Finding a Place to Think Deeply: A Conversation with Megan Giddings
Frequent readers of Split Lip Magazine are likely already fans of Megan Giddings, whose 2018 flash fiction contribution, “A Husband Should Be Eaten and Not Heard,” earned the distinction of being included in the 2018 Best of the Net anthology. It wasn’t her first story to receive that honor. Giddings also had fiction included in the 2014 Best of the Net anthology and went on to judge the 2019 issue.
Having loved Giddings’ work since I first began reading her stories in 2016, I was ecstatic to meet her last year at AWP in Portland. Encountering Megan IRL was all sorts of delightful. As editor of the anthology Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, a collection devoted to amplifying the work of writers of color, she held an event at a coffeehouse where, one reader after the next, alchemy abounded.
What’s a virtuosic short fiction writer and editor to do next? Why, publish a novel, of course. This spring, her much anticipated debut, Lakewood, is out from Amistad/HarperCollins. It’s been called, “profoundly poetic and utterly compelling,” “eerie,” and “thought-provoking,” while being compared to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Peele’s Get Out.
Megan was kind enough to correspond with me this winter about the novel and her life as a writer.
Ruth LeFaive: One of the things that strikes me about Lakewood is the pervading sense of instability and mistrust that intensifies with each chapter. Even during the protagonist’s time off around town, the strangers in her proximity all end up seeming dishonest and dangerous. It’s a feat of world-building the way you’ve infused every page with tension. How did you go about modulating this atmosphere?
Megan Giddings: One thing that my MFA thesis director, Liz Eslami, taught me to do when revising a larger project is to try to be objective about what each page is doing. I identified different levels of tensions and tried to make sure that in different chapters or different moments, I wasn’t hitting the same note.
It was important to me while writing and revising and revising and revising Lakewood to establish several types of tension. There’s a kind of—I hate this word but I can't think of a better one—universal tension a lot of women experience in the US: the tension of going into public and how many public spaces aren't designed for women — for our safety, convenience, and health among other things. I’m reading a book now, Feminist City by Leslie Kern (out in June in the US from Verso) that I wish I had gotten to read while writing Lakewood. There's also the tension that many people of color, especially in the arts, especially in the Midwest, experience: everyone here is white but me. Which of these people is going to go out of their way to make sure I feel extra not-welcome? And then there's the tension from the plot, from the character having to lie, from the health and psychological tolls. It was not often fun to be in the world of Lakewood.
RL: The book is mostly written from a third-person point of view, fairly close with the protagonist, Lena, but in the final quarter shifts to an epistolary form, told in the form of letters Lena writes to her best friend Tanya. What considerations went into this decision?
MG: The more revisions I did, the more it felt important on a plot, character, and thematic level that this character get to have the last word. I knew it was impossible for me (because of who I am at this point in time) to be deeply optimistic or tie things in a nice bow. I understand that fiction is not real, that fiction is a form where you can imagine a wonderful new world where everything makes sense and all the questions you had—well, let me, the wise and gracious author, answer them in the last four chapters. I think living in a world where everything is immensely knowable would be deeply terrible. I think reading a book where all the questions get answered negates what fiction is about to me: finding a place to think deeply and ask questions.
RL: That reminds me of your story, “The Alive Sister,” which originally appeared in The Offing. It’s such an outstanding and stunning story, and in it, the narrator explicitly grapples with this notion: “Maybe in fiction I’ll find a way to let her have the answer. But I know that’s impossible because if it was possible, I wouldn’t be writing this story.”
What are some of the questions you’re interested in with your current works-in-progress? Have you seen the questions you bring to the page changing over time?
MG: Excuse me for using the phrase “my process” but almost everything I write starts with a simple question: why are you still thinking about this? Here’s an example. I was out at dinner months ago and I was seated next to an older man and a teenaged boy. Throughout the dinner, I couldn’t stop listening because it became clear that this was a dinner between a soon-to-be-former stepdad and his, I guess, ex-son. And the stepdad was getting raw, talking about why the relationship fell apart in his perspective, what it means to be a good husband, how he has issues to work on. I don’t know these people, and I probably wouldn’t recognize them if I saw them again, but I started asking myself: what does it take to be this vulnerable with someone else? All of what the older man said felt raw and very honest, but what does it mean for this much younger person to have to think about his parents not as parents, but as adults? Who is this speech truly for? I’m working on a project right now where the main character—because of a lot of life things—is trying to figure out how to become a person who is vulnerable and open with other people. How do you become a person who listens to what she actually wants in the long term?
RL: I recently listened to an episode of “Your New Best Friends,” the podcast you created a few years ago, which is sadly no longer in production. You said that writing “feels like something stabilizing. It brings me a lot of pleasure to not be in the world as it is.” Much of your flash fiction plays with strange or magical imaginative situations. You’ve even written a textbook chapter on “how to create the strange in flash fiction.” There are scenes in Lakewood that portray hallucinatory, reality-bending circumstances while simultaneously exuding narrative control. How do you exercise such inventiveness without letting it get in the way of telling the story?
MG: In some ways, it was much easier with Lakewood to do this because between my agents and my editors, there was essentially a team of people who were taking the time to say: wait, what's happening; or you're focusing more on image than character; or I stopped reading here. For a novel like Lakewood, I think all of us agreed that it had to have that eating-chips reading experience. It’s structured in a way that even though things are disturbing or gross or tense or hallucinatory, you hopefully keep reading.
When it’s a short story, and it’s me by myself, well, that’s harder. My impulse is to, when in doubt, think about the character or think about the emotions at the heart of the story. It is really fun to show off when you’re writing. Look at my sumptuous image. Oh ho, lyricism! But most readers get pretty impatient. Give me something beautiful, but also give me something that I want to talk to my friends about.
RL: You’re currently the Fiction co-Editor at The Offing and a Features Editor at The Rumpus. In the past, you’ve served as a contributing editor at Boulevard, and the Executive Editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, a post that involved regularly publishing interviews with writers. Last year, you edited the gorgeous anthology Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction. You’ve judged several contests. Meanwhile, since 2012, in addition to finishing Lakewood, you’ve published two chapbooks and roughly fifty short stories—many of which have won awards. According to your Instagram feed, you also bake and refinish antiques. Can you offer some tips for time management? Seriously, what are your workdays like?
MG: Well, some grains of salt: I did a lot of these things or began them while I was an MFA student. I was lucky enough to have a very generous funding package where I only had to teach in the first and third years. And in those years, I was only teaching small creative writing classes, no comp. I also have insomnia and will sometimes use that wide-awake can’t-sleep feeling to write, or read, or work on projects. I do not do excellent work during these insomnia periods—well, I have baked some fucking bomb cookies at two in the morning—but they are things I can do and then quickly fix when I’m more alive and have slept.
I also write quickly, with a lot of confidence, and I don’t hold a standard forty-hour/week job. Since graduating, I've worked a thirty-hour/week social media job, freelanced, adjuncted, test graded and been a research study subject on top of writing. I’m also lucky enough that I’m married to someone who values my writing and career. He makes dinner a lot, and we schedule times to clean the house together. I don’t have kids. There will probably be at least a month this summer where I’ll have the freedom to live off my very small savings and focus mostly on writing. I’m also lucky enough to be married to someone who does have a stable 9-5 job that has excellent insurance. I couldn’t afford to do any of this if I didn’t have that financial safety net and didn’t still live in fairly inexpensive Indiana.
Another big gift I have is things don’t have to be the perfect conditions for me to do stuff. I write whenever I get a chance. Right now, I’m writing this between student conferences. I’ll probably answer other parts of your questions late at night or in the lobby of my optometrist’s office. I wrote Lakewood in cars, on park benches, between student meetings, in bed, at a desk, in coffee shops, at a Fresh Thyme market bar.
I am also really fucking burnt out.
RL: That’s understandable. How do you go about restoring your energy?
MG: Some of the things you mentioned are my attempts to restore energy. I’m not a machine who can write every day. But I do feel very down if I’m not being regularly creative. So, I do things like learning how to restore furniture because it’s creative and I fail at it. I run or take long walks because I need to make my brain feel better and disgustingly, yes, exercise does help. And I fail at exercise. I fail at baking. I fail at drawing. I fail at writing.
Once I move past the initial disappointment of failing at something, it gives me the opportunity to try and learn and change. I don’t want to write the same story twenty times. I don’t want to write everything in the same style. I feel like if I sulk in my hurt feelings or with being afraid of rejection, I’ll stagnate.
But back to restoring my energy: video games, liquor. I’ll probably go back to therapy some time this year. Reading YA novels. Gardening.
RL: This winter, Stylist acknowledged your work as being among the “Unmissable super short stories by brilliant women.” I particularly love how your flash fiction experiments with form, and invariably delivers prose that shines in freshness or emotional resonance or both. Can you share any lines you’ve written that felt satisfying?
MG: Honestly, one of the annoying things about my brain is I rarely can remember things I’ve written. I have to almost completely empty out to work on new things. This question forced me to do a deep dive on myself that was a mixture of fun, embarrassing, and gross.
“A person, best described as a disheveled Santa Claus, was seen driving around and throwing candy at local children.” — from “Vacations.” I almost laughed again at this one.
This is cheating a little but now, if I revised this story, it would be one line with a semi-colon: “This is the final battle, the older girl yells, and sees a golden unicorn. Its wings thrill her.” — from “The Alive Sister.” It hurts my feelings a little because this character will be dead soon.
RL: It does hurt. A standout line for me in that story immediately precedes the one you chose: “The vanquished one will bring the victor candy cake and a golden crown that has you are the best engraved upon it.” The joy is palpable, however fleeting. So good! Any others?
MG: “You’re safe now, said the plates, the walls, the glasses, even the golden chandelier that I hadn’t noticed before.” — from “Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me.” I guess I like the word “gold” more than I realized.
“The rain is being a real Steve today.” — from “Desert Island Dirt.” This line should not make sense out of context but somehow, I feel like it deeply makes sense.
RL: Absolutely! And it’s hilarious.
MG: My friend Paul Asta and I say things like, ugh this situation is such a fucking Kyle. We talk a lot about how some names have big connotations though. Also, no offense Steves and Kyles. My name is Megan; I know shit can be talked.
Megan Giddings (@megiddings) is the fiction editor at The Offing and a features editor at The Rumpus. In 2018, she was a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial fund grant for feminist fiction. Her stories are forthcoming or have recently been published in Story Magazine, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. Her debut novel, Lakewood, is out now from Amistad/HarperCollins. More about her can be found at megangiddings.com.
Ruth LeFaive (@ruthlefaive) lives in Los Angeles where she is working on a collection of short stories. Her flash fiction has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2018, Little Fiction, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Her interviews have appeared in The Rumpus and Longreads. Find her online at ruthlefaive.com.