Luke Rolfes: Fiction writer Dinah Cox is out with her third collection of stories entitled THE PAPER ANNIVERSARY from Elixir Press. These Oklahoma-based stories of varying length run the gamut between biting satire to gut-punch tragedy. Thanks for talking with us today, Dinah, and congratulations on your new book!
Dinah Cox: Thanks very much, Luke—it’s my pleasure.
LR: Let’s start at the beginning. Can you discuss the origins of THE PAPER ANNIVERSARY? How did this project come to be and how long has it been in the works?
DC: The Paper Anniversary appeared in January from Elixir, but its origins, as you might imagine, date back much further. I’ve lost track of how old—or how new—many of the stories are, but let’s just say I’m a working writer who has been working for many years. For a long time, I’ve been interested in documents that appear on paper—and not necessarily on screens or in digital form—as artifacts of shared experience. I like paper. I like holding it, writing on it, stacking it in piles. I still insist my students turn in assigned work on paper. “On paper-?” they sometimes ask. “As in, printed on paper-?” YES. Recently I had a student who had never heard the term “xerox copy.” There’s no reason for me to lament the loss of cultural knowledge here—brand names of the twentieth century are not especially important to me—but I also had a student who did not know how to address a postcard. I like paper; that’s why I wanted to write about it.
LR: Your story collection is a combination of flash fiction and more traditional-length short fiction. I’m curious about how your writing process changes when you move between each form. Do you have a sense of the length of a piece when you start out writing, or is it something that happens organically?
DC: Every once in a while, I’ll run into a call for submissions, something like, “for the first Wednesday of every leap year, we’re accepting only 500-word stories about buffalo.” On those occasions, I sometimes think to myself something like, hmmm, I have not yet written any 500-word stories about buffalo, but perhaps I shall write one RIGHT NOW. Then, I sit down to write a 500-word story about buffalo—just in time to submit on the first Wednesday of the next leap year—only to discover that my attempted 500 words won’t stand alone and the buffalo part is perhaps unearned or stupid. That’s my long way of saying that—like many writers—I like to allow things to work out—or not—organically. Often, I’ll have in mind to write something very short only to have it turn out much longer. Rarely does it happen the other way around.
LR: All these stories are set in Oklahoma—your home state. What about this state inclines you to use it as the backdrop for all these narratives? And to follow that up, what sort of limitations or cultural idiosyncrasies does a setting like Oklahoma provide?
DC: Oklahoma is a very troubled place. And I say that with the full knowledge that saying so in public has at least some potential to cause me, personally, additional trouble of one kind or another. Anyone who doesn’t know what goes on here should learn about the villainy of State Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters. There are many others like him, but he gets the most press. (That’s by design—his). But in addition to all the trouble—the creep toward theocracy—there are many, many of us working every day to unleash the artistic potential in our students, to create a culture of inclusion, to undermine white supremacy, male power, homophobia and transphobia, and all the forces that very rapidly throughout the course of my lifetime have become more and more influential when it comes to controlling the official levers of power. Writing so much about Oklahoma was not really a choice I made consciously. I write about what’s on my mind; the trouble in Oklahoma is often on my mind.
LR: You write satire so well—an extraordinarily difficult task. A couple of my favorites in here are “Guidelines” and “Lab Report.” Anecdotally, I’ve heard some people describe the times we are living in right now as “difficult to satirize.” Do you think this is true in your experience? Why or why not?
DC: I can see why people say the times we are living in right now are difficult to satirize. Terrifying is perhaps the first word that comes to mind. In November, 2016, on the morning after the ill-fated election, I remember feeling deeply ashamed I’d spent so much time amusing myself by trying to make jokes about Donald Trump. Some of my jokes were funny—and, even at this late date on which we’re still very much on the verge of potential national peril of the most profound variety, I still laugh at some jokes about his utterly ridiculous bombast—but I no longer take pleasure in making these kinds of jokes myself. It’s important for the court jester to try to make the king fall out of his throne, but implicit in such an exchange is that the court jester feels safe enough to perform in the king’s presence in the first place. How to activate the trapdoor? We can laugh after it’s done.
LR: When choosing a subject to satirize, how do you go about it? Is the genesis in anger? A sense of unfairness? Ridiculousness? Absurdity? Is there something that goes off in your brain that says, “This needs to be satire”?
DC: I like the idea that injustice first makes the writer angry, then makes the writer funny, which in turns makes the reader laugh, then perhaps makes the reader understand the injustice in a new light, and then—only in rare cases—walk around in the world seeing—and rectifying—injustice anew. Often, I think about what people spend their time doing. Did someone spend all day making up new rules that no one else will follow? Does someone clean his bathroom sink every single morning after brushing his teeth? Those ordinary, absurd things are funny to me. I like to see them in action.
LR: Many of your characters are “band kids.” (I was a band kid in my day.) One of my favorite stories in here is called “The Moon Landing,” a piece set during the pandemic in which the main character is supposed to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the annual Cheese and Sausage Festival. What do you think differentiates these “band kids” from the rest of their cohort? What sort of payoffs and pitfalls do you encounter when writing young protagonists, such as Violet in “The Moon Landing”?
DC: You’ll have to tell me what instrument you played during your band days. I played the trumpet and the French horn and now play nothing at all. Band kids—or any students pursuing the arts—are smarter than their strictly engineering counterparts; everyone knows this. There’s also a particular kind of adolescent pain that accompanies attending weekly football games when you’re neither a football player nor cheerleader that seems to me especially appealing when it comes to creating characters who deserve our sympathy. Those band kids are my people: they’re making music, and—just as the world needs more writing—it also needs more music, even the rah-rah kind you hear at football games. I think back to my own band days with a great deal of fondness.
LR: I played the trombone—poorly—and now I also play nothing at all. I was never a good musician, but I liked to play. I too look back on those days with fondness! Let me switch gears a little bit. A couple of your stories utilize flash-forwards, which I don’t see all that often. I’m thinking of the pieces “Dress Rehearsal” and “April Fools Day.” Can you talk about the “flash forward” as a craft choice? Why does it appeal to you?
DC: In terms of narrative structure, I sometimes like moving fairly rapidly forward in time because it can be a great pleasure to see the fullness of a single character’s life—readers spend time with a character, for example, during the character’s young adulthood, and then, suddenly, the reader realizes the character did not stay the same age forever. It’s like learning your teachers were once children or learning that your once-young students are doing things like getting real jobs and buying houses and having children or grandchildren. The passage of time means more fears, more regrets, but also more insight.
LR: Another favorite of mine is called “The Shark.” In it, Kate tries to navigate a strange corporate landscape that is obsessed with sports and braggadocio, while at the same time dealing with her dying mother (who also likes those things). Can you talk a bit about this piece. How did you go about balancing the tragic with the comic in this one?
DC: The story you mention here is perhaps the first time I felt like I wrote something that more or less succeeded in both the tragic and the comic modes. This was entirely unconscious. My own mother was a sports fanatic—and I am not—so the contrast there is part of what drove me to include those particular details. Writers I admire often talk about “letting the characters decide” both what happens in a story as well as its potential—or lack of potential—for emotional heft, and certainly I’ve tried to make some version of that a guiding principle in my own work. People—and the characters they become when we fictionalize them—are funny, both consciously and unconsciously, and much of that humor stems from sadness. It’s interesting to think of it as a contrast, but it’s really just ordinary “people-watching” within the confines of the writer’s imagination.
LR: A few grab bag questions: Did you have to make any “tough cuts” or “last minute additions” in the final editing? Was there a piece in here that you really wrestled with? Do you have one that came out easier than the rest?
I did not add or subtract stories from this manuscript between the contest judge—thank you, Anthony Varallo—choosing the collection and its final publication. The manuscript was in progress for many, many months or longer before it won this contest. Over the course of those many months, I added stories—and sometimes eliminated others—any time I received good news about the upcoming publication of individual stories.
LR: What’s next for you and your work?
Thank you for this question, Luke, and thanks, too, for the honor of the interview as a whole. I’m at work on a novel about sad people in Oklahoma, most of them members of the same (sad) family. I’ve written a lot. I can feel it nearing a place where I can at least see the finish line, so here’s hoping eager and generous people will read it at some point in the future.
LR: Thanks again, Dinah, for taking some time with us today. Don't miss THE PAPER ANNIVERSARY from Elixir Press. See below for more info: