Mollie McMullan
An Interview with Amy Stuber
Amy Stuber is fiction writer currently based in Lawrence, Kansas, where she works as an editor for Split Lip magazine. Recently, Stuber’s Sad Grownups was announced as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Though Sad Grownups is her debut, Stuber’s writing can be found in publications like Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Cincinnati Review, OK Donkey, and numerous others.
Gandy Dancer: While reading Sad Grownups, we were struck by how intimate and personal the collection felt. What experiences from your own life led you to writing these stories? How did you know that you needed to write this collection?
Amy Stuber: Most of the stories have some piece of truth from my life, whether it’s an emotion or a place or an event. “Cinema,” for example, was inspired by my own experiences with postpartum depression and my own sadness and nostalgia around my children aging out of previous versions of themselves. “Day Hike” is set in a place where I’ve been many times in Colorado, on a hike I’ve taken repeatedly. In “Doctor Visit,” an ophthalmologist tells the main character she has “the tiniest little baby cataracts,” and an ophthalmologist told me that exact thing. In that same story, the main character’s mother is always trying to get the main character to try her coleslaw, and that has been true of my mother. But almost everything else in the story—the situations, the actual events of the story—is fiction.
Most writers I know weave little bits of their own lives into their work, so the end product is like a treasure map for people who know them, reading through and recognizing little prizes from reality. Most of these stories are about 90% fiction and 10% autobiography. Broadly, though, I think my own experiences with aging, parenting, trying to have solid adult relationships, trying to connect with people, and also questioning the direction of America, all fed into writing this book. And regarding knowing I needed to write this collection: I’ve always wanted to publish a book. That’s probably two parts feeling compelled to write just because I enjoy it and can’t seem to not do it and one part ambition.
GD: In “People’s Parties,” Ray makes a conscious effort to connect with her child, Bea, in spite of the abandonment she experienced from her own mother. Other children later in Sad Grownups are not as fortunate as Bea. How did you decide to place this story near the beginning of the collection? Can you talk more about the organization or order of your collection?
AS: I struggled with ordering this collection, and it was ordered in many different ways before my editor, Rebecca Burke, helped me see an order. I still wonder about the first story as first, though, to be honest. And I also wonder if “People’s Parties” should even be here! It’s a story that I turned into a novel draft a few years ago, so I really debated whether to put it into this book. In some ways, I’m not as sure it fits tonally. But in terms of theme, part of the ordering was, for me, an emotional progression from the start to finish of the book, with some of the early stories more tied up in a more adolescent emotional struggle and some of the later stories trending toward emotional maturity or if not maturity, release, if that makes sense.
When people talk about revision being a kind of endless process, I think that very much applies to the act of ordering and structuring a collection. I could definitely go back in now and make a case for rearranging!
GD: There is an abundance of humor across this collection. In Sad Grownups, Odon looks like a “child Rachel Maddow,” and in “Doctor’s Visit,” the narrator says: “I wonder, what is this life, because I’m deep like that. No, ha, I’m really not.” How necessary is humor when writing characters dealing with common issues like grief, loss, betrayal, aging, and so forth?
AS: I’m glad it felt humorous. I always worry that some of this stuff comes across as cringey. But, in life, I do tend to use humor to protect myself from emotion, and that definitely surfaces in my writing.
GD: The stories in Sad Grownups often handle difficult subjects, but never feel grim because the language has its own gravitational pull and intrigue. As a poet, I noticed rich phrasing like “grief striated” and “all of life is contained in a day anyway. Wake up its own little birth and sleep a death, and all of whatever in between.” What kinds of things inspire and inform your writing, especially when dealing with heavier subjects?
AS: I love poetry! It’s what I first wrote in college, and it’s writing that I turn to repeatedly when I feel stuck with my own writing or stuck as a reader and struggling to focus on novels or collections. Poets like Diane Suess and Erika Meitner really inspired me during the period of writing some of these stories. I also really loved picking up big anthologies from grad school and flipping through them at random and letting whatever I settled on inform what I was writing. I love the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and Modernist poetry more broadly and the Beats and confessional poets. When writing this collection’s closing story, “The Last Summer,” where the narrator, an adjunct literature teacher, is dying of cancer, I pulled directly from a Norton anthology into the story and let particular poems’ themes feed the story’s progression.
I know a lot of people feel like writing about some of these heavier issues is boring or cliche or whatever, and I’ve noticed a trend in the last ten years in novels toward focusing on less heavy topics: breakups, workplace drama, etc. And I very much like those books. But for my own writing, I tend to keep going back to some of these big life and death issues, kind of existential crisis things for me. Maybe I’m just really morbid! But I do get very much in my head thinking about death, dying, human cruelty, probably to a fault, and that definitely shows in what I end up writing about.
GD: Multiple characters in the collection are afraid to connect—or go to great lengths to disguise their desire for connection and love. This felt to us like the result of Covid-19, where we grew accustomed to our loneliness. Were you thinking about that as you were writing these stories?
AS: Possibly Covid related in some cases but also probably my own lifelong struggle to connect with people, to let down my guard, to allow myself to feel and give love. That feels very embarrassing to type! There’s one story here, “Corvids and Their Allies,” where one of the characters recognizes her own struggle with knowing how to love, and that’s definitely personal to me. I think we all use various tactics to try to protect ourselves from hurt and heartbreak and vulnerability. These characters, much like myself, use humor to deflect, use isolation to protect, but still have a desire for connection. I wanted some of these stories to capture that very human tendency to shelter ourselves from anything that might be harmful.
GD: The settings in Sad Grownups are incredibly varied and memorable, ranging from Las Vegas to New York, a houseboat to a resort in New Mexico—to name a few. When writing a story, is setting the initial thing you establish?
AS: Sense of place is very important to me in what I read, and I’m very much inspired by nature and the natural world in what I write. It’s not always the first thing, but that feeling of place definitely inspires everything I write. There are some places I’ve visited where I feel like I just have to write about the place because it’s so beautiful and moving that I want to try to use words to recreate how it feels to be there (the desert in Utah or the headlands in Mendocino, CA). I also wanted to set a lot of stories in Lawrence, KS, where I live because I enjoyed writing about all these really familiar-to-me places and trying to show how some of these “flyover” places are interesting, unique, and beautiful in their way.
GD: In “Cinema,” “More Fun in the New World,” and “The Last Summer,” death and dying force characters to interact with people they otherwise might not. What allows this? And how is this good for fiction?
AS: Generally, I think unexpected events and interactions are fun to read and write about. Stuff that happens at the margins of human experience mixed with average, everyday occurrences—that blend feels interesting to me as a writer. As in “The Last Summer”: a dying man in a car with two college women drinking White Claws—that kind of absurdity where truly monumental life events hit up against the trivial—that’s how this all tends to work in real life, and I enjoy trying to capture it in stories.
GD: A number of the stories feel meta in that the writer is either a character, or the stories seem to respond to prompts, like in the beginning of “Dead Animals,” where you write: “Take me on a journey. Make me feel something. Surprise me.” We’d love to hear more about your process creating Sad Grownups’ metafictional qualities.
AS: This was the outgrowth of being bored with myself and my own writing and wanting to take a standard linear narrative and add a layer to it. Many of these stories (“Dead Animals,” and “Day Hike,” for examples) started as more standard narratives, and I finished them, read them, and thought they needed something else added to create texture or tension or interest. In most cases, this ended up being a kind of meta element that pushed the story to function on two levels. I’m not sure I’ll do that in future work, but it was fun to play with in this book. And, for me, really having a narrative and metanarrative reflected the way we live in the world: our actual lives, the events we’re involved in and with, conversations we have, and then our internal lives, often very different and sometimes detached from our actions and interactions.
Bonus Questions!
GD: Adulthood and childhood mirror one another in “More Fun in the New World” and “The Last Summer.” How estranged are we from our childhood selves? How does that relationship influence your narratives?
AS: This is a big one for me! Without devolving too much into therapy speak, I do feel like we’re all carting around our childhood selves and trying to reassure, parent, and save that childhood self, let it feel adept and confident and safe enough to kind of merge with our adult selves. That’s so much of what this book is about.
GD: While reading, I noticed two references to Joni Mitchell: the title of “People’s Parties,” which is the name of a song from her Court and Spark album, and then her song “Carey” is also referenced in “Cinema.” Are there other musicians that inspired you?
AS: I actually did this playlist1 for the amazing “Largehearted Boy,” and it speaks to all the music that inspired my writing of these stories. It’s probably true for most writers so not unique to mention, but music, writing, art, nature—all inspire pretty much everything I write.
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1 https://largeheartedboy.com/2024/10/07/amy-stubers-playlist-for-her-story-collection-sad-grownups/