Elizabeth Crane and Steve Almond are not the only short story writers to tackle the complexities and hardships of singledom, but their abilities to write about relationships from refreshingly new angles make these two authors stand ahead of the pack. Both Crane and Almond published debut story collections that met with critical acclaim.

The New York Times Book Review called Crane’s When the Messenger is Hot (2004) a “remarkably strong and coherent artistic vision.” These stories are unique and heartwarming. The collection balances intelligent literary structure with tragic emotional struggle, and won Crane the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award.

Almond’s debut collection, My Life in Heavy Metal (2003), injected a shot of literary energy into the tales of love and longing. “Almond’s eye for modern types is impeccably, almost academically sharp,” wrote the reviewer at the Los Angles Times, aptly summing up Almond’s uncanny ability to capture the reality of love gone astray. His next book, the nonfictional Candyfreak, devoted to the author’s own obsession with American candy, proved that Almond’s sophisticated literary styling is not only confined to fiction.

The publication of Crane’s and Almond’s highly anticipated sophomore story collections, All This Heavenly Glory and The Evil B.B. Chow respectively, provided the perfect platform to discuss the differences and perspectives of female and male short story writers. Other Voices staffers Matt Pagano and Tina Spielman met with Crane and Almond at the 2005 Printer’s Row Book Fair in Chicago at the Harold Washington Library for a He Said/She Said take on the author interview. We discussed their new story collections, their teaching styles and the literature of relationships.

TS: You both have published new story collections this year. How was the process of working on the second book different from the first? Did you have more creative freedom?

BETSY : My process was pretty much the same. I think with fiction in general you have so much freedom, especially once you know that they like you. I just did my own thing, though I felt a little pressure to live up to something.

STEVE: I have this book of stories and then this nonfiction book, and B.B. Chow was purchased along with the candy book and the work was just choosing what stories I wanted to publish. No one was clamoring for more stories from me or wanted me to write on a particular theme. The larger pressure was just, “Where’s your novel?” The amazing thing is I don’t think there are many other people whose second book of fiction is a book of short stories. I can tell you I’ve met publishers absolutely eager to not have that be the case.

MP: Although you’re working on a novel. Isn’t that your next project?

STEVE: Right. They wanted that to be published right after Candyfreak.

BETSY: The compromise that I think helped me a lot was that this was one character [Charlotte Anne Byers who is followed throughout All This Heavenly Glory].

TS: How do they officially classify All This Heavenly Glory? I’ve seen it described as short stories, as linked stories…

BETSY : I thought it said “stories” right on front—

STEVE: No, it doesn’t say that anymore. They do not put “stories” in front of story collections anymore.

BETSY: Wow. That must be very recent because Messenger says “stories” on the front.

STEVE: It’s very recent, and it’s a result of this paradigm shift. We’re probably also the last two authors to have their second book of stories in hardback. Because increasingly they are all going to be originals in paperback.

BETSY: Which is cool.

STEVE: Which is very cool. I understand it. But not when your contract says hardback.

BETSY: My intention was for my character to have progression. I don’t know what defines a novel-in-stories anyway. When Steve was talking about how the stories were written, quite a few of mine were also written already. It had always been my intention to write a complete book about this character. My original idea years ago was they would all be childhood stories, but when I started to read through a few I thought, well, maybe I should mix it up a little bit. So I tried to fill out her story on that basis and what was missing from the overall story.

MP: Does the story process involve heavy work with your editor giving you input about what to add or to change?

BETSY: There’s so little work with the editor until it’s extremely done. With everything I’ve read, I think the publishing world seems to have changed before I got into it to the extent that the editing process has become something very different. If there’s editing before you get it published, you work with your agent. She was the one who thought it was ready before I did, and I guess she was right. By the time it gets to the process of the editor, it’s pretty painless.

TS: How aware are you of your audience when writing? Is there a certain reaction you’re trying to evoke from them?

STEVE: When things are going well, I’m thinking about the characters and nothing other than that. But there are two ways of answering that: I don’t ever think of demographics or niches or who’s supposed to read this, which is deeply condescending to people.

BETSY: Why?

STEVE: I think it’s condescending to suppose that if you’re writing a particular theme or topic or style—

BETSY: Oh, I see.

STEVE: …that somehow a fifty-year-old housewife in Iowa wouldn’t get it. All humans are deep enough to get literature if they pay attention carefully enough. But I do think all writers of any merit think about the reader in the generic sense of not confusing them, not being condescending to them, not putting in extra words to call attention to the author. Beyond that, that’s it. You know, I never think, “Oh, gosh no, where might this go, who might like this?”

BETSY: That’s interesting to me because I always feel like such a charlatan going in to teach a class telling my students that I don’t think about my audience, because I know that there are people who teach you to think about your audience—

STEVE: There is a sense that you have to think about trying to connect to your audience—

BETSY: Yes, in that sense absolutely. But not in the particulars of who the people are or who the groups of people are. That would be utterly baffling.

STEVE: Right, there’s a word for it: it’s called marketing.

BETSY: Right.

TS: What does it mean for you to connect with your audience?

STEVE: Well, it means they feel more than they felt when they picked up the piece of art. It means the love that you’ve felt for the character gets translated into them. That’s what it means when you read a great book or a great story or great poem. But that’s very different than the commercial intent where the goal is to sell books. Lots of them.

MP: Then does marketing dictate where you send your stories? For example, something you might send to Playboy may be very different than what you send to Other Voices.

STEVE: Well, sort of. I am unburdened by getting into a big slick magazine. It will probably never happen. But it could, I hope it does. But I’ve given up on the idea that that’s how I’m going to build a readership, which is how I think a lot of young writers think. They think, I’m going to send this to the New Yorker or Harper’s…but within that literal arrangement there is some work that is so graphic I know that Nerve is going to be the one who is going to run it, although really I’d like to give Other Voices and the Missouri Review and some of these literary magazines the credit to say, “It’s a good story, I’ll run it.” I don’t care if there are pussies and dicks and parts in congress in my stories. But I tend to think about, “I’m certainly not going to send this kind of work to Atlantic Monthly or the Georgia Review,” or publications I know have a particular aesthetic where I’m just barking up the wrong tree.

BETSY: I don’t even think it’s the graphic that keeps me out of those publications. I think, particularly with the New Yorker, that they have their Updike and their Murakami and the six other people and the occasional new voice and that’s it. I don’t think it’s even about the content of my work as much, is what I’m saying.

STEVE: It’s an interesting question and I want to say that that’s the sort of ambitious, almost a sort of marketing arm of our brains, to mix a metaphor. Especially when you’re writing short stories it’s so difficult to get the work into the world and get noticed. And I know coming out of Candyfreak that was the big sitcom. Now everybody knows me as the candy guy so I say, “Hey, I write these short stories on the side,” and people couldn’t care less. So that’s why I think it’s difficult when you are serious about the craft to say wouldn’t it be fabulous to be in one of those slicks that automatically you can say to your mother or whomever else, “Yes, I have arrived.” I’m interested to hear what Elizabeth has to say because I think there’s something to not having that kind of recognition that makes you find other ways.

BETSY: I find that more and more what’s been happening in my life is that I am connecting, very directly—I’m sure you have this experience because you tour so much—to things like the Dollar Store and Sleepwalk. People come out to these events and there are other, various local zines and publications that I find myself more and more interested in because people do read them. People come out to see you. It’s so direct and so immediate that it seems to be much more what writing is about than recognition. You want to make a living.

STEVE: I think these reading series that are organically emerging from cities where a bunch of writers have respect for one another and want to enlarge the circle of literature are fabulous. Boston’s got a great scene.

BETSY: Oh, really? That’s great.

MP: Steve, you’re doing some of those literary events, too, which include music with writing.

STEVE: Yes, we do this thing in Boston called Cover to Cover. Basically, two authors come in and read their favorite authors and then talk a little bit. So like Andre Dubus III read his father’s work and talked about his father’s writing, which is just innately beautiful. And then bands will come in and play all covers.

BETSY: A little bit like Happy Ending [in New York]?

STEVE: It’s a little bit like that, but imagine a room with two hundred and fifty people. And it’s an interesting thing because you want to expand the sense of literature as not being stuffy and exclusive, but you don’t want to water it down so much that it’s gimmicky. But if you can get people out into a big public space to hear Tom Perrotta read “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” you know a few of those people are going to want to go to another reading.

MP: What do you think about David Sedaris’s readings, which are events in themselves?

BETSY: He is a lot of fun to go see, but it’s just so mind-boggling that he brings out so many people. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what it is about him that is so—

STEVE: It’s the literature of humiliation.

BETSY: With all due respect to him, he’s not the best writer in world, you know? He’s good.

STEVE: But he’s very honest and he awakens people’s own legacies of shame gently enough to allow us to experience them. There are a bunch of memoirs that do that and they’re great because everybody has their moments of mortification and he sort of unpacks it.

BETSY: But the fact that he brings out that many people makes me think, why aren’t there more people like that? Why aren’t writers celebrities, like movie stars? If there’s one, there must be room for another one.

STEVE: Well let me just say that I think, in the broader way, people don’t want to experience art. It’s too intense, it’s too dark, it’s too true.

BETSY: I’m sure that’s true.

STEVE: They want some version of it that is gentle. So I look at a guy like Sedaris and I don’t know quite what to think because I think he’s funny. But I’m not sure people are going to use that as their next step to reading Martin Amis’s early novels, which are really funny as hell, but dark.

BETSY: One great thing that Sedaris does is he always recommends a book or two at the end of his readings.

TS: Betsy, you have also combined literature with theatre like the Stories on Stage event at the Chopin Theater here in Chicago last March, where you read “Super Fantastic New Zealand Triangle.”

BETSY: Yes, with Megan [Stielstra of Sleepwalk]. That’s another thing the Sleepwalk people do, which is so great. They collaborate. They have writers collaborate with artists of different kinds. Fine artists and filmmakers and dancers or rock stars to come up with something new. It’s wonderful.

TS: Since that reading combined one of your own stories with theater acting, did the experience of seeing your story acted out change the way you look at it?

BETSY: It certainly does when someone else is up there reading it and it sounds different than it did in my head [laughs].

MP: You are both known for writing about singledom, relationships and that kind of thing. What are you trying to reveal—what are you trying to say about relationships and how gender plays into that?

STEVE: That’s a big one.

MP: Well, Steve, you often write with female protagonists and narrators. So, for example, “The Evil B. B. Chow,” and “Geek Player”—

STEVE: I just hate to think about the furniture of the story in that way. The best, the purest way you engage in your work is to have empathy for your character and their situation, which, in a lot of our stories, is struggling to find love but somehow sabotaging it unconsciously in such a way that you wind up in a ditch. You wake up and your head’s very bruised. So that’s what I’m thinking about. What I will say about female characters is that they tend to ask more literary questions than guys. They ask: Where did things go wrong? What happened? Why did he turn off? Why am I turning off? Where is this going long term? And guys, for the most part, tend to default into sports or whatever. Writing from a female’s perspective on these issues makes more sense because it’s not unrealistic but much less common for a guy to go, What went wrong? What happened? What did I do? It happens—

BETSY: Oh, it does happen.

STEVE: But in the end all those questions—gender, age, theme, style—they are the furniture of the story. The real action in a story is the crisis the characters are in.

BETSY: It’s interesting just listening to what you had to say. It makes me think about a lot of the men that I write about. The circles that I’ve been in for so long are very arty—not necessarily literary, just broadly arty—and the men are inclined toward some level of self-examination. More than the ones that I hear about and see walking around, who look like they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these things. So I know the world that I exist in is different in that way. But at the same time, for the most sensitive guy, I think it’s still sort of a struggle to be a man and ask those same questions.

STEVE: They’re instructed to live farther from their feelings. Women are allowed to express their feelings. There is this assumption that women should be more sort of coy and soft spoken and less cynical and all these attributes we attribute to men. It seems like a slippery slope. Because men, they read my writing and they get it. They get the story.

BETSY: Yes, I’ve had a lot of men who were rather surprised to discover that they connected to my work.

STEVE: And more and more of my readers are women, I’m sure, but that’s partly because—

BETSY: More women read.

STEVE: Right. Those numbers are probably skewed, but right.

MP: Well it sounds like female protagonists or narrators open up the chance to have better literature. But at the same time, it seems that the public is so dismissive of Chick Lit. Where do you think that comes from?

BETSY: I don’t know what to say about that subject anymore. There’s so much written about it. I think because it’s not considered to be as well written, or it only covers certain topics. I’m just starting to lose perspective on what Chick Lit is anymore.

STEVE: Sure. And people will say I’m Dick Lit. I mean I can tell you what Chick Lit is: it’s a marketing term. But I guess it mostly signifies middlebrow writing that is not as concerned with the intense, painful experiences that literature is trying to take on. And it does follow a formula, which life, by the fucking way, doesn’t. So it’s not about the subject matter as much as it is about the artist’s intent when they sit down. You really have to be willing to go to the most dangerous places and have bad shit happen and put your characters through it, and furthermore, don’t abandon them in the midst of it. And when we talk about Chick Lit, we’re talking about relationship literature. It’s doing that some…but to really imperil the reader, to say maybe you’re not going to have a happy ending, maybe you are going to be wronged or somehow wrong yourself in a way that’s irreparable, that’s kind of the definition of Art. So this Chick Lit stuff is sort of infuriating. If anyone’s calling your stuff Chick Lit, I would just say, “Please fucking grow up!”

TS: Do you think there is a difference between the way that females and males approach fiction?

BETSY: I’m troubled by the fact that I read more male writers.

STEVE: Well, just more of them are published. It’s just true. I mean you look at any business and women are still getting the shaft.

TS: When choosing a book to read, how conscious are you of reading an author based on gender? Does it play a role?

STEVE: I’m conscious of it when teaching. I’m conscious of it when I have to keep going back to Jane Austen and Lorrie Moore and Toni Morrison and thinking, O.K. now wait a second, I want to have a broader range of people to choose from. That’s when I really notice how many more male authors I have to choose from, like Don DeLillo and Denis Johnson.

BETSY: And you wonder is it because women are not getting published? Or they’re not doing the same kind of writing? Or maybe it’s all of the above.

STEVE: I think it’s changing though. I do think that women are publishing books that are more interesting to readers.

TS: You both write a lot about relationships, both healthy and dysfunctional. Which do you find easier to write about?

BETSY: It’s so much easier to write about the hard ones. I recently got married and it’s wonderful, but I find that I’m still trying to figure out how I write about it. What’s interesting about it? What would be interesting to someone else? It’s interesting to us.

STEVE: That’s the problem: and they live happily ever after, which is generally the ending of a story. You know if there isn’t danger in the story then the reader isn’t going to get sunk in as deep. We tend to write about relationships where at some moment there’s terrible danger. It’s very hard to find books that are good books about the small quiet compromises of a successful relationship, or the small agonies of making that kind of ongoing compromise. Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge by Evan Connell are absolutely brilliant. There’s also the Rabbit series by John Updike. But of course, they’re always getting divorced or back together or having affairs on one another. It’s hard to find books that are really about enduring. That’s much more subtle.

BETSY: And subtle is hard to write.

STEVE: You wonder why people are frightened of literature and it’s because books are generally about things going wrong.

TS: Since you’re especially known for writing about certain aspects of dating, such as multiple partners and the quest for a suitable partner, has being in a committed relationship altered your writing perspective?

BETSY: I find myself writing a lot more from scratch. Very little that comes from my past. Which is fun.

STEVE: Because it’s over. That line’s closed.

BETSY: I think I’ve mined that territory at this point. I have to wait for somebody else to get a really horrible illness or—

MP: Does it make you look at Messenger any differently? When you look back and think, the person who wrote that is just different than—

BETSY: I was thinking like that regardless of the book. Just the other day I was thinking who am I now that I am happy? What does that even mean? Who am I if I’m not that angsty girl who goes out with—

STEVE: Shmucks.

BETSY: Yes. Maybe not shmucks, but just the wrong guy.

STEVE: It’s true. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. This sort of great untapped, even unidentified struggle: the struggle to exist with your own happiness.

BETSY: [laughs] It’s so true. And I’ve been starting to write about that a little bit.

STEVE: And I think it will find an audience because it is what most people have difficulty with. They need grievances and unhappiness and all the stuff they got when they were kids and need to keep it around. It’s very frightening to get to the point where you’re actualized and healthy in a good relationship.

MP: The desire for love, to be loved and to belong is so basic. So why are relationships so hard?

STEVE: It’s all the bad stuff that happens when you’re young, difficulties you have in connecting in a loving way to the immediate members of your family. Most things are indelible. They are marked in a way that can’t be corrected or worked out of the system. And everybody’s walking around, god, this culture is so incredibly pathological. You spend any time touring or just in one city and you see everybody’s scared to death, they’re lonely as hell, they have guns and big cars and they’re fucking nuts. They are out of their minds because the things inside, the deep connections, are so chaotic and out of control. And, of course, the one place where it comes out is when they are really, closely, passionately connected to another person.

BETSY: And it’s terrifying. I actually wrote a story about that based on when my husband and I first started dating, and I’m not sure it’s as successful as I would like it to be. But it was so unfamiliar and I had no frame of reference to bring to it. It’s true we are attached to our problems.

TS: Is the story you’re referring to “The Evolution of the Thing”?

BETSY: That’s the story. I was trying to indicate her complete insecurity about the fact that he’s younger. That they’re cool—he and his friends are a lot cooler than she is.

STEVE: So even if a story involves happiness you have to say, “It’s still deep. It’s dark.”

BETSY: And the last story in the book takes place in the future. I originally wanted it to be this imaginary future where everything’s really nice. Like what if I lived in the country and had this really simple existence? Small town. Football games. And drinking beer on the porch or whatever. And I couldn’t. It started out that way and then the woman gets a gay son and then one of them is on drugs and it still goes wrong. That character’s just as sentimental about the dark stuff as she is about the happy stuff.

TS: Both of your stories seem to be very personal and honest portrayals of relationships. Do you mostly base your short stories on your own history?

BETSY: Yes.

STEVE: I write about a lot of people I know and who, one way or the other, are connected. I have to feel the feelings that I feel toward my pal X in order to get the character right and it’s predicated on my understanding of them, my affection for them, my intuition and insight into their character. So I worry sometimes when I write a story that I know is based on a pal, or a former lover or friend who has had some experience that caught in my craw. I worry that they’ll be angry or offended or exposed when they read my stories. But they generally tend to be very happy to have their experience recognized. Now my girlfriend inspires me to write stories. I’ll start showing off for her or just kinda riffing on something and start thinking, ‘That’d be a good story,’ and just keep going with it. If I wrote a story that was clearly based on her, yes I’d be worried.

BETSY: Yes [laughing].

STEVE: Because you have something to lose there. But in practice, if your friends are artists or if they’re at least artistically inclined, they recognize no one is trying to exploit them.

BETSY: Of course, yes. I’ve actually cut some things that were based on true relationships that I thought were too brutal. You know, because even if I don’t have an ongoing relationship with that person, I just thought, it wasn’t necessary to make the story what it is overall. Is your girlfriend a writer?

STEVE: Yes, she is.

BETSY: How’s that?

STEVE: Well, it’s interesting to start with because, if we’re doing our jobs, we’re not going to make any money. If we’re really writing about the stuff that’s important, we’re not going to make much money at all. So there’s that consideration. Then there’s also the issue of two people having the same ambition and the inevitable envy. Everybody’s so under-attended to and insecure that you always turn on one another. But that being said, it would be a complication if she wasn’t a writer. It’s like any relationship: it’s a tradeoff. And I think it’s very difficult because we do interact with one another’s work, read it. And if it’s tough in workshop to say, “This seems to need work,” or, “I’m not sure this is working,” you can imagine what it’s like in a relationship.

BETSY: Yes. I dated very few writers and, for whatever reason, I think my own insecurities would have just completely run amok. So it’s nice my husband’s art is fine art, and not writing, because he has that sensitivity.

MP: Being involved in the same artistic profession, have you ever had a shared experience your girlfriend wrote about one way and you wrote about another, creating competing narratives?

STEVE: Not yet. But that would be interesting. That’s a good question. But if it’s good writing, it’s not like you’re racing to get your version out. You’re really trying to make sense of whatever transpired. Usually it’s something, as we discussed, that’s painful if not heartbreaking. And the effort there is not about exposure or vengeance but it’s about forgiving the people who made those mistakes, who came to that difficult juncture in their relationship. I know there’s at least one person who’s good and pissed off about a story in Heavy Metal and I just had to say, “O.K., I wasn’t writing it for revenge and I’m going to have to decide that I think the piece of art is important enough and I’m sorry, really sorry, but I’m not not going to put it into the world for that reason.”

TS: Realistic relationship writing is sometimes difficult to portray, but what about writing about sex? It’s hard to write a good and convincing sexual scene in fiction. What are the elements of good sex writing?

STEVE: I have ten kind-of rules, which are very intuitive. The reason that I write sex scenes is that they’re just very emotional. There’s so much emotion there.

BETSY: Maybe that’s why I avoid them.

STEVE: I’m interested in the emotional mechanics of those moments because all this stuff is going on all at once and good sex writing is honoring that. I just read A Sporting Pastime by James Stevelzer, and it’s startling, astonishing really, because 140 pages of the central plot, sixty percent of it, is just an American expatriate and his love affair—a very graphic, sexual, romantic love affair—with a French shop girl. And you think, Well, gosh, how is this going to be sustained? But the thing is, it’s all so exquisitely emotional. That is how these characters interact. That is when things become intimate between them. The writer is expressing how they’re going at one another physically because their bodies are saying things.

BETSY: That’s true, and I think that’s a really good way to describe it. Where I run into trouble is getting really tripped up on the available language when trying to describe what’s going on between two people in a physical sense.

STEVE: I say never use “penis,” never use “vagina,” and you don’t even need to usually mention the genitals. The reason the language sucks is because our culture is so neurotic and it’s the most interesting thing in the world. I mean we’re just an orgy of violence, and there’s no problem talking about or expressing violent ideation and that’s what we do, we’re number one. But the available language to write about sex is so inelegant.

BETSY: Yes, inelegant is a good word.

STEVE: It’s sad, because even the Bible, which is mostly violence, also has the Song of Songs, or it’s sometimes called the Song of Solomon, and that’s just unbelievably gorgeous. Vivid. That’s what people should read if they want to read good sex writing. It’s not long; just eight short, basically erotic love poems. And they didn’t have all of the crap that we have now, screens and phones, and so everything is incredibly sensual—metaphors and images—or animal.

MP: Steve, a lot of people pick up on your explicitness and just focus on that aspect as opposed to the emotional. I know with Heavy Metal there was a lot of talk about that among critics. Has there been any change in people’s reactions between Heavy Metal and Chow?

STEVE: I think so, but it always shifts. It shifts from, “He’s the sex guy,” to “He’s the pop culture guy.” I don’t think that’s just in terms of me—this is how it works.

BETSY: Yes!

STEVE: This is how the people who don’t have the vocabulary to talk about the emotional aspects of art and the psychological aspects—this is just how they talk about writers. They go, “Oh this was great,” and, “Let’s start with the angsty women.” To me it’s beautiful and miraculous when you find a critic who really loves Art. You know, as opposed to where they’re just angry, angry at artists.

BETSY: Well, I’ve gotten reviews that were not gushingly great that I thought were very fair. You know, and that’s saying a lot, coming from a sensitive artist. I mean they help you identify your aesthetic.

STEVE: Yes.

BETSY: And I think that’s rare.

MP: Did that play at all into your selections for the second book? In response to those comments. For example, I’m sure people are going to react to “Skull.”

STEVE: I very intentionally wanted B.B. Chow to be the title of the book, because I thought it was a strong story and it was a female narrator. I chose the first four stories very carefully and their order. I tried to do the same thing with Heavy Metal. The second story in Heavy Metal is about a widower who can’t connect to his family. It doesn’t have a whit of sex in it, but you can absolutely count on people not to get that. They need their tag. And part of it is cued by the publishers. Most of the stories in the collection are not young, urban, smarty-pants-fucking-up kind of stories. But that’s how it’s going to get played in certain venues and whatever. This is why I travel around, to try and get a chance to get the book into peoples’ hands, because then you stand a shot that they’ll read it and go, “Wow.” They’re after something deeper than the label.

TS: How does the criticism that you receive play into your criticism of books that you’re asked to blurb?

BETSY: I don’t do that much reviewing at this point. I find it too painful. [laughing] Before, I wrote very short little reviews for book magazines. It was painful. They weren’t usually great, the books that they would send me. And I just found it sort of difficult to ever say anything bad.

STEVE: Yes. I think about it a lot, because I wrote a piece about how much it sucks to get bad, dismissive reviews that are just wrong. And I generally feel like your role as a writer in the world is to not be an asshole in terms of other writers.

BETSY: Right.

STEVE: You know there are all these bad books, but your job is to be the best that you can be. You have those feelings, everybody has them, but when you release them into a public venue, when you fuckin’— as Bear Bryant used to say when somebody would score a touchdown, he’d say, “Act like you’ve been there before. Show a little class.” So be positive about the books that you love and never become a sniping, fucked up cynic. But when I review a book and I dislike it, I feel an extra burden to identify why, to put enough of the person’s prose out there that the reader can decide on his or her own. Because I know how much it sucks when I just get a short, snarky, dismissive review. What really kills me is when a reviewer’s picked on the work, rather than just reflecting the sensibility of the reviewer. When somebody goes, “Well this just isn’t my kind of book.”

BETSY: That’s part of the reason why I don’t really want to do it. Or that I’m not that interested in doing it, because I have such a particular—sometimes I think it’s narrow, even if it’s probably not as narrow as I think it is—but I have such particular tastes that I don’t want to impose that on a book review.

TS: Is that a positive aspect of having your own blog, then, because you can talk about books without—?

BETSY: I can just talk about books that I like.

TS: Has that changed your writing routine because, in addition to journaling and short story writing, you now blog?

BETSY: It’s taking away from my journaling, if anything. Not from the fiction so much. But I notice I’m not writing as often.

STEVE: Do you write every day?

BETSY: On my blog? I don’t force myself to, but I tend to have something to say about something. It’s really not particularly literary at all.

STEVE: You talk about recent books?

BETSY: I talk about whatever I watched on TV the night before.

MP: What about your process, Steve? You have your e-zine.

STEVE: Right, the Tip. I send it to my dozen friends, and I realized at a certain point, well, you know it’s once every six months. It’s not going to burden anybody. It’s not going to be like spam, but I might as well recommend things.

BETSY: I’m on the list. I always enjoy it.

STEVE: Good. Those albums are fabulous. I make people’s lives happier.

BETSY: I firmly believe that you should recommend the art that you really like. Books, whatever. Yes, books, records. Occasionally. I’m not a big record buyer.

TS: You guys ever think about having a soundtrack to your stories?

BETSY: I haven’t.

TS: If you did, what do you think you would use?

STEVE: I fantasize a lot and that’s scary for me because I have just so much. Now I’ve got the Apple thing, so I have five thousand songs that are there.

BETSY: Can you write with music on?

STEVE: Yes. Music is always on.

BETSY: Fascinating! That’s fascinating to me.

STEVE: On the way up, I was listening to this live show by a guy I like a lot, and he just kicked this song’s ass so hard. It’s called “Ass Rockin’ Beats.” It’s by a guy who makes the Red Hot Chili Peppers look like a little fleck of paprika. I wish I could just blare this in the red states and just force them to listen. Try to shake their ass up. Try to get them to recognize that this exists in the world. So I do think about the natural relationship between different kinds of art. Art as a larger mechanism for awakening people’s senses of themselves and the best parts of their personality. The adult parts of their personality. Not being so inhibited that you can’t dance in public. That’s why I always, not always, but frequently do readings in bars and, if I can set it up, with a band that I like. You know, hip music. Or a deejay. Not a lot, but sometimes.

BETSY: One of my students recently was laughing because, for some reason it came up, we were talking about listening to music. It seemed surprising to her that listening to music was an activity in and of itself. She was like, “Oh. That’s so 70s.”

STEVE: Right.

BETSY: And that is the way that I grew up, listening. But still I can’t listen and write, particularly if it’s a record I really like. I cannot concentrate on anything else because it seems like a really active thing to me. It’s not just background.

STEVE: That is true. It does. And if I were more together I wouldn’t listen to it at all when I write. Because when I do, it does take away some of my concentration. But now, what I’m surprised about with my students is that they have so many different narratives going on at the same time. They’re these little screen addicts. They’ve got their IMs, their email, and their cell phone and text messaging.

BETSY: These are undergraduates?

STEVE: Yes. And their lives are segmented into these tiny slices—their intellectual metabolisms are watching the corner of a TV screen and it’s just five-second cuts. Or less than that.

BETSY: But they absorb it and they process it.

STEVE: Yes, but I think differently. You just dually process it and people are not perceiving the world. They’re getting addicted to these various screens. And I see it in myself, because my computer is TV.

BETSY: I’m getting there.

MP: Talking about your students, have their questions or issues they’ve brought up in class helped shape or change your perspective on writing?

BETSY: Oh, absolutely. I sometimes feel like an idiot in class quite frankly because my students have contributed so much to the discussions. And, you know, come up with insights that I don’t.

STEVE: I teach for a couple of reasons. Mostly because I enjoy it a lot and I find it very inspiring.

BETSY: It’s incredibly inspiring!

STEVE: I think it’s beautiful that people that young are that serious about writing and the difficulty of it. At age twenty-one that just wasn’t where I was at. That kind of exposure was way out of my league. But also because it reminds you why you do it and you get good ideas. And the workshop setting, if it’s a good workshop, isn’t the transmission of wisdom from the teacher to the student. You know more, but you don’t know everything. It’s also interesting to see unsuccessful stories and why they’re unsuccessful. That’s how you learn. You’re inspired by reading successful literature, but you actually learn by reading other peoples’ mistakes. I find that, while teaching, the part of my brain/heart/spirit which generates stories is activated in probably twenty different ways.

BETSY: I had an especially talented class last time. But also, in rereading some of my favorite things to prepare for the class I’ve been inspired, re-inspired, by the things I love. Because you find new things. But also I just get so jazzed about the process of teaching. In general, to see the progress and excitement that students have.

STEVE: There are very few people who will listen to us otherwise. It makes us feel masterful. Largely, if you’re writing well—not like your stuff is great or commercially successful—but if you’re really writing seriously, you’re in a state of constant doubt, and you’re overmatched by it. You know it feels very gratifying to be in a setting where you can really immediately identify concrete mistakes in people’s work and remind them and yourself over and over that when you get to this point in the story, you don’t bail. This is a necessary word for this reason, because it’s doing this to the reader. But more than one person will listen—you have a captive audience—and it sounds silly, like we shouldn’t say it, but part of the motivation is to get your word out.

BETSY: Right.

STEVE: And I’m also getting my aesthetic out, what I want literature to be.

BETSY: Definitely, that’s fun.

MP: Steve, you have a more activist theory of teaching, seeing yourself as a gatekeeper. You’ve talked about how if somebody is not ready to write or not serious about writing, you’ll ride them much more than others.

STEVE: I just get them out. I don’t want them to slow us down.

BETSY: Wow! That’s great. Of course, I’m so new at it that I’m still finding my way in a lot of respects.

STEVE: I like to say in the first class, “I don’t believe in grade inflation. It’s condescending to you. It’s not in your best interest. And I just don’t believe in it. And if you think this is a gut class, it’s not. And unless you do really excellent work, you’re not going to get an A. If you do average work, you’re going to get a C. And furthermore, those grades are not just going to reflect how you did academically, they’re going to reflect what I think of you. They’re my way of telling you whether I like you or not. And you’ll know, long before you get that grade, if you’re doing bad work, if you’re doing lazy work, if you’re being an asshole in class and not listening. If you’re not on the bus, if you’re not really trying, you’ll know I dislike you. Because I’ll make it patently clear to you and it’s really going to hurt your feelings, so get out.”

BETSY: I’m going to have to get a little tougher. It’s a bit different at Northwestern. Along those lines, my friend teaches at several of the writing programs here and she’s told me that she does that in the first class as well. She says, “If you do everything on the syllabus, you get a C. Beyond that, you have to push yourself.” A lot of the same kind of stuff. One of the things about Northwestern’s Graduate Writing Program is that they’re adults of all ages, so they want to be there. And also, even if they’re beginning writers, they’re bringing something to the table. They’re bringing life experience with them. Even if they’re not writing about that particularly, they’re bringing some perspective. I think it’s a bit different than undergraduate or even just straight, regular graduate school.

TS: Is it strange for you when people talk about how much your writing’s influenced them?

STEVE: Could there be a higher form of flattery? It’s amazing. It hasn’t happened a lot, but there have been times. Especially Heavy Metal, which seems to hit certain people a certain way. It’s very intense, and I think it mirrors a lot of the feeling states that a lot of post-adolescents have and their struggles to confess the really dirty, dark stuff. A couple of times, people who have dog-eared copies of Heavy Metal have said, “This is why I write,” or, “This helped me write something,” or, “This helped me write when I was blocked.” That’s the kind of good feeling you really have to fight against. Your struggle with happiness is at its height when people say things like that. You immediately have to go, They probably don’t mean it. And, They’re probably retarded.

BETSY: Right. It just seems—it’s almost surreal.

MP: Women must say that with When The Messenger Is Hot.

BETSY: They do. And I hear from friends that I’m being taught now. That I’ve been taught. It’s strange to be taught. These are people at other schools like Yale and Princeton. But I also have friends who teach here at Columbia College and at UIC and I’ve visited their classes, or my friend will tell me how much of an influence I have been on these people. It’s pretty awesome and it makes me incredibly proud.

STEVE: Those are the times you have to be really careful. Because they have so much expectation about who you are.

BETSY: And that’s the part I really don’t get.

STEVE: That stuff’s tough. That transference, when they ascribe to you the wisdom and marvelous eloquence that you can have in a story because it’s crafted. They think you’re just going to come right out with it. So that pressure is weird. And the emotional feeling of, You understand me. Like Single White Female.

BETSY: Yes.

STEVE: That is strange, but it’s exactly the reason I think that you have to be so careful in not letting others glom onto you in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable. But to recognize that they really want to connect to you, and they’re really going to take seriously the way you conduct yourself. And if you’re one of those authors who bitches at other authors and complains or carps, you’re really going to hurt them because they’re so vulnerable to how connected they are.

BETSY: I agree. And I feel so grateful just to be in the position that I’m in, and I have actually had bad experiences with authors as a fan. And I’ve seen writers, whose work I’m really impressed with, who will sit for however long the line is—for three hours—to sign books. And if that should ever be my fortune in this life, that’s who I want to be. I care about what people think of me.

STEVE: Everybody does.

BETSY: But I admire you because you’re much more willing to put your strong opinions out there. Whereas, I probably have some of the same ones, but…

STEVE: That’s part of my effort to be—

BETSY: Who you are.

STEVE: No, liked. In a basic way, that’s just my trying to set down what needs to be said about literature. Because in its best incarnation, it preoccupies me—because I want the community of literature to be better. To be more compassionate. To be more vital. To get out into the world and start turning it around, because this species is just zooming towards extinction. And suicide. Or, actually, a lot of homicides, given the amount of guns we have. And so, we’re supposed to be humanizing. That’s sort of our job, our calling. But to me that noble motive is always partly narcissistic. The impulse that I want to have my say.

BETSY: Well it took me a long time to put any opinion I have about anything out there into the world. As a kid I just agreed with anything anybody said. I’ve gotten over that, thank goodness, and realized that I have quite a few opinions.