This interview was conducted by Editorial Assistant Gianna Gaetano..

Tell us about I Meant It Once. 

Well, the short pitch I often give is: I Meant It Once is about being a mess in your twenties. But the more nuanced answer is that it’s a book about being in your twenties and figuring out how to exist in the world as a young woman, in a world that is so often dismissive of women and prepared to write us off when we talk about our lives. It’s about how stories stick with us, how memories return to us—especially things we’ve been taught to assume aren’t “important.” It’s a book about why stories matter, as a way to talk about our experiences.

Your prose is so captivating. All of your sentences do an excellent job at moving the story forward; each of them is needed. I was wondering if you can speak to your writing process on a line level? 

That means a lot to me, thank you! How sentences come into being is part of the writing process that feels a bit mysterious and magical to me, so it’s a little hard to explain—but certainly when I was first becoming serious about writing, maybe ten years ago, syntax was the most exciting part to me, doing that technical work word by word. I read the book How Fiction Works by James Wood and was really excited about how he was talking about word choice as a way of getting into a character’s point of view. There’s also a great, tiny essay by the playwright Sarah Ruhl called “The Drama of the Sentence” that really gets to the heart of the sentence as being a story in itself. I guess the main thing that feels exciting is trying to make it so that each sentence creates tension and expectation and curiosity about what will follow. The first sentence of my book is “This happened to me when I was still in college,” and I like sentences that raise questions like this: What’s the thing that happened? If this happened in the past, how many years has it been since? Who’s talking and why is she bringing this up now? Why does it still weigh on her, whatever it was—does she herself even know why? I think in I Meant It Once, characters are often telling stories from the past to try to understand why the story has stayed with them—what’s in the story that they need to come to grips with.

We were lucky enough to publish your story “We Can’t Explain” here at Pigeon Pages back in 2018, that is now part of I Meant It Once. How have literary journals, big and small, impacted your journey as a writer?

That story was among the first few I published. I still remember Ashley Lopez, my editor, telling me about reading the story for the first time (on the subway, if I remember correctly?) and how it resonated with her. That really meant a lot to me, and it was such an encouragement to continue writing stories. A version of that happened so many times with so many journals, and I can’t overstate how essential it was to have those moments of working with editors to hone my stories, moments of sharing stories with readers. It made each story stronger, and it encouraged me to see the possibility of a place in the world for this book one day. 

There are three stories that focus on siblings Helen, Evan, and Grace: “This Is the Way Things Are Now,” “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote,” and “Like a Cloud, Lighter Than Air.” I was curious to know which of the three stories you wrote first? How did you decide the order to present these stories for the reader? 

“This Is the Way Things Are Now” was the first story I wrote in the whole book—though I didn’t have a sense of a book at that point; it was only this one story. But I think that story pointed me off in a few directions that felt exciting, one being that I just wanted to write more stories generally. Another was that I had a strong sense I had more to say about this sibling dynamic between Helen and Evan and Grace, I think because it had sort of surprised me: I’d set out to write about the disintegration of this friendship between Helen and her friend Catherine, but Helen’s siblings, initially peripheral, became just as central to the story. I always say I could just let Helen and Evan and Grace talk to each other forever, because each one is so purely themselves, and they have that sibling thing of being at once deeply loyal to each other and totally prepared to disagree with and contradict each other. There’s a lot of humor and energy in that, and I had this feeling I wanted to keep letting them talk to each other. As to the ordering, I knew I wanted the three stories spaced out from each other in the book. And since the story “Like a Cloud, Lighter Than Air” is a true chronological sequel to the first story, picking up right where “This Is the Way Things Are Now” leaves off, I wanted the story that is more like flashbacks and backstory from childhood, “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote,” to come between them. Hopefully to give the feeling that each time we come back to them after being away for a few stories, there’s a kind of familiarity. (Not unlike coming home to your siblings after a semester away at college, I guess—which is the moment in life when we meet these three.)

Each of your characters really shined on the page. They were all so distinct and had their own unique voices. I was curious about your process for creating and developing your characters. 

This too feels a little mysterious and hard to describe—I’m mostly just feeling out instinctively what seems right. I think that one piece of it is that when I was younger, in high school and in college, I was involved in theater. I acted in plays a little, but mostly I directed plays. I spent a lot of time sitting in a room just watching people, actors, interact with each other. I think that was very formative, and I think I draw on it all the time in writing—it was great training in close observation, in how one gesture or someone’s tone of voice or just the amount of space between people in a room can really evoke the whole emotional tenor, the whole the dynamic between people, the history they share.

 There are quite a few stories where the narrator is retelling her story to the reader, which naturally makes the reader question the narrator’s reliability. Three stories that really stick out to me are “That Is Shocking,” “What Else Happened,” and “We Can’t Explain.” Can you speak to writing these types of narrators, narrators who withhold information from the reader? 

I don’t really even believe much in the idea that some narrators are “reliable.” I wasn’t trying to write particularly unreliable narrators, I was more trying to write stories in the way, it seems to me, they actually live in the mind—in fragments and flashes, in bits that come back to us later. I wanted to render on the page how the past bleeds into the present moment, or how something in the present can make us reevaluate the past. How talking with your sibling in your twenties can flash you back to a memory of childhood that still affects the family roles you’ve been each assigned to play. I think every story in this book that’s narrated in the first person is a story about someone trying to make sense of something, someone asking: Why does this memory still bother me? Or Why do I feel how I do about this? “What Else Happened” is a story that takes that question farthest of any of the stories in the book, I think. It’s really about a narrator who cannot get resolution on a set of memories that deeply trouble her. Something about this period of her life she’s looking back on doesn’t sit right with her, but she can’t quite acknowledge what. It’s really a story about not trusting your own instincts, and how that can hurt you all your life. She never lets herself believe that something bad happened—surely in part because she has not come of age in a society that believes what happens to young women is important, or that what they feel about what happened to them is important. So no, I don’t think of these characters as unreliable narrators—I think of them as very reliable narrators really, subjective ones of course, but narrators trying their best to speak truthfully about the events of their own lives. Trying, even though as women they are so often told: calm down, you’re overreacting, life is just like this, get over it.  

All of these stories deal with heavy themes. There are characters who are dealing with grief and loss, who are unable to move on from their past. Characters who are struggling to come to terms with their identity. Characters—specifically women—who are fighting against people’s expectations of them. You did a fantastic job intersecting these powerful ideas throughout the collection. When writing these stories, did you already know the focus of the collection or did it reveal itself as you wrote? 

I’m definitely a writer who’s interested in what reveals itself to you as you go along. I wrote a few of these stories as standalone pieces before I started to see what themes they had in common, themes that I think were some of my own obsessions and preoccupations coming through—things I was trying to figure out by writing stories. The obvious ones, the themes I could see initially, were time and memory. I could see I was trying to write about the things we hold onto as humans, and why—about the weirdness of living with the memories of another time of your life. Whether the loss of a friend, as in a few of the stories, or something harder to define, like the break-up scones in “That Is Shocking.” In many of those early stories, everything was kind of an answer to this question Tom asks Margaret about those scones: “Do you ever feel weird that this still bothers you?” But I would say that it took quite a bit more time for me to start to see the theme of women trying to sort through others’ expectations of them. At a certain point I realized that, without even trying, I had written into almost every story at least one moment, if not several, where a young woman is told to “take it easy,” or “calm down.” And I hadn’t set out to do that, I was just trying to write “memory,” trying to be “realistic.” But in so many of these characters’ memories, that kind of insidious thing was lurking. It is just such a part of what it is to be a woman, and when you’re young you don’t yet have the words for it—you just feel a little crazy. Every generation has a different version of it, and in mine, growing up in the 90s, it was this “girls can do anything” sentiment, this idea that things were “great” economically, and the American myth that “hard work always pays off.” And then you’re coming of age feeling like, something about all of this just seems so untrue, but you don’t have the words for what feels so wrong. Anyway, I think one of the most amazing parts about making art is how it starts to show you what you’re really trying to say. I’m definitely a writer who subscribes to the idea that if I could just say something, I wouldn’t have had to write about it. Writing is a way to say what can’t be said in some other, more direct way.

I devoured each and every one of these stories. They all really packed a punch. I was wondering if there is a story in this collection that really resonates with you. In other words, do you have a favorite? 

This isn’t the most fun answer, but no! I love them all differently, and what’s most exciting to me about the story collection as a form is the way the different pieces each stand alone but also exist in relationship to one another, kind of like a record album. I mean, I love how one story can complicate another, or underscore another, how they can be in harmony with each other or stand in contrast to each other. It means the reader gets to go on this thematic journey rather than a plot journey in the course of the book. They can really think through a set of themes from different angles. And the stories can speak to one another in this cool way where—well for example in “What Else Happened” the narrator is remembering a moment in her life where she became afraid of “becoming too close too quickly,” and later in a different story, that fear is alluded to again. It’s a different narrator, but just mentioning that same feeling kind of brings all the sinister energy of the prior story into this completely different moment. I love that about stories—I love how they can speak to each other. More than any individual story, that communication between them within the book is what I love.

There is so much talk about how publishers aren’t interested in short story collections and how they only want novels. It is said to be essentially rare for someone to have a debut short story collection, so I was curious if you had any tips or advice for writers who are interested in writing collections instead of novels. What compelled you to the short story form? 

I think I started writing stories mostly as a matter of convenience at first. It just felt like an approachable form in its brevity—a novel felt sprawling and scary. I wrote one story and learned a few things I felt like I could apply to writing another one, so I wrote some more, and once I had a few stories, I started noticing what they had in common that might add up to a thematic coherence that could connect them together in a book. I feel lucky I had written a lot of the book before I ever caught wind of the idea that “stories don’t sell”—or “stories are hard,” as they often say in publishing. By the time I heard about that, I was too attached to this project to make some strategic choice about novels being more sellable. And I do feel like I sort of barely crawled over the finish line to getting this book published—it was not easy, which only makes me think with alarm about all the story collections we don’t get to read because no publisher gets behind them, or they don’t get enough distribution, or because novels get more media coverage. There is a lot of luck involved in getting a collection into the world, in this particular moment in publishing. And I don’t really understand where this idea that people don’t read stories has come from—clearly people are reading them and writing them. I think it’s one of those myths that fulfills itself: If publishers see stories as risky, they don’t put as much money into marketing them, and so then of course they don’t do as well as that season’s big novels that had more energy behind them. And then the whole thing repeats itself.

Are you working on another project? 

Yes! I still have more to say about Helen and her siblings, so now I’m writing (yes) a novel about them. Or maybe it’s truer to say a story collection disguising itself as a novel: the book has this form where each chapter operates within itself, like a collection, but they add up to something larger in a novel-esque way. In this book Helen and her siblings are in their thirties now, and Helen is untangling the themes that come with that next part of life. Her siblings, as ever, are doing things differently than she is, and there’s friction and humor in that, and a place for them to work out the questions that are coming up in their lives. 

What are you reading right now? 

I’ve had this amazing summer doing book events with some other writers who’ve also just published first or second books, so I’ve had the pleasure of reading them as I’ve been getting ready to be in conversation with them. One collection is Tomb Sweeping, a beautiful collection by Alexandra Chang who also wrote one of my favorite novels, Days of Distraction. Also the altogether eerie short story collection Here in the Night, by Rebecca Turkewitz, and the memoirs Disappearing Act by Jiordan Castle and Acceptance by Emi Nietfeld. I so strongly recommend all of these books. Each in their own way an investigation of what it means to tell a story, and why we do this—as humans, but also in particular as young women forging a way forward in life.