Alicia Gifford is a short story writer and a fiction editor with Night Train. In
a previous life, she was a registered nurse in the intensive care unit. Her
work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Confrontation, The Barcelona Review, Storyglossia, Per Contra, The Mississippi Review (Web), Smokelong Quarterly, 3:AM Magazine, Eyeshot, Opium, and other journals. She’s been anthologized in Best American Erotica, Del Sol Press’s Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories 2005, and Better Non-Sequitur’s See You Next Tuesday. “Toggling the Switch,” published in Narrative, won storySouth’s “Million Writers Awards” for Best Online Story of 2004, and “Gorgeous World,” published in Confrontation, was a finalist in the 2005 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Contest. Alicia lives near Los Angeles.

You are strictly a writer of short fiction. What draws you to this form, rather than, say, the novel?

I love the challenge of the form, and my narrative trajectory seems to naturally arc short, i.e., the arrow rises and falls three feet in front of me. I love the essential nature of short fiction, how language and structure and character and plot and theme converge to illuminate something true.

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Will we see a short story collection from you in the future?

There’s a kind of pressure to write a novel or a novel-in-stories, or linked stories, or a circle of stories because they’re more marketable than a disparate story collection, but so far, I work story-to-story without an overall concept in mind. So it’s hard to say.

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Your story, “You Go,” originally published in the now obsolete journal NFG, and reprinted in issue 14 of Storyglossia, is brilliant. It starts out in this wonderfully sarcastic, self-deprecating tone, then gets wildly, albeit smartly, hilarious. Within a sentence, however, the atmosphere is rendered serious. And the ending, oh that ending, it is pure hope. I can’t think of any other story I’ve read that carried me through such a range of emotions. Where did this piece come from?

Writing in the second person imperative shaped the story, set the tone and voice, and it was a great writing exercise. I spent hours and hours on the ending, maybe days, and reading it, the ending, still makes me weepy. I wrote it while taking a workshop at UCLA Extension during a phase when I was heavily influenced by Carver, and my teacher, Rob Roberge, immediately zeroed in on the Carver, down to the specific story of Carver’s that I leaned on, “What’s in Alaska?”. I love Rob Roberge, by the way. He taught me to write.

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You didn’t start writing until the fall of 2000, when you took an extension class at UCLA. What prompted you to enroll in a writing class?

I always liked to write, and I had a knack for it. In fourth grade, every week we were required to write either a story or a poem to read aloud to the class, and I would do it at the last minute, very quickly and easily knocking off these little poems while others ahead of me in the alphabet read their stuff aloud. My teacher fussed over me and sent my work to the principal.

I was, um, distracted in high school, but I liked English and the few times I applied myself, I received very positive and encouraging feedback. I liked to write very much but never tried to write fiction. I loved to draw and paint and my first college major was art.

When I worked in ICU, I liked to write my nurse’s notes with a bit of quirk to make their drudgery more entertaining to write and read. I’d imagine them being read in court.

Flash forward: Three years after the end of a seventeen-year marriage I found myself single and dating online (apologies to all who’ve heard this before) and, while you hear a lot of horror stories, I had a lot of fun. Online dating is a lot of written communication via email, and cleverly answered profile questions to lure men on the internet, and a few of the men asked if I were a writer and said I should give it a go, enough that I looked into writing classes at UCLA Extension.

As to the rest of the story, I met a guy named Gene in July of 2000 via Matchmaker.com, and we’ve been together ever since.

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It is often said that it takes an average of ten years to gain recognition as a writer, and yet, only six years into it, you’ve garnered many outstanding publication credits, awards and honors. To what do you attribute your success?

Ten years? Really? That’s a galvanizer for the next four years.

Maybe starting to write after gathering some life experience and a certain, um, *maturity* accelerates the process. I definitely began writing with a sense of urgency, catalyzed by my OCD.

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Has your previous profession, as an ICU nurse, helped you in any way prepare for the perseverance it takes to be a successful writer? Has it helped you deal with rejection?

I quite enjoyed working in critical care; it was techy and high-adrenalin, lots of drama. What I didn’t like so much was working for hospital bottom-line administrators, and that nurses, mainly women back then, women who needed their jobs, were afraid to stand up for themselves. But I digress …

Writing (and rejection) takes place in another cerebral hemisphere from nursing, but dealing with life and death, loss, grief, trauma, stress, pain, mucus, pus, blood, urine, feces, drugs—all that has contributed to my story toolbox, even though I don’t write many nurse or hospital based stories. Also, when you work in the ICU, it’s pretty common for doctors and nurses to engage in sick, gallows humor. This carries over into my writing, most definitely.

And there’s this: When I decided to apply myself and get a BS in nursing, I worked hard and excelled. There was a kind of proportion to the effort and reward.

It doesn’t work that way with writing so much. You can work harder than you’ve ever worked at anything, and come up with mediocrity. You can write one story that you love and maybe it’s well received, and then feel like you’ll never be able to write another one again. You can write a story that you love but no one else does. It’s a tougher struggle.

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What themes tend to creep up most in your writing?

I like to dig into morally gray areas, the relativity of right and wrong—and lust interests me, the biological drive of it, how it poses as love, how it confuses. You’ll often see how lust fucks someone up in one of my stories. And, while not really a “theme”, humor. Most of my stories have some kind of humor

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Your work has been published in two erotica anthologies. How do people within the larger literary community regard the erotica genre?

Can’t speak for the larger literary community but, as I said above, lust interests me, and I’ve written about lust and also some explicit sexual scenes in stories, but not with the idea that I’m writing erotica but with the idea that I’m writing about one of the great forces in life. I’m all for erotica but I’m mainly interested in writing and reading literary short fiction. But some of my stories have crossed over.

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Night Train went into hiatus in August of 2006. Rumor has it it’s coming back. What can we expect from it next?

I hear the train a comin´
It´s rolling round the bend …

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Where is your favorite place to write?

I seem to be most productive at my desktop computer in my little home office where the printer is, but I’m getting more and more prolific on my little Sony Vaio and writing late at night in bed. I email work in progress back and forth, from desktop to laptop.

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You currently live near Los Angeles? Have you been a California girl all your life?

Yes!

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I’m a firm believer that place influences people in profound ways, probably more than we realize. I’ve lived in two states and four different cities, and each one felt culturally, economically, politically, and geographically different. And each one taught me new ways of being. Do you think California, and Los Angeles in particular, have shaped who you are and how you view life? Your writing?

Most of my stories are set in the L.A. area and I love to haul out landmarks of the vicinity—the freeways, streets, restaurants, the beaches, the incredible light. I try to convey an L.A. zeitgeist to those stories. I’m happy and comfortable in the laid back and liberal cliché of California, and while I’ll piss and moan about the traffic, the smog, the crowds, the brazen consumerism and the biz phonies, I secretly love it all like I secretly love the smell of my dogs’ farts.

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Right now, if you could be any place in the world, where would it be?

I love, love, LOVE to travel, but like Dorothy said, there’s no place like home.

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Contact Alicia

Read:

Toggling the Switch
published in Narrative
Winner of the Million Writers Award for Best Online Story 2004

Surviving Darwin
published by The Barcelona Review
Anthologized in Best American Erotica 2005

Transubstantiation
published by Eyeshot.net
Warning: Rated R

Lobster Girl
published in Opium

Broodiness published in SmokeLong Quarterly

Punk Love
published in 3:AM Magazine

Inertia
published in Per Contra


Filed Under: The Writer Profile Project |