Recent Chapters: An Interview with Anne Rasmussen by Ella Schweizer

Split Lip Magazine’s co-fiction editor, Anne Rasmussen, has been a writer off and on since she was nine years old. After majoring in theater in college—which culminated in a thesis play about her complex relationship with her mom, which her mother insisted on attending—Anne spent her twenties working with her hands, making costumes for regional theater and opera, including giant puppets for a Superbowl halftime show and colorful fur suits for Sesame Street Live. Eventually, she moved to New York for graduate school. In addition to writing and other creative endeavors, Anne’s current day job involves helping people in her Portland, Oregon, community access Medicaid and SNAP benefits.

In reading Anne’s published work, including “Cyber Monday,” which appeared in Split Lip in 2016, I gained a sense of who she is as a writer. Everything she writes is emotionally raw, expertly crafted, with a truly distinct narrative voice. However, as someone who aspires to enter the field of editing myself, I was most interested in the work she currently does. Thank you, Anne, for taking the time to let us into the life of a writer/fiction editor, and for sharing your personal journey with writing!

Ella Schweizer: How long have you been at Split Lip, and what roles have you taken on throughout your time here?

Anne Rasmussen: I was approached in late 2020 by then-Fiction Editor Michele Johnson about reading for the SL fiction team. As someone who had published my first story with Split Lip, I knew what a supportive community the magazine had built, and in the midst of that first year of Covid, I was particularly eager for this kind of connection. 

The vibe in the Split Lip queue is very open and conversational at all levels, and SL editors are willing to take a chance on a piece that stands out to the team but may require some developmental or structural work to reach publication. When Janelle and Anna stepped up as co-Fiction Editors in 2022, I transitioned into an Assistant Fiction Editor role, which allowed me to work more closely with the writers we publish.

I’m excited about the new opportunity to serve as co-Fiction Editor with Anna, although I’m sad to see Janelle go—her writing and perspective are truly singular, and we’ve been lucky to have her leadership and voice in the queue.

ES: What made you want to work for a literary magazine? 

AR: Initially, I was just looking for literary peers. I was several years out of grad school and had just started submitting and publishing my own work. I had a small writing group going with a couple of grad school friends, but my actual job was unconnected to writing. My day-to-day life felt very disconnected from the creative process, even as I was trying to write. I was writing these very personal pieces and sending them off to be rejected or published, but with little interaction either way. I started reading fiction for Kim Magowan at Pithead Chapel in 2019, and joined the Split Lip fiction team about a year later. It was great to just nerd out with fellow readers about what was working and what wasn’t in these stories. 

ES: What advice might you have for someone looking to get involved at a literary magazine or to begin a career in editing?

AR: I’ve never sought a career in editing, so I can’t speak to that. However, for writers who want to understand more about the sausage-making of the submission or publication cycle, volunteering to read for literary journals is invaluable. If you’re reading in the same genre you write, it allows you to get to know the range and quality of work, as well as themes and techniques that are oversaturated. 

Each journal has its own culture and approach in the queue. I love that Split Lip has a dedicated team and queue for mid-length short fiction, separate from its flash fiction offerings.

ES: What excites you when reading a story?

AR: I like to be surprised and delighted, whether by a novel use of form, specificity of detail, or a sense of movement in a story. I love writing that expands my own understanding of the possibilities of storytelling.

ES: What makes a piece in the submission queue stand out to you? 

AR: A clear sense of humor, purpose, and play can elevate a story, especially one dealing with heavier themes. This includes playing with form. But a nontraditional form, to me, needs to feel necessary to the story to work. I love Carly Alaimo’s use of a literal intake form in “Describe Your Most Recent Episode, ctd.” (October 2023). Her narrator’s responses spill beyond the allotted space and into the margins, occupying the spaces intended for other questions. This pushes the story’s chronology out of sequence for the reader, who has to piece the story and characters into context as they go. It challenges the reader in a way that would be risky if the story itself weren’t so compelling. 

In Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi’s “Mrs. Tsubaki”  (May 2024), the deceptively simple premise of a second-grade teacher audibly farting in class moves unexpectedly from a memorable “teaching moment” to an expansive flash forward that tracks the title character and her impact on this class of students far into the future as they grow up, marry, have children, and die. 

ES: How has reading and editing submissions impacted how you approach writing?

AR: Being a reader in the queue has been eye-opening for me as a writer: the sheer volume of submissions, good or not-as-strong, can be overwhelming. And I’m such a process geek that even when a story isn’t working, I feel like I can learn something from the choices the writer has made. A rejection, as it turns out, isn’t necessarily an indictment of the work—it may simply be a matter of fit, or personal preference, or the fact that we’ve recently published a really similar story.

It’s a special privilege to look at someone else’s writing with an eye to amplifying their unique voice. Are they succeeding in telling the story they want to tell? So many themes that are deeply personal to the writer are so commonly seen in the queue that it takes a great deal for them to stand out. For example, I recently lost my father to dementia, and that’s something I want and need to explore in my current work. But I see submissions on this subject matter so frequently that the bar is quite high—it forces me to think about how to approach it in a way that will stand out in a queue and bring a fresh perspective to the experience, for me and other readers.

ES: You were not only a reader though, you published your story “Cyber Monday” with Split Lip almost ten years ago now! 

AR: Funny story, “Cyber Monday” was my first published story, and it came out exactly a week after the 2016 election, so it almost immediately felt irrelevant in the face of an entire country trying to wrap its head around a Trump administration and what that might mean for the country. It felt like a weird time for me to promote this odd little break-up story. I had imagined that having a story published would…change things for me? I’m not sure how, but in the midst of the external silence that followed, I had to develop the internal confidence to start submitting more.

ES: “Cyber Monday” has some very unique formatting! What inspired you to use these products as a method of storytelling?

AR: “Cyber Monday” was incredibly fun to write! For those who haven’t read it, it takes the form of a wedding registry that the main character stumbles across while stalking an ex online. I’d noticed how the word “fulfilled” appears every time an item is purchased—I imagined an ex-girlfriend seeing that word over and over as she scrolled, and the story sort of grew from there. What better way to interrogate one’s failures than through aspirational ad copy? 

Each lofty product description (quoted directly from the Crate & Barrel website) was its own little writing prompt. What memory of the bitter end of a relationship might be triggered by each object (a teapot, a serving spoon)? The registry is a sort of shorthand for domestic bliss, each purchase signalling community support of the couple’s success. And the main character feels compelled to push back against this perfect facade, aiming her unresolved rage at every cup, knife, and bowl.

ES: How do you think your work has evolved since then?

AR: I tend to write stories and essays that convey a sense of personal vulnerability, and finding a form to play with or push against is not only fun, but it also helps provide a measure of distance and structure. Many of my stories or essays are in conversation with something else—an object, an image, or a text—which allows me to look sidelong at the difficult, scary, or sad thing on my mind on any given day. 

“Apology” (Jellyfish Review) revisits the trauma of the Challenger explosion through the incredibly insensitive schoolyard jokes that developed in its wake. “The Scientific Method”(Sundog Lit) examines ambivalence about motherhood through a famous attachment theory study, which utilized baby monkeys and mechanical mothers constructed from wire and cloth. There is so much weirdness in the world that I couldn’t possibly make up, and so my fiction and nonfiction play with these elements. A story I wrote about the beginning signs of my Dad’s dementia, “Instructions for Losing Your Mind” (Cosmonauts Avenue, RIP), is written from three perspectives: the daughter, the mother, and the father. Although much of this might be characterized as memoir or autofiction, the fictional element for me lies in imagining this through my parents’ eyes and trying to capture their voices and internal thoughts.

ES: I noticed in your author bio that you have taught writing in a jail. Has that experience affected how you approach your other work? 

AR: I’m trying to think of a way to put this that doesn’t sound trite, but teaching in a jail setting gave me a new appreciation for all kinds of basic freedoms I’d taken for granted: the freedom to go outside, to decide what to eat, what color to wear. To use an everyday object without scrutiny. A ballpoint pen was contraband, and as instructors we had to account for (and carry out) every pen we brought in for class. One student missed class because she was on punishment for having a Scotch tape dispenser. To cut costs, the women’s unit had recently been moved from a separate building to a single floor of the larger men’s facility. Because they would have had to walk past a men’s unit to go outdoors, they no longer went outdoors. They were understandably wary of a group of graduate and college students from some fancy school showing up to teach them poetry, of all things. Were we there to gawk at them? Were we going to write about them or steal their words? It was a balancing act, gaining the trust of our students who were funny, curious, playful, and surprisingly open once we started coming every week. We had to make our curriculum flexible enough to accommodate a broad range of literacy skills, from barely sounding out words to college-educated. 

ES: What were your biggest takeaways from teaching in such an unconventional learning environment?

AR: What’s really stuck with me since is how inaccessible writing is for so many, many people. It’s easy to use an idea like proper grammar to shut down someone with a lot to say, but it’s much harder to get them to trust writing again. My students in the jail had so much to say, and I tried to encourage them to get the words down in whatever way they came, without getting stuck on whether the writing was “correct.” The poems and blues riffs and stories they wrote were so alive, bright, and defiant and full of personality. The saddest part of that experience was seeing some students who had been released from jail return to that class within the following year. A lot of women were in for drug offenses, and even those who got clean in jail worried about returning to a partner or situation that might perpetuate the cycle that had landed them there to start with. They were often quite clear-eyed about it.

ES: Wow, it is so incredible that you were able to motivate these writers. Are you personally working on any new pieces that we can look forward to?

AR: Since 2020, between Covid, caring for elderly parents, and processing a changing relationship with my Dad through a decade of Alzheimer’s and his recent death, there are a lot of things I’d love to explore through writing that still feel too close for me to tackle head-on. I’m still searching for the right angle and frame to write about my Dad’s last ten years with Alzheimer’s. He was the person who really taught me to enjoy words and wordplay, who shaped so much of my sense of humor. It was surreal to watch his memory and command of language stripped away piece by piece over a decade. 

Because much of his personality remained intact and he was still quite verbal to the end, I had to keep inventing and reinventing ways to connect with him that didn’t rely on him knowing exactly who I was or validating some childhood memory of mine. It was heartbreaking but also fascinating. I felt like I was playing an endless game of improv, which got me thinking about language, repetition, rehearsal, and performance. 

When Dad was in hospice, he’d ask me things like “Did you bring a horse?” and “Do you fight with your glasses on?” and he really wanted to know! In some respects, it could be kind of fun to just roll with whatever reality presented itself on any given day. I’m sure thinking about losing my Dad as a future writing project was a way to compartmentalize the pain, but it was also a way to keep myself engaged with a goal that I think he would have appreciated. 

For now, I’m turning these moments over in my head and thinking about what form might suit them. Reading and editing for SL has been a great way to stay in conversation with writing until I’m ready to get back in the ring. With a bit more time, I hope to have the distance and perspective I’ll need to get something on the page. Stay tuned!

To learn more, check out Anne Rasmussen’s website, whatll-i-do.com, and find her on Bluesky at @what’ll-i-do. 

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Ella Schweizer is currently completing a bachelor’s degree in English & Economics from Pitzer College. Beyond interning at Split Lip, she is working on a book to celebrate the history of sailing on Nantucket. Ella enjoys travel, fashion history, and of course, sitting down with a good book!