BY CHRISTINE RICE
Amina Gautier’s collections of short fiction – At Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and most recently The Loss of All Lost Things – have garnered some pretty weighty awards. Most recently, in addition to the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library, she’s collected a Silver IPPY Award (Multicultural Fiction), an International Book Award (Literary Fiction), a USA Best Book Award (African American Fiction), a Phillis Wheatley Award, and the PEN/MALAMUD Award, among other awards.
Nearly every sentence in Gautier’s latest collection, The Loss of All Lost Things (Elixir Press 2016), hums with heartache and reveals the intimate details of her characters’ longing and loneliness.
The Loss of All Lost Things came out in 2016 so why, you might ask, are you talking to Amina Gautier about it just now? That’s a story for another time. What’s important is that you read this interview and her work because, if you pride yourself on writing short stories, you’ll learn a hell of a lot from her approach and from reading her work.
CHRISTINE RICE: So what were you up to before you started winning all of these awards (before 2002)? What have been the most important moments on your journey to becoming a writer? What writers or teachers helped you hone your craft?
AMINA GAUTIER: Before I started winning, I was writing. I was always writing. As an undergrad at Stanford in the mid to late 1990’s, I was faced with the choice of whether to pursue a creative writing MFA or a literature PhD, and although I applied to a few MFA programs, I ultimately decided to attend the University of Pennsylvania and earn a PhD in English Literature. It was a very different landscape for writers back then, not so many choices, and not so much encouragement to choose the life of a writer. Teachers and mentors generally discouraged aspiring writers from going straight for the MFA—they recommended taking time off and working and obtaining life experience, which was not something I could do as a poor kid saddled with loans which I would have had to begin repaying six months into my “life experience.” Opting for an MFA program would have piled more loans on me as the literary landscape of the 90’s did not have the proliferation of MFA programs seen today, and, consequently, did not have many fully funded programs. This is all to say that although I declined to pursue the MFA in favor of the PhD, I never declined to be a writer. I knew that without the MFA, I would have to figure out another way to obtain the training I would need to set myself up for a lifetime of writing. So I studied literature—literary history, criticism and analysis— and during the summers of my graduate studies years I attended writers’ conferences—Breadloaf, Callaloo, Hurston/Wright, and Sewanee—so that I could workshop, and study craft.
And I wrote, wrote, wrote.
Three years after undergrad, I had some ten to fifteen stories published, so I put them into a collection, completed a draft of a novel (or thought I did) and did the whole find an agent thing. I garnered a lot of interest and pretty much had my choice of a few good agents, but in the process of interviewing them, I also received a lot of age-based condescension—you know, a lot of patting you on the head and calling you sweetie, honey, and dear and thinking they know better or more than you simply because they are older. Which was interesting, given that I was completing a PhD in literature at an Ivy League institution, which, while still leaving me younger would make me far better educated than the ones giving me advice. I also received a lot of gender and race-based condescension—editorial advice slanted on a very narrow and biased belief of what a black woman writer should write, and what elements should be in a black story. Suffice it to say that since I am no intellectual slouch by anyone’s measure, I didn’t appreciate anyone attempting to think for me, make decisions for me, rewrite my fiction according to their precepts, or try to turn my very human characters into pathological ones, and to justify their right to do so simply because I was young and black and a woman. No matter what my age, race, ethnicity, and gender identity happen to be, my characters are not minstrels; they are not here to perform, shuffle along, or step and fetch it. I would be untrue to both my creative and scholarly training if I were to recast my characters into the stereotypical depictions that we black and brown people have fought long and hard to refute and counter. So I took back all of my material and assigned myself a ten year apprenticeship, by which I mean I decided to spend ten years writing stories and developing my craft (the stories in the three collections only comprise about 30% of my body of work), with the goal of publishing a diverse and record number of stories before attempting to publish a book so that no one could dare mistake me for an amateur or surmise that I could be pushed around. That decision was a major stepping stone for me, because that was when I made clear my commitment to my craft, pushed aside any desire for immediate gratification and fame in favor of being the best writer I could. I built my reputation as a writer of unquestionable talent by writing the stories that interested me rather than the ones that were sensational or trendy and I empowered myself, assuming authority and control over the trajectory of my literary career.
CR: That’s an incredible model for all writers…something I wish I’d known to do or had done.
I’m curious about what kind of ‘editorial advice’ those editors gave you and how you pushed back? You said that much of it “slanted on a very narrow and biased belief of what a black woman writer should write, and what elements should be in a black story.”
AG: I have encountered many examples, both large and small, of such biased editing. A small example would be when a male editor wanted to change the word “scream” to “shout” in a story of mine that featured two brothers arguing. According to the editor, men never screamed, they only shouted. Women screamed. You can see a world of bias in this small example—it’s indicative of why women are referred to as “females” while men are referred to as men, why women are said to get “hysterical” but men get angry; it’s a very small example of the way in which changing one word in a story introduces gender bias in the narrative’s language. Here’s another small example: I used to submit to a journal in the Pacific Northwest, and after about five rejections, I received handwritten feedback from the editor stating that I should submit more “mainstream” stories with more “mainstream” characters. Given that my stories were pretty mainstream— they were about black American characters doing mainstream things—I had to conclude that “mainstream” was being used as code for “white” in much the way “urban” has become code for “black.” A larger example of bias comes from an early point in my career. When I was around twenty-six, I was approached by a well-known editor of a well-known literary journal who touts himself as someone who has always published diverse authors. After inviting me to submit to his journal, he rejected my first submissions, which were about black characters building and developing relationships with one another. He rejected my story about a gifted black boy whose parents embarrass him at a scholarship banquet and another story about a young black boy sent down south for the summer to escape the violence in his neighborhood, finally opting to accept a story in which a fifteen year old girl has an affair with an older man, a story which contains racier content than the former two stories. More recently, I shared a story about a black girl having roommate problems during her freshman year at college. The story begins with the protagonist, Ellen, waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of her roommate having sex in the bunk below. In the story you learn that the two roommates are both black, but come from different class backgrounds. The protagonist Ellen feels socially isolated when her roommate looks down on her for being poor and encourages her friends who come over to ignore her so that Ellen feels like a guest in her own dorm room. She has a hard time fitting in socially and you see her driven from her dorm room to the dorm lounge and finally all the way out of the dorm—physical representations of her social isolation and her palpable loneliness—until she’s wandering the campus alone, while everyone else passes by in groups and pairs. Finally, she interacts with a fellow student who is smoking outside and the interaction gives her a glimmer of hope that she can make a friend. It seems pretty obvious that this story is about loneliness and friendship, but thus far, I’ve been told there’s “not enough at stake” in the story; I’ve been asked to turn my protagonist into a voyeur so that instead of her being embarrassed about being stuck in the room with the couple having sex, she should become excited and get into the act of watching them; and I’ve been asked for her to make a scene i.e. to bring her new friend back to the dorm room to confront the roommate and get into a girl fight. Because, hey, why write a story about loneliness when you can have girls going wild and having cat fights? Apparently, loneliness is only for old men fishing for marlins.
Whether stated explicitly through editorial commentary or implicitly through rejection, editorial advice that encourages stories in which black characters must perform and entertain the reader is biased. White characters are allowed to exist in a story and do nothing—there are plenty of quiet meditative stories in which white characters do little more than walk their dogs, or sit in front of their windows drinking coffee while contemplating the coming day, or get dressed for a dinner party, or take a trip to the zoo—but black characters are asked to perform. When I write stories in which black characters have quotidian experiences, editors ask for more, they say nothing is at stake or that they cannot tell what the stakes are. But, of course, black normalcy is the stake, and the acceptance of the idea that black characters can exist in a story without being sensationalized, stereotyped, or “othered,” and asked to perform, and that black women can exist in stories without having to be whores or wise women—i.e. that they can live in stories without taking off their clothes or bringing white or male characters to states of enlightenment and then conveniently sacrificing themselves— is what’s at stake. Some of the ways I push back is to stop submitting work to those journals and editors and to instead opt to submit my work to more intelligent editors. I also let the awards do my speaking for me since that’s what seems to speak the loudest to certain people. But my biggest way of pushing back is to simply write more of the same. More stories about black normalcy, more stories about black people having quotidian experiences, more stories about black characters being human and not on stage. More stories about black characters doing no more and no less than anyone else. The belief that black characters need to “do more” than other characters, that they need to perform and be magical negroes in order to be noteworthy is a biased belief against which all of my writing pushes back.
CR: Something I so greatly admire about your writing is the subtle use of gesture. Your touch is so light but packs a wallop.
In “Resident Lover” you write:
When pressed, she told him it was not good practice to sit while painting; she said it was better to use one’s whole body. And she did. As he watched, Ray noticed that she used her full arm, and not just her wrist. “Only illustrators do that,” she explained.
Or this, from “As I Wander” you write:
She gestured for him to remove the black nylon stocking cap tied around his head. Beneath the du-rag, his long hair was braided in a complex pattern with two whorls on either side that reminded her of ram’s horns. Judy lightly touched his hair, finding it as soft and downy as a child’s.
In short stories, this use of gesture is so important. Can you talk about the role of gesture in your work? How it impacts moment? How it impacts the movement of story?
AG: I tend to imagine my stories cinematically. I want to see the story in action, not just hear characters speaking. I want to know what they are doing with their bodies at the same time—to know if their body language corroborates or contradicts their dialogue. I want to know how their bodies give them away and speak even when they themselves are verbally silent, and then, of course, to know how those physical movements and tics are interpreted by the other characters. So much tension and conflict in real life is caused by what we do with our bodies, i.e. what we think we are doing versus how our movements and physical behaviors are interpreted by others. How we move in our spaces, how we take up space inhabited by others—leaning over people’s shoulders, crowding them, spreading our legs in public seating areas like subway trains and conversely, the way we shrink away, ball ourselves up, refuse to let our bodies intrude—these things are all the stuff of real life drama, conflict, and tension, so it’s only naturally that they should be equally relevant in fiction.
CR: Some of my favorite short stories hinge around a moment of truth. In A Brief Pause, for example, there is the moment where you write in close third from a college admissions counselor:
My task is one of discernment. Less than two percent will make it in and it is my job to winnow them from the other ninety-eight percent, the chaff.
And right there, as a reader, I’m hooked. What else will she winnow down? How far will she go? How hard will she be? How hard has life made her?
Is this how you feel with the ideas, the other characters bumping around in your imagination? How do you decide what hits the page? What lives and what dies?
AG: That’s a tough question! It’s hard to answer what lives and what dies, because what often dies in one of my stories is excised and given life in another story. At least that’s true when it comes to ideas and images. If they don’t work in a particular story, I’ll cut them and write a new story around them. So what really dies is bad language and sentimental or clichéd plots. My early drafts tend to be really bad, nice language but overly sentimental dialogue and plot. This is especially true if I’ve been watching a lot of TV or reading a bunch of genre fiction, then I just kind of soak up all of that awful stuff—people sighing, necks craning, eyes widening, lots of characters looking, smiling, and glancing and doing diddly squat. But I need to lay it all down, the bad stuff, the clichéd movements and the boring flat dialogue in order to see it and say “Okay, this is what the typical character would do, or this is what the sit-com character would do or say, but how would my character handle this?” I write a lot of chaff to get to my wheat; I write drafts full of okay imagery and dialogue and scenes that work well enough before I write the scenes and words that are the right ones. I’ll spend years on a story, going through draft after draft until I’m satisfied that I have the story right—right POV, right language, right images, right mood, right tone, right pace.
CR: Diddly squat. That’s going to be the question I ask myself from now on: Who’s doing diddly squat? And then cut that out.
What really struck me in this collection was your masterful pacing, of the slow and painful attention to the detail of loss. Did this collection make you see the world in a different way? And at what point did you say: this collection is about ABC? Or did you know that going into it?
AG: I did not know going in. I did not know until the ninth hour. The Loss of All Lost Things went through so many versions and titles. It had previously been named after other stories in the collection. At one point it had been called Been Meaning to Say, at another point it had been called Intersections. In its penultimate iteration, I called it What Matters Most. I think you can see that I was edging closer and closer, sensing the yearning under the surface of all of the stories, touching on the regret that appears in all of them, but not yet hitting on the unifying aspect of loss. Many of the stories in The Loss of All Lost Things were written around the same time as the stories in my other two collections. But while I was putting all these stories together in one collection, I had started researching child abduction cases. From 2007-2010, I was following a specific case and then from 2010-2014, I did the research and writing for the two stories that became “Lost and Found” and “The Loss of All Lost Things.” Once I completed those two stories, I knew they belonged in the collection and that they seamlessly tied everything together. It was as if the collection had been waiting for them to pull all of its pieces together.
CR: As I read the sentences below, it struck me that loss is what many of us fear the most. Loss is constant and unrelenting. But there is a hierarchy to it too. In the title story, The Loss of All Lost Things, you write:
They are not the first to suffer loss. They try to keep it all in perspective, to think of the myriad of things that have been lost. Such as:
The Arc of the Covenant, The city of Atlantis. The Dead Sea Scrolls, El Dorado. The Holy Grail. Amelia Earhart, somewhere over the Pacific, Pompeii, buried beneath volcanic ash, The RMS Titanic, at the bottom of the sea.
Other lost things are lost slowly, over time, rather than in one fell swoop. Such as:
Loss of feeling, of life and limb. Loss of blood. Loss of memory. Loss of looks, of faith and time. Loss of sanity. Teeth lost under the pillow. Long-lost relatives–ignored, forgotten, and pretended away.
I loved that section. As a reader, it let me catch my breath in an incredibly intense story. You use humor – dark humor but humor nonetheless! – throughout. Can you talk about the pacing (the push/pull of dark and light) in a story, in a collection?
AG: There are two types of pacing that interest me: sentence pacing and emotional pacing and I’m super picky about both. I learned about sentence pacing from reading that long serpentine sentence in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” when Sarty is running and the sentence is running with him. It’s a long sentence; it makes you pant when you read it aloud. But right after that long exhausting sentence that mirrors the boy’s running, you get a super short sentence, just eleven words, and you catch your breath. As for emotional pacing, I think you have to be willing to hang on tight, to keep ratcheting up the tension and not step away, to tighten and tighten, and to take it as far as it can go before letting the reader come down. I think that’s what makes the push and pull satisfying—the reader knows you’ve gone as far as you could go and doesn’t feel as if anything has been held back or left out. The experience feels complete.
CR: Your stories are so poised. They are incredibly balanced and lean. I just had to say that.
AG: Thank you. At Stanford, I was trained that “Less is more.” The creative writing teachers there used to beat that into us. I couldn’t write a flabby story now to save my life! When I write, I can hear in the back of my mind this voice saying, “Less is more,” and asking me if really need a certain sentence or line or phrase. And if I can’t prove that I need it, I have to let it go.
CR: Your title story, The Loss of All Lost Things, is a meditation on loss and grief and the undoing of a marriage. I have to admit that, as a parent, that story was a wrenching read. It felt like watching an accident: mesmerizing and horrible.
How is this collection the same or different from your first two collections?
AG: The collections are the same in that they’re all well-written and that many of their stories were all written around the same time. They’re different in that they’re all about different themes.
CR: Can you talk a bit about your process when giving into or letting the characters take over your imagination? Can you talk about your process? How do characters develop on the page (and in such tight quarters)? Do you first get a sense of the situation? Or a sense of character? Or does it all reveal itself as you write?
AG: I take a long time to write a story—years— so I work on multiple stories at the same time. I go from scratching out sketches and bits of sentences on notebook paper to typed full drafts, and in between I do a lot of thinking and daydreaming about the story’s main character—who he or she is, etc. I tend to start with character and imagery. I think about the situation much later, after I’ve started to see the character as a real person with likes and dislikes, hopes and worries, as someone worthy of my interest and care. While I’m thinking about the character, I am also thinking about what images belong with him or her, so the character and the imagery develop side by side. Perhaps they develop in such tight quarters because I was born in the late 70’s and was a kid in the 80’s who watched a lot of MacGyver. I’m partial to the concept of using what’s around you and making do with what you have (I also think this is a concept in Back to the Future when Doc and Marty use lightning in place of plutonium, and in Quantum Leap, where Sam always has to improvise, but I digress). I’m not big on deus ex machina devices or plots of convenience when objects and people just happen to appear in the story to do and say the right things at exactly the right time. Instead I work with what I have, with what would naturally be there in the room, in the character’s line of sight, or within the character’s reach. When I MacGyver a story, I choose a few items or objects or details and then see what I can do with them and how I can use them to make meaning. For example, in “Been Meaning to Say” I saw the curlers in Iphigenia’s hair, her bedroom slippers and her console sewing machine before I had any idea what would happen in the story. In “Intersections,” I started with the braids in Jasmine’s hair and Jack’s ungloved hand. In “Lost and Found,” I knew the Twilight Zone episodes, the fridge magnet, the scissors and the Rudolph Christmas cartoon would all need to come into play. I had all of these images and I had to do something with them, to find the characters to whom they belonged and defined or haunted. The situations are ultimately born from those combinations of characters and images.
CR: What I love about these stories is their sense of surprise. The narrative movement never felt forced. Can you talk about how your stories unfold? Are you surprised by them? Or do you go into them with an inkling of the narrative arc?
AG: I never know what’s going to happen at the end of the story. I often believe I have an inkling of an ending in mind, but by the time I write toward it, that ending has become the story’s middle, or it’s been discarded. What’s most important is that I always have a sense of what the stakes are in a given story. Knowing what’s at stake usually guides my arc and resolution and the story’s unfolding. Because I’m deeply invested in depicting the psychological development of my characters as well as specifically revealing the interiority of black and brown characters in order to combat prevalent depictions which portray such characters as embodying pathological identities, the stakes in my stories are often ephemeral and epiphany-based, with characters often going from one emotional state of being to another. The narrative movement is never forced because it’s never based on a stereotype or a cliché, but rather it’s always organic and based on what’s at stake for these individual and particular characters.
Dr. Amina Gautier is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy and The Loss of All Lost Things. She has been awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, the Elixir Press Award in Fiction, the Eric Hoffer Legacy Award, the International Latino Book Award, the Phillis Wheatley Award, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and has been a Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize, the Hurston/Wright Award, the Paterson Prize, and the John Gardner Award. Gautier has been the recipient of fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, the Chateau de Lavigny, Dora Maar House/Brown Foundation, Hawthornden Castle, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Gautier has published one hundred stories. Her fiction appears in Agni, Blackbird, Callaloo, Glimmer Train, Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review, among other places.
