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.Read More »

Sejal Shah’s debut collection of short stories, How To Make Your Mother Cry continues the rich tradition of innovative feminist work by Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston. These astonishing stories about friendship and love, resilience and survival establish Shah as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction. Jeremy Wang-Iverson and Justin Hargett asked Sejal a few questions about her work.

 The book is dedicated to the memory of five important people in your life – can you tell us a little bit about them and why you want to honor them with this book?

While working on How to Make Your Mother Cry, I mourned the passing of my uncle, Kirit N. Shah, a writer and poet who also loved to dance, and who died of COVID-19 on February 12, 2021. My uncle inspired me and always supported my interest in and love of writing. I am indebted to him for that. Exactly one year later, on February 12, 2022, my friend and former editor (she edited my first book, This Is One Way to Dance: Essays), Valerie Boyd died. As I wrote about in an essay for Literary Hub, she was the mentor I had been looking for. I interviewed Valerie for Creative Nonfiction magazine: reading this interview, “Tracing Literary Lineage,” is an excellent way to learn more about her life, work, and influences.

In one of the essays in This Is One Way to Dance, I noted, “To say their names–this is the way to keep the people you love alive.” Themes in my book include love and friendship, memory and memorials. James Wright Foley, my friend Jim, was a talented fiction writer and my graduate school classmate during the years of 1999-2002. His presence and friendship made any classroom or party better and an unsafe workshop situation more tolerable. I thought about Jim a lot while working on this book and included two of his workshop letters to me in the book itself. Jim died too soon, the first American hostage murdered by ISIS in Syria. Urvashi Vaid, the fourth person to whom I dedicated my book, was a civil rights and gay and lesbian rights activist whose life and work affected my generation and beyond. She also died at a relatively young age, in 2022. I met her many years ago and was inspired by her activism, outspokenness, and advocacy.

And finally, I was moved by the life story of Rana Zoe Mungin, a Black Afro-Latina writer and fellow alumna of Wellesley College and the MFA program at UMass Amherst. Zoe died at age thirty of COVID-19 in 2020 after having been turned away from hospitals and refused treatment twice. She is the youngest of all those to whom I dedicated my book. I was especially angered to learn that Zoe had also found our MFA program to be a toxic environment for writers of color–to know that it had continued to be this way well after my time there. Zoe was a talented fiction writer and I included her in my book, because I wanted, as with the other people to whom I dedicated the book–I wanted their names to be out there once more, for others to know their names, to say their names and to learn their stories. I hope that Zoe’s story continues to be known and that more of her words and fiction writing will eventually be published posthumously.

In your first book, the essay collection This Is One Way to Dance, your writing was described as having “a style that rejects the notion of fixed genres.” Now you have followed that up with short fiction that also defies traditional conventions. What is it that excites you about pushing the boundaries of story and genre?

I think walking alongside boundaries in liminal spaces is where I feel most comfortable. I wrote about this in This Is One Way to Dance–about boundaries and sparks: “At heart, I’m interested in self-definition and invention. I worry the boundaries and borders to see where sparks arise: they look like fireflies. We occupy space. I spin and twirl. I dwell and revel in the spaces between.” I think I’ve always been fascinated by sparks–by the edges of where one can go within a genre.

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Out February 1, 2024, this fantastic new novel chronicles the sisters Roxy and Coco, two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time. Action figure–worthy, for readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell, this modern take on these fabled women touches on mental illness, racism, animal rights, and the rights of children. Justin Hargett recently caught up briefly with the author.

WVUP: The novel’s protagonists, Roxy and Coco, are a pair of harpies—mythical bird-women—and sisters, living in the modern world and taking revenge on child abusers. What drew you to that particular Greek and Roman myth?

TS: The origins of my obsession are over twenty years old, given that I published a poem titled “Harpies” in Treason, my fourth book of poetry, in 2002, and have a short story in draft from about the same time. The epigraph of both quote the Aeneid that mentions harpies befouling the food of Phineus, a Greek soothsayer, because he abused his children. Always looking for female muses, I was curious about these powerful creatures who were always said to be ugly and frightening and concluded that such denigration was the result of Greek patriarchy, men frightened of vengeful women.Read More »

Courtney Sender’s braided story collection In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me—described as “fierce” by Danielle Evans, “a stunner” by Deesha Philyaw, and a book that “upends . . . what it means to tell a love story” by Alice McDermott—is available now. Sender talked with Vesto PR for the blog.

When did you start writing the stories in this book?

I am a structuralist at heart—or at least, my instinct is to look at structure second only to voice—so I wanted to create a collection that reads like individual stories at first and like a novel by the end.

So this is a braided collection that becomes one story by the final word. Characters recur and offer refractions against each other. One set of characters shows one outcome when a lost lover comes back, and another set shows a very different outcome.

Most of all I view the book as existing in three parts: “In other lifetimes,” which is the longing and the recourse to magic and the spiritual; “All I’ve lost,” which is that deep loneliness that I know so well from being single throughout my twenties; “Comes back to me,” which is the longed-for thing. And the question is whether, after all those longing and loss, the longed-for thing is even what we want or can accept anymore.

The stories have changed so much as I’ve shaped them into a unit for a book project. To me, they all feel new in the terms of the words on the page. That’s a testament to the work and vision of my editor, Sarah Munroe, who helped me think about the relationships of one story to another. I went through and matched last lines to first lines, and created an emotional arc from story to story by drawing a thread from one to the next.Read More »