Matter of Craft with Lucy Ives
In this edition of Matter of Craft, Lucy Ives, author of Loudermilk and Cosmogony chats about writing short stories - what she loves about the genre, what makes a good story, and how writing her collection differed from her novel.
As this is your first short story collection, how did your process differ from that of novel writing? What, if any, were some of the challenges you faced when putting Cosmogony together?
A novel requires a kind of patience and incremental attention that I do not have to sustain for a short story. For stories, the challenge is to remain open to the way in which things are transforming and to keep up. The stories in Cosmogony are in part about letting myself go in imaginary situations that fascinate me, but they are also (inevitably) about escaping from those situations, speaking of challenges. I can say more about in answer to your next question…
What do you love about the short story genre? What keeps you going back to them as a writer and a reader?
I like the simultaneous looseness and constraint of short forms. The writer Tao Lin calls my stories “controlledly wandering,” and I think there is something to that characterization. The short story, in particular, has qualities that please me—and that set it apart from other brief forms I also like (poetry and essays). The short story has an unusual capacity to convey information below what I’ll call the conscious reading “radar.” (I’d mention Shirley Jackson’s ultra-famous “The Lottery” here, as one ready example.) A good story makes us aware, when we come to the end, of how we have been absorbing information about the world and its odd symmetries without noticing this information arriving. A good story surprises us with how much we already knew about what was happening and what was going to happen, even as we did not know that we knew it and believed we knew nothing about what would come to pass. This is very important to me: that I can hide a sort of “Easter egg” in what seems to be a casual narrative in which not much is going on—so that by the end you realize, oh, wait, this was actually a story about murder, or, this was a story about traumatic loss, or, this was a story about being able to see the future. While at first the life that the story described seemed normal and meandering and without significant events or a plot, as such. I like the limited time I have to turn things around in a short story. It’s like sleight of hand.
I particularly loved your story “Recognition of This World Is Not the Invention of It.” What was the inspiration or spark behind this one?
This is a story about the games we play—with ourselves and others. I wanted to show how someone might have a construct in their mind that they use to orient themselves and keep score, because I think we all do this in one way or another. However, here the notion of quantifying one’s personal life becomes more literal, more extreme.
With the stories in Cosmogony, I go back and forth between thinking they are a time capsule of ways of life and mind of the Trump presidency, previous to the pandemic, and thinking how, weirdly, they seem already to be about isolation and the experience of abandonment (by one’s parents, one’s spouse, fate, god, or a social safety net) and thus also function as a record of the ways in which certain imaginary people survived things that were supposedly normal. “Recognition of This World Is Not the Invention of It” is very much about that sort of survival.
Can you share your writing routine with us? Take us through a day in your life.
It’s interesting to consider this question right now, as I’m waiting for the second half of my vaccination. I’ve noticed that I seem to have a million different kinds of days, even as I’m living Groundhog Day over and over. I find that I read books differently, that I sort of find myself asking the authors for help with everyday living and empathizing more deeply with their blind spots and confusions. There’s a side of me that used to be very opinionated and quick to move on that now lingers. I’m not sure if this is the same as having an altered routine, but something sure is different.
But to answer your question more directly and to the best of my abilities: get up, coffee, computer. Later: books.
What are some of your favorite pieces of craft advice that you return to over and over?
You can do the same thing twice, but don’t do it three times. I know that’s a bit cryptic but it works on many levels. And I have one other that I turn to all the time: write for your best reader. Again, you have to define this for yourself.
If you could make a playlist for Cosmogony, what are a few songs you might put on it?
I can’t make a playlist! I’m too shy. (However, this cover was important to me at one time.)
What was the last book you read that you would want to recommend?
Margery Kempe by Robert Glück, a perfect novel.
Lucy Ives is most recently the author of the novel Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World (2019) and the hybrid photobook The Poetics (2019, with photographs by Matthew Connors), and a collection of short stories, Cosmogony (Soft Skull Press, 2021). She is also editor of The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader (2020). She writes regularly on contemporary art and literature for Art in America and frieze, among other publications.
