This.This.This.Is.Love.Love.Love
Short stories by Jennifer Wortman
Split Lip Press
$16.00, 170 pp.
ISBN-9781070561516
Not A Thing To Comfort You
Short stories by Emily Wortman-Wunder
University of Iowa Press
$17.00, 130 pp.
ISBN- 978-1-60938-681-8
Living in what feels like an ever-worsening news cycle has altered the way that I read fiction; it feels embarrassingly narcissistic to admit it, but now I read everything as a self-help book. Some days I’m well past reading for entertainment or art: I look to stories to offer relief from my existential despair and hope I finish them before the planet implodes. And you know what? Lucky me, because in 2019 two Ohio-born writers named Wortman released short story collections that, although very different from each other, offered a kind of richness and roundness that reminded me of the power of stories and how they connect us not only to the world but to ourselves. Emily Wortman-Wunder and Jennifer Wortman, now both residents of Colorado’s Front Range, where I also live, have written tightly observed, thoughtful characters whose stories go the heart of life in late capitalism. These days in which we mourn our planet’s decline even as we contribute to it, in which we rely on technology to connect to people even as that technology leaves us deeply lonely, cry out for these stories, which are a balm.
The stories in Emily Wortman-Wunder’s “Not A Thing to Comfort You,”, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction award, are stylistically varied, from conventional narratives to explorations of the form. Her narrators seek escape in the natural world, often as a counterpoint to the demands of family and identity. They struggle with the ethical implications of development and climate change. They take refuge in science and they maintain uneasy connections to family. As I read them, I was reminded of so many of the dualities of our time: the joys of modern life set against the environment costs of modernity, the pull toward family that can come at the expense of self, and the ways in science offers solutions to many problems yet cannot save us.
In Jennifer Wortman’s first collection of stories, “This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love”, the narrators tend toward the keenly (and often hilariously) self-aware and obsessed. They fall in love, but they’re angry with the objects of their affection too. Their fathers are as exacting as they are fond. Wortman’s stories run from the very short to more traditional lengths. And all of the stories, while deeply interior, account for the socio-economic and cultural space in which the characters live. These characters see the world with a shimmering honesty, one that I envied and that inspired me to be more frank and observant in my own life.
In October, the three of us talked about these collections.
Emily Sinclair: In reading your story collections, I felt a real kinship with both of you (even though I am not named Wortman and am not from Ohio) and I wanted to start there, with the role of place, which is one of the thematic elements that appears in both collections. I think all three of us live here in Colorado, either in or on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and came here, to Colorado, because it’s not ’there’. Yet as I read your work, I found myself thinking about a friend’s comment about moving, made some years ago, as a ‘location solution’. The comment was meant a bit cynically, that change of place is merely an externalization of an internal problem. In Emily’s stories, many of the characters seem to be longing for a deeper connection, either spiritually or scientifically, to the natural world, and they’ve intentionally chosen a particular place to work out that longing. In Jenny’s stories, ‘place’ is often a signifier of class, a comfortable middle or upper-middle class home in a suburban area, and there’s often an unease among the characters about the failure of those comforts to save them from a kind of despair. In other stories, ‘place’ as a signifier of success seems insecure, by which I mean that characters are aware of losing what they have. So, first, can you please speak to whether or not you Ohio Wortmans are related, or if we’ve just reached peak randomness, and then talk a bit about place in your work?
Emily Wortman-Wunder: I LOVE this reading of how Jenny & I use place in our stories and I’m going to let myself be distracted for a teeny tiny second by that delight. (The failure of middle-class comforts to save them from despair! Yes!)
Okay, I’m back. As far as I can tell, our shared Ohio Wortman-ness is a trick of the universe. My dad’s family goes back several generations in a small Iowa town. My mother’s family (very non-Wortman) is east coast Anglo Irish. The fact that we lived in Ohio was a compromise: equidistant from both families. Also, my dad was a university librarian, so we went where the job was – before Ohio we lived in Kennebunk Port, Maine, and I never quite forgave my parents for leaving. Perhaps that was the beginning of my obsession with place, although it was definitely intensified the year we spent living in suburban New Jersey, when I was 12 – I hated the way the houses just went on and on and on forever. I still hate that. It feels so desperately wrong, and I was in flight from that type of development when I started taking outdoorsy jobs in the Rocky Mountain West in my twenties. (The fact that I have landed in the Denver suburbs is a bitterness that I am still trying to work out in my fiction, and which totally informs “Trespassing” and “The Endangered Fish of the Colorado” in particular).
This is all a very slow windup to the role of place in my work. Some of the earliest stories in my collection, “Otters” and “Burning” in particular, came directly from events and characters I knew or heard about while batting about various Forest Service jobs and were definitely me kind of parading my semi-exotic background before my fellow students. On the one hand I was very proud of that experience, but on the other I knew in my heart that I was an outsider to those rural mountain communities, just as I was basically an outsider to the small Ohio town where I grew up. I think I was constantly aware of that tension, and I can point to several more stories (especially “The Hitchhiker Rule,” “Appletree Acres,” and “Gustav and Vera”) that poke around inside this tension, probing for hurt.
Jennifer Wortman: I, too, am fairly certain Emily and I aren’t related: I am of the Jewish Wortmans—no small Iowa towns in our past, just a shtetl in Ukraine, which my paternal grandfather left, ending up in the Bronx via Palestine, Paris, and Canada. My father went to college in Colorado to get away from the Bronx and ended up in Ohio. Then I moved to Colorado to get away from Ohio! My mother, for her part, is an Ohio native, with her own share of immigrant ancestors from eastern Europe. She, however, grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, a part of Ohio very different from my hometown. (By the way, my mom is a retired librarian—so a librarian parent is yet another strange parallel between me and Emily.)
Unlike Emily, I lived in the same town--Gambier, Ohio--for the first eighteen years of my life. A small college town in rural Ohio, Gambier generally differed in culture, politics, and resources from neighboring communities, which tended to be more working class. There were a lot of so-called “town-gown” tensions. As a faculty brat, I definitely occupied the world of “gown,” but as someone who’d lived in the area my whole life and went to school and worked and had close friends beyond the college, I also felt connected to—and defensive of—the world of “town.” The fact that I was one of only two Jews my age (Hi, Josh!) in an extremely Gentile—and sometimes zealously Christian--environment complicated matters further. This is my roundabout way of saying that I have a complex and convoluted relationship to place.
While Emily's tension with her surroundings may have sparked her obsession with place, for me, it’s done the opposite: I have to force myself to add setting to my fiction. My work is generally much more oriented toward placelessness and the inner life than the physical features of place. That said, I’ve always been acutely aware of class, and I’m glad you picked up on that in my writing. I’m also struck by your characterization of my stories as taking place in “suburban areas”: in my mind, only a few of these stories take place in the suburbs, but because of my relative inattention to setting details, how would you know? I envision “Love You. Bye.,” “Median,” and “The Speech” as occurring in suburban environments. But most of the other stories take place in small Ohio towns (“What Family Does,” “Slumber Party”), urban Denver (“This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.,” “Sometimes Things Just Disappear”), or self-contained college communities (“I’m Dying without You, Tom,” “Explain Yourselves”)—and in some, setting barely comes into play (“The Men I Love,” “How to Get Over Someone You Love in Ten Easy Steps”). Then again, maybe suburbia is more a state of mind than a geography. If we conflate class and race and sensibility with place, then my collection could be said to be very suburban, as well as a critique of suburbia. Which is not exactly a fresh enterprise, but I hope I’ve brought something new to the table.
ES: Jenny, you’ve pointed out a bias that I didn't realize I had as I read. Which is that I have indeed conflated class, race, and aspiration with place, as a suburban value. For instance, in “This .This. This. Is. Love. Love .Love.” and “What Family Does,” (urban and small town) there’s a father figure whose professional success or longing for his child’s success are points of tension, which I located in the suburbs. I particularly appreciated the attention to class--and capitalism—where they occurred in these stories. Lines like these--“This dynamic explains….the depression epidemic: the great unrequited love in late capitalism between people and their things,”; or “One of those painfully engineered coffee spots where a table is never just a table: this table contains chalkboards”; and “I thought of my own parents: quiet, sorrowful people who didn’t expect much from life and worked hard not out of faith that they could have better, but for distraction from the fact that they could not,”—serve up a world in which economic concerns complicate characters’ emotional lives.
And Emily, I understand that bitterness about having ended up in the suburbs. Your story “Appletree Acres” really hit home for me because I live in a formerly agricultural community that’s been heavily developed. In the story, the narrator recalls the murder of a childhood friend, Missy, who was a sassy, outspoken girl from an old farming family, at a time when farm families were selling their land to developers. Everyone attributed Missy’s death to the workers building homes, and Missy’s death dovetails with the death of the community. Now an adult, the narrator says, “Land was land, and we’d all contributed to its wreck and degradation,” and “This is how to become part of a place: survive and remember…When I stop in the new Kroger’s to pick up sesame oil and a decent Malbec, I know what I am walking over.” She concludes in the end that ‘we are all complicit, a little, in her (Missy’s) death.” In “Trespassing,” Julia thinks, “It’s why they bought this house, after all: she thought they could better bear the affluent sameness of the suburbs if they had a creek at their back.”
I read these stories as, in part, witnessing our current political, environmental, and cultural exigencies and the way they push on our interior lives and our relationships. Of course, it’s easy to read everything that way these days, given the lightspeed of our news cycles and the dire tones of our news. Can you both address the process of putting together these collections, e.g. how many years you spent writing the stories and whether, in the process of editing them for these books, if you reconsidered them in the time since they were originally written?
JW: My stories were written over a good decade and a half, some of them going back to the early 2000s, so I’d grown a lot as a writer and a person by the time I finessed the collection into its final form. And the world, the zeitgeist, has changed too. I made edits with that new awareness in mind, but these stories do, to me, feel mostly like a product of an earlier time. While I believe that all writing is implicitly political, I’m not a great topical writer. I do hope my stories grapple with morality without being moralistic. (I think Emily W.’s stories do that especially well, by the way.)
There were a couple cases where I wanted to change my stories to better align with my current politics, but I realized doing so would compromise the story. For instance, there’s a passage in “This. This. This.” where Annie, the narrator, says, “I could step onto a side street and buy crystal meth. I could find strangers to pay me for sex. Everywhere, chances to ruin my life. And so everywhere, chances not to.” The notion that people “ruin their lives” by becoming sex workers now strikes me as classist and puritanical and rooted in sexist ideas of “fallen women.” I was tempted to strike or change that line. But whether she admits it or not, Annie has absorbed these middle-class notions from her family, and her inability to transcend them contributes to her sense of worthlessness.
EWW: It took me so long to assemble a collection that my stories reveal the cracks and lumps of my own development as a writer. I think the oldest story (“Otters”) I actually wrote before starting my MFA program in 2000, and the last two just a few years ago. One thing that jumps out to me is that my earliest stories are more about stories for their own sake – maybe to explore a place or a feeling, but the overriding impulse is to transport the reader to a place I knew well. My more recent stories more self-consciously work with theme and ideas: “Appletree Acres” and “Trespassing” in particular deliberately explore the idea of changing landscapes and the loss of rural and natural landscapes to development. “Appletree Acres” did this through the development of the narrator’s understanding of her own impact on the world, while in “Trespassing,” a story in which a woman falls in love with, or is seduced by, a creek, I explore the theme using supernatural elements. In that story in particular I wrestled with questions of sexual politics (what does it mean for the woman’s agency that she is seduced? Why is the creek male or male-ish? Is her act a revolt or a betrayal?) I don’t feel like I really satisfactorily resolved those questions (why is the creek male?), but the fact that I struggled with them was a distinct change in my process.
ES: So, your last two comments are eerily prescient in that you’re both talking about sex, power, and female identity, which is where I wanted to end up. Although these collections are so distinct from each other, I came away from both of them with this bone-deep sense that what runs below the surface of them both is an exploration of female desire (even though some narrators are male). I dislike characterizing desire in gendered terms, and at the same time, desire in so many of these stories struck me as deeply intimate and interior, which, for better or worse, reads ‘female’ to me. Jenny, you mentioned Annie in “This.This.This.” I particularly loved the titular line in the collection because it encompasses, as do many of the stories in the collection, the idea that love and desire aren’t one feeling; instead, they’re a bundle of many that can include anger, dislike, and other feelings that aren’t part of the popular cultural conversation about romantic love. Here’s the section:
“Our mouths met, a slippery union that turned predatory, our lips wrestling until we dropped to the floor for can’t-make-it-to-the-bed sex. We fixed our gazes on each other. He looked angry and I felt angry, and it felt good. I thought, This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. When it was over, he rested his head on my chest, and a familiar sadness plunged into my gut. I fiddled with his hair, wishing we could stay there forever and wishing he’d get up. One or both of us would soon feel confused. One or both of us would start acting like an asshole. Or maybe we’d make a go of it, get married, and defer all that for later.”
There’s just something so gritty and real about Annie’s awareness of all that is really present in desire. Then, in a number of your stories, desire was the lens through which characters understood other parts of their lives. The teenage narrator in What Family Does, for example, develops a deeper understanding of her parents’ marriage after sneaking out and meeting Dirt (I love that name), an older bad boy.
And Emily, I loved “Trespassing.” It brings together some of the themes that recurred throughout the collection: a woman making sense of her life through some environmental encounter, a woman faced with choices that can take her away from her family and toward some external obsession (usually in the natural world). The main character, Julia, says several times of her secret exploring trips that she’s trying to ‘find the lay of the land’ which is such an apt metaphor for her, a woman just moved to a new place, and pushes back against the old chestnut about women defining themselves via relationships. Another favorite of mine for these same themes was “The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River” in which the narrator leaves her husband and son to return to research and fieldwork. The narrator says, “This was the story of my life, the one for which I thought Max would eventually forgive me: left my dream job to marry an engineer, had his baby, lived a sensible decade buried in the suburbs and then, against all odds, clawed my way back to work with the pikeminnow, its resurgence mirroring my own.” But there’s a consequence to the choice, of course: her son resents her leaving and then, as a young adult, dies in an accident just as they are beginning to renegotiate the relationship. I had the feeling that even if she’d known the outcome, she still would have chosen to leave.
For me, these stories were like exploded-view drawings in that they took moments that I often want to gloss over—the dark underbelly of love, the drive toward and away from family as an aspect of my identity—and made me look. At the same time, there’s a way that a reader projects her own story onto the one that’s been written, and I wonder if my read of the stories aligns with your intentions. Can you talk a bit about the broader themes that compel or obsess you, and whether you, after writing these stories, came to any deeper understanding about your subject matter after writing about it? I guess what I’m saying is that for me as a reader some of these stories took me back in time as a child, a parent, a partner, a writer, and I felt a lessening of my existential despair because these stories are so honest in their rendering of how complex many of those choices are.
EWW: Oh, man. My obsessions. I feel like my obsessions stomp all over this collection like messy toddlers: all but two of these stories were written after I became a parent, and parenthood has been a fraught enterprise from the start. When my kids were small, I was horrified and fascinated by stories of mothers leaving their families. I loved my little kids so much! And yet I felt so erased by them. The places I wanted to be, the things I wanted to do were in such staunch opposition to what I felt I needed to do as a parent. Four of the stories in my book (“Gustav and Vera,” “Trespassing,” “Endangered Fish,” and “Burning”) feature a mother or mother figure who is left alone at the end of the story, often by design, and always with regret (and yet! She is freeee!). There are also several stories that feature mother-son relationships; my son was in middle and high school while I was writing the later stories in the collection. “Trespassing” in fact began as an essay (and did NOT include my son); in the course of playing around with that essay, this story emerged. You could use it as a field guide to Things I Have Struggled With As a Parent (guns? Check. Kids who won’t play outside? Check. That thing where he runs out into the night barefoot? My son did that. I feel it is important to add that he’s in college now and we get along well). There’s also a LOT in these stories of wanting to be someplace else.
Whoo boy. DID I come to a deeper understanding of any of these obsessions by writing about them? You’d hope the answer would be yes, wouldn’t you? I definitely feel like some of the sharpness of the distress was dispelled. Writing these was kind of like applying an anesthetizing crème (fiction: the other CBD oil!). I think maybe, too, it helped me to see my anger and frustration from the other side, from the point of view of my kids and my husband.
As for the deeper conflicts at work: over the past two decades, as I moved from being a wildlife worker who spent most of her time alone in the mountains to being a homeowner and parent who was basically stuck in the city or suburbs most of the time, I have come to a different way of thinking about wilderness and nature. I used to think wilderness was essential to my happiness, to my well-being, and that everyone felt better for being out of doors. I still believe that on some level, but I know the reality is much more complicated. Those two decades have been pretty crappy ones for the earth as a whole, too, and I have a much more complex and compromised sense of what we’re going to have to live with as things deteriorate further.
JW: Your read of my stories jibes with mine, especially what you say about the messy mixed bag of love and desire. I didn’t set out to explore a specifically female type of desire, but it was—and is—important to me to show women experiencing desire, to acknowledge that sexual desire, in particular, can be a central and complex part of women’s lives. Plenty of writers before me have foregrounded subjective experiences of female desire; this isn’t new ground. But for good or ill, that’s where my writing often goes, even more so in my work since This. This. This. Desire in various forms obsesses me, as does, for that matter, obsession. I’ve joked about calling my next collection Obsession and Other Obsessions.
Other themes I’m drawn to include the wavering nature of reality, the elusiveness of knowledge, and the curious phenomenon of self-sabotage. And, of course, family dysfunction. I think these themes all somehow relate to mental illness, which I hadn’t consciously identified as a primary concern in my work but obviously appears all over it, as many readers of my collection have noted. I’ve dealt with anxiety and depression for much of my life, so those mental states for me form an unremarkable norm: a sort of landscape, the place my characters live--to bring our conversation back to your first question. Some recurring themes arise when I’m not consciously obsessing or even looking.
Exploring these themes is a work-in-progress for me—literally, as they figure prominently in my current project, a novel-in-stories dealing with the madness of grief. Whether I come to a deeper understanding of my subject matter after writing about it is hard to say. Writing gives me a measure of clarity and relief, but I’m skeptical that it brings me lasting wisdom. In any case, it warms my heart that my and Emily W.’s stories lessened your existential despair. That’s no small thing.
ES: And maybe that’s what matters most in the end. Thanks to both of you.
Emily Sinclair’s essays and short stories have been published in The Missouri Review, River Teeth, Colorado Review, The Normal School, and elsewhere. Her work has been acknowledged by Best American Essays, Best of the Net, and anthologized. She lives on an apple orchard in Golden, CO, with her husband, dog, and hens.
Emily Wortman-Wunder is an essayist and fiction writer, with recent work in the Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, Nimrod, High Country News, and elsewhere. Her work explores the emotional resonance of place by drawing on history, ecology, landscape art, and folklore. Not a Thing to Comfort You (University of Iowa Press, 2019) is her first book. Find more at https://emilywortmanwunder.wordpress.com/
Jennifer Wortman is the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love (Split Lip Press, 2019). Her work appears in TriQuarterly, Glimmer Train, The Normal School, DIAGRAM, Copper Nickel, Brevity, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Colorado, where she serves as associate fiction editor for Colorado Review and teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Find more at jenniferwortman.com.