AMBER CARON INTERVIEW — Interlocutor

Amber Caron is the author of the story collection Call Up the Waters (Milkweed Editions) and the recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Southwest Review’s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Her stories and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, AGNI, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, Longreads, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Utah State University and an Assistant Fiction Editor at AGNI.

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

When I first read your collection, Call Up The Waters, I noticed each story seemed to be about people lost and adrift in different ways. What draws you to that aspect of human behavior, the tendency towards drifting and survival?

I’m honestly not sure. As I wrote these stories, that tension between drifting and survival kept appearing, and it became clear that it occupied a lot of space in my mind and in my art. I think if I knew why I was interested in this tension, I wouldn’t be compelled to explore it in the stories. It’s through the stories and characters that I find myself working it out.

Your book moves across the United States, and covers a range of topics, jobs, and landscapes. What was your process of research like? How much information about a place, or a job, did a story typically require?

It depends on the story; but long before these topics, jobs, and landscapes appeared in my fiction, they were things I became intrigued with. So, I just trusted that interest and moved toward it. I read everything I could get my hands on. I asked a lot of questions. I gathered images I found interesting and language I found compelling. I kept long lists of words I liked the sound or meaning of. Then I just started playing with it all—shaping sentences, writing paragraphs, pushing those paragraphs into pages. Eventually, if I was lucky, a character would start to emerge from this play, and the story would move forward. At that point, I found myself moving away from the research and toward the story. The vast majority of the research doesn’t make it to the page.

Your book does not romanticize nature or physical labor. There are moments of beauty or purpose, but they coexist with harshness, violence, and ordinariness. What was it like to resist the usual ways these things are talked about?

It’s more that I wanted to capture how complex and intertwined these things are. Just an example: one of my brothers was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer last year. He receives chemo treatment every three weeks, and even though those treatments are helping to shrink the tumor in his lung, they’re taking a toll on him physically. Still, he works between 40-50 hours a week in a factory because the work is both a distraction for him and a necessity. It gives him a sense of purpose, something to focus on besides his own mortality; but he also needs to make money to pay his bills, and like most Americans, his ability to access health insurance is tied to his job. So, when I write about labor, I’m also writing about health and healthcare and class and other things. I think something similar happens when I write about nature. These are complicated—sometimes terrifying—entanglements. I hope to capture some of that in my stories.

What was the process of putting together this collection like? How long did it take you to write the stories, and how did you arrange them in the collection? (I was struck, for example, by how the first and last stories seemed to be about motherhood or parenthood, narrated by two non-parents.)

The whole process—from drafting the first story of the collection to publishing the book—took a little over nine years. Arranging the stories was difficult, and it took a long time to find the final order. I moved stories around and put them next to each other. Several friends read the whole collection when I thought I had the right order, but they showed me I wasn’t there yet. I do think something clicked for the collection when I put “The Handler” at the beginning and “Didi” at the end because those stories point to another concern of the collection, which (as you point out) is how we care for one another, both inside and outside of traditional familial roles.

Many of your stories are about perspective—memories remembered differently by different family members, objects that look like people from a particular angle. “Bending the Map”—subconsciously making information in the world match what you want, rather than seeing reality—seems like such an apt metaphor for so many characters in your book. I’d love to hear more about this idea, and how you’re drawn to this kind of mismatch between how different people see the world.

I should start by saying I’m obsessed with physical maps. I always buy them before I travel to a new place so I can study the landscape. Partly this is for my safety. I hike a lot—often alone—and I need a good sense of the trail before I head out. Even taking precautions, I have found myself turned around at times. It’s an unsettling moment when you realize you did everything you could to avoid getting lost, and there you are. But I’m most interested in what we do with that realization, how we panic and then try to convince ourselves we’re going to be okay; we lie to ourselves and force the world to fit into that lie. When I learned that there was a phrase for this very specific kind of confirmation bias, I could see all the ways my characters were “bending the map,” not just on the side of some mountain but in their relationships and their careers. It became a helpful framing device.

The other thing you’re describing is less about how we lie to ourselves and more about how, say, two members of a family might experience the same event in a very different way, with neither member lying. That’s interesting to me as well. That’s rich territory for a story.

On a craft level, how do you decide where a story must end? Your collection avoids easy or simple endings, and stories often end on a bittersweet—and very true-to-life—note.

Honestly, it takes a long time to find the right ending. If I’m struggling, it often signals a larger problem with the story; so, a lot of the process of finding the right ending is about revising what comes before. I can’t remember who said that the best endings allow you to imagine how a character lives beyond the final page of the story. That’s always been a helpful gauge for me as a writer.

You’ve said before that “art has an opportunity to embrace nuance and complexity in a way that a lot of media can’t or won’t.” How do you see the form of the short story specifically as a way to explore that nuance? I find it a very powerful form, despite (or perhaps because of) its length. I would love to hear what you think of that.

I like what Tobias Wolff wrote about the power of reading short stories: “[The] experience of something read can form us no less than the experience lived through. Even more, sometimes, because so much of what we live through comes to us disguised as routine, or at a moment when we’re too well-defended to receive it. But when we read, we are alert and undefended, and liable to be struck hard” (introduction to The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories [1994]). What stands out to me is the implicit trust between reader and writer. The reader approaches a story without armor; the writer can’t abuse that vulnerability. We have to write honestly, which requires complexity and nuance. And given the constraints of the form, we have to do so succinctly. Every sentence has to matter; every paragraph must do heavy lifting. These are the challenges that keep me coming back to the short-story form.

Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.