Interviewed by Christine Maul Rice
Each of the nine finely-tuned, emotionally-taut, and darkly-humorous stories in Rachel Swearingen’s How to Walk on Water (New American Fiction Prize Winner) demonstrate masterful technique. Not only are these stories deliciously surprising but many, including the title story “How to Walk on Water,” reveal how characters employ familial intimacy to inflict devastating emotional trauma.
This collection reinforces the crucial role independent literary publishers play in an increasingly safe commercial publishing landscape: Independent literary publishers consistently publish finely crafted, risky, innovative, and engaging contemporary work.
Swearingen’s work has been turning heads for a while now. She received the 2015 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a 2013 MacDowell Colony fellowship, a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction.
We talked with Rachel—a teacher at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago—about her time in Seattle’s Grunge scene, Coast to Coast AM, how certain phrases can reveal worlds, yielding to what the story needs, among other topics.
One story takes place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a few in Chicago—and other cities large and small. How do you consider place when shaping each narrative?
I’ve always thought of place as a container for stories and novels, but it’s more complex than this. Setting has such a huge impact on the atmosphere of a piece, but so do the themes and the characters, and all of these things together inform the final structure. For me, place is like a set of nesting dolls; there’s the city or town or region, but then there’s also the houses and taverns and outdoor spaces. Quite a few of the stories in the collection take place in confined, urban apartments with the outer world pressing in. I think this leads to a feeling of unease and of being outside of time. Like so many writers, setting is filtered through my own senses and memories. I think this is why readers often get excited or disappointed when a place either captures or doesn’t match their own experience. I wonder now if this might be part of the reason you set Swarm Theory in a fictional town?
That’s exactly why I set Swarm Theory in a fictional town.
The fact that your scenes often take place in “confined, urban apartments with the outer world pressing in” seems, in this day and age, prescient.
I kept noting the incredibly funny lines throughout the collection. For example, in “Mitz’s Theory of Everything Series” you write:
“Disturbing,” a woman said, as she looked at Ona’s sketch of two skeletal women tangled together on a doll-sized bed, men flat as rugs on either side.
“You had to be there,” Mitz told the woman. “It was a lot more fun than it looks.”
You use humor to such devastating effect—in the face of so much anguish and sorrow. Your timing is impeccable. Can you talk about how you employ dark humor in your work?
I have a pretty dark sense of humor that is fairly common where I grew up. It took me a while to realize that many of the hilarious stories I heard as a child were actually quite tragic. I’d retell these tales to friends and they’d look a little horrified. My favorite storytellers from back home have this kind of humor though, and I’ve been working on not stifling the impulse when I’m writing. It’s such a delicate balance. Humor is so personal, and sometimes it can be used to avoid uncomfortable territory. When it’s working, it’s a kindness to the reader, especially when it’s used to alleviate heaviness.
“It’s a kindness to the reader.” I love that.
Your characters are often dealing (or, in most cases, not dealing) with past trauma. As a nation, we’re experiencing collective trauma on so many fronts. As I read your collection, I kept thinking about how I will frame this period in my future work. Have you thought about that yet? Can you even think about that yet?
I’m not surprised that you’re thinking about this. So many of us are, and I think it’s our work as American writers, and as humans, whether we acknowledge it or not. As a reader, I see traces of trauma everywhere, in so much of our literature, going way back. I’m not sure how to even untangle that word, “collective trauma.” Our country was founded in genocide and slavery, and many of us still can’t utter these words or fully contend with their long-lasting implications, let alone manage our personal losses. For me, this is at the heart of the haunted house story in American literature. Our country is essentially a haunted house, as are so many other countries. The difference for Americans, I think (and hope), is that we appear to be moving into a period, collectively, where we’re finally acknowledging this haunting.
As far as future work goes, I’m finishing a novel now that deals sidelong with some of these issues through a group of neighbors. I’m also taking a break to write something less realistic. I feel the need to steep myself in something beautiful right now. Maybe it’s my way of escaping. I’m not sure if it will be a novella or something longer, but it contains a lot of icy landscapes and strange but wondrous foods.
The popular references—places, radio shows, movies—in this collection felt so comforting (even in your darkest stories). Since the pandemic, I yearn for the everyday things I took for granted—visiting a favorite cafe, going to the movies, throwing a baby shower (which I used to dread).
You wrote this collection while working on your PhD (Western Michigan University). How long ago was that? I’m in the middle of a rewrite and my novel is set in 2013-2017 and, because so much has happened in the past few years, that time period seems ancient.
In light of current events, has your writing process shifted at all?
I know what you mean. I miss tangible, physical moments with others. I miss friends and family, and just bumping into strangers on the L. To answer your question, I wrote much of the book towards the end of my program and in the few years following. The earliest story is from 2009; the latest from 2017. I pared the manuscript down quite a bit, keeping only the stories that seemed to work together. As far as my writing process now and current events go, I’m still figuring it out. One of the things that has been driving me crazy lately is that I spend more time revising than writing new work. This feels like a metaphor for so much more that is happening around us. It’s as if everything we write is out of date before we even finish it. I know this is an exaggeration, but it does feel like the world changes so quickly that the written word cannot keep up. I had a dream the other night in which my brother’s cat, Verbal, died, and I realized later that I do worry that words are being replaced by pictures, that language is incapable of capturing this moment. But then again, few things move me, or make me slow down, in the way good literature does. It’s why I keep trying.
Many new writers want to knock out a trilogy in a few months. Writing takes time. Figuring out characters is very much like having a new roommate…or a new partner.
Yes. So true. I do know some writers who are able to complete novels in less than a year, and I’m in awe of this. Like you, I need to live with my characters for a while.
In “How to Walk on Water” Sigrid listens to Art Bell’s radio show Coast to Coast AM. My husband and I used to listen to Coast to Coast when road trips were a thing (when it was hosted by George Noory).
Did you listen to that show? Or did you find it while researching? Do you do a lot of research while writing or before? Or do you clean-reach into memory? A combination?
It’s been years since I listened to Coast to Coast, but those late-night broadcasts stuck with me, especially when truckers would call in from the road with their spooky stories.
Yes!
I was one of the many Gen-Xers that moved to Seattle during the Grunge years. My first apartment there was a cinder block building called The Loredo, wedged next to a Safeway parking lot where addicts and hookers hung out. I had no furniture except a table and a chair, and I slept on a blanket on the floor with my cat. I had a radio though, and I listened to Art Bell late at night for company and to drown out the noise. It was such a weird and funny program, but addictive too. Many years later, I was shocked to find out the program was still running and that my mother-in-law was listening to it in suburban Ohio. I knew I wanted to bring it into a story. I do tend to draw on memory, and I try to trust my intuition, but I also do research as I revise. I went back and listened to some episodes before finishing writing those sections.
In “How to Walk on Water,” the lunch scene is absolutely devastating, so spare and unyielding. Was this a story that came to you in a rush or did you work on it over a period of time?
The lunch scene in that story did come in a rush, but it was incomplete and I had to put it away for a while. I knew something was missing. Sigrid was a difficult character for me, as was Nolan. They’re both stoic. They never talk directly about anything. I kept wanting to cut those lines about Nolan fixating on his mother keeping too much butter in her refrigerator. They made no sense to me, and I kept cutting them only to put them right back in. Then I realized this was the only way he could voice his frustration over their inability to discuss what happened.
I admire how you yield to what the story needs. As a reader, I felt off balance—in the best way—because your stories never take expected routes.
How did the stories in this collection reveal themselves to you?
The title story was actually one of the later stories. I did try to use the Art Bell radio program in an earlier story for a workshop with Kellie Wells. That story didn’t work, but later when I was teaching, quite a few of my students were turning in glorified serial killer stories, and I still had lines from that radio show in my head. This was when Dexter was big. I challenged them to write their stories from other perspectives, and then made myself try it too. Once I started writing it, I knew the radio program needed to be there too.
Many of the other stories in the collection revealed themselves as a result of consciously working with other art forms—film, art installations, crime shows, paintings. Two were the result of a single line I read in a Mary Ruefle poem: “I had the sudden urge to eat postcards of famous paintings.”
Your work puts me in mind of Alice Munro—the emotional range, the attention to detail, the odd things your characters notice, language, the nuance you bring to the page.
What short story writers do you admire? What are you reading now?
Thank you. I love Alice Munro, and I did read several of her collections when I was first starting out. I’ve never thought of her as an influence, but someone else said the same thing recently. I wonder if it has something to do with both of us being brought up in similar rural settings? I think literary periods and tastes leave their marks on our prose too. As far as story writers I admire, the list is endless because I’ve been writing for so long and appreciate so many writers for different reasons. Lately, I’ve been enjoying Etgar Keret and Joy Williams. As far as current books go, I’ve been reading some other recent Chicago debuts. I just finished Kate Wisel’s gritty and tender story collection Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, and I’ve started Rita Woods’ novel Remembrance, along with Mike Puican’s poetry collection, Central Air.
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