Another post where I've "known" the author, Matthew Cheney, for some time and even had the pleasure of meeting him back at the Litblog Co-Op party in NYC back in 2006 (?) if I remember right. His story collection published back last February and I've greatly enjoyed the stories from it that I've read to date.
EWN: Your short story collection, Blood: Stories, 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?
Matthew: The earliest story is “Getting a Date for Amelia”, which was originally published by Failbetter.com in 2001. I wrote the story in the summer of 2000, then attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, where I met Thom Didato, one of the editors of Failbetter. I didn’t really know what an online magazine was at that point, and really didn’t think it was anything to pay attention to, because only weird freaks published online. But Thom seemed nice, and he gave me his card, and it wasn’t like anybody else had ever asked me to submit a story to them at that point. I sent him something and he rejected it with one of my favorite rejections ever. He said it was like broccoli: he knew it was good for him, but he didn’t particularly enjoy eating it. I sent him “Amelia” because I’d been afraid to send it out, given how bizarre it is. I thought, “If I’ve written anything that’s not broccoli, it’s this story.” And Thom loved it and eventually nominated it for a Pushcart Prize, which they’d fought to make Failbetter eligible for, making my story, to my knowledge, one of the first things published online ever to be nominated for a Pushcart. I continued to write broccoli stories — stories with Important Themes and Serious Characters and Good Prose — and still occasionally can’t help doing so, but I’ve learned over the years to try to embrace my weirdness, to try to tell stories in the way that only I can, whatever that may be, even if it unsettles me or scares me. It’s one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned about writing.
One of the later stories in the book, “Walk in the Light While There Is Light”, was published at Failbetter ten years later. By then, webzines had taken over the world.
EWN: How did the publication of this particular collection come about? Were you solicited by the publisher, win a contest, agent submission, etc.?
Matthew: I tried sending it to one or two places that read unsolicited manuscripts of collections, and got form rejections from them, or no response at all. I should have been discouraged, but I’m stubborn and persevered. I was afraid to approach an agent, because given the tendency of short story collections not to make any money unless they’re from well-known writers, what luck would I have? So I settled finally on submitting to a contest, something I’d hardly ever done before, but Black Lawrence Press was at that time offering to send 2 books to early submitters to their Hudson Prize, so it seemed worth the entrance fee, since I’d at least get a couple books out of it. (I think entrance fees that don’t provide the writer with anything other than entrance are less justifiable, though for contests somewhat understandable. Submission fees for journals are abhorrent, as the journal is monetizing their slushpile, which I consider unethical. But, as they say, your mileage may vary.) I submitted, and then some months later, Diane Goettel, the editor-in-chief of Black Lawrence Press, called from Hong Kong to tell me I’d won and would have a book, which left me pretty much speechless, as the most I’d ever hoped for was that I’d be a finalist and they might publish me anyway. I’ve never won much of anything for my writing, and I’ve published fiction for 15 years without anybody really noticing, and then suddenly not only do they notice but they’ve chosen my manuscript out of all the ones submitted? The world felt topsy-turvy.
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 …?
Matthew: It’s the form I’ve worked with the longest, since I was a little kid, really, and I’ve been reading short stories ever since my cousin read me some Stephen King stories at an entirely (and delightfully) inappropriate age. My imagination tends toward fragments, pieces, shards of stuff. (It’s no surprise that in my academic life my primary specialty is modernism.) I was amused to see recently in the bio note on “Getting a Date for Amelia” at Failbetter that there’s still a sentence saying I’d completed a novel. This was true. Agents even asked to read it, then never wanted to speak to me again. It wasn’t awful, it was just boring, which is worse than awful. But it was a good experience, writing it, because it showed me all the things I’m really bad at as a writer. This is important to know, because you can then work on either fixing what you’re bad at or finding forms to better steer you away from that badness. I abandoned stories (and fiction itself) for a while after realizing the novel was unsalvageable, but then I returned. My life was hectic and I didn’t think I could bear to focus on a long project again. After Blood, though, I started a new novel. It felt like I’d accomplished what I could, for the moment, in short fiction, and I needed a new challenge. I don’t promise that it will ever be publishable, but 2/3rds of the way through now, it feels like it’s teaching me some new ways to write.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as a reader?
Matthew: They’re often all I have time to read other than what I read for my academic work (I’m at work on a PhD dissertation right now about Virginia Woolf, J.M. Coetzee, and Samuel R. Delany). I love the novel as a form, I find them fascinating to think about and to explore, but I often don’t have time to read the novels I want to read. Short stories, I can find time for, and we live in a golden age for both the short fiction being published now and the short fiction being brought back into print (Leonora Carrington’s being the most recent of that sort). There is probably no better time in the history of humanity to be a short story reader than now. And we should read them now. All the writers are going broke, and the planet’s biosphere is crumbling, so it’s good to read them while we can.
EWN: How will you be celebrating National Short Story Month this May?
Matthew: Every month is short story month! I’ve been meaning for a while to return to Paul Bowles’s fiction, which was so important to me ten or so years ago, but which I haven’t had time to really delve into again, and perhaps I will reread some favorites like “The Delicate Prey”, “Pages from Cold Point”, and “The Time of Friendship”.
EWN: Thank you very much for your time!
Matthew: Thanks for all you do for short fiction, Dan. It sometimes feels lonely being a writer of short stories, and I’ve encountered lots of people who claim they haven’t read any since high school or college or ever. It’s a beautiful form, and yet so relatively unappreciated, that its champions are, for me, real heroes.
Matthew Cheney’s Blood: Stories won the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in One Story, Conjunctions, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, Weird Tales, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Electric Literature, Best Gay Stories 2016, and elsewhere. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Literature at the University of New Hampshire.
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