Interview: Janis Hubschman
In her debut short story collection, Take Me With You Next Time, Janis Hubschman illuminates the inner lives of girls and women by guiding the reader through the intricate crevices of her characters’ psyches—the thoughts and feelings that we are loathe to say out loud, out of fear, shame, longing. Hubschman works on her characters with both a flashlight and a scalpel, peeling back layers, peering into the dark corners and under the rugs. In the end, the reader is left with the experience of the ordinary rendered extraordinary. While the locales and characters that populate these stories felt as familiar to me as those I might encounter on a suburban street, I found myself haunted by Hubschman’s stories long after reading them. She has a way of meeting women at the crux of life, and she makes room for us to walk beside them as they move into actions and decisions that push them into the territory of the irrevocable. In the interview below, Janis Hubschman generously shares her thoughts about life, writing, and the characters who speak to her.
—Melissa Benton Barker
Melissa Benton Barker: Having spent many summers with my cousins in suburban New Jersey, I was excited to read a story collection set in this corner of the world, a place that is often dismissed as secondary to the big cities. How did you decide to write about this particular place, and how does sense of place inform these stories?
Janis Hubschman: New Jersey is often the brunt of jokes. I’m glad that you got to appreciate the particular pleasures of the state. I’ve lived most of my life in New Jersey suburbs and have wonderful memories of climbing trees, swimming in my neighborhood lake, joining kickball games in vacant lots, and riding my bicycle everywhere. When most people think about the suburbs, they imagine wholesome Norman Rockwell-like scenes—church services, block parties, backyard barbecues, Little League games—but thanks to writers like John Cheever, Tom Perrotta, and Rick Moody, to name only a few, we’ve been shown a richer, more complicated picture with characters feeling trapped and unfulfilled, misbehaving, and messing up. In my own stories, I wanted to take advantage of the tensions that exist between suburbia’s wholesome ideal and the darker, knottier realities.
MBB: All of the protagonists in this collection are girls and women, and many of the stories deal with the struggles of caregiving, in particular, the relationships between adult women and their aging mothers and/or mothers-in-law. Heretofore, this topic has been underexplored in literature, perhaps because caregiving is typically viewed as “women’s work.” One of your characters struggles to remember the Muriel Rukeyser quote: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about / her life? / The world would split open.” Could you share your thoughts about illuminating this area of women’s experience? And your thoughts about the Rukeyser quote in general?
JH: I agree that caregiving is an underexplored aspect of women’s experience. With my stories, I set out to write truthfully about women’s lives. That means showing women picking up the slack in their families and communities; my characters take care of struggling husbands, elderly parents, difficult in-laws, children, stepchildren, their own pets and other people’s pets—the unpaid physical and emotional labor women are often expected to assume. Sometimes, the caretaking responsibility feels like a trap to my characters. Other times, it helps them feel connected to the people in their lives. In any case, it’s only one part of their story.
The first time I read Muriel Rukeyser’s words in her beautiful poem, “Käthe Kollwitz,” I felt a jolt of recognition, and I wondered who Rukeyser imagined a woman telling her truths to, to make the world “split open.” Certainly not other women. We’re already always telling each other about our lives; we cheer each other on and support each other during tough times, offering resources and advice. At least, that’s been my experience with close friends and sisters. I was struck by a moment in Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary Pelosi in the House, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is rushing off to the House vote on impeachment proceedings, and calls over her shoulder to someone to remember to send her granddaughter’s birthday card. My surprise was not that Pelosi was multitasking at such an important, history-making moment, but that this moment wasn’t cut from the film. It was gratifying to see Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra bearing witness to her powerful mother’s life in a way the world often refuses to do. We need more stories about women that aren’t reductive, stories that reflect in a full and realistic way how women often juggle family needs and professional demands as well as personal concerns. I think most women are hungry for these stories.
MBB: I’d like to share a quote from one of the stories in your collection, “Please See Me.” “That was life: you were rolling along, minding your own business, when your mother phoned to say she had leukemia.” In Take Me With You Next Time, life’s so-called minor dramas are often interrupted by the major dramas, such as death, terminal illness, et cetera. Yet the daily aspects of the characters’ lives are filled with complexity and narrative tension. There are no small actions or decisions. In your writing, how do you balance the so-called big and small moments in your characters’ lives? How do you find the tension in moments that are often written off as “ordinary”?
JH: I like to write about life’s more instructive moments. Characters who are experiencing pressure from multiple directions are compelling. They either make rash or ill-advised choices, or they rise to the occasion in unexpected or surprising ways. Either way, they are presented with the opportunity to discover something important about themselves.
When I wrote the line that you reference from “Please See Me,” I had my own experience in mind as well as my character’s. I began writing that story years before it was published. I struggled for months to finish it. I had trouble finding the right tone; the mother/daughter conflict wouldn’t congeal; and the ending eluded me. I had decided the mother would die at the end, but I couldn’t bring myself to write that scene. I set the story aside. Then, a couple of years later, the COVID pandemic happened. I stocked up on masks and hand sanitizer; my writing class went remote; and I obsessively read the news. All of it was difficult and frightening, and, sometimes, annoying. Then, in April 2020, my mother died of COVID, alone in a hospital, surrounded by medical staff dressed in hazmat suits. My last words to her were shouted through the phone that a compassionate doctor held to her ear. My distress over the pandemic’s inconveniences seemed laughable compared to the acute pain of losing my mother. I thought it might be too difficult to work on my mother/daughter story at this time, but it was comforting to spend the days after her death with a fictional daughter who struggles to truly see her mother’s life before it’s too late.
MBB: Many of your protagonists have similar backgrounds: middle-class, middle-aged white women in suburban New Jersey. Yet, each woman comes alive in the specificity of her circumstances and her psychological contradictions. Most of the time, we think of world-building in terms of setting, but in this book you do phenomenal work building the inner world of your characters. As a writer, how do you approach character, particularly a character’s inner life?
JH: Thank you for the compliment! As a reader and a writer, I prefer complicated and flawed female characters, characters who can’t or won’t fit into the expected mold. I often approach a story with a particular character in mind, asking myself: What if this particular character with this blind spot or this traumatic backstory finds herself in this tricky situation?
My writing process is a bit slow, because I revise as I go. I can’t move forward until I’ve gotten the characters and scenes right. I’m envious of writers who nail their character’s interiority in the early drafts. For me, it’s a long process of thinking and revising and then thinking some more. I give myself multiple opportunities to interrogate my characters. What are they thinking about now? What are they avoiding thinking about? What do they tell themselves about that avoidance? What do they feel now? What do they think about what they feel? Eventually, I arrive at something that feels right for the story and true to life, and only then can I move forward. I’ve learned to trust my process. And, now, I’m a bit suspicious when the story arrives too quickly and easily, although that happens, too, sometimes.
MBB: Many of the stories in this collection end on a hopeful note, one of connection or renewal. Yet the ending of the last story, “After the Party,” to me at least, felt decidedly and somewhat surprisingly dark. Do you have a sense of where you are going when you write your stories, or are you sometimes surprised at where you end up? What was your process in ordering the stories in this collection, and do you have a rationale for why the reader is left on a darker note?
JH: Rarely do I know where a story will end up when I start writing. I might have a vague idea about whether I want a happy or sad ending, but I’m open to letting the story show me where it needs to go. In early drafts, I try not to censor myself. I add many details, action, backstory, and interiority that might not make it into the final draft. Having different options makes for a pleasurable revision process, my favorite part of writing.
I struggled with the ending of “After the Party.” I went back and forth between a hopeful and a tragic outcome. I remember my early draft readers had strong opinions about where the story should end up, and it wasn’t always the ending I showed them. I think this feedback influenced my decision to write an open-ended ending. How readers interpret Wendy’s ability to overcome obstacles and handle adversity in her past will determine their opinion about whether she makes it across the channel and back to Hank.
Some factors like tone, theme, conflict, and the characters’ ages came into play when I ordered the stories in my collection. The two stories with younger protagonists (“Tabor Lake, 1993” and “Wilderness of Ghosts”) are placed back-to-back, as are the two stories with common characters (“Coyote” and “Open House”). I decided to open the collection with a funny story. I like the way humor can disarm people and perhaps make them more receptive to taking on difficult subjects.
I placed “After the Party” at the end of the collection, in part, because it depicts various endings in the characters’ lives: the end of an affair, the end of trust, the end of a career, the end of a happier period in the couple’s marriage. I’m always interested in what happens on the other side of endings. Will the married couple regain their footing and create a better life for themselves, or will they give up on the relationship or themselves? I hope readers will continue to think about Wendy and Hank—and all of my characters—after they close the book.
MBB: I’m always excited to read a debut short story collection. Can you tell our readers a little about your journey to your first book? Do you have any advice for writers who are hoping to publish a debut story collection, particularly for those who have been writing for a while without achieving this particular milestone?
JH: I’ve been writing and publishing stories for two decades. As soon as I’d published enough stories to make up a collection, I gathered them into a manuscript that I submitted to contests. The process was a little haphazard. Over the years, I’d swap out new stories for older ones and submit a revised manuscript. Later, after I’d published more stories, I could be more selective about assembling a manuscript. I read what other writers had to say about how their books came together and was happy to learn that there’s more than one way to assemble and organize a collection.
I would advise writers to write the kinds of stories they enjoy reading, but also to take a few risks. Play with structure and time, try different points of view, and explore new subject matter. The story’s shorter length makes experimentation less daunting. Years ago, I asked an established writer why he thought I might be having trouble getting a collection published. Without knowing my work, aside from the story I’d brought to his workshop, he suggested that I might need to introduce a little variety into the collection, mix things up a little. Many of the short story writers I admire explore the same themes and subjects over and over again in their work, but each story is always surprising.
JANIS HUBSCHMAN has published dozens of stories in literary magazines, including Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Southern Humanities Review, and West Branch. Her stories have won Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award and a first-place award from Glimmer Train. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Glimmer Train Bulletin, and New York Runner. She was the recipient of a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Fiction Scholarship and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives with her husband in New Jersey and currently teaches fiction writing at Montclair State University. Take Me With You Next Time is her first book. Find Janis on Instagram @janis_hub.
MELISSA BENTON BARKER lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with her family. Her writing appears in X-R-A-Y, Pine Hills Review, Lammergeier, Best Small Fictions 2021, and other publications. Her chapbook, Beauty Queen, is available at Bottlecap Press. She coedits the flash fiction section at CRAFT.
