This interview was conducted by Gianna Gaetano over Google Doc.

Tell us about Heartbroke.

These stories are rich in heart, grit, and truth. To me, these characters are striving, they are trying to do the right thing, but they are up against, well, everything. I wanted to write about characters who might not ever really find the love and freedom they seek because of the oppression of addiction, domestic violence, classism, loss, and lack of access to things like familial love, education, etc. What happens when your worst nightmares come true? Well, unless you kill yourself, you go on. I was concerned with that going on piece. The resiliency in the face of devastation. I came out of that world myself, it was all I knew. So I had to write it all down.

How long did it take you to write this collection?

The stories span about seven or eight years from the oldest in the book (“The Bare of Our Chests”) to the newest (“Heartbroke”). I had just completed an MFA where I wrote a collection and none of those crossed over into Heartbroke. It was on the heels of the program that I had gotten my footing and started honing in on the type of work I wanted to make, or rather, the type of work I had to make, as I tend to think the choice isn’t really ours. These are the stories that needed to come through. I was exploring a really specific world in this book and they all coexist together even though I was not cognizant of that at the time of making them.

The arrangement of the stories in Heartbroke feel strategic. The opening story sets up this catastrophic mood that builds throughout the collection. I was wondering if you had a specific method for choosing or if you always knew where certain stories would belong.

That was something that came later. I wanted to start the collection with the story “Cowboys and Angels,” but ultimately didn’t trust that a wide enough audience would be able to immediately latch onto it. I had to start out with something more, how do I say it, digestible? Representative of the collection as a whole? The voice of “Cowboys and Angels” is one of my favorite voices that has ever come through to me, but I realize that it’s sort of wild. I wanted to hold the reader’s hand into the world a little more with something that maybe felt slightly more familiar. I started thinking of ordering them in terms of theme, and voice, and making sure things felt varied enough going through. I also spaced the three connected stories that involve the character Pretty strategically so the reader could track him throughout the book itself. I did not come at this alone, my editor Jonathan Lee was brilliant in helping me get distance from them and had input on the ordering that was really useful.

It is so rare for me to read a collection and enjoy every story in it, but I was engrossed with each character and story you wrote. I was wondering if there was a specific story in your collection that means the most to you? In other words, did you have a favorite story or a story that stayed with you longer than the others?

I love them all for what they taught me, but I think “Lyra” holds a special place in my heart. It was the most challenging to write. I thought for a long time I’d never actually finish it because it felt very hard to write a story about this content (in terms of what the main character does to survive) but I never quit on it, and eventually came to a place where I thought it was enough. Where I believed she would have done this and believed in the inevitably of it. “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Miners” is very special to me, too, because it felt in some ways like a conversation with a young version of my mother. I opened the collection there because I knew her energy that had infused into it was immediately effervescent and compelling. But all of them, truly, because in each one I see the marking of my soul’s dilemma.

All of these stories are very visceral and dark. The opening story focuses on an abusive romantic relationship, in another, a woman steals another woman’s baby as a way to mourn the loss of her own child, and others dive into family abuse. They’re all so masterfully done, so I was wondering if any of these stories were particularly hard for you to write? Did you have to do a lot of research before writing these stories?

My life is my research. I survived my childhood and early adulthood, and so I had a wealth of “content” to choose from, not that I really got to choose. From my earliest writings at nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, I was writing about this stuff. I don’t consider writing about these things hard necessarily though of course there were tears and moments of overwhelm but you have to know, I was running a very tight mental health game the entire time. Becoming sober at twenty, being vigorous with self growth, therapy, healing, etc. makes me able to write this way. But these aren’t stories I would write today. I mean, of course not, because I already wrote them! But I was writing these during my twenties, a time of intense growth and realizations, having children, watching my parents die slow alcoholic deaths and so they do have a rawness (though I sort of bristle at this term because it seems to evoke that the writing is messy, and my writing is really purposeful on a sentence level) but I guess I mean to say I wasn’t afraid of the dark. I was raised on Dorothy Allison and Toni Morrison and Denis Johnson and Stephen King, and thought it was perfectly reasonable to write this way. Everything I was reading was going to these places. It wasn’t until my first MFA workshop that someone labeled my work as “dark” and I started understanding that not everyone necessarily wanted to exist in these places. For me it was a comfort, I actually never thought of my work as dark myself. I thought I was very funny. But now many years later, seeing how I am reviewed, I get it, my work is dark, it’s dealing in hellscapes. But I learned a long time ago that if we don’t visit those underworlds ourselves willingly, they come for us. I choose to dive in in order to survive.

Your prose is so powerful and sharp, and your characters really come to life on the page. While the setting is the same throughout the collection (California), each voice is so distinct. I was curious how you managed to master each character’s voice?

Thank you for saying this. Going back to the earlier question, I think sometimes when women are writing in this gritty territory there comes a lack of focus on the craft of it all, the prose. People want to know why the hell you’re writing about this stuff as a woman. But I’m incredibly focused on craft, particularly voice. I refuse to read anything where the voice doesn't immediately reach out and grab me by the collar. I want to feel like I can’t look away, and I want to come in contact with the entirety of a person, and not just a story about a moral lesson, which I worry a lot of literature has become geared toward. That’s not why I read. My characters are not thinking in moral terms. The reader can self impose those meanings as they like but my job as the writer is to transcribe a full human experience. When I think of it that way, when I open myself to the fullness of the voice, it sings.

The way you reveal information in your stories is truly remarkable. Specifically, I’m thinking of the stories “Lyra” and “The Bare of Our Chests.” I’m also thinking of the character Pretty. He is introduced in one of the earlier stories as a background character, but becomes a main character in a later story. “Heartbroke,” the second to last story in the collection, is in the form of letters from Pretty’s mother addressed to Pretty. I was curious about your decisions in revealing information this way, how you gave the reader breadcrumbs through every section. In earlier drafts, did you write these stories where the reader had all of the information at once?

I wrote the story “Cadillac Flats” first, and I realized that this character of Pretty, a teenage boy when we start, who is gay, is going to be pummeled by war trauma and home abuse and become someone we would never imagine. I wanted the reader and myself to have to entertain his true essence before we understood the violence he would one day enact. I had to get at him from all angles. These topics are often rendered in stereotypes especially when dealing with alcoholism but I had to investigate him and show the integral moments that shaped him. It’s really only by doing that that we can form compassion, and compassion is ultimately what I’m after here. We hear from his mother last, a final cry of guilt and remorse and longing, feeling, as mothers do, responsible for their children, and like they could have prevented something. But we know she couldn’t have. She was under the same laws of oppression, too. She was also surviving. I wanted to show the generational disease of it all. Mental health in families is a true rich get richer thing. It’s a privilege to not be abused growing up. Is that fair to say? I think it is. It’s a hell of a lot of work to come out from under that and I wish we acknowledged that more.

Are you working on another project?

I am writing a novel, yes. I really think we write what we must write and this book feels like the closest cut to my heart yet. Though I would have said the same about Heartbroke and Godshot at the time. But that’s thrilling. It means the magic keeps coming if we keep paying attention.

What are you reading right now?

Mostly the brilliant work in draft form of close friends. T Kira Madden and Genevieve Hudson and Kimberly King Parsons have novels in the cauldron right now that are mind-blowing. It’s beyond a privilege to read them. I really loved My Trade Is Mystery by Carl Phillips. It speaks to the experience of being a writer over a lifetime, the stamina it requires, a beautiful book on continuing even when things feel difficult. The work of Miriam Toews. She’s a north star writer for me.

Can you tell us about your writing process? Your characters are so lively and fleshed out. I could’ve happily read a novel about each of these characters. I was curious if you began with an idea for a story or began with a character?

Usually a character comes first. A voice starts talking and they tell me where they need to go. Then as I’m walking around in daily life, the voice shows me things about the story. It begins to piece together. It requires an attention to life. I’m very boundaried in terms of limiting distraction, doing things that nurture my body and mind, and being frugal about the things I say yes to. It’s too easy to cloud and overwhelm my psychic vision, my lifeforce energy that really is required for this work. I’ve become stringent about what I let in, but of course that doesn’t always work. I have come to know now with true assuredness that as far as my literary life goes, the work really is the only thing that matters and the only thing I can count on. Of course the other stuff aids in the continuing of the work like money for starters but remembering money is just a tool by which we ensure the work keeps getting made. I get letters from readers all the time from all over, spanning age and race and gender saying the most encouraging things, surprising things. Those notes keep me going because it can be brutal out there. The reader means so much to me. The work as I see it is ultimately a tool for healing and for seeing, and I take the responsibility of my gifts very seriously. I love the May Sarton quote: “The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.” Because that’s really true. Writing is an exercise in allowing my gift to turn outward, to share the work so that I don’t feel alone with this stuff. So it doesn’t turn inward on me, become poison. Which I know it would. Spend a few days or weeks not engaging with your soul’s purpose and it will let you know. It doesn't feel great.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers out there who are working on short story collections?

I think the key is to make sure that each story holds its own. That each one means the world to you. Put your heart and deepest pains on the page. And if you’re not in touch with those yet, or unable to, that’s alright, but find a way to open that door. Otherwise you’ll be blocked. The work won’t have that unnamable quality I believe we’re all looking for when we read, that X factor. I feel I can usually tell when the author abandoned themselves on the page, took the easy route. Ask yourself, am I creating shortcuts? Am I evading something? Or am I writing into the scene that will absolutely demolish me? Robert Boswell says “I don’t quit until the story stands on its own hooves and turns around to glower—meaning that it’s fully alive and no longer mine.” I have that over my desk. Push into the story until it glowers back at you. What an image. But it hit home for me. That’s what we strive toward. You hit that point in the story where you go, oh my god, I didn’t know we were going there! And that’s the fun and that’s when it gets good. So, are you surprising yourself?