×

SmokeLong Quarterly

Share This f l Translate this page

“Problems of Regret and Nostalgia”: An Interview with Guest Reader Meagan Cass

Interview by Shasta Grant February 20, 2017

What themes do you find yourself frequently writing about? What themes are you drawn to when reading?

I’m obsessed with how the desire for approval—from a parent or a lover or a job—can lead us to repress parts of ourselves, to avoid necessary risks, to perform some idea of perfection. This desire especially effects my girl and women characters. I want to enter those moments when, inevitably, the performance cracks open and the character enters into a deep uncertainty about who they are.

My stories also examine how physical and emotional transformations often occur together in ways we can’t predict. My characters excavate, re-imagine, damage and reconstruct themselves through the language of sports, games, and fitness.

Finally, the power of memory to warp and unsettle and enrich the present comes up a lot in my stories. Within this theme, I’m especially drawn to the problems of regret and of nostalgia: how we dismantle it so that we can have more empathy for each other in the present.

I’m drawn to all these themes in my reading. They intersect in so many of the books and stories I can’t be without: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Dorothy Allison’s Trash and Skin, Edwidge Danticat’s The Dewbreaker, Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures and The Girl with the Flammable Skirt, Tessa Mellas’ Lungs Full of Noise, Stuart Dybek’s I Sailed with Magellan and The Coast of Chicago, Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and The House on Mango Street, Junot Diaz’ Drown and This is How You Lose Her, everything by Sherman Alexie, but especially the story “What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church,” Caitlin Horrocks’ “Zolaria,” and on and on.

Can you tell us about how you came to flash fiction and what it can do and can’t do compared to longer stories? Do you prefer writing one or the other?

Ah, I love this question! I can’t remember how I came to flash exactly. I know I loved the short pieces in Dybek’s Coast of Chicago, Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, and Alexie’s Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven. Each flash expressed an intense emotional experience, often through entering a seemingly small moment. Each flash encompassed a world.

The work in SLQ, as well as anthologies from Rosemetal Press and Starcherone, also revealed to me the many possibilities of flash. I especially love how writers in this genre tend to play more with sound and rhythm, aspects of my prose I was once told should be reserved for poetry.

I think flash fiction can do most all of the things longer fictions can do. It can jump around in time. It can frame a particular conflict very specifically so that readers feel it. It can express a complex interiority. It can show how big emotional change is embodied in tiny gestures and seemingly small decisions. Maybe in flash the individual images do more narrative work?

I don’t prefer one to the other, but I’ve especially loved the process of revising and editing flash fiction. The genre demands that I dig deep on the sentence level, pay special attention to rhythm, syntax, sound, and image. Writing flash reminds me of the importance of these techniques, of their particular joys and pleasures. I bring them with me into longer stories.

 What can make or break a flash story?

Ooooh. I think it varies so much across stories. In my own work, what sometimes gets me in trouble is a desire to spell out a particular emotional turn too explicitly in the last line, rather than leaving the reader that delicious interpretive room.

One of many things that can make a flash for me is the richness and strangeness of the images, how each one deepens our understanding of the characters and the emotional tensions within and between them. Casey Hannan’s “Other Sons,” Ashley Farmer’s “Where Everyone is a Star,” Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “The Solutions to Brian’s Problem’s,” Cisneros’ “Linoleum Roses,” and “Bums in the Attic,” and Kincaid’s “Girl,” are all stellar examples of this.

Do you ever experience writer’s block? What techniques have you developed to get past it?

Totally! It usually happens after I’ve finished a big project or a difficult story, when I decide I have my writing routine and process down. Now I get to just rinse and repeat, right?

LOLOLOL say the writing powers-that-be.

For the last six years, when I was writing the stories in ActivAmerica, I tried to write for two hours a day, most days, alone, at home whenever possible. I drafted entirely on the computer, using a notebook only for research notes.

This worked for awhile, but over the last year I noticed myself becoming way too much of a perfectionist in the early drafts. This perfectionism was keeping me from deep revision, was shutting out that vital element of surprise in the process.

So now I’m radically changing it up again. I write in coffee shops and museums and on my back porch. I write alongside a writer friend for one hour a week. I scrawl first drafts in lined notebooks, forcing myself to get all the way through before I start to revise. I’m digging into new and old craft books in search of challenging restrictions.

Also, I like to reread Lynda Barry’s comic “Two Questions.” It appeared in Best American Comics (in 2008 I think), and I have a copy of the last panel taped up on my office wall. Throughout the comic, the narrator struggles with viewing her work as either excellent or as total crap. These value judgments (“Is this good? Does this suck?”) shut her down. She eventually learns (and must always relearn) to embrace “not knowing,” which is represented by this eerie octopus that weaves its tentacles around her while she works. Sounds scary, right? Not knowing is bewildering! But for me it’s absolutely necessary.

 

About the Interviewer

Shasta Grant  is the author of the chapbook Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home (Split Lip Press, 2017). She won the 2015 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest and the 2016 SmokeLong Quarterly Kathy Fish Fellowship. She has received residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project and was selected as a 2020 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow. Her work has appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, Hobart, wigleaf, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and divides her time between Singapore and Indianapolis.

ornament

Support SmokeLong Quarterly

Your donation helps writers and artists get paid for their work. If you’re enjoying what you read here, please consider donating to SmokeLong Quarterly today.

SmokeLong Fitness -- The SmokeLong Community Workshop

Book Now!

Included in the price of SmokeLong Fitness:

One live Zoom webinar each month with killer workshop leaders (recorded for participants unable to attend).

One open-mic party each month (or other live Zoom events)

Discounts on intensive workshops

Discounts on senior editor feedback

Surprises (good ones)