Another generous author, Paula Whyman, has answered some questions about her book You May See a Stranger (Triquarterly, 2016) and short stories in general to help us celebrate NSSM. As it's one of the more recent additions to our 2016 SSC shelf, we've not delved too deeply, but have really liked what we've read so far.
EWN: Your short story collection, YOU MAY SEE A STRANGER, was published in 2016. What story within the collection had the earliest publication history outside of being in the collection, and what was that history?
Paula: “Driver’s Education,” the story that opens the book, is the one I wrote first. It was published back in 2005 by The Hudson Review, and then it was selected for their anthology, Writes of Passage: Coming of Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review, in 2008. The then-unnamed 15-year-old narrator in in “Driver’s Education” was the precursor to Miranda Weber; however, it was years before I had any thoughts about writing more stories about her. As part of The Hudson Review’s writers-in-schools program, when the story first came out, I visited a class at The Young Women’s Leadership School in Harlem, a public high school for girls. The students had read the story and discussed it with their teacher, and now they had a lot of questions and comments about it that they were eager to share with me. They were enthusiastic about the story—in fact that story is now part of the TYWLS English curriculum—and they wanted to know what happened next with the girl. I had no idea. I’d gone on to work on other things that had nothing to do with that character. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I was writing stories about women who could be that same girl but at different points in her life. So I decided to try it intentionally. I had a residency coming up—this was in late 2012—and I devoted my time there to writing connected stories about that girl at a later time in her life. (The two stories I drafted there ended up in the book.) By the time I finished my residency, I was sure that I was going to write a book of linked stories all about that girl and her future. I was finally going to attempt to answer the question those students had asked me back in 2006—What happened?
EWN: How did the publication of this particular collection come about? Were you solicited by the publisher, win a contest, agent submission, etc.?
Paula: So much of what happened with the publication process seems serendipitous. If I had not enrolled in Daniel Menaker’s humor workshop at the Key West Literary Seminar, would I have met him some other way? Would he have read my work and offered to represent me, when my book was not even finished yet, and when he had not represented anyone before? Would he have served as the first editor on my collection, reading the stories as I completed them? Would I have met a different agent who believes in short stories enough that it didn’t matter to him that, at the time, I didn’t have a novel he could sell to sweeten the deal?
The way I met my publisher also seems like a serendipitous event: While my book was making the rounds of the big publishers, I found out I was selected to be a Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A few weeks before the conference, I was contacted by Mike Levine from TriQuarterly. He saw my Scholar bio on the Sewanee website and wanted to know what I was working on. I told him about YOU MAY SEE A STRANGER. Dan sent him the manuscript. We made plans to meet at Sewanee, where Mike was a “visitor,” an editorial panelist. One evening, we met for drinks at French House, where everyone gathered after the last reading of the day, and he told me he wanted to publish my book.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as an author? Primary form to work with, or something you write when an idea hits, or …?
Paula: I wrote my first book of stories when I was in the 6th grade. (It’s out of print!) I think in school we are oriented toward stories when we write fiction, but toward novels when we are assigned reading. Until college, perhaps. I was an avid reader of both—an avid reader, period.
As an adult, post-MFA, I’ve written a couple of draft novels and many stories. I switch rather readily between the forms, because when an idea strikes me, I know whether it feels like it’s a story or a novel. I think my experience playing around with novels helped me to write a novelistic story collection, one that spans a few decades of the protagonist’s life and in which every story is told from her perspective. Something about giving myself permission to write a story collection, even though I suspected it would not be popular with publishers, was freeing. When people tell you, write what you want to write, not what you think you should write, there’s a good reason. Sometimes I’d stop work on a novel to write stories, because I was impatient to finish something. Having done that, having written the stories I wanted to write, I now want to do something different. I’m working on a novel, a book I’m excited about, and for the first time in years, I have no impulse to write a short story. It’s a little weird, to be honest. But also good, because I feel like I know what I’m doing, and I want to stay in it.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as a reader?
Paula: I read short stories all the time. I generally alternate between reading stories and reading novels. But, interestingly, when I was working on my story collection, I read novels, for the most part. I never considered my story collection to be a novel, but I wanted it to have a novelistic arc. So it felt natural for me to read books that would inform that goal. When I read stories, though, I often return to my favorites—Lorrie Moore, Edward P. Jones, Alice Munro, Ann Beattie, TC Boyle. I’m curious to see how they do it so well.
EWN: How will you be celebrating National Short Story Month this May?
Paula: In fact, I’m a judge for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction this year, so I’ll be reading a lot of high-quality short story collections. I look forward to it! The competition is open from April 1 through May 31.
EWN: Thank you very much for your time!
Paula Whyman is the author of YOU MAY SEE A STRANGER, a linked story collection that won praise from The New Yorker and a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Paula has been awarded the 2017 Towson Prize for Literature. She was selected for “Best of 2016” lists including Chicago Review of Books and the first-ever Poets & Writers Magazine “5 Over 50” list. Paula's writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Ploughshares, VQR, The Washington Post, and on NPR’s All Things Considered. A music theater piece based on a story from her book is in development with composer Scott Wheeler. Paula teaches in writers-in-schools programs through the Pen/Faulkner Foundation in Washington, DC, and The Hudson Review in Harlem and the Bronx, New York. She is a fellow of The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Paula is founding editor of the online journal, Scoundrel Time.
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