Claire Jimenez—teacher, archivist, and award-winning author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and the novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023)—caught up with Megan Howell earlier this month.
First, Megan, congratulations on your debut collection. I love the strangeness of these stories, and how you defamiliarize violence that is often normalized by the day-to-day grind of the world: the violence between parents and children, teachers and students, between lovers, and between best friends. I want to begin with the title. So many of these stories deal directly with cruelty, and yet the collection is entitled Softie. How did you come to name this book? When did you realize that you were straddling a tension between vulnerability and brutality?
Thanks! Super grateful to see that Softie is finally out in the world.
Cruelty is definitely a huge theme in the collection. Initially, it was called “Make a Home with Sadness,” but the title’s length and abstractness made me fall out of love with it. I wanted something pithy and cute that also conveyed emotional vulnerability. When I think of the word “softie,” I imagine something malleable and sweet like soft-serve ice cream but also a lot of my characters who, because of their softness, struggle not to be consumed by cynicism.
I feel like the tension you bring up—vulnerability versus brutality—defines coming-of-age stories. Becoming an adult means hardening yourself to the world’s abuse, but becoming happy means rediscovering the childlike innocence that we lose in order to grow up. I think I came to this conclusion a while ago in my own life and applied it to my work once I started taking fiction writing seriously. The literary protagonists who informed my writing all struggle to be the paradox of an adult who’s completely open to the world but also guarded or even cruel. Think of Nel from Sula witnessing the drowning of Chicken Little or Lenu from My Brilliant Friend processing the deaths (and lives) of despair that claim people in her old neighborhood. Or the family from your amazing novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez. What they all share in common is a tendency to vacillate between vulnerability and unfeelingness. They’re searching in vain for an ideal middle ground.
In the titular story “Age-Defying Bubble Bath with Tri-Shield Technology” there’s a moment that hit me hard in which Alda desires “to be small and safe again.” Why did you choose to end the collection with this story? Do you feel that there is something about the story that clarifies or brings into focus the rest of the collection?
That was one of my favorite stories to write, partially because I think it sums up the collection so well, especially that last paragraph you cite from. Alda’s devolution from adult to teenager to nothing is, in my opinion, an apt metaphor for mourning. When Alda loses her mother, her perception of time becomes fluid while time itself marches forward. Her memories and regrets drive her to ruin. Many of the other characters in the collection mourn in similar ways. Their losses are varied: children, lovers, ways of life, relationships, pets, jobs. But they’ve all lost a part of their innocence, which they abortively try to regain because they just want to be “small and safe again.” “Age-Defying Bubble Bath with Tri-Shield Technology” uses magic to highlight the impossibility of going back to the way things used to be. Alda can literally, physically become younger, and yet she still can’t fill the void that her mother left behind.
There are also some supernatural and uncanny elements woven throughout these stories. Do you see yourself as a writer who is working in or inspired by different genres? Or were these stories that just organically demanded you test reality?
I got into reading because of how much variety and creativity literature can offer. I’ve always read a lot but also across genres, everything from YA to literary fiction and non-fiction. They’ve all inspired me as a writer, which is why I don’t think I’m that tied down to a specific type of story. I think magical realism haunts me, though. One of my all-time favorite books is Like Water for Chocolate. It felt refreshing to the point of almost being terrifying because I’d never experienced something like that before on the page. I was used to pure fantasy books with established rules that separate magic from science, spirituality, and boring everyday existence. What kept me reading was the need for answers (Is Tita’s food actually magical? Or is something else possessing everyone?). But the lack of answers was what stayed with me, stimulating my imagination more than Harry Potter could ever.
I think all good stories test reality, even the ones that are 100% contemporary. Just being a regular-degular human is such an alien experience. It leaves us with so many questions that we’ll never know. What does it mean to be a person? Why are we here? Is time real? Am I? Are you?
Who were the literary mentors that helped guide your work as these stories came together — books you often turned to or writers whose advice you summoned during a challenging moment as you moved from one draft to the next?
There are so many, too many to list (though I’ll try because if there’s one thing that I love, it’s giving book recommendations). The process of putting Softie together took a little over two years, but some of the stories are much older. The collection’s inspirations are the same ones that jumpstarted my nascent writing career. The list is random but enjoyable: Memorial Drive, The Virgins, Kitchen, When You Were Everything, Heaven, Heartbroke, Delta of Venus, Florida, Heads of the Colored People, Three Women, Dogs of Summer, Vinegar Girl, Just Kids, etc.
It’s often said that every book teaches the author something new as they write it. Did you feel that this collection taught you something about storytelling or yourself as a writer? If so, what?
Gosh, I learned so much. Like I said, the collection’s curation was a two-year process, but each story was its own separate adventure. “Blue” is the oldest story. I wrote it when I was still in my MFA program at UMD. I was doing a summer writing program in Iowa. I feel like that time marked the beginning of my career as a serious writer. “Blue” was my first piece of creative writing that felt complete, like something that I could shop to literary magazines (which I did) and get published (which it did, in The Nashville Review). I think what helped was being away from the DC area, my lifelong home as well as UMD’s. The physical distance allowed me to reprocess my work and personal goals. I soon realized that my short fiction’s biggest weakness was its tendency to overexplain. I love the people from my workshop at UMD, but they were being too nice when they told me to expand my stories. What I needed to do was learn the art of conciseness and mystery, which I did, but I’m still learning.
What’s next for you? Where can we see you read? What projects or next moves are you most excited about?
I just finished drafting a second short story collection. Three of the stories—“Don’t Call the Sea Cerulean,” “Alycia,” and “Before and After and After Again”—have been featured in literary journals (you can read the first one here). I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing short fiction. I just really love its utility (seriously, you can do so much in just a few pages) and how fast the turnover can be (heavy, heavy emphasis on “can,” because oftentimes the process isn’t so simple).
I’m also writing a YA novel. It’s about a Black aspiring model navigating her high school, dysfunctional family, and fledgling friend group of popular but troubled partiers. Her relationships fall into jeopardy when she discovers that one of her new friends is the daughter of her sister’s rapist’s defense attorney. The whole novel process isn’t totally new to me (I have one complete trunk novel and a slew of unfinished attempts), but I’m still getting used to its challenges, which are frustrating but also exciting.
Claire Jimenez is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and the novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023). She received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and her PhD in English with specializations in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers from over the last century. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.