What a great pleasure to interview author/writing instructor Shannon Robinson. Her just-launched story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin (Press 53), is weird, exciting, exuberant, tender, and so much more. No matter how hard a reader may try not to notice, she will likely find herself somewhere in these pages. And Shannon’s advice for student and emerging writers may be the best I’ve ever read.
How would you describe your body of work to someone who had never read it?
My book contains both realist and fantastical stories, but even the realist stories have some uncanny inflection or reference fantasy elements, such as Dungeons & Dragons, mythology, zombies, or anthropomorphized animals. On a thematic level, the stories ruminate variously on motherhood, nurturing, and bad romance. If you like John Cheever, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, or George Saunders—all of whom play with genre—this book might be your cup of strange tea.
Many of your stories hit the sweet spot between heartbreak and humor and/or irony. How difficult is this to achieve? Does it depend more on tone or plot elements?
I feel like humor and irony are intertwined with heartbreak, and so I think my writing tends to reflect that both in terms of plot and tone. There’s an absurdity to human folly—to flaws, fears, desires, and failures of empathy, whether they be our own or those of others. My characters joke about painful things: it’s a way of coping, but it’s also an acknowledgment of their circumstances, which are often overwhelming, disconcerting, or rife with contradiction.
The beginnings of the parenting stories are terrifying, because the narrators’ concerns are concerns most moms or soon-to-be moms experience. It’s almost a relief when what seems possible—metaphorically at least; no one is afraid of giving birth to rabbits but there are abnormalities that would be its equivalent—at the beginning of a story moves into the realm of the absurd by the middle, such as when the out-of-control boy in “Origin Story” becomes a werewolf. Is that your intention, to offer comfort by way of fantasy?
I think fantasy can be comforting in that it allows us some distance, but at the same time, we can recognize the truth of what’s happening on a metaphorical level—and that can be unsettling … but hopefully in a way that’s interesting and thought-provoking and perhaps validating, ultimately. The fantastical can be a way of “defamiliarizing” commonplace experiences so we can look at them afresh; it’s sort of like a Trojan Horse for our imagination.
There are a lot of dead animals in “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” How do they work in a story about a family intervention?
In that story, a woman who paints commemorative portraits of dead pets takes on the project of confronting her brother’s substance abuse—and she draws a connection between the redemptive impulses behind both these undertakings. She is an amateur at both. In an earlier version of the story, she had no such job, but I think it ups the thematic ante; her work is akin to taxidermy, which I’ve always found fascinating for its tragicomic potential—if you fail at taxidermy, you fail hard. It’s a poignant and challenging art, arguably tied to a lost cause.
Several of your female characters seem to have in common an inability to stand up against things that men do that make them uncomfortable. Certainly that’s true in “The Rabbits,” but also in “Dirt” and “Zombies.” Can you talk more about your female characters generally?
It’s hard to stand up for yourself when you’ve been shoved in a box. That’s what a lot of my female characters are experiencing—they are bumping up against the walls of insidious preconceptions and expectations, reinforced by years of social messaging, centuries of laws. “Sugar and spice and everything nice: that’s what little girls are made of”—yeah, right! I grew up with that, and it took me years to recognize that it’s not a compliment but a trap!
That said, I don’t mean to be fatalistic: in fiction, helpless victims tend to present foregone conclusions, which are not so interesting to the reader. First and foremost, I’ve aimed to create female characters who are not parables but recognizably human, filled with complication and ambivalence; they may have compromised agency or low self-esteem, but they are self-aware and they can still choose and act. For instance, the main protagonist in “Dirt” plays along with her employer’s sexual fetish for a time, but her character arc involves her both recognizing and rejecting the notion that it’s somehow her job to be constantly accommodating, that her discomfort—and her anger—aren’t valid.
Do you see your male characters as having anything in common?
My stories tend to center on female experience, so the men in my stories are, for the most part, secondary characters. Some of these men can be placed along a continuum of toxicity, ranging from selfish-but-charming at the one end to cruelly abusive at the other. There are also various sweet and supportive boyfriends and husbands, but they are partnered with women whose problems are beyond their reach; these women have to save themselves. There are brothers and sons, whom the female protagonists struggle to nurture and care for with varying degrees of success. Granted, one story in the collection, “You Are Now in a Dark Chamber,” does center on male characters—specifically, boys playing Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. There’s one female character in their midst, an interloper dork named Megan: I loved her so much, I was in danger of letting her take over the story! In a way, the story is about her being ousted from the narrative. Maybe Megan will get her own spin-off story in a future collection …
The narrator in “Charybdis” finds it fascinating that the ancient Greeks had so many female monsters. Does she become one by not being able to let go of the story of Mr. Micropenis?
The idea of a woman turning into a monster brings to mind Medusa: in Ovid’s account of her origins, she’s transformed from a beautiful maiden to a snake-haired gorgon because she was raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple (Ovid has Athena focusing her wrath on the offended girl, not the offending god). Thereafter, Medusa’s gaze turns men to stone. In “Charybdis,” a middle-aged woman thinks back on her college-aged fling—someone who ended up harassing her. All these years later, she has enduring feelings of ambivalence: on the one hand, she feels (and felt) sorry for him because of his small penis. At the same time, she never really wanted to sleep with him in the first place … and it’s not so much the size of his member as the size of his ego—his smug entitlement—that was the off-putting revelation, the ever-expanding issue. He was selfish in bed, and then he became enraged by her rejection of him, to the point where she found him scary. And yet she still wonders if she was unkind, and if she’s being unkind to his memory. She’s carrying these bad feelings, but on some level, she knows they belong to him.
You teach creative writing at Johns Hopkins. What obstacles are most common among your students? How do you suggest they overcome them?
Firstly, let me say that I love teaching creative writing at Hopkins! And I love teaching emerging writers in general. I think one of the most common obstacles students face is inhibition. Sometimes this stems from self-doubt, but it can also be a habit leftover from high school, with its pragmatic emphasis on tidiness and order. My advice is to be a square as a student: meet deadlines, do the readings, show up to every class, be generous and diplomatic in workshop. But then, be punk rock on the page—that is, vulnerable, daring, reckless, weird, challenging. I would much rather read something that seems ambitious and experimental—even if the draft doesn’t quite land—than something that seems polished but unexciting.
Shannon Robinson’s debut short story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin, has won the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction (forthcoming with Press 53 in May 2024). Her writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Joyland, Water-Stone Review, Nimrod, failbetter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2011 she was the writer-in-residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Other honors include Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, a Hedgebrook Fellowship, a Sewanee Scholarship, and an Independent Artist Award from the Maryland Arts Council. She teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with her husband and son.