This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emma Smith-Stevens, whose short story collection Greyhounds is out today from Dzanc Books. The stories of Greyhounds are populated by people who are, in one way or another, alone. There is the woman reminiscing about a bygone affair with a friend on the eve of his nuptials, the boy sneaking around in search of a contraband can of Coca Cola, the couple whose quarantined Betta fish become a metaphor for how they feel about each other. But being alone doesn’t necessarily equate to being lonely. Each of the characters Smith-Stevens sketches is in process, is going somewhere, as in the case of Grant, who finds himself thinking of childhood trips to church in rural Indiana while standing on a subway platform in New York. “Only now does he think of the Bible, in a way that had never occurred to him back at church with his parents—of Moses, parting the seas. That scene wasn’t finished, though. The seas must’ve come back together eventually. And then what?” Deesha Philyaw calls Greyhounds a “simply stunning collection.” And Booklist praises the book for being “threaded with dark humor and rendered with incisive prose.” Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of a novel, The Australian (Dzanc Books, 2017). Her writing has been published in Bomb, Lit Hub, Catapult, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two street dogs from Baku, Azerbaijan.
Emma Smith-Stevens, author of Greyhounds.
1. How long did it take you to write Greyhounds?
I wrote much of Greyhounds simultaneously with my first book, The Australian, a novel. I’d written the last page of The Australian when I’d written only fifteen pages of the beginning, and I hadn’t a clue how to write to that ending.
If my novel lowered me into the molten metal of anxiety, Greyhounds welded me free. Writing short stories imparted something necessary that soothed the gaping unknowns of my novel, offering experiences of completion. When The Australian felt fragile, terrifyingly so, I’d dive into Greyhounds, let myself sink, [and] emerge smooth, a dolphin in a dream.
The Australian was published in 2017. Over the next five or so years, alongside essays and other short fiction and humor pieces, I finished several iterations of Greyhounds. The book continuously transformed with the addition of new stories that evolved the context of them all. I never wanted Greyhounds to end. I knew it was complete about fourteen years after I started, when the book kept its promise to tell the truth about the struggle between one person and another, or between dueling aspects of one person—like stray dogs or wrestlers or warlords.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
My highest ambition is for Greyhounds to render relationships closer to the light of love, scrutiny, inspection, celebration—between lovers, sisters, neighbors, friends. These stories include things that are uncomfortable to talk or even think about, situations “in poor taste” (as I was once told about a story in the book) and “private.” Just as much as illuminating neglected corners of reality, I hope these elements make the book funny.
The idea of sharing these stories with someone who might connect with them, works animated with the pulp that animates me, is exhilarating, but also tough. Short stories, more than perhaps any other form of fiction, tend to inspire readers to believe that the characters are you. What horrors and terrible decisions, sex acts and indiscretions, would be attributed to me?
I was anxious about this stuff. Now, though—whether it’s a yeast infection from having lots of sex in a situationship or a Betta fish that can’t carry the weight of salvaging a marriage—bring it on. I created these stories, so yes, they are me. All of them, in every way except the facts. I’m here, and you needn’t feel weird. I don’t. Not anymore.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Starting the year before I began the University of Florida’s MFA program in fiction writing in 2013 and throughout my time in the program, I was an everyday writer. Then, I worked a nine-to-five at a tech startup. My five years in Gainesville, Florida, were among the happiest of my life. My boyfriend, now my husband, had just moved in with me. We’d adopted a second dog. I had deep and loyal friendships and a cast of fascinating, talented, and kind friends with whom to laugh and share writing.
Around the time I completed grad school, I began feeling unusually tired, unable to stay at a party past 9 PM, for example. My feet, ears, or hands occasionally throbbed, red-purple, veins bulging, ferociously hot to the touch. I went to my doctor. He diagnosed me with an exceedingly rare neurovascular condition but ruled out immediately life-threatening causes.
I’d grown up and struggled most of my adulthood thus far with severe bipolar disorder. Finally, I thought, I was free. As for the strange symptoms and fatigue, I thought, “Well, this must be what happens when you turn thirty.” Then came the sickness that has debilitated me to varying degrees for over a decade, while organs have suffered damage and my brain has become inflamed and landed me in the hospital twice, arthritis and tendonitis making a feat of each step.
I woke up on December 15, 2015, in the worst pain of my life. Stubborn and hopeful, I began my dream job teaching in a college for incarcerated students. First, I was treated for two undiagnosed tickborne diseases, but they had already ignited three autoimmune conditions and myriad complications. After one incredible semester, I stepped away from the classroom. In the last stretch of writing Greyhounds, rhythms, voices, versions of myself I used to be or never dared become kept visiting; and when I could, I continued adding new stories and writing new versions of old ones, updated to mirror my mind as it had become.
Now, I write in storms. In circles. Too much. Not enough. Always and never as my new self. I write slowly, illustrated letters to friends and my husband, and quick emails to myself. I write stories until they sting too much to keep going. I take a break, I return to my laptop, or I don’t.
In high school, I was a graphomaniac, running out of paper to fill with poems and missives, scrawling in the margins of newspapers and magazines, writing on napkins and coffee cups in coffee shops, sitting in classes penning long ribbons of text along the inside of my left forearm. The compulsion felt out of control, but that writing had the most natural and sustained flow I’ve ever experienced.
4. What are you reading right now?
Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) (Orion Press, 1959), a searing portrait of brutality, tragedy, tenderness, agony, and conformity. The horror that we have and do perpetrate against one another is starkly revealed, in this case through Levi’s imprisonment. His story is terrifying, gutting, incredibly hard to take in—so much so, I often need to put the book down and focus on my breathing. I feel guilty. Levi, the others in the death and work camps, had nowhere else to look.
Survival in Auschwitz enhances the silence [of] my Jewish grandparents and many other Jews closer to the Holocaust [around this part of history]. I think about evil—that it exists, appearing not just ordinary but intentionally mundane, boring to the point of [inducing] numbness: synced, endlessly repetitive in its songs, cultureless except for the monotone song of conformity, its victories tallied in bones.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Peter Gizzi’s poetry is shaped by magical yet understated and welcome returns of phrases and visions. Each line, stanza, poem is sharp, intense, visceral. His work will cut you open and sew you up, stretch your mind until it can catch the beauty of his loving intention. Gizzi’s poem “A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me” is among my favorite poems. If you told me you would read it but you needed one of my molars to do so, I would provide one immediately and without question.
Some other writers who, like Gizzi, have enthusiastic and devoted readerships that I think should multiply toward the infinitude of talent they embody are Joy Williams, Mary Robison, Javier Marías, Yiyun Li, Edwidge Danticat, and the late poet Jack Spicer.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Illness, which—in a life of joys and privileges and love, yes, but also profound traumas and brutality—is the worst thing ever to happen to me. Every day I work to connect to a self, but the self I’m bound to no longer feels like my own.
At the same time, I am still me in the ways that count most. I love and hope and pray my secular prayers; I read as much as I’m able and write whenever I can; I find joy in nature and others’ laughter at my jokes and my dogs. I joke, I’m funny, and as long as that’s the case, it’s enough. My love for my husband inspires the best in me.
7. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book?
My first memory connected to greyhounds—the dog breed that would inspire the book—is a distant recollection of sitting in the back seat of a friend’s parents’ station wagon and learning that dogs were forced to chase mechanical rabbits until they could run no more. Sometimes they even died. It took all my might not to cry. That image never left me: Dogs running until they fell to the dust and were then discarded. When I wrote Greyhounds, that imagery came back to me, desperate, hungry, hollow, obsessed, dying. Later I was relieved to find that some, like my landlord’s dog, were rescued.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Greyhounds, what would you say?
Don’t fear the past. Don’t be afraid of writing as a woman with a body. Don’t run from terrible experiences or embarrassment. Don’t worry that humor in fiction makes it less good, on some pretentious and contrived terms I don’t care about anyway. Don’t count on validation from others—especially mid-story. Writing with confidence makes for better writing, even if the confidence is misplaced. Pretend this is just for you. What better use of creativity [is there] than to feed your hunger? To satisfy your thirst?
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Greyhounds?
[Reading a] section of Craigslist personal ads [called] Missed Connections, where people who felt a connection with someone they didn’t know well, usually someone they met or glimpsed in passing, [write missives]: “You were wearing a blue camisole and had the smile of an angel,” “you helped my mother load plants into her hatchback at Home Depot,” “you stepped on my foot and I cursed you out, but I’m sorry, you didn’t deserve it—please let me make it up to you.” The humanity, chance, grace, and hope of these miniature narratives makes me cry. I wonder if I’m alone in that, but I don’t care. It’s moving and beautiful—the best of us.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
David Leavitt, my professor in graduate school, wrote on the last page of a short story of mine: “Don’t flinch.”
