Luke Rolfes: It is a treat today to spend some time with prose and poetry writer Sarah Freligh. Freligh’s newest collection of stories—Other Emergencies—is out from Moon City Press. Other Emergencies is a beautifully rendered collection of short fiction, with a few flash/micros mixed in. Thanks for taking some time with us, Sarah. This is a wonderful book!
Sarah Freligh: Luke, thanks so much! I appreciate the chance to talk about fiction of any length and especially about Other Emergencies.
LR: I always like to start at the beginning. Can you tell us how Other Emergencies came into existence? Was it a long time in the making?
SF: Yes and no. I wrote the title story in the late 90s, but the rest of the stories are more recent, all of them written in the last five or six years. In the early 2000s, fiction writing took a back burner to poetry and to job-juggling, sometimes three at a time! It was only after retiring from academia in 2015 that I had hours to actually sit down and write, rather than fifteen minutes grabbed here and there. Having that kind of time was a real gift. I eventually started—and finished!—a whole bunch of short stories, some of which found their way into this book.
LR: You’ve written novellas, micro-fiction, poems, traditional-length short stories—and everything in between. Do you have a particular sense what form a piece of writing will take when you start it? And does that change your approach in any way?
SF: Nope, I’m typically clueless as to what I’m doing, which for me is actually pretty healthy as it allows the story to do what it wants to do. I’ve written 2,000-word stories that became flashes and micros that became full-length stories. I think my approach over the years has changed in that I used to determine early on what was going to happen, but lately, I’ve handed the keys over to my characters and let them drive the bus. They’ll often take the back roads, but the scenery there is way better than it is on the Thruway. Again, that’s probably owing to luxury of time.
LR: The stories in this collection take place in a world that can turn violent in a moment’s notice. To my ear, the threat of danger in these pieces is essentially embedded into the setting. Can you talk a bit about your usage of violence/danger as backdrop?
SF: I love the word “backdrop” and what it infers: that the violence itself, the action, is secondary to character and its effect on the various characters. In “Heaven,” for example, the violence is dispensed of within a couple of sentences early on, but the ripple effect of that initial, violent act becomes the entire story. In “Happenstance,” the reverse is true as the violent act that’s changed everything for the narrator happens near the end of the story. That story rejects the chronology of “Heaven” and is narrated instead in skittery bits that jig and jag in subject and time—in essence, mirroring the narrator’s gradual ability to grapple with this monstrous thing that she’s been party to. So, yeah, the violence is backgrounded in service to character.
LR: The characters in this collection are vivid and so, so true to life. They seem to be distinctly American—mostly from the Great Lakes area—with many of our trappings and anxieties. What draws you to these particular people? And could you walk us through your process of character generation?
SF: I grew up in Michigan and currently live in the part of New York State that borders on a Great Lake, so my experience with the setting and its people as inspiration is both formative and current. It’s an area that’s been to hell and back during my own lifetime, thanks to the vagaries of the automobile industry in Michigan—notably Ford and GM—and Kodak in Rochester, and most of the survivors have had to learn to be resilient, to ride out the bad times as well as create a better future for themselves. That’s gold for character creation!
Most of my stories start with a character or characters, and who they are is so contingent on where they live. Once I know that, I chase whatever story is theirs. It takes a bunch of drafts and sometimes years to understand all that.
LR: You’ve titled this collection Other Emergencies—great title!—based off a story by the same name. What about this phrase spoke to you and led to that decision?
SF: It’s funny because this is the oldest story in the book, but I can remember how and when the story started. I used to set my alarm for 5 a.m. so I could get some writing done before I walked to work. On this particular day, I was in that state of semi-sleep just before the alarm went off when the first sentence of the story came to me, word for word. I wrote it down in my notebook and at some point not long afterward, I drafted the whole story in one afternoon. It changed a lot from early to final draft, but that first sentence stayed where it was, exactly the same as I dreamed it. The title comes from the narrator’s realization that her grandmother “came out of her house only for babies and other emergencies,” which is a nod to how it was for me growing up. We knew when Grandma landed, something was awry, so I decided to hand that real life bit over to the narrator in the story. The original title for the story was “Babies and Other Emergencies” and the editors at Third Coast, who’d accepted the story, suggested “Other Emergencies” and I agreed and it eventually became the title for this collection, which is all about emergencies, large and small.
LR: Speaking of “Other Emergencies,” it’s one of my favorites in the book. In it, the narrator’s brother Jack, a promising high school pitching prospect, blows off most of his hands in a freak accident with dynamite. This tragedy tears a hole in the narrator’s universe. What inspired this piece? What made you decide to funnel this narrative through the sister’s perspective?
SF: The inspiration was that first sentence. I just had to chase it a little to figure out who was talking and what her conflict was. I set it during the 60s, with the Cuban missile crisis as backdrop, because of the limited options for girls at that time. There were many avenues for boys to be popular in junior high or high school but not so for girls. Girls had to be pretty or cheerleaders or both, and Laura was neither, destined to be an eternal second banana to her star-athlete brother. I loved her dilemma, I loved chasing that in the drafting of the story, which seemed far more interesting and complex than the story would have been had it been narrated by one of the other characters. I should say, too, that her final action came as a total surprise to me. I didn’t see it coming until I wrote it and when I did, it just felt right.
LR: “Skinny-Dip,” a fantastic micro, tells us so much in so few words. You are an accomplished writer of flash and micro-fiction. What is it about this length of story that appeals to you?
SF: What I love about writing poetry is getting down and dirty on the word level—this one or that one?—and wandering around in the land of sound and subtext and metaphor. I do that with micro length stories, too, once I feel like I’ve nailed a rough structure, one that serves as “a container for change”—my favorite definition of “story.” I did it with “Skinny Dip” and do it with most of my fiction to a certain extend. One of my first mentors announced once that “there are no true synonyms” and I’ve spent decades finding that that’s pretty true – that the English language is vast and wonderful and there’s a verb out there that nails not only the what of the action but the how. Poetry is verbs; micro is, too.
LR: Sorry—but I always ask this question to people who write short things! When writing something short, do you imagine a more extended narrative, and the short piece is a slice of that? Or do you think of flash fiction as a squished story? A small story? Let me put it the way I sometimes describe it to my students: If you have a picture frame you are trying to fill with an image (flash fiction), and the frame is 2X2, does that mean that the image is a 2X2 cropping of a 10X10, a 2X2 resizing of a 10X10, or simply a 2X2 image. Is there even a difference in your mind?
SF: Years ago, a poetry mentor instructed us to run our hand over the draft of a poem to feel the heat and then let that guide us on revision. I think I nodded “yes, yes” when she said that, while inwardly thinking what a load of woo-woo that was. Feel the heat, baloney. But the more I write, the more I find that to be true, not by running my hand over the text, but by feeling in my gut the sentences, the images that are vital, true and necessary to a story. Typically, that’s possible only when I write the 10 x 10 version and locate the vitality in the 2 x 2. So it’s not so much a cropping as a burning in, to borrow an old photography/darkroom term.
LR: I loved “Heaven.” This longer story involves a cast of characters who try to sort through the aftermath of a mass shooting at a fast-food burger restaurant. I’ve been thinking about fear lately, as something a writer can tap into. In today’s world, the fear of a random violent act is ever-present. This specific fear feels volatile, and it contains the ability to mute everything around it. How, as a writer, does one access this fear without letting it overwhelm a very nuanced narrative?
SF: By writing character-driven stories rather than narratives that are dictated by events.
LR: Another piece I was drawn to was “All that Water,” which really played with my expectations as a reader. A man and his hostage (a bank teller) attempt to drive away from the scene of the crime, and I certainly couldn’t guess what happens next. How did you arrive at this premise?
SF: I really love writing journey narratives and clueless guy characters so he was near and dear to my heart. He’s entitled, by virtue of birth, but he’s at a point in his life where he’s starting to question the limits of that and to reject a lot of what’s been handed to him as a rich, white guy who was a legacy admission at Dartmouth. There’s kind of a been there/done that ennui about him that’s countered by the bank teller, Celeste, who’s never been anywhere, really, but is wise and worldly in a way that he isn’t. The story, then, became less about the money that he allegedly steals and more about what they learn from each other during their afternoon together.
LR: What’s next for you? Any new projects?
SF: I think I’m writing a novel: Rotating points of view, small town, lots of old, buried grudges—plenty of tinder for the fire. This summer, I’m trying to bang out words and get a messy draft in the tank by the end of the year. We’ll see.
LR: Thanks so much spending some time with us, Sarah! Don’t miss Other Emergencies, out now from Moon City Press: https://www.uapress.com/product/other-emergencies/
SF: Luke, thanks so much for these wonderful questions!