I had the
honor a few months back of sitting in on a panel discussion about the short
story. The featured writers included Ramona Ausubel, whose collection of
shorts, A
Guide to Being Born, was
scheduled to debut the following week.
The literary blog The Millions is currently running an interview with Ramona. Check out some of her comments.
On humor:
"I don’t think about humor logically, as in, I don’t see a dark place in a story and think, 'I could use some comic relief here.' It’s much more instinctual than that, and actually I think that’s a feature of humor in general. . . . Plus, when you get your reader to laugh, they become involved in the story in a new way, they are a participant, and I like that. I like it when everyone’s got their hands in the mud-pile together."
On seeing themes in your stories:
"It’s always amazing to me how long you can go along, not realizing your own obsessions. I first wrote these stories as individuals and not as a book, and then I looked back at the stack and the themes jumped right out at me."
More about themes:
"I don’t find I do very interesting work when I’m navigating with logic, so I try to let themes rise up if they rise up, rather than setting out to write a book about such-and-such."
". . . I love exploring the chemistry between fiction and reality. As for the fantastical elements — yes, I recognize that no one has ever grown another arm when they fell in love [Ramona is referring to her short story where people grow another arm when they fall in love], but our real, actual bodies are very, very strange and amazing, even though we’re used to them, and love is very, very strange and amazing. So even though I was writing about an unreal variation, to me the magical elements are simply a magnification of what we’re all in the throws of all the time."
The difference between sentences in a short-story versus a novel:
I don’t know if my approach is consciously different when writing a novel vs. writing stories, although I’m sure there are more workaday sentences in [her novel] No One is Here Except All of Us and in the new novel I’m working on, simply because there is more story to tell.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Photo courtesy RamonaAusubel.com and Twin Lens Images.
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