Jacqueline Doyle published The Missing Girl last year (2017) and also found some time to answer a question or five for us!
EWN: Your short story collection The Missing Girl was published in 2017. What story within the collection had the earliest publication history outside of being in the collection, and what was that history?
Jacqueline: The stories in the chapbook aren’t arranged in the order they were written, but it happens that the first story, “The Missing Girl,” was also the first one I published, in Vestal Review. At the time, I had no intention of putting together a collection. It was five years before I realized that missing girls, abused girls and the men who preyed on them had become recurrent themes in my work. They continue to haunt me.
EWN: How did the publication of this particular collection come about? Were you solicited by the publisher, win a contest, agent submission, etc.?
Jacqueline: One of the stories, “Nola,” drew some attention when it was written up on the Ploughshares blog as “The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week” and then J.T. Hill, the editor at Monkeybicycle, nominated it for some awards, so I decided to put a chapbook together. I was lucky enough to win the Black River Chapbook Competition at Black Lawrence Press. They’ve been great. I’ve done a lot of readings, including one with other BLP authors at AWP18 in Tampa. The chapbook has garnered more reviews than I ever expected, and made two “best indie short story collection of 2017” lists (at Paper Darts and The Coil). The Missing Girl has just gone into a second printing. I attribute a lot of my success to editors Kit Frick and Diane Goettel at Black Lawrence Press.
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 …?
Jacqueline: I started as a creative nonfiction writer, moving from personal essays to narrative nonfiction, and for a long time that was my primary form. I’ve published a number of short stories too, but lots and lots of flash, both flash fiction and flash nonfiction. Flash started as something fun, a break from the intensity of my nonfiction, and then became a more serious endeavor. I write flash partly because it’s easier to fit into my schedule than longer fiction and nonfiction. But I also love the form: its compression, unpredictability, variety—and the opportunity it affords me to inhabit the lives of characters I don’t know, characters who frequently take me in surprising directions.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as a reader?
Jacqueline: Hearing from you was such a coincidence, since I’d just finished reading Emily Geminder’s powerful story collection from Dzanc Books, Dead Girls and Other Stories. I loved Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, and I’ve just started The Collected Stories of Leonora Carrington. The short story may be my favorite genre, and I also read flash fiction online every day. I teach classes in American literature and women’s literature, and frequently teach story collections because I think they’re an underrated genre (don’t get me started on the “Great American Novel”) —most recently, Bharati Mukherjee, Sandra Cisneros, Tim O’Brien, Gish Jen, Sherwood Anderson (as well as Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville in my nineteenth-century surveys). I always find something new to appreciate when I reread the story collections that I teach.
EWN: How will you be celebrating National Short Story Month this May?
Jacqueline: On May 8, I’ll participate in a reading in San Francisco for Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story, just out from the San Francisco publisher Outpost 19. I love launching the month with microflash, in an anthology edited by the wonderful Lynn Mundell, Grant Faulkner, and Beret Olsen that includes work by a lot of wonderful flash writers that I know (including my husband Steve Gutierrez). There are so many readings in the San Francisco Bay Area; I expect to celebrate the short story all month, in one way or another. Here’s a shout-out to local indie booksellers: Books on B in Hayward, Octopus Salon in Oakland, Green Apple Books and Alley Cat Books and Dogeared Books in San Francisco, and many others. I expect they have some events planned for National Short Story Month and I’ll be sure to attend.
EWN: Thank you very much for your time!
Jacqueline: Thank you so much for asking me! I’ll be reading your interviews for National Short Story Month and buying some books!
Jacqueline Doyle is the author of the flash fiction collection The Missing Girl from Black Lawrence Press. Her flash fiction and nonfiction, essays, and stories have appeared in Wigleaf, The Gettysburg Review, Post Road, Hotel Amerika, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere., She lives with her husband and son in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches at California State University, East Bay. Her work has earned numerous awards, including First Place in the 2017 Midway Journal Flash and Poetry contest, judged by Michael Martone, five Pushcart nominations, two Finalist listings in Best Small Fictions 2018, and Notable Essay listings in Best American Essays 2013, 2015, and 2017.
Links:
For my name at the beginning of interview or in the bio: www.jacquelinedoyle.com
For The Missing Girl at the beginning of interview or in the bio: https://www.blacklawrence.com/the-missing-girl/
For Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story in the second to last question: http://outpost19.com/NothingShortOf/
Comments