First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
Article continues after advertisement
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Lori Ostlund about her new short story collection, Are You Happy?
Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!
From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: There are very developed dual time periods, maybe even triple periods in your story collection. That’s the story of this man, Phil, who is remembering this time when he met someone on a trip with his mom, who was married and who he had a gay affair with who said something to him that changed the course of his life but that story is taking place in the present where he’s going home for the death of a family member. And it seems to me that one of the things you do in the story is find an ending that links these two time periods and links these two subplots together, which seems like a high wire act.
Lori Ostlund: Endings, I think, are the hardest part of writing. I mean, I don’t know whether you would agree with that, but for me, they are the hardest, and I always know when they’re wrong. I just don’t know how to make it right, you know, like I write the ending, and I try to convince myself maybe I’ll send the story out and inevitably, if I had that feeling inside that it’s not right, the story will not get accepted. And that was a story where that was definitely the case, and in thinking about that story, you know, sometimes I have to just think about my character in a different way, like in that case, he’s there sitting with his mother, and the tendency would be to think like, who is he as a grieving son? But then I thought, he’s a veterinarian. And so I Googled what happens when a dog is put down, and I watched a really awful clip of a dog being put down, so that was what I leveraged. That was the piece that brought it all together. It was this idea of him having just put this dog down before he got on the plane to come to his mother and hearing the voice of this man that he’d had the affair with years ago and bringing that all together in this final moment of trying to figure out what to do, and thinking that he and his mother have come to some sort of different place, and realizing that maybe that’s not the case, but that he nonetheless is in that different place. I wrote the bones of that story on a flight from San Francisco to Boston one time, just as a way of, kind of like keeping the plane aloft. I had a little notebook, and I thought surely, if I write a story about a plane crashing, that would be too on the nose, like the plane could not crash if I am sitting on it, writing a story about that very event.
***
Lori Ostlund is the author of After the Parade, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Ferro-Grumley Award. Her story collection, The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda Finalist and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her third book is called Are You Happy?