An Interview with Ellen Klages – Metaphors for Short Stories: Petits Fours, Scrimshaw, and Training Bikes

So what exactly is a short story? Ask Ellen Klages, author of novel The Green Glass Sea and numerous pieces of short fiction (collected in Portable Childhoods), and she’ll give you five or six vibrant images to think about.

You are adept at writing from a child’s point of view with a combination of sympathy and special attention to their anxieties. Can you talk about where this empathy comes from: how you develop it, why it’s important?

I think the key is that I’m able to tap into my own childhood, not by looking back from an adult’s perspective, but by inhabiting that former self for a little while.

Example: I used to lie in bed and look at a splotch on the ceiling, shaped vaguely like a brontosaurus, from a piece of Play-Doh that I tossed up to see if it would stick. (Yes. And when it fell, it took some paint with it…) Now, if I can see it, suddenly the rest of the room, the house, etc., becomes accessible—the smell of Hamburger Helper cooking wafts up from the kitchen, and I can hear the sound of my father’s car pulling into the driveway. All those details bring with them an emotional reality as well: what made me happy, what scared me, what gave me comfort. Then my adult self takes notes.

You don’t have children of your own, and yet the titular story of Portable Childhoods is a haunting first-person evocation of the pain and beauty that a parent experiences watching her child develop into a full-fledged human being. What experiences did you draw on to make this story believable?

That story is part of a larger group that took me completely by surprise. I didn’t intend to write them; they happened to me. One morning, I started writing about this kid who wanted to learn how to shuffle. It flowed—my hand just sped across the page. The child came back the next couple of mornings. I had no idea who she was, A neighbor kid, I figured. One day she wanted waffles, and the next she had a report to do for school and needed help. Then on the fourth morning, I watched my hand write, “Hey, mom?” and thought—what!? But there she was, my nine-year-old daughter.

I spent a year with her, writing those vignettes (there are about 60 of them, all told), and it was, I think, the most healing thing I’ve ever done. My own mother and I didn’t get along, and when I wrote child protagonists, I found myself unable to imagine a warm and nurturing and safe parent. But writing from the point of view of the mother, I was just as unable to imagine treating the child unfairly, being mean, not being the responsible grown-up.

They’re probably also the most autobiographical pieces I’ve ever written. All of the details about the narrator’s childhood are true; only the child is imaginary.

On the subject of children, many of your stories in Portable Childhoods have, as the title would suggest, protagonists under the age of 13, yet they aren’t easily classifiable as traditional children’s books. I’m wondering if that leads to any challenges or amusing moments in selling or marketing.

I just write what I write, and let other people sort out what to call it. I rather like not being classifiable. It leaves me free to write whatever I want.

But that does sometimes lead to challenges when I want someone to buy the story. I wrote a short story, “The Green Glass Sea,” in 2002, I think. I sent it out to several magazines, and no one wanted it. One editor sent me the nicest rejection I’ve ever gotten, saying that it was a great story, but he couldn’t buy it because it wasn’t science fiction.

It’s a story about two girls having a birthday party on the Trinity test site, the morning that the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, but before the news is public. It’s fiction about science. But that’s not the same as science fiction, I was told. I did eventually sell it, to an online SF magazine, but in the meantime, I’d expanded it into a novel, which Viking bought. The Green Glass Sea was published in 2006—as a children’s book. The last chapter is, more or less, the short story. (Just to finish the odd tale, the short story will be reprinted in a horror anthology, Poe’s Children, later this year.)

So that one story has been categorized as science fiction, not science fiction, horror, children’s, and YA.

I don’t think of my short fiction as YA, although I think most of it is accessible to non-adult readers. But because of the novel, I’m now best known as a children’s/YA author, so Portable Childhoods is in some middle-school libraries, and I’ve had to warn teachers that a few stories—“Guy’s Day Out” and “Triangle”—are really not for kids.

The preponderance of young girls in your short fiction makes me wonder what you were like as a kid. Did you write, tell stories, have stories told or read to you? What influences from your own childhood have you found especially portable into your current fiction?

I write about young girls in part because that was my experience, and in part because, when I was a kid, it seemed like all the interesting stories were about boys.

I wasn’t a boy. But I wasn’t a traditional girl, either. I was just a kid. And I hope that the characters in my stories reflect that.

I learned to read when I was not quite four, and have been absorbing any printed matter ever since. I wrote stories and poems and the occasional play in elementary school. I wrote a novel called G.I.P.E.T. when I was in junior high (no, no one can see it), and wrote short stories (in lower case) in high school and college. Then I stopped for twenty years because I had no idea what the next step was. I published my first short story when I was 45.

My influences are, in no particular order: Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Superman comics, Chas Addams cartoons, The Twilight Zone, John D. MacDonald, Kurt Vonnegut, Modesty Blaise, Kelly Link, Roald Dahl, and J. D. Salinger.

In Portable Childhoods, there’s an obvious engagement with queer themes, since several of the stories feature gay characters. Do you identify as a queer (or gay or lesbian or bisexual, etc.) writer, meaning a person committed to exploring those identities in his or her writing?

No, not really. I’m gay, but I’ve never felt a need to exclaim that publicly, nor hide it. It’s just another facet of my life. I’m gay, I have green eyes, I collect little lead people, I write science fiction, I’m short, I’m from Ohio. I’ve never considered myself political.

Stories arise from a lot of different places, a lot of different motives. Some are planned; others are happy accidents, like my imaginary child. And some are born because there’s an opportunity, which is the case with “Triangle” and “Time Gypsy.” I began writing each of them because a friend was editing a gay-themed anthology and asked me if I wanted to contribute. They grew from there.

The final sentence of your afterword in Portable Childhoods states, “Many of my stories appear to have happy endings.” What were you thinking when you wrote this conclusion?

In writing a short story, I walk a fine line between telling too little and telling too much. What I want to do is end the story with a little ambiguity, just enough to make you wonder what happens next. My favorite example of this is “Basement Magic.” Mary Louise escapes her wicked stepmother and goes off to live with Ruby. Yea! Happy ending!

But she’s a mouse, at least for the time being. And what’s Ruby going to do when she gets home and finds a mouse in her pocket? Raise it like Stuart Little? Swat at it with a broom? Set out a trap? What happens when/if Mary Louise turns back into a girl? Is that an even happier ending? Or does her father come home from his business trip and find his wife unable to speak and his daughter missing and call the police, who go looking for her and find her at Ruby’s, with no rational explanation?

Endings are tricky, and last sentences are even trickier. That line is the last sentence in the collection, because, I hope, it will leave the reader wondering—and wanting more.

What’s your perspective on your status as an author? I mean…is it your bringing-home-the-bacon job, a sacred calling, a hobby, a vice, a diversion, what you’d rather be doing? Is it the way that you earn your primary income? If not, how does it fit into what you do day to day job-wise?

All of the above. (Except sacred calling. Not sure I’d go that far.) I get paid for it, which is a lovely thing, since I’m pretty much unemployable at this point in my life. I’m too used to working at home, on my own schedule (and in my jammies, if I want), to ever go back to a 9-to-5 job. It used to be a hobby, isn’t anymore. That has its pluses and minuses. I still write mostly for myself, for my own amusement, but often to someone else’s deadline. It’s definitely not a vice. Snood is a vice.

No matter what portion of one’s life writing takes up, writers always have writing habits and rituals that help channel inspiration and produce their best work. Give us a glimpse into a typical writing day in terms of organization, habits, goals.

It depends on what phase of the process I’m in. Every day I write three pages (about 1000 words, in my handwriting) in a Big Chief tablet, an exercise from The Artist’s Way called “Morning Pages.” I’ve been doing it for 11 years now. The current notebook is #112. Most days it’s just a brain blurt, but when I’m in the middle of a story I’ll sometimes use that exercise to try out a scene or a point-of-view shift, or just scribble and free associate in a character’s voice to try to get to the nugget, the heart of the story that I know is in there somewhere. I’ve also mined those pages for snippets of description that are exactly what a story needs. The highway scene in “A Taste of Summer” came from some Morning Pages that I’d written three years before. It’s all material.

When I’m working on a specific story (or a part of a novel), I write my first drafts in longhand, on wide-lined notebook paper, with a 1.0 mm UniBall gel pen. (I can’t compose on a keyboard. Too linear or something. First drafts need to run free…) I write anywhere but home—coffee shops, usually. There are a dozen within walking distance of my house. I aspire to having a writing routine, but I doubt I’ll achieve it. My process is as messy as my office.

Once I’ve got a draft, I type it into my laptop, editing as I go. I type at home, because the tables in coffee shops are never the right height, and my neck gets stiff very easily. I’ve trained myself to save the file every ten minutes, and as a story begins to gel and get longer, I also save to a portable USB drive. When I leave the house, the laptop stays on my desk and the drive goes with me. If anything happens, one of them should be safe. It begins to feel like the logic problem of the goose and the fox and the bag of grain, but I’ve never lost a story.

What appeals to you about the short story as a fictional form?

Some people seem to view short stories as practice for writing novels, for “real” writing, as if short stories were a bike with training wheels. But I think they’re a separate art form.

I love short stories. They’re like scrimshaw or tiny lacquered boxes. They are all about detail, for me, finding a way to convey as much as possible in a very few words.

I didn’t think I’d ever write a novel. Too long, too complicated. I have now written two; they both arose out of the same short story. In the first drafts, I wrote each chapter as if it were a short story, complete in and of itself, in terms of language and structure (although not plot), and eventually wove them together.

Short stories aren’t appetizers to the entrée of a novel. They’re exquisite pastries, little treats that can be savored in small, slow bites.

To find out more about Ellen Klages and her work, you can visit her website at ellenklages.com.