INTERVIEW: Elizabeth Stix by Noah Sanders
Things I Want Back From You
Elizabeth Stix
Black Lawrence Press
Interview by Noah Sanders
I’ve been reading the work of Elizabeth Stix, and specifically many of the stories in her new collection, for more than a decade. I’ve heard these stories read at The Racket Reading Series and published versions of them in The Racket Journal. I am well acquainted with her work and the stories featured in her debut collection, Things I Want Back From You, to say the least. And I will, as I have for years, say this: I truly think Elizabeth Stix is, and has been, one of the best short story writers out there. Her writing is funny and sharp and she’s picks at the emotional scabs we all bear without losing herself in the darkness.
Though I’ve spent a good deal of time with a good deal of these stories, Stix’s new collection forms the existing work into a linked narrative spanning five decades in a small, fictional, Marin town. Stories I’d enjoyed previously, now existed in a new context allowing characters, and their stories, to grow and change and, in some cases, find closure.
I sat down with Stix over Zoom and we talked about the highs and lows of converting short stories into a linked narrative, the way dreams affect her writing, her husband Jeff’s doodles, and so much more.
Noah Sanders: Hi, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Stix: Hello. You’re my very first interview, the first person who’s interviewed me about the book.
NS: I love that.
ES: So let me just say, I hate being recorded. All of a sudden, I'm nervous about everything I say.
NS: You’re going to do great. There’s a lot of imposed structure in this book – forms, lists, surveys. What draws you to this sort of structure?
ES: I think the short story form is conducive to playing with form because you can experiment and sustain something unusual and weird for five pages that you can't sustain in a novel. You can write a breakup letter in list form that has a narrator who’s becoming increasingly unhinged for five pages or six pages. But I don't think I would want to read an entire book that was a breakup letter in list form. Flash fiction is even more conducive to that.
The first one I wrote was “Things I Want Back From You” - the breakup letter. I have a writing partner named Ericka Lutz, and we met in a cafe a long time ago, and she gave me a prompt. She said, “Write a story in the form of a numbered list.” I wrote the title “Things I Want Back From You”, knowing that it was going to be a breakup letter I just started writing. I wrote that story really, really, really fast, and I changed it very little over time.
To get started sometimes we would just reach into a bag and pull out a writing prompt. It was a great way to get over writer's block because you couldn't judge what you were writing because you had an assignment and only ten or fifteen minutes to do it. It helped quiet the internal editor. If it turned out that you liked it, you could keep going with it. If it turned out that you didn't like it, you didn't think you were a terrible person, and it didn't throw you into despair.
NS: When you decide to use a form or a structure in your short stories, does the structure come first, or is it something you assign later once the basic narrative and characters have developed?
ES: I think structure comes first. One of the last stories I wrote for the book was “Resurrection Man”, where the story is told in the form of magic tricks. I wanted to write a story about the character, Ollie, and I was doing some research on magicians and magic tricks, and the names of them were so evocative. They just felt like they could be chapter headings or sections. There’s a trick called “Battle of the Balls,” and to me, that sounds like two men squaring off for a fight. Or “The Lady Disappears” or “Our Little Secret” – they’re just ripe for exploring.
But they came from a lot of places. I wanted to write about magic, but I also wanted to write about a poker parlor. My father played a lot of poker. Like three nights a week at this little club. He’d be gone from 6pm to 2 in the morning. This was after my parents were divorced, and it was his entertainment and how he wanted to spend his time and money. And at this little club, they made him a hot dinner and took care of him, and I wanted to write about that. The poker parlor and the community at the poker parlor and Ollie and Max and Sandy and it just merged into that story.
NS: Your character, Spirit Rosenblatt, is represented almost entirely through forms–a list of instructions for her dog-walker, a new-age evaluation form, etc. Was Spirit always a character you had in mind? Or was she created as a means for these forms to exist?
ES: Spirit was born in the first story in the book, “Things I Want Back From You,” and was just really fun to write. I kept putting her in different situations because I wanted to see what happened to her.
NS: What about her do you enjoy writing?
ES: I think that oversharers are fascinating. The conventions of what is appropriate to say out loud are very narrow. And when anyone strays from them, they seem really startling. I was at a reading, and I asked this woman, “Do you know who’s performing?” And she said something like, “Oh, she’s my neighbor.” And then, “I just wanted to get out of the house. I’m painting my house right now, and it’s such a wreck because, you know, my marriage has fallen apart, and I found out I don’t really have anyone to turn to. There’s no one who can just help me paint my house.” And she kept going, and I was standing there, looking at her like she was absolutely unhinged because the conventional answer is, “She’s my neighbor,” and just breaking the conventions of conversation a fraction, can make someone look wildly unhinged. It interests me how Spirit keeps creating discomfort by breaking the boundaries of what she shares.
NS: I read or heard a lot of these stories when they existed outside of the linked narrative. What was the process of linking them like?
ES: It’s partly why it took me so long to finish this collection. All these stories were written as standalone stories without intention of making them a linked collection. As I looked through it, though, I realized there were a lot of characters from each story who seemed like the same people. Everybody had different names, sure, but it felt like I was tracking the same person through different parts of their lives. One person in high school is the same character as a fresh college grad and the same person whose friend died when she was in her mid-thirties and now has to take care of her mother. They’re all the same person.
Then, I needed to place them in the same physical location. I lived for a very short time as a child on a cul de sac in San Diego. So, I transplanted the cul de sac to this fictional west Marin suburb. Once I knew where they were and that it was a fictional place and there were some magical elements, and fantastic things could happen, then I could see it. I knew the rules of the universe, and it became much easier to move around within it. In the beginning, though, when I didn’t know where they were, it was frustrating to keep track of everybody. My husband Jeff made the map that’s at the beginning of the book to orient me. I could look at this very simple map and say, “This character is performing a magic trick, and this character is watching the magic trick because he’s the neighbor who lives over there.”
NS: Your husband Jeff did all the drawings for the book? How’d that come to fruition?
ES: I went to a psychic once a long time ago, and I asked her about my book. She said, “I see it with doodles in it. Why do I see it with doodles?” And I said, “I don't know.” It just planted the idea in the back of my mind. Years and years later, I was like, “My husband likes to doodle. Maybe doodles would be fun.” So I asked him to do doodles.
NS: The book spans from the explosion of the Skylab space station to the present, and so much of my enjoyment, at least, was having the details of these characters' lives slowly revealed over five decades. Was there a reason you wanted to stretch it across such a long timeline?
ES: This collection took me a really long time to write. At different times in my life, I was interested in different things. When I started writing this book, I was reflecting on my childhood and individuating myself from my parents and my family of origin. By the end of the book, I was taking care of my parents. You know? So, time has to pass.
NS: Did lining up the stories chronologically, affect the end product?
ES: When I had the original stories lined up, I realized there were gaps—characters I hadn’t circled back on. I never knew what happened to Emeline or Alice or Owen Applebaum. But now, these were characters with arcs, and I had to make sure all of them were wrapped up. When I was done with that, I felt like I had neglected Betty from “Safekeeping.” We learn she got divorced, but we don’t know what happened to her. We never see the breakdown of the marriage and I wanted to write the moment where everything fell apart. And that–“Party at the End of the World”–was the last story I wrote.
NS: I love that story. I love how Betty has been looking out at what she thinks is a canyon for so much of her life, and at the party, someone says, “That’s not a canyon,” which breaks down the last vestiges of whatever fragile ego she was still nursing.
ES: She’s been wrong about everything for her entire life.
NS: This is what I find to be such a strength of your writing: These stories can be a little depressing, but you are so light in your style and tone that it takes the sting out of watching these people stumble, fail, and collapse. Do you think of this as a sad book?
ES: No. I think sadness is a part of life, and so it isn’t sad. I don’t have a value judgment on sadness. It’s not a bad thing. You asked me if I think the book is sad, and I don’t, but also, maybe I think sad things are okay. This book is essentially a funny book. There's a lot of humor in it. I'm a big fan of the combination of humor and pathos. I don't think something that's just slapstick is that interesting.
NS: There were moments in this book that were just laugh-out funny. Moments, or lines, where you let go of the anxious humor, or the pathos, and just go for a good crass joke. I loved the line in “The Acorn” where Owen says, “Blood rushes to my cheeks, and other places.”
ES: What did that bring out for you?
NS: I come from a really crass family. A lot of sex talk. A lot of dumb sex jokes. And, frankly, it was just a funny, smart way to talk about boners in a story that’s ostensibly about a pretty intense reaction to grief.
ES: It’s the great thing about humor. If you can find the sweet spot between emotional resonance and humor, that's my favorite kind of story. Humor lets people relax,and it gets their guard down, so that when there is something with emotional impact, they can receive it, and it's all the more of a punch in the gut.
NS: The next-to-last line in the book’s last story–“The Small Earth Guide”–is Robert, the travel writer, saying, “Stay in the fishbowl of your circumstance,and you’ll miss all the wonder.” It was the defining line for me in the book. All these characters, to varying degrees, have done that. And you get to see them from different perspectives. You see Spirit outside of the structure of the form. You hear Robert’s thoughts as a travel writer and not a barfly or a crappy husband and father. Outside in the world, with all the freedom that affords.
ES: Outside of that cul-de-sac that’s so enclosed. And traveling is so good for that. The definition of perspective is distance. And you can’t have perspective if you’re in the fishbowl of your circumstance. You literally can’t, because you’re there. If you leave, you can have perspective.
NS: There’s a lot of dreaming, or dream-logic, or dreamlike situations in these stories. And I remember in your short story class, we talked about dreams and the power of dream imagery. What draws you to dreams?
ES: To my understanding, you dream about the things you’re trying to sort through in your waking life. You’re just churning that stuff over and over. You’re processing your subconscious, and in dreams, you do so through imagery. Any kind of logic can apply. A carpet can turn into an elevator or whatever. If you’re processing the thoughts you find interesting, and they’re depicted as images, that’s exactly the same thing as writing fiction. What’s interesting to you, in that moment, shown in scene.
I think you can even direct your dreams. Ask them to take over, and when you wake up, you’ll have a bunch of scenes to work through. Jeff, will joke that if I’m stuck in my writing, I’ll just go to sleep and “give it to the night shift.”
I took a class from Lael Gold on dreams and one of the things she suggested is when you wake up, you write down just the title of your dream, which is the most dominant image or whatever jumps out at you. I had a dream that I was driving in a car with my mother. We were driving in the lobby of a movie theater. We drove past the concession stand and it knocked off the rearview mirror of my car. I looked at the rearview mirror being gone, and I said to my mother, “Well, I guess there’s no looking back now.” When I woke up, I wrote “concession” because of the concession stand, and I thought, “Wow, what a loaded word. What a great title.” So I wrote this story, “Concessions.” It starts out in a movie theater with a girl and her mother, and it incorporates the movie theater and the idea of this woman taking care of her elderly mother. It is even another image from a different dream I had, maybe even that night.
NS: What was the other dream?
ES: I was skateboarding down Market Street with my face painted gold.
NS: The image of you skateboarding is amazing.
ES: Oh, the only time I ever skateboard is in my dreams. But yeah, in the end, I pulled all of these images from different dreams and turned them into a surreal, little story.
NS: One hundred percent agree. At the end of the book, I felt like each character and overarching storyline had travelled along the narrative arc, and you’d given them each the ending they deserved. What are you going to do next?
ES: When I was done with this book, I was till very interested in the character of Spirit Rosenblatt. I wanted to keep going with her. I wrote an entire outline of a novel, where she’s the protagonist, and it’s just waiting to be filled in. But in getting this short story collection ready to go, I found myself falling in love with the short story form. Especially the linked short story form and being able to do it knowing that's what I was going to do from the get-go. So, I think I might write short stories again.
NS: Man, I hope so.
