Claire Bateman: On Reimagining Reality, Flash Fiction as Schrödinger’s Cat, and Her New Collection ‘The Pillow Museum’

Claire Bateman’s collection The Pillow Museum (FC2, 2025) examines entire eons and single instants with a scientist’s eye for the microscopic. I read the title story in an issue of New Ohio Review and thought, well, I have just got to tell this person how great that story is. Unsurprisingly, she had even more great stories. Though she has a number of books to her name, she’s never stopped publishing in lit mags big and small. Her work and career are about making the most of every moment. I’ve been told that the difference between poetry and flash fiction is the passage of time within a piece. Bateman weaves her best magic like clockwork: every gear’s teeth chew each other in perfect time.

She discusses the porous genre lines between poetry and flash fiction, and the slipperiness of apocalypse. 

Carl Lavigne: Your collection has endless iterations of bureaucracy attempting to wrangle whimsy. There is the titular museum of pillows where guests are invited to experience the dreams of the pillows’ original owners; there is a guild of housesitters who soothe the emotional and temperamental buildings; there is a union of time travel tourism docents. How do you see these forces mingling in your life and work? Why are they always so entwined?

Claire Bateman: Actually, until you brought this up, I hadn’t noticed it as a theme, so I must be gravitating toward it instinctively rather than intentionally. Both my parents worked for the CIA during the Cold War, and I’m fascinated by subgroups across time and cultures (organized crime, cults, guilds, entrenched pockets of local government, residential schools, circuses, etc.)—their hierarchies, their codified and implicit mores, their mythologized histories and esoteric modes of expression. I’m also interested in systems theories. These stories probably come out of my internal conflict—while I want to honor the human drive to create and nurture various collective forms, I’m inclined to satirize any group that takes itself very seriously. 

CL: As a multi-genre writer, how do you know when you’re writing a piece of flash fiction, versus writing a poem? What attracts you to the flash form? Do you approach them differently? Is there a difference?

CJB: When beginning a piece, I tended to find myself either tuning into a kind of free-floating inner music with some spaces and gaps inside it (poetry) or following some kind of narrative trying to unfold just on the edge of my consciousness (prose). Only rarely have I started something in one genre and then switched to another. 

However, more and more, I’ve come to especially love prose poems; like Schrödinger’s cat which is simultaneously dead and alive before the wave function collapses, they can be simultaneously blocky and spacious/lyrical. I’m becoming increasingly disinterested in genre distinctions, though after completing a piece, I may assign it a genre label in order to be able to submit it. I’m always grateful for editors that are open to hybrid works. As Robert Pinsky wrote, “Bless all things that are more than one thing.”

CL: Related question: how do you go about revising flash fiction pieces? I find it hard to alter them after the second draft or so, since they are so compact.

CJB: If they’re that compact, then you probably have them just right by the second draft. I revise flash fiction the same way I revise longer fiction and poetry—by chipping away at unnecessary moments and trying to create as much specificity in the language and clarity/nuance of movement as I can, and by seeking opportunities to compress while incorporating generative anomalies, contradictions, and surprises.

CL: How do you go about sequencing a collection of flash fiction? With so many more pieces than a stereotypical short story collection, it must get overwhelming. What gets left out? 

CJB: I tend to omit anything that’s either too similar to other pieces or so different from them that it’s jarring, though I did close this collection with an ekphrastic piece that feels distinct from the others in that it’s more historical than speculative. Nevertheless, there’s still a degree of continuity because it deals with sleep, as do other pieces. Sequencing The Pillow Museum was so difficult that I was grateful to receive help from one of the editors, Sarah Blackman, who could be objective about how the stories related to each other. In general, sequencing is my least favorite part of putting together any manuscript because in my mind, the pieces coexist simultaneously like the components of a mobile sculpture or some other form of kinetic art rather than in a particular order.

CL: Do you think the internet has changed readers’ relationships to flash fiction? 

CJB: I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone in feeling that the crushing awareness of all the instantly accessible reading material has sent me into something like permanent low-level panic mode—if I’m reading X, I’m not reading Y, Z, or A, so I live with a jitteriness that sometimes keeps me from investing my reading time in long, dense works—or I do try to take them in, but in a hovering, skimming, superficial way. This is the era of TL;DR, after all, and yet we still crave stories, so it makes sense that flash fiction has become immensely popular since each story is so brief that in a brief span of time, we can fully experience a universe that’s larger on the inside than it is on the outside.

CL: You’re a painter as well as a writer. Does your visual art play a role in your writing practice?

CJB: Each practice is a relief and refreshment after having immersed myself in the other; they both drain and recharge me in different ways and at different times. Since my artwork is nonrepresentational,  I don’t have to think about narrative or meaning; it’s very liberating to work only with color and shape and line, but then it’s always great to get back to moving words and ideas and images around. However, I do tend to use a collage approach in both art and writing, proceeding from the parts to the whole. While I’m working on a story or a poem, I often turn to my fragments journal to see if there are disparate bits and pieces I can incorporate to create texture and points of divergence, and with art, I keep a chest of drawers full of scraps from torn-up failed painting and sketchbook experiments.

CL: What influences do you see looking back at your work on this collection? Are there other writers, artists, or inputs you didn’t notice during the process?

CJB: I think immediately of Gabriel García Márquez and Kafka and contemporary fabulist writers like Kelly Link, Kevin Brockmeier, Charles Baxter, Aimee Bender. Also cartoonists like Gary Larson who reimagine reality in surprising ways. 

CL: You’ve published many books before this one. How do you see The Pillow Museum fitting in with the rest of your oeuvre?

CJB: Since reality often seems kind of arbitrary to me, I’ve always been drawn to a “what if?” approach, wondering how things could be different.  I’ve explored those kinds of ideas in previous books such as Locals (Serving House Books, 2012), a collection of prose poems about alternate realms. There’s the realm in which a book or newspaper is good for only one-time use because the reader’s gaze absorbs the letters and illustrations, so the less-well-off, known as “after-readers,” are reduced to rummaging through dumpsters in order to scavenge long descriptive passages the previous reader had skipped or skimmed, and the realm where people take turns being old, “passing the condition around like a sacred chalice or a hot potato.” In The Pillow Museum, I pushed this speculative curiosity as far as I could take it. For instance, “Reversals” opens with the statement, “Like infants accidentally switched at birth, sometimes cremation urns are sent to the wrong homes along with their accompanying ghosts.” While that story presents itself as humorous, a mixture of deadpan slapstick and therapy-speak, on a deeper level, it addresses our prevailing sense of displacement and the desire to find the people with whom we truly belong. 

The main difference with The Pillow Museum is that while it does contain lyric passages, it’s generally more plot-driven than much of my previous work. Also, I wrote a significant portion of The Pillow Museum during the most intense years of the pandemic, and of course, we’re all increasingly aware of climate change, so some of these fictions have dystopian overtones, more so than in earlier collections, and yet there’s still some delight and imaginative play, as in “Bread,” the story about the Esoteric Baker who places an enchanted tale in each loaf of bread.

Going back to your question about influences, moving forward, I hope that writers I adore but whose work and style are very different from mine are having an effect on my consciousness and process. I especially appreciate Kim Stanley Robinson and Nnedi Okorafor, who have moved beyond dystopian/utopian binaries to imagine communities refusing to succumb to despair despite their awareness of the fragile, provisional nature of their collaborative innovations.

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Claire Bateman is the author of The Pillow Museum (FC2 Press, January 2025) and nine poetry collections, most recently, Wonders of the Invisible World with 42 Miles Press and Scape with New Issues Poetry & Prose. She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Poetry Prize, also twice.