Interview: Amy Stuber
There’s a tipping point in life when a possibility becomes a certainty, and a metaphorical crossroads becomes a permanent change of direction. Amy Stuber is adept at finding pivotal moments in her fiction, choices that simultaneously disrupt expectations and invigorate a story.
Stuber’s debut collection, Sad Grownups, is being published this fall by Stillhouse Press, but she is not a newcomer to the short fiction genre. Gradually and steadily, Stuber is building an impressive, award-winning catalog of work grounded in a thoughtful and empathetic writing style. This wide-ranging selection of her tales features fluid, complicated story arcs, and personalities with complicated lives. Stuber traces the full dimensions of contemporary social landscapes, from exultant highs to traumatic lows.
“Being an adult in the world is a wilderness…sometimes its boundlessness feels confining,” Stuber shares in this interview. Many of the characters in Sad Grownups are struggling to define themselves, or shaking off past disappointments. They’re searching for physical and emotional landmarks as they accumulate new jobs, new relationships, and new identities. Occasionally, these aspirants are so busy pursuing their goals that they become heedless or exploitive of vulnerable individuals around them, and the most memorable scenes occur when the two groups collide.
In Sad Grownups, Stuber demonstrates her ability to use structure and voice in dynamic and surprising ways. She isn’t afraid to bend a timeline, swap protagonists, deconstruct her own plots, or to challenge conventional thinking as she leads the reader through a series of shifts in perspective. The book opens with “Day Hike,” a multilayered exploration of tiny fractures that break apart relationships. In “Day Hike,” Stuber describes action from both third-person and first-person points of view, a narrative strategy known as metalepsis in which the storyteller appears in more than one role. Stuber’s prose technique never stumbles; she moves between story levels with the sure-footed precision of an alpine climber.
As a fan of short fiction, and of the metafictional flourishes in Sad Grownups particularly, I was delighted to correspond with Stuber by email. She generously shared insights on how she generates ideas, sharpens descriptions, and tackles the challenges of revision. Because Amy Stuber is an editor at Split Lip Magazine, we also discussed what editing has taught her about writing.
—K Roberts
K Roberts: CRAFT has published a series of critical essays on the Art of the Opening. In one installment, Albert Liau quotes an interview between Richard Powers and Mitzi Rapkin, where Powers said he strives for “a kind of microcosm of everything that’s going to unfold…a fractal version of the novel,” adding, “but it also has to seem simple and transparent.” Amy, your openings achieve those goals, and more. They are intriguing and complex. Can we spend time discussing how you arrive at the right mix? Does the beginning come to you early in the process, or after you have worked out the rest of the narrative?
Amy Stuber: I really appreciate what Powers says about the opening having a “seed” or a “fractal version…compressed.” I love thinking of an opening in that way, and I’m glad to hear my opening sentences came across as complex.
The truth is that I often almost hear an opening sentence or a few sentences on repeat in my head before I start a story, either when I’m walking or driving. It’s basically like I’m hearing something down a hallway and walking toward it. I’m not trying to inject too much mysticism or magic into the process, but that’s usually how a story starts for me: with a feeling that’s gathering peripherally for a few hours or days, and then a first sentence or paragraph shows up, and I write it down. And then I’m left wondering, Okay, what the hell is this?, like I’ve come upon a strange object or scene and have to discern its logic.
The story “Dead Animals” starts with this sentence: “Take me on a journey. Make me feel something. Surprise me. Make me change. Okay. Okay.”
This opening occurred to me disconnected from narrative, character, plot, et cetera. I wrote it down and then thought about it for a few days: Who is this? What is happening? What is the emotion and place? Those first phrases then connected sort of inexplicably with a scene that happened in real life: our neighbor’s cat being hit by a car on the street in front of my kids. The story’s pieces came together from there. So, I guess the fact is that my openings, while a starting point, are often not intentional with regard to setting the stage for what’s to come, but I do think whatever feeling that first sentence gives me when it comes pervades the entire story.
KR: I admire so much how details give your characters a three-dimensional presence. There are many examples, especially in “LittleWomenHouse,” your prize-winning story at Northwest Review. The scenario is this: Four actresses are confined in an isolated house, making Instagram and TikTok content that reenacts Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War era novel. Due to commercial pressures from the producers, and voyeuristic comments from the public, a warped sense of historical accuracy invades the production. The cast begins to respond or rebel in subtle ways, each according to her own personality. During one free weekend, “Jo,” playing the writer, allows her sister “Beth” to decorate her arms with henna tattoos shaped like typewriters. Perhaps it’s their shared private joke about anachronisms, or an outward reminder of their commitment to the original intentions of the production. Either way, the moment is vivid, intimate, and physical. How do you discover these nuances—do you keep a list of ideas, or research when something extra is needed?
AS: As a reader, I love specificity. Without it, the world of a story or a book doesn’t feel fully realized or unique enough. So, I do try to think about details as I write, and they are often random bits gathered from life: things seen, heard, read. I don’t keep a running list. I walk a lot, and I look at people’s houses and apartments and imagine the inner lives of everyone I see, and, without thinking about it, stockpile the details.
I saw the movie Little Women with my daughter who was probably thirteen or fourteen at the time. It was at the height of teenagers living in TikTok houses and creating endless content. We went into the movie at a massive theater with its big wraparound suburban parking lot. We walked out to the car talking about these characters, the antiquity of all of it, the contrast to now, and my car was running. I’d left it on the whole time, for almost three hours. I felt so foolish, but it also right then gave me this idea of the clash of modernity and premodernity: the Little Women in cars, the Little Women sitting in hot tubs. I don’t know. I imagined these women in this house, what the house would look like, what they would do, how this blend would make them act, what their backstories were. That’s maybe the most fun part of writing for me: trying to inhabit people and see their worlds down to the details and then, when revising, trying to increase the specificity and uniqueness of the details and the words that describe them. Then Northwest Review’s contest had a climate fiction element, so I added that into the story, and that seemed to add the layer the story was missing.
Mainly, for me, adding details is kind of a spackling process to make a character lived-in and real and to up the emotion of a story, to make it so it’s clear this vision of the world belongs specifically to one character and could not belong to anyone else.
KR: In another past article at CRAFT, Laura Spence-Ash discusses how multiple storylines can elaborate backstory. This aspect of your story “Wizards of the Coast” stood out for me, enhancing the suspense. After describing the primary setting, a children’s party, you shift into the perspective of a vagrant with dubious intentions sneaking up the hill toward them. Rather than burden the action with exposition, you slip important information to the reader via the character’s thoughts. In “Our Female Geniuses,” the close-third-person perspective peers over a different character’s shoulder every few moments. The story advances through scene changes, as in a movie. When do you decide multiple perspectives are needed? Does this choice make creating structure easier, or more challenging?
AS: For a while, I was endlessly doing triptychs without even realizing it. But I was fascinated with the idea of seeing a story from multiple perspectives and how that approach could really enhance the story’s meaning. With “Our Female Geniuses,” I wanted the two women on the balcony to function as a kind of chorus in the story, to be these drunken truth tellers, revealing the vapidity and wrongness of this high school auction—and they were really fun to write. With “Wizards of the Coast,” I wanted the man who was unhoused to be a foil showing how cutting off from convention and expectation affected this one person—in opposition to the middle-aged people who are a bit stuck fixating on being perceived versus perceiving.
In some of the more recent stories in the collection, that inclination to look at a story from multiple perspectives takes a slightly different shape and comes in the form of metanarrative.
KR: We hear a lot about how urban centers like New York and Los Angeles dominate what we see in media and popular culture, but you live in the Great Plains. Does that background influence your sensibility as a writer? Was a sense of place a significant element in creating this book? If so, did that intent affect locations, pacing, and rhythms, or was it more of an intangible influence?
AS: I live in Kansas and spend a few weeks a year in California. Most of the stories in this book are set in those two states. My work is incredibly influenced by the natural world and a connection to place. I do think being from a “flyover” place has made me more focused on tiny details, on really looking for meaning in places where others might not find meaning or importance. I like spending a lot of time in a place that isn’t the place and really studying all the in-between places in the in-between place itself. My work is probably too “quiet” at times, and I do think that’s a byproduct, in part, of being a Midwesterner.
KR: Amy, I couldn’t help but notice your online résumé shows a sudden burst of increased activity around 2018. Since then, you’ve averaged seven to twelve publications a year. I’m curious about what happened to make your career take flight. Sad Grownups is an unusually large first collection, with seventeen stories spanning five years, yet you published an astonishing sixty stories during the same period. How do you stay so prolific over long periods of time?
AS: I started writing and publishing in the early 1990s. I finished a PhD in 1998, went on the academic job market, got a teaching job, then got a tenure-track teaching job, moved twice, started working full-time outside of academia, moved again, had a child, had another child. I was about forty-five before I looked up and thought, Wait, didn’t I used to be a writer? It wasn’t that I hadn’t written at all, but it had been extremely sporadic. I wrote a couple of stories in 2015, though, and placed one in the New England Review (“Tell Me How to Do This”) and one in Faultline (“Wizards of the Coast”) and that was a real turning point in terms of my own thinking about finding time to write. I had dropped down to part-time work a year after my first child was born but went back up to full-time, and there were all those incredibly full days of work, kids, work, kids, clean, cook, laundry, work. It’s nothing unique—so many people do this and far more. But when your life is this programmed, it’s really challenging to find any headspace to allow for anything that’s not truly necessary.
Around this time, I started reading more flash fiction, and writing 500–1000 words felt doable. Thinking of a character or a situation or a setting on a walk or after kid drop-off but before a meeting, writing it down quickly, revisiting it that night, that felt doable. I didn’t have to invest weeks on some sustained story arc. A flash required less regimented, devoted time and mental space.
So, I started writing a lot of flash and working as a flash reader and then editor for Split Lip Magazine. Becoming a part of that community of readers and writers was life-changing because it got me to read current work really regularly, and, through Split Lip, I created these really strong friendships with other writers.
But I will say the kind of almost-mania that buzzed around me when I wrote two novels in three years (they didn’t go anywhere, by the way, but maybe they will eventually) is not something I’d recommend. In the last year, I’ve slowed down and have written far less because of work and book-release-related work, which is fine and even good.
KR: When you’re reading for your own enjoyment, which authors or genres do you turn to? I noticed references to poems in “The Last Summer,” and one story mentions Edward Abbey. Do other writers provide a jumping-off point? Do you find inspiration in other art forms?
AS: I go to art galleries really any time I can and am heavily influenced by paintings and photography. There was a period twenty years ago when I used photos—Joel Sternfeld, Vivian Maier, for example—as jumping-off points for stories when I felt stuck. I just saw an incredible Joan Jonas exhibit at MOMA, and her work has been floating around in my head and will probably emerge in something I write.
Music and poetry are also hugely influential. I’ve been obsessed with music since I was a kid and began record collecting by ordering six albums for six cents. My sister immediately put them in the trash because we’d recently been indoctrinated by some fundamentalists to think the devil was working through music, and I was so sad to see my new Rush and AC/DC records crushed. But music is omnipresent for me, and I often have one album or song on repeat when writing a story. I listened to Pharoah Sanders while trying to write the second novel I mentioned. “People’s Parties” in this collection was, unsurprisingly, written while listening to Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark on repeat. And “The Last Summer,” the final story in this book, was the byproduct of deciding to spend a few weeks picking up an old Norton Anthology every day, opening to a random page, and reading whatever I opened to.
I will say I’ve read far less in the last five years than I used to. I have gotten into the habit of reading the first sixty pages of a novel and then stopping. I think life has been intense emotionally, and the world is overwhelming on many days, and I’m too habituated to turning to my phone during downtime. It’s something I’m actively working on changing, but I’m also trying to accept that reading sixty pages of something is still reading, and finishing everything is not required.
I do think short stories are a good antidote to the flight of thought that often takes me out of novels. I just read this year’s Best American Short Stories collection, and it has a lot of good stories. I’ll read almost any short story collection I see at the library and, when I can, buy them.
KR: You’ve included in the book’s acknowledgments a note of thanks to literary magazine editors for their input. What does an editor bring to the table that can help a writer in the revision process? And as you mentioned, you’re also an editor at Split Lip Magazine. What have you learned about editing, and how has this new knowledge informed your own writing process?
AS: I’ve been lucky enough to work with so many incredible journal editors. There are very few times that I do not take the suggestions of an editor. I can remember the editors at CRAFT, for example, pointing out my tendency to repeat this one sentence construction over and over. I was so grateful they alerted me to that repetition because I would never have noticed it in my own work—I was too close to it.
Most editors are doing this work on a volunteer basis, often mainly for the love of the work or for the desire to be part of a community of people who care about putting more art into the world. Editorial work is also often outside the engines of capitalism, and I love that.
I have learned so much as an editor for Split Lip. Sifting through probably thousands of flash fictions, I’ve noticed an issue I struggle with a lot in my work: presenting a situation instead of a story—a good idea that’s just a static concept. Another common issue is work that’s well written, well paced, and interesting, but lacks emotional depth. This issue often happens when it’s just a draft, and the author hasn’t sat with it long enough—hasn’t thought about it or let it develop enough prior to writing or hasn’t revised enough. Flash has this sort of mystical quality where people think they can sit down and write it “in a flash” and then not revise. Flash can be written quickly, but if it didn’t brew enough prior to writing, if you don’t think about it enough to really allow the character(s) to be full and deep, then the story often doesn’t work. So, these are lessons I needed in my own work, and I’m constantly thinking about them and trying to apply them.
KR: Could you share with us the road to publication of Sad Grownups? What were the challenges? Are there words of advice, or words of caution, you might have for other writers who are about to make that journey?
AS: Persistence? Practice? Those are my best pieces of advice. As I mentioned, I’ve been writing for several decades. I saw a lot of people get books, win prizes, get publications I desperately wanted, too. I came very close to selling earlier collections to small presses many times and then didn’t. The process of trying to write and publish in places that accept maybe one percent of the work submitted can be very demoralizing.
I’m actually so happy to be “debuting” with a collection instead of a novel and with this collection in particular, as it represents work I’ve gathered mostly in the last five years. Big Publishing really sells writers on this idea that short stories aren’t enough, and I’m happy to be—in my own tiny way—pushing against that narrative. I love short stories. I love reading them and writing them. I love how they can be more jewellike, more poetic, very focused on words and sentences, less beholden to plot, and just more concentrated.
I guess I would say: if you’re publishing a little and getting decent enough feedback, keep going. Realistically, there are only so many books and stories that will get published, so you also have to be okay with the element of luck that comes along with publishing and be ready for tons of rejection. You might get the publications you want, and you might not, but if you like writing, keep writing.
I’d love to publish another book after this one, of course, but I also want to keep getting better at writing. I think The Bluest Eye is such a beautifully written and kind of perfect book. It has poetry and voice and humor and movement and message and emotion and everything. I taught it for many years. Writing a book that’s three percent as good as that would make me happy.
AMY STUBER is the author of the short story collection, Sad Grownups (Stillhouse Press, 2024). Her writing has appeared in New England Review, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, American Short Fiction, Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the 2023 William Peden Prize from The Missouri Review and the 2021 Fiction Prize from Northwest Review. She serves as an editor for Split Lip Magazine. Find Amy on Twitter @amy_stuber_.
K ROBERTS has essays in print and forthcoming with journals at Salem State University, Kent State University, and the University of Canberra, and with the international travel journal Panorama. The writer’s creative work appears in literary magazines in Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, Germany, Indonesia, and the United States. Roberts is a reader for CRAFT.
