does his mounting excitement while waiting for her phone call. It seems Stewart, for all the years and therapy, cannot quite break free of Hasina’s power—his actions and inactions determined by her influence. What do you think it is that Stewart admires so much about Hasina? Do you think Stewart’s infatuation with Hasina in some ways mirrors Heike’s clinging dependence on him?

ML: I’m intrigued by the idea that Stewart’s infatuation with Hasina might somehow mirror Heike’s dependence on Stewart. I hadn’t seen this possible connection or thought about this parallel. Of course, it makes sense that, as much as Stewart resists his mother and judges her, he does also mirror aspects of her personality. I certainly have noticed this in my own relationship with my mother.

As for what Stewart admires about Hasina, this isn’t something I’ve thought about either. I’m guessing he admires her confidence. I see her as someone who spends less time in her head than Stewart does—someone who doesn’t second-guess herself all the time.

MD: At first reading, I was appalled by Hasina’s actions and believed her to be heartless, someone reveling in her power to shock and wound others. But after giving it some thought and rereading, I feel a greater sense of sympathy for her and wonder if her actions are not more indicative of a sense of insecurity, of genuine pain over Stewart’s lack of reciprocated feelings. Do you have sympathy for Hasina? Was your intention for the reader to view her with compassion?

ML: I love the fact that you’re seeing sides of these characters I hadn’t thought about previously. It means, perhaps, that I’ve done my job as a writer by creating multidimensional characters who evoke a range of reactions in readers.

I must admit I don’t find anything about Hasina appalling—everything she does makes sense to me, even leaving Stewart behind in Baja California. I’ve always felt tremendous sympathy for her. Indeed, she embodies impulses I very much identify with. (I hope that doesn’t make me come off as too much of a psychopath!)

MD: “Hasina” captures the impressionable quality of young adults experiencing life on campus, their bid for independence and forging of identities in opposition to authority. The intensity of Stewart and Hasina’s friendship is distinctive to that place and time of life. Was your writing influenced by other literature featuring college-aged characters?

ML: Not that I’m aware of. I don’t think I’ve read much about college-aged characters I’ve found extremely compelling. I suppose I tend to be more interested in people who’ve been knocked around by the passage of time—people who’ve faced more setbacks and accumulated more wounds. (There are, of course, many exceptions. I find Nabokov’s Dolores Haze and J.D. Salinger’s younger characters, for example, fascinating and marvelous.)

MD: Stewart and Heike are characters from your linked short story collection Outside Is the Ocean, winner of the 2017 Iowa Short Fiction Award. How did writing a series of linked stories better serve the narrative than a more traditional novel form? What challenges and opportunities did you encounter by choosing to structure your book in this way? Can we expect to see more stories about Stewart and Heike in the future?

ML: When I first started writing fiction, I didn’t set out to write a book. Writing a book felt too daunting and ambitious. My goal was simply to learn how to write a short story. Gradually, over time, as I began to work with Stewart and Heike as characters, I found myself becoming obsessed—with who they were, and what motivated them, and what fueled their dysfunctional relationship. (Full disclosure: Though my stories about Stewart and Heike are fiction, elements in this work are inspired by my relationship with my mother.)

I found writing about Heike and Stewart incredibly cathartic and therapeutic, and, over time, I realized that I was amassing a corpus of work that might be shaped into a novel-in-stories. The idea that I was working on a book didn’t occur to me until several years into the process. Outside Is the Ocean has a bit of a kaleidoscopic feel. As in “Hasina,” my use of time in the book isn’t linear. I guess that allowing myself to learn about the relationship between Stewart and his mother through narratives that occur at various moments in time allowed me to tackle a project that might otherwise have felt too intimidating to take on.

As for your last question, yes, I am continuing to write about Stewart and Heike! I’ve spent the past few years working on a novel—provisionally entitled The Miraculous—that has nothing to do with them, but, recently, I’ve been writing more stories about them and am considering writing a novel that examines how Stewart’s relationship with his mother changes after she dies: If she were to come back from the dead to visit Stewart, would his attitude toward her be different? Would they be able to break free of the conflict they experienced when they were both alive? What would happen if Stewart died and went to heaven? How would their dynamic change in an entirely different world/setting?

MD: Can you tell us more about the new novel you’re currently working on? Was it a challenge or a relief (or, perhaps, both) to populate your work with new characters?

ML: It’s about a woman (Klara Ozoliņa) from a small town in Latvia who is born with wings. People believe her town was cursed, centuries earlier, when a hermaphrodite was burned at the stake, and the book falls squarely into the realm of magic realism. In the novel, Klara emigrates to the United States as a mail-order bride and is disappointed to learn, when she arrives, that the man she’s been corresponding with is neither wealthy nor handsome.

The book explores the themes of fitting in and marginalization and what it means to belong. (These are themes I notice myself revisiting in a lot of my work, but it’s been fun to explore them through characters who are completely different from Heike and Stewart.) As for how Klara materialized, I’m not sure I know the answer. Many years ago, I wrote a scene about a woman with wings who was bawdy and irreverent, and even though that project never gained traction, the character stayed with me…

Matthew Lansburgh‘s collection of linked stories, Outside Is the Ocean (University of Iowa Press, 2017), won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award and the 2018 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. His fiction has appeared in journals such as One Story, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, Alaska Quarterly Review, Guernica, and Epoch, and has been shortlisted in the Best American Short Stories series. Recent honors include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.

Malka Daskal, a fiction reader for NER, received her master’s degree from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Kind Writers, december Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, and Adelaide and has been anthologized in The Bookends Review’s “Best of 2020.” Her short story “Symbology” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and two sons.

Behind the Byline

Avigayl Sharp

I actually first started writing this story—or a version of it—in a very different voice, with an adult narrator reminiscing about her teenage years. That version wasn’t working at all.

NER author Avigayl Sharp talks to staff reader Malka Daskal about the teen protagonist in Sharp’s story “I Love You, Dr. Rudnitsky” (NER 41.2) and the elaborate fantasies she develops “to escape the powerlessness of puberty and its accompanying indignities.”

Malka Daskal: In “I Love You, Dr. Rudnitsky,” Chava joins the ranks of other contemporary protagonists (the boys of Leopard by Wells Tower and 10th of December by George Saunders come to mind) who develop elaborate fantasies to escape the powerlessness of puberty and its accompanying indignities. What drew you to writing this character, at this moment in time, at this moment in your life? 

Avigayl Sharp: There’s probably a simple answer, which is that when I wrote this story I had just started psychoanalysis—very old school—and was spending four mornings a week lying on a couch, going on and on about my childhood. So adolescence was very much on my mind, all the routine little humiliations of being twelve or thirteen years old, the horror of having to buy a training bra and all that. And I found myself thinking a lot about psychoanalysis on a theoretical level, as well, this idea that there are things that can’t be looked upon directly, or aren’t directly articulable, and so are forced to manifest themselves in some indirect way: dreams, obsessions, fantasies. Chava’s character rose out of my growing preoccupation with the structure of fantasy in particular, the way in which it always functions both as an escape and as an articulation of whatever it is that makes escape necessary in the first place. 

I think in some ways it’s hard for me to really look at anything head on; I’m always trying to talk about one thing by talking about something completely different. Thinking about adolescence in terms of the kind of fantasy terrain it might produce felt more intuitive to me than writing about the events of someone’s teen years in a more direct way. And I’ve always loved fiction that operates on this level—the Tower and Saunders stories you mention are brilliant examples. Nabokov’s Pale Fire is another one, and was very much on my mind while I was working on this story.

MD: Chava’s brutal self-assessments and yearning for affirmations of normalcy are equal parts humorous and heartbreaking in this largely voice-driven story. What was your process for finding her teenage voice and interpreting her thoughts on paper?  

AS: I actually first started writing this story—or a version of it—in a very different voice, with an adult narrator reminiscing about her teenage years. That version wasn’t working at all; for one thing, it wasn’t very funny, though it was trying hard to be, and tonally it felt wrong—too distant and nostalgic. I had a writer friend take a look at the first few pages, and it was her idea to experiment with rewriting in the voice of a teenager. So I can’t really take credit! The lesson here is that it’s useful to have smart friends, especially smart friends who are generous enough to read your terrible first drafts.

Once I started to inhabit Chava’s voice, that’s when the story really opened up for me. When you’re twelve or thirteen, you’re still really playing around with language, I think; you tend to have a decent grasp on the adult lexicon, but you haven’t yet assimilated it fully. So you end up incorporating all sorts of imported phrases or concepts into your speech in ways that are just slightly off. I wanted Chava’s voice to have that kind of texture, where complex thoughts and feelings are getting filtered through what’s clearly a received lexicon. She uses a lot of words and ideas that she’s obviously picked up from her parents or from the media or from her classmates, and she’s usually using them in a way that’s a little absurd. Much of the process for figuring out her voice involved navigating that tension, between great depth and intensity of feeling on the one hand and the limits of communication on the other. I think the tension is inherently a funny one, but behind it lies a real desperation. It was very important to me that her voice walk that tragicomic tightrope. 

MD: Chava’s mother is a remarkably intriguing character because of her loving but volatile relationship with Chava, her profound but not fully explained sadness, and because we only see glimpses of her through Chava’s unreliable point of view. Was it challenging or freeing to write this complex, enigmatic character under the constraints of a first-person narrator?

AS: It’s a great question, and in some ways it was a bit of both. I think it was challenging in the same way that just being a person is challenging—you know, there’s this fundamental problem of existence wherein we’re all sort of wandering around, constrained in ourselves and bounded off from everyone else, even (and perhaps especially) those we love the most. And this can feel particularly intense in adolescence, I think, when you’re first becoming fully conscious of that gap. I knew that I wanted Chava’s mother to embody this kind of mystery, especially because her sadness is simply too big and too complex for Chava to be able to bear confronting it directly. It can only be glimpsed for a moment, or only in a sidelong way. 

There’s a way in which Chava’s mother’s sadness is historically situated, as well, rooted in part in the lineage of the Holocaust. This is some of what Chava is grappling with in her relationship with her mother; there’s an attempt to come to terms with that lineage, and with the weight of a history that has been passed down from her grandparents to her mother and now to her own self, whether or not she can identify it. In that sense the limits of the first person were actually freeing, because they allowed me to replicate the experience of confronting something unbearable, in which you can only really gesture around the thing itself—it appears for a moment, then disappears again. 

MD: As if Chava did not have enough to contend with, as the only Jew in her Catholic school, her search for acceptance is further complicated by feelings of cultural alienation. At what point in the writing process did you know Chava’s struggle with her Jewish identity and heritage would play a role in the formation of her character? 

AS: That was probably the first thing I knew when I sat down to write this story. My father is from Waco and was raised Baptist, my mother is Jewish and from Lithuania, and I attended a Catholic elementary and middle school—so much of Chava’s attempt to make sense of her Jewish identity came out of my own struggles with those same questions.

I’m interested in adolescence as this period during which you’re desperately trying to categorize yourself; you have some vague sense of what all these categories mean, maybe from your parents and your peers and TV and the internet and magazines, but at the same time many of the nuances of those meanings escape you. I think the funny and illuminating thing about that age is that no one actually has any idea what’s going on, but everyone insists on pretending that they do. Of course, this is also what adults are like, but we get a lot better at faking it as we get older. I knew that I wanted to write a narrator who was on some level asking all of these difficult questions—what does it mean to be Jewish? What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be American?—but who, on a more conscious level, was very adamantly not asking these questions, and instead putting a great deal of effort into feigning certainty.

There was also a lineage I wanted to explore, in that Chava’s alienation as a Jew in Catholic school in some ways mirrors her mother’s alienation as an Eastern European Jewish immigrant in the States. Chava’s mother makes a lot of sweeping generalizations about “American Jews,” and she makes it clear that she doesn’t want her daughter to be “too American”; but, of course, Chava is an American Jew, whether her mother likes it or not. So the question becomes, well, what does that even mean? I knew that Chava couldn’t directly ask that question, and so instead she has to stage it in her fantasy love affair with Dr. Rudnitsky, in which she envisions herself as some kind of perfect and unalienated American Jewish Woman—of course, her idea of what this would look like is a strange amalgamation of tropes and misunderstandings, as these things tend to be.

MD: Besides being an author, you also served as the fiction editor for the literary journal Bat City Review and are currently a contributing editor. What qualities do you look for in evaluating works of fiction and are these the same criterion by which you assess your own works in progress?  

AS: On the most basic level I’m always reading for beautifully crafted sentences. And I’m usually looking to be caught off guard in some way, whether that’s formally or on the level of plot, character, language. I try to hold my own work to those same standards—I write very slowly, and spend a lot of time on each sentence, writing and rewriting. Ultimately I’m drawn to fiction that can hold onto uncertainty, that attempts to approach the limits of our understanding and asks difficult questions about ourselves, our material world, our history.

Avigayl Sharp grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She now lives in Austin, where she is a fiction fellow at the Michener Center for Writers and a contributing editor of Bat City Review.

Malka Daskal, one of NER‘s fiction readers, received her master’s degree from Columbia University and was the recipient of the Maricopa Artist of Promise Award in 2016. Her work has appeared in Bookends Review, Passages, and the Traveler and is forthcoming in Kind Writers and december. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and two sons.

Behind the Byline

Christine Sneed

Longtime NER author Christine Sneed talks to our staff reader Malka Daskal about complex, nuanced, and seductive characters, the need for the heat of conflict, and about “The Swami Buchu Trungpa” (NER 41.1, 2020).

Malka Daskal: How did the idea for your story “The Swami Buchu Trungpa” germinate? In particular, I’m curious to hear what inspired you to write about a Swami, a character we don’t often see.

Christine Sneed: In the fall of 2018, right before I started writing this story, I read the novel You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik, which I absolutely loved. It’s very sexy, controversial (there’s a student-teacher affair), beautifully spare and arresting, and is set in contemporary Paris. While reading it I thought, “I haven’t written any fiction set in Paris in several years, so . . . I want to go back there and see what happens.”  The first sentence arrived soon after.  

I consciously tried to write an opening line that would point to the source of one of the story’s primary conflicts or themes. Alcohol and its omnipresence in Midwestern culture (well, American culture on the whole)—I’d be hard-pressed to find a social gathering or sporting event in the Midwest that doesn’t feature the opportunity to get soused—these are aspects I have familiarity with, having lived in the Chicago sprawl for most of my life (until a couple of years ago)—and once I knew what the voice and point of view were, and had a sense of the story’s narrative trajectory, I started writing in earnest. 

MD: In “Swami,” Nora strains under the competing demands of the two people she loves most, Buchu and her mother, each of whom are convinced she would be happier without the other. Caught between these two powerful forces, Nora could easily be dismissed as a passive victim, but instead she comes across as modern, intelligent, and formidable. Where do you find compassion for your characters and how do you calibrate the story to ensure readers feel the same compassion?

CS: As I suspect is true for many of us, I know a number of people who have had problems with drugs and alcohol, and although this story isn’t based on a friend or family member, I did try to make each of the main characters, especially Regina, who struggles with alcoholism, as complex and nuanced as I could.

Specificity and precision are two of the qualities I most admire in the books by authors I love, and in my own writing I try hard to make the external world and the characters’ interior lives as specific and exact as possible—the character doesn’t just wear a sweater, she’s in a mauve cardigan with a stained sleeve. It always pains me when someone says during a workshop, “Oh, there are too many details in this story.” That’s almost never true—at least not in the work of novice writers. The details are where the personality and the real life of the character reside. If I draw my characters with enough specificity, I’m going to love them. If I don’t love them, I know I haven’t done the necessary work yet. 

MD: “Swami” reminds me of another short story of yours, “Quality of Life,” published in your collection Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry. Both feature women attracted to older, charismatic, yet fundamentally unavailable men who take more than they give and use control as a substitute for love. Buchu even claims the story’s title! What draws you to writing these kinds of characters and the emotional fallout of their stubborn selfishness on the women who try to love them?    

CS: That story was originally published in New England Review, coincidentally!  

What draws me to these tricky male characters is their ability to make other people—women especially—adore them and do things that are not necessarily good for them. I think often of something I heard Mike Nichols say during an interview: a scene should be a seduction, an argument, or a negotiation. He was speaking about film (and perhaps stage plays), but it applies to fiction too, especially when we’re looking at domestic realism; regardless, I think it’s a helpful suggestion for fiction writers. I don’t always adhere to this stricture, but I do like the idea of seductive characters, and there’s at least one sexy jerk in many of the stories I’ve written. 

You need the heat of conflict if you’re going to have a story people will want to read, and the conflict generally comes from a flaw—whether it’s greed or arrogance or selfishness or a tendency toward jealousy and violence.  

MD: The character of Regina, Nora’s mother, is superbly and comically brought to life through her clever quips and stinging barbs. Her frank and overbearing love serves as the perfect foil to Buchu’s cold detachment. The dialogue between Nora and Regina was a great pleasure to read. What is your process for writing dialogue and how do you discover your characters’ voices?

CS: I really love writing dialogue, and if I have the voice of the character in my head and can picture them, the dialogue usually unspools more or less organically. As soon as I wrote the line Regina says early in the story about Paris having a lot of old drunks (and by extension, AA meetings), I knew I had a good feel for who she was.  

One thing I’m always on the lookout for, however, is sitcom-like dialogue. I love sitcoms, but in fiction, the flippant goofball character can come across as very mannered. Onscreen, you have the actor and everyone knows it’s a performance, but on the page, the performative aspect, the set design, the music, etc., are missing. The words are judged on their own, and so you have to work harder to make sure they don’t sound hollow.  

Reading them aloud helps me sometimes, as does critical distance—which can’t really be rushed. You’re not going to spot what sounds cheesy until you’ve had some time away from the story. For some writers, it might only be a few hours or days before they know something isn’t ringing true. For others, it might be months, or even longer. The drive to send out new work right away that many of us feel—I’m not exempt, that’s for sure—isn’t helpful either. Writing well takes time. Or at least knowing when something you’ve written is ready for others to see. 

MD: You mentioned in our correspondence that this story had gone through extensive revisions before arriving at its published form. I have always been fascinated by the evolutionary process of a story. Can you share with us the ways in which this story evolved? What significant changes were made and how and why did you choose to make those changes?  

CS: One thing that happened was my partner Adam read the first draft of the story—he’s my first reader and although he’s not a writer, he has an uncanny ability to pinpoint a problem or suggest a solution for a work in progress. He’s been a serious Zen Buddhist for more than twenty years, and through his practice he’s encountered Swami Buchu–like people. After reading this first draft, he said, “The swami doesn’t strike me as . . . well, he’s not working for me.” And I thought, “Huh. Okay . . .”  

I sat with that assessment for a week or so before I began rewriting the story to make Buchu a less cartoonish figure. I also spent more time developing Regina’s role, as well as Nora’s complicated feelings about her.  
After Carolyn Kuebler accepted the story, she and I worked even more on the swami’s characterization and Nora’s response to him. It was so helpful to have her suggestions, needless to say. For one, I realized that ironic distance was a problem—I was still too far removed from the swami and needed to make it clear why Nora had ever bothered with him at all. 

Lastly, I wanted Regina to be a little more sympathetic too. With Nora being pulled back and forth between Regina and Buchu, I had to figure out how to make them both alternately seductive and somewhat repellent. 

MD: I like to consider the ways in which contemporary writers are a part of a linked heritage; an author’s DNA is imprinted upon by the works of the previous generation and then made manifest in their craft, a sort of literary ancestry. Who do you consider your literary influencers and how do the works you admire shape the content and form of your stories?

CS: A few of the writers whose work I haven’t been able to put down over the last several years: Rachel Cusk, David Szalay, Scott Spencer, Joan Silber, and before that, Penelope Fitzgerald, John Updike, Edward P. Jones, Penelope Lively, and always always always Alice Munro. When I find a writer whose work I love, I try to read all of it—or in the case of the steadily prolific Updike, at least half of it.  

Updike and Spencer in particular have taught me about beautiful sentences and imagery. And they are both writers who have no fear of writing about sex, desire, and sensuality. I am often drawn to these themes too—not as much in “Swami Buchu,” but in other stories I’ve written, and my two novels for sure.  

Munro’s expansiveness has been something I aspire to as well-—she writes long short stories (an oxymoron!), but in these stories, she has more depth than can be found in many novels. She’s brilliant. And also often very funny. And profoundly sympathetic. 

And regarding Updike, who once said his default mode is the comic—I aspire to this too. 

Christine Sneed’s stories have appeared in New England Review and have been included in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. Her most recent book is The Virginity of Famous Men (Tortoise Books, 2017). She lives in Pasadena, California.

Malka Daskal received her master’s degree from Columbia University and was the recipient of the Maricopa Artist of Promise Award in 2016. Her work has appeared in Bookends Review, Passages, and the Traveler and is forthcoming in Kind Writers and december. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and two sons.

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