In 2016, I moved from Philadelphia to the Upper Midwest, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to attend a creative writing program. My family struggled to adjust, and no one struggled more than I did. It wasn’t the remoteness or the weather that challenged me most, but the way people communicated. I hadn’t realized the way the east coast had conditioned me to be blunt and open, and I balked at the strange combination of warmth and reservedness I found in the Midwest. And, more than anything, I felt like a queer weirdo. I set most of my stories at home in Philadelphia, a place that was becoming squishier in my mind, but I failed to see how to square my queerness with the new setting in which I was living and writing. I told my fiction professor I was thinking of leaving the program and Michigan. She gave lots of good advice. One of the best pieces: read Lori Ostlund. I started with “All Boy,” and then one by one read and re-read all of the stories in Lori’s debut collection, The Bigness of the World. No book had meant as much to me since I found Harriet the Spy and Matilda in childhood and felt myself wrapped up in the queerness of these little girls’ worlds. 

In her stories as well as her novel After the Parade, Lori captured something about queer people who grow up in small Midwest towns and strike out to the coasts, or to New Mexico, or abroad, that moved me intensely as someone who had traveled in the other direction. Even though I was new to the Upper Midwest, I saw my new friends and acquaintances and their families and contexts captured. So when I saw that Lori was publishing a new collection in 2025, I did something I had been meaning to do for years: I reached out and told her how her writing had changed my life. I didn’t drop out of school and retreat to the coast like I had told my professor I would. I stayed, finished my degree, and now, years later, find myself writing and teaching in Lori’s home state, Minnesota. 

I couldn’t wait to talk about her new collection, Are You Happy?, whose stories strike out in bold directions but at whose heart is the same measured, hyper-realistic prose that allows astounding access to the interior lives of characters who often keep their innermost thoughts secreted away from their family and friends. I wanted to know how she does it, and how her interest in “the bigness of the world” continues to morph and attach to her new stories.

Krys Malcolm Belc: There’s this interesting movement I noticed through the collection where, especially in the first couple stories, there are huge events that are really shaking up people’s lives, like the loss of a child, or the plane accident described in one of the stories.

And then there are a couple stories later where it’s more about accretion of smaller events [that] sometimes don’t ever coalesce into a big event. Two women who believe one of their neighbors may be watching them, a teacher who feels menaced by one of her students.

I’m wondering how you’re thinking about big events and small events in your characters’ lives. 

Lori Ostlund: Every time I’m asked to describe the book, one of the things I talk about is that specter of violence. Events that actually happen are one thing, but in some ways, I’m almost more intrigued by the big thing that never comes to fruition, but your whole life, at least for a moment, is defined by feeling that it might. 

“The Stalker” is the last piece that I wrote for this collection. I wrote it last year, and it’s about a stalker that I had. I think every teacher has something like that, a moment in their classroom that leaves them feeling slightly uncomfortable. What I remember most is my own reaction, which was to feel that I was over responding to it, giving it too much credence. 

It was this big guy who would always stay after class and wait for everyone to leave and always wanted my time in this very specific way. One night I told him I needed to get going, and I was gathering my things, and I turned around and he was like two inches behind me. I just remember looking up at him and [seeing] this look like he wanted to kill me. I left, it was at night on this remote campus, and by the time I got home and started to tell [my partner], Anne, and she was like, You gotta talk to your boss. 

If you just say, what’s the end of the story, the end of the story is nothing happened. But I’m interested in that whole in-between, when all you’re doing is reacting to it and thinking about it, and how it transforms everything. 

KMB: This isn’t the first time I’ve seen New Mexico in your work, but I did feel like Albuquerque, especially, but also Santa Fe [in “Two Serious Ladies”] were very big and built out in this collection. How were you thinking about presenting these cities to your readers? 

LO: The novel that I’m working on is set in Albuquerque. My wife and I started an Asian furniture store, which we ran for seven years, called Two Serious Ladies. The novel is also about this undercurrent of violence that runs through things. And it’s also about loneliness. I think loneliness remains one of my preoccupations as a writer. 

The book is definitely an Albuquerque book in some ways. I think that people don’t really know much about Albuquerque. If you say New Mexico, people just default to Santa Fe.

I like Santa Fe, but it’s not my New Mexico. I lived in Albuquerque for many, many years. I think you’re making me aware of the fact that maybe I write about it more comfortably when I don’t live there. 20 years ago we moved [to San Francisco]. I always say that I can’t write a thing about Minnesota when I’m there. I think that that remains true, yet it’s factored so much.

I always feel like my job as a writer is to sit between the world that I know, that very specific world of towns of 400 people, and interpret that for the rest of the world. Albuquerque is a very specific place also. It has a very high per capita crime rate, and that’s what people tend to know about it or fixate on, but that’s not necessarily the world of Albuquerque that I’m presenting.

KMB: Many of your characters seem to be people who withhold things that they’re thinking, either because of their constitutions, or because they’re coming from a cultural context [like the Upper Midwest] where we don’t say the things that we’re really thinking. Reading through the collection and getting to the last story, “Just Another Family,” Sybil is a character who says “the thing” to be provocative in an almost aggressive way. 

In one moment, Sybil’s Mom, who talks around things and is a very elliptical speaker, says, “You know how your sister gets about the kids” when Sybil asks why she moved her deceased father’s guns into the room where she’s staying. 

And Sybil says, “You mean how she gets about not wanting them to blow their heads off?” She just says it. I want to hear a little bit more about writing this character who goes against the rules that so many of the other characters are following. 

LO: This is a character who is really struggling against something and so she’s saying all of these things because she hasn’t made her peace, hasn’t done that work yet of figuring [herself] out.

A reader said that they really like that story because the narrator reveals herself to be such an asshole. And I don’t know why, but it gave me such pleasure because I thought, That’s it exactly. That’s what I was going for. That pushing back. 

I grew up where nothing was talked about. My understanding of how [to] write dialogue in particular, but I think everything else too, came out of that. The most interesting things were unsaid. Humor is created by understanding how to put the words on the page in a certain way, and knowing when to stop, when to create that restraint. And all of that went away a little bit when I wrote “Just Another Family.” It went in the opposite direction.

A friend read it, and he said, “I’m so interested. Your characters often seem to take great pleasure in making a joke that people don’t think is funny.”  That’s kind of the way I define Midwestern humor: We’re happiest when we make a joke that no one else gets. We don’t laugh outwardly but [are] laughing inside.

Sybil is all of that, all these pieces of me that are maybe pieces of me if I’d gone a slightly different path. It gave me a certain pleasure. As a writer, I’m really intrigued by that gap you have to be able to open up on the page, and it’s the gap between what a character knows about themselves, our narrator, and what the reader knows.

KMB: A lot of the protagonists have a partner character who serves as a bouncing off point. In “Just Another Family,” [Sybil’s partner] Rachel says things that are right about how Sybil acts like the worst version of herself when she’s dealing with family stuff, but on the other hand, whenever Rachel would say these things to Sybil, I would tell myself, Don’t hate her too much! And I wanted to tell Rachel, Just remember that when you go back home, it’s not gonna be like this. 

You developed my affinity for the character who, if you just went by actions on the page and the way that she’s interacting with her sister and her mom, you’d be like, God, she just stinks. But you know there’s this other self that [Sibyl] can get back to when she leaves. 

LO: Maybe this is just a shift in me, but I’m not very interested in cynicism right now. As I get older, I feel it’s really easy to become more cynical. I can see how, and I can easily reflect each other’s cynicism back to each other.

When I was writing this final version of that story, I could feel early criticism that nothing really happens with this character, and the way that I addressed that or wrote into it had to do with the fact that I didn’t want the story to just be cynical.

Petra [Sybil’s neice] saying [“Were Sybil and Rachel born together in a big bubble?”] at the dinner table was an opportunity to show how miserable everyone is. [It was] just this awkward moment and that was it. But later I started to think about it. Suddenly that became bigger, and it became one of the moments I was writing toward at the end, a more hopeful moment. 

KMB: I was thinking a lot about domesticity and queer domesticity in particular throughout this story, [how] sometimes these stories are about the safety that you can create inside of a home. 

We create the bubble. When you have the bubble, then you’re the self you need to be to go out in the world and do stuff, right? We can go be teachers and work in our community and connect with other people, in a way that we can’t do when we’re in the dysfunction of the place that caused us to make the bubble. 

LO: I completely agree. That bubble was one of those things that got handed to me. Years ago, when we were living in Albuquerque, we had good friends who lived around the corner. They were over at dinner one night, and their daughter, who was like three at the time, she just sensed something, and she asked whether we were born in a bubble together. I think she was noticing something, and she understood that we had this connection that felt big, but she also understood that we were kind of separate from the world in some ways, and that was how she expressed it.

And I loved it. I thought, I’m going to figure that out someday. That’s going to go in a story and I’m going to figure out what it means. 

KMB: In “A Little Customer Service,” there’s a moment where the protagonist, Tara, is charged with freeing the caught mice that her older, possibly manipulative girlfriend-figure catches inside of her home. Tara gets in the car with the girlfriend’s kids, they drive out of town, and they’re going to be releasing these mice. One of the children is upset, and he says, “Tara, do you feel sad about how the world, how big the world must seem to him right now?”

I want to talk about your enduring interest in the situation that this mouse is in. There are the people who stay, the people who leave, and then this mouse, the people who are on the threshold of something. 

LO: When I was writing The Bigness of the World, I had all these stories, and I didn’t know how they connected beyond the fact that they all came out of my brain. I was stuck on the title story, and I knew that I needed something.

So Anne said, “Let’s go. Let’s go to Point Lobos and let’s go see the ocean.” So we drove down there, and we’re walking along, and Anne said something to me like, “Your mother should come and visit us,” which just terrified me because my mother has never really left Minnesota. She’s never been on a plane.

Much of my adult life has involved estrangement. So this idea just seemed awful to me. I said to Anne, “Why would you say my mother should come and visit us? She’s fine where she is.” And Anne said, “Well, because she’s never seen the ocean.”

And I said, “Well, why does she need to see the ocean? She’s lived this many years without it.” And she said, “Well, you can never really understand the bigness of the world if you haven’t seen the ocean. “

I think I always, because I was so curious, wanted to just go out in the world. Being gay saved me. It pushed me out. And the very first time I saw the ocean, I was in my early twenties, and I remember so clearly that feeling of thinking the world is huge. And I understood equally people who would look at the ocean and feel that sense of awe, and people who would see it and retreat. I understood both of those, and maybe that’s because I have both of those inside me. That is one of the things I come back to all the time in my writing: That feeling of fear of the world, and a need to retreat from it, to close it off for whatever reason—because of fear, because of that specter of violence, because of whatever it is inside oneself—and that need to engage.

And so I think the mouse has that thrust on him, doesn’t he? But Tara is really speaking more about herself. Tara was an interesting character for me to write because I don’t really identify with her. It was a story in many ways about class, and I am interested in class issues. My parents didn’t go to college. I grew up in this hardware store. When I left, I went to a state school an hour and a half down the interstate. 

I live in a world now where the people around me grew up in a much different place. They went to different sorts of schools. I always call it “the credentialing”: the conversations about where did you go to school and where did you vacation when you were a kid with your family, and all these sorts of things that had no bearing on my life whatsoever. 

My partner, Anne, she’s first generation born in this country; her parents were Holocaust refugees. Her father was a professor of Russian history and her mother a psychiatrist. When she hooked up with me, they were like, Who is this woman from Minnesota? You know, her father referred to it as “the provinces” one time. So Tara interested me, but still, even though there were so many things about her that I could relate to, she was again who I would be if maybe I had not gone out into the bigness of the world, if I had stayed at a certain place. She’s curious, but stuck in the mud a little.

Tara is in and out of school, and then in this relationship that’s clearly not going anywhere. And you see that she would like the ocean, but [that] she might not get there. She might not fit into that dichotomy of characters. That’s completely who she is. It’s the parallel life that I never pursued, but I still feel it.