Interview: Naomi Cohn

Naomi Cohn was sighted until the age of thirty, when her vision began to decline. Now in her sixties, her pathological myopia has progressed to the point that she is legally blind. One of the ten percent of blind…
Naomi Cohn was sighted until the age of thirty, when her vision began to decline. Now in her sixties, her pathological myopia has progressed to the point that she is legally blind. One of the ten percent of blind…
Chapter One When Lena climbs off the bus in the predawn dark of a small mountain town she doesn’t know the name of, she’s not thinking about her home now some seven hundred miles behind her; she’s not thinking…
When I signed the contract to publish my novel-in-stories, Choose This Now, with Noemi Press, I asked to include a clause that the press would make a “good faith effort” to publish it as an audiobook too. They’d never…
I should have noticed when my wedding ring fell out of my pocket. I should have heard it strike and plink on the concrete floor in Big Willie’s dressing room behind the bar when I slung my jacket over…
Cynthia Marie Hoffman and Emily Costa are both authors of memoirs about obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Costa’s Until It Feels Right is a diary-style account of intensive three-week therapy for OCD. Hoffman’s Exploding Head is a collection of prose poems…
Kimberly King Parsons, whose sparkling debut novel We Were the Universe is a USA Today national bestseller, is serving as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2024 First Chapters Contest. From the outset, Associate Editor Rowena Leong Singer was…
Deesha Philyaw, acclaimed author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, is graciously serving as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2024 Short Fiction Prize. In this interview conducted over email, Editor in Chief Courtney Harler asks Deesha to…
Trula be gone, selfish-flown some say or eyeing a new man. I say, Tru chugged by her own factory steam—didn’t one of us help or remind her of the mold blooming up the sides of her curtainless house—that Judson…
Essay by Rachel León • I met Nora Decter over Zoom when we were tasked to outline her forthcoming novel, What’s Not Mine. We were both fellows in Stony Brook University’s BookEnds program, paired to work together on our…
“It is possible to control Los Angeles by being the one with the most vivid fantasy about it.” —Theresa Duncan, The Wit of the Staircase 1992 My brother joined the world’s smallest cult. There were precisely two members:…
During a break in a writing workshop, a fellow writer and friend shared that she’d been self-conscious choosing her outfit that day, on account of the “well-observed details” about my characters’ attire. Until her comment, I had not noticed my noticing, and assumed everyone else paid as much attention to garments as I do. I am not possessed of the gift Mary Gaitskill has for faces, for her descriptions that are not technically precise but evoke a character like an abstract painter might suggest an entire form with a few strokes of the brush. But clothes have often served as substitute.
Clothing is one of the ultimate signifiers—communicating culture, wealth, age, gender expression, sexual proclivities, and the subtlest matters of taste and status. In many cases, clothing is uniquely self-expressive, reflecting not only interior states but also the way a person wishes to be seen. The narrator’s or other character’s judgments of a character’s clothing also provide a rich opportunity for a writer.
Clothing plays a crucial role in The Golden Suicides, a book in part inspired by a true story, with a main character whose real-life counterpart possessed timeless style—effortless and enviably cool. I wanted to capture the spirit of what that person might have worn, without aping the specifics. In one of the earliest drafts of the novel, the character Simone is introduced wearing “high-waisted trouser jeans—which were not in vogue at the time, making them more sophisticated on her—and a linen button-down with a low-cut neckline, revealing a long thin necklace with a small gold arrowhead at the end, and a shorter necklace with a bar that looked like it had an inscription I couldn’t read.” Passable, I suppose, but not evocative and a bit anachronistic.
At one point in my writing, I returned to The Great Gatsby and the scene where Daisy is introduced. Like Gatsby (to say “like Gatsby’’—oh, what a sense of humor!), The Golden Suicides is narrated by a secondary character and tells the story of a doomed couple from a distance. On this read, I noticed the way Fitzgerald pays extra attention to the introduction of Daisy and Jordan on the divan, the rise and fall of the fluttering white dresses. I reconsidered the importance of that introductory moment, the way each choice—including clothing—informed the entire character.
In the later revisions of The Golden Suicides, Simone is introduced wearing a “crushed velvet jacket the color of malachite, the shoulders adorned with bronze epaulets, a general from the secret kingdom of women.” The narrator’s attire—a foil to Simone’s throughout the novel—was not originally described in the scene at all. It was only in later drafts we learn the narrator had planned to wear her “peach-colored crocheted cardigan with a daisy on the breast,” but instead meets Simone while still dressed as an ass for the school production of Don Quixote, in jodhpurs and a sweat-stained shirt, a sewn-on tail she has to tuck between her legs. Those were all missed opportunities in earlier versions.
But why a malachite jacket with epaulets? From where does such an improbable garment arise? That is the thing about craft: it can give you tools to know what you might need to do, but the specifics often arise from that other, mysterious place. I could analyze the literary merits of that choice—a garment both soft and strong, if slightly ridiculous—but it just felt right. The person who inspired the character deserved better than a linen shirt.
MELISSA YANCY’s story collection, Dog Years (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), was winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and a California Book Award and was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, and many other journals. The recipient of an NEA fellowship, Yancy works and lives in Los Angeles. Find her on Twitter @melyancy.