Susan Woodring is the author of The Traveling Disease and Springtime on Mars: Stories. Her short fiction can be found in Isotope, Passages North, Turnrow, The William and Mary Review, Surreal South, Ballyhoo Stories, Quick Fiction and more. She’s also the recipient of the 2006 Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Fiction Award, the 2006 Isotope Editor’s Prize, and her story “Inertia” received a notable mention in Best American Non-Required Reading, 2007. Susan lives in North Carolina with her family. For more information, visit her website.

On your website, you talk about how Springtime on Mars grew out of imagining your grandmother’s life. You say:

Growing up, I only knew my grandmother as an old lady living alone in a small, pink-roofed house in Crescent City, Illinois. She played cards and wore clip-on earrings and kept rolls of winter-green Velemints in her purse.

After investing so much time exploring another person’s—a character’s— life, how do you feel? What do you come away with?

Truly, writing is an escape for me, and searching out the depths of a character absorbs me. I love it. Working through a character’s psyche makes me more curious about the people I encounter in real life. Then, it turns into a cycle: real people fascinate me, so I make up characters who heighten my interest in real-life human beings, so I investigate, which prompts me to write. Interestingly, though all of this is about me contemplating the lives of others, I find the process ultimately makes me a bit more introspective in many ways.

You also say this (which is profound and beautiful) about what you learned from musing over your grandmother’s life:

“…inside every character, even the most ordinary—boring, even—there exists the exquisite, the invaluable, the suffocation of normalcy, the brilliant and the ugly—the something that longs to be expressed.

Yes, I do believe that, that there’s a glint of the bizarre inside the most mundane. I think the greatest blessing of being a writer is possessing the drive to seek out the extraordinary in the most ordinary character, to unearth it. So many of my favorite writers–Bret Lott, Charles Baxter, Raymond Carver–have a knack for showing this.

Many of the stories in Springtime on Mars take place during prominent historical events—the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the Cold War, for example. Do you find fiction set during memorable moments in history more compelling? Do you think readers do?

I think it’s true what they say about history repeating itself, at least to some degree, and I think that when people read about characters living through a specific historic event, they see similarities to today’s issues. They identify with these situations in the same way they identify with characters who possess traits we’re all familiar with, or traits we find in ourselves. I was born in 1974, which means I grew up during the last stretch of the Cold War in the eighties. I’ve always been intrigued with the events of post-World War II America, the events that shaped the world–and its fears. Something about hearing President Reagan refer to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” compelled me to sign up for a year of teaching in Russia during the mid-nineties, after the Soviet Union had fallen. I just had to see this place and get to know these people we had formerly been so afraid of. Also, I think characters are complex mixtures of distant and unnameable fears and desires and that national and global upheavals reverberate in interesting ways through these characters’ everyday lives. A character who worries equally over invisible Russian aircraft hovering over her backyard and running out of home-canned green beans in the basement fascinates me and speaks to the essential rhythm of real life.

What was it like teaching in Russia? What was their attitude toward you—an American?

It was an amazing experience–I’m so glad I went. Russians are extremely generous people with a heart for hospitality. I remember marathon tea parties where we would have these philosophical discussions and get up every now and then to dance or to pose for a picture. Often, we would discuss the differences between Americans and Russians. We–another American girl my age and I–taught mostly college-aged students, just a few years younger than us, who had grown up on the other side of the Cold War. They were curious about Americans and were very pleased to have us there. To Russians, home is so very important, and they were always looking out for us, so far away from our own homes. We traveled quite a bit while we were there and I remember having tea with strangers on the train–they were all so interested in talking with us, even those who spoke very little English (our Russian was very poor). Of course, it’s been more than ten years now, and I’m sure a lot has changed. I’d love to return for a visit.

I’m going to steal a question from the Springtime on Mars Book Club Discussion Questions, which appear in the back of the book. Question number 14 asks: “All of the characters are unique. Is there one in particular you most empathize with? Why or how?”

I often write of uncertain adolescent girls and overwhelmed young mothers because these are the two people I’ve been most of my life–even when I was no longer an adolescent and not yet a mother, I was uncertain and usually overwhelmed. There are also a number of women in my fiction who are quite a bit older than I am, and I identify with them simply because they’ve already been the places I’m going. They are, in many ways, projections of my own fears and hopes of that stage of my life. However, I’d have to say that the character I most empathize with is Marianne from “Zenith, 1954.” Pregnancy is so often portrayed as a time of hopeful anticipation, and certainly, it is just that. But I think it can often be, as it is for Marianne, a rather scary passage into a new, unknown life. I remember the days just following the birth of my first child. I lay on my bed, exhausted, physically stretched out and swollen everywhere, emotionally topsy-turvy. I thought: eighteen years. For a moment, I was absolutely terrified of the task I’d committed myself to. Of course, it’s wonderful, too–I certainly love my children. But it’s just huge. I find myself both embracing and resisting certain aspects of motherhood, just as Marianne does.

I want to share with everyone the first sentences from “Morning Again” and “Birds of Illinois,” both of which are fascinating and attention grabbing. From “Morning Again”: “Harold,” I say. “You’d better take me to a rocket launch. I’m sixty-eight years old.” And from “Birds of Illinois”: Maud began having sex dreams about the retarded bag boy at the start of April. Which is your favorite first sentence from your collection? Why?

Actually, I think my favorites are the two you picked out, especially the one about Maud. They just speak so much about the desires of the characters and show a glimpse of how the characters feel about these desires–tension from the get-go. I also like the first line in “Inertia” mainly because I sympathize with the young narrator–crushes are hard: “Duncan Jones had thick black lashes and clear blue eyes.” I must have fallen in love with a million boys like Duncan Jones growing up. Sigh.

You published Springtime on Mars through Press 53, which is run by the energetic Sheryl Monks and Kevin Watson. You’ve known Sheryl for a while, haven’t you? What was it like working on this book together?

Yes, I met Sheryl several years ago when we were enrolled in the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte. She is a wildly talented writer and a superb editor. She is both a perfectionist and a tireless encourager–she seems to hold more faith in my work than I do. She and Kevin make a terrific team–energetic is a good word to describe the both of them. I’m thrilled to be working with them.

You and fellow Press 53 author Curtis Smith (The Species Crown) interviewed each other recently. (View interview here.) How fun was that? Have you two met in person?

Yes, it was great fun. I love that Press 53 is so involved in facilitating a community among their writers. I actually did get a chance to meet Curt a few years ago when Press 53 hosted a cook-out on Sheryl’s deck. Curt is an incredible writer–exacting and elegant and bold. His work is thoroughly imagined, which I appreciate quite a bit. He’s incredibly prolific, too–I’ll stay busy, keeping up with him.

What is your first novel, The Traveling Disease, about? Where does the title come from?

At first glance, it’s about a reckless but not altogether horrible mother who drops her daughter off on the virtual doorstep of her own parents with whom she has been estranged for years. What follows is the girl–named Pamela–spending a summer searching out this tiny southern town for clues of what made her mother leave in the first place. She reads up on the life of Christopher Columbus whom she likens to her mother; they both had “the traveling disease,” or the compulsion to keep moving. I think, though, that what it’s really about is what the absence and presence of loved ones means to a person, what ties us down and what makes us flee, and about a family who is lost to each other, though not completely.

Tell us about your new novel, which is about the death of a factory town.

It’s still very rough, so I don’t have much to say quite yet. The events are centered on the closing of a furniture factory in a small town, something we here in western North Carolina know a lot about these days. Though there is a central character, it is told (at the moment) from the omniscient point of view, which has been a fun challenge for me. Also, I’m having a great time allowing bits of magic realism and surrealism to pop up here and there. I might have to edit some of that out later, but for now, I’m having a ball writing up communal dream sequences and amazing feats of weather. I love weather. Liz Strout, who teaches at the MFA program I attended, says the first draft is for the writer, the second for the reader. I’m sort of wallowing in the first draft at the moment, savoring it.

Do you prefer writing short stories or writing novels? Do you like to read one format over the other?

I think I’m more of a novelist, though I see the short story as the higher art form–fiction at its purest. I do love how a short story can crystallize a particular moment; it has an ability to freeze time that you just can’t do, or at least not in the same way, in a novel. I also like the space I’m allowed working on a novel. Really, though, I go back and forth, both in my writing habits and my reading preferences. I enjoy reading short story collections quite a bit–I see them as having the best of both worlds. There, you have that crystallized moment happen again and again, yet you also get to know and enjoy a single writer’s voice for an entire book. Also, I think there’s such an art to sequencing stories in a collection.

How did determine the sequence of the stories in your collection?

I began with “Inertia” because, in some ways, I feel like it’s the strongest story in the collection. Also, it ends with the sort of image that (I hope!) sticks with the reader as they move into the other stories. I chose “The Neighbors” for the last story because it feels the most substantial to me; it is the longest story with the most main characters and it’s the only story with a bit of distance between the narrative voice and the characters. Also, I wanted to end the collection on a hopeful note–I like the reconciliation that happens at the end of “The Neighbors.” The order of the stories in between was mostly selected through instinct and a little help from my editor Sheryl Monks. I think the best short story collections tunnel into greater meaning as the reader moves through the stories. I’d hoped to arrange the book so that one story built on some of the themes or ideas of the previous story without echoing them–or the characters–too closely.

You write very eloquently about writing. Are you a natural public speaker, as well?

Thank you! I’m actually a pretty terrible public speaker. My hands shake like crazy. I do love to teach–I guess I’m more comfortable talking about writing in general or about other writers than my own work. When I’m doing a reading, I find that it’s much easier to read to strangers than to people I know. With strangers, I can pretend I really am who I am pretending to be–a writer. With my family and friends, I feel like an imposter. I did a reading a few weeks ago in my parents’ hometown in Illinois and I kept thinking about how almost everyone in the audience had known me since I was in diapers. It’s hard to pull off “writer” when your audience is busy picturing you during your poodle-perm and braces stage. Yikes. In either case, I do a lot better once I get past the opening banter, when I can just read. I try to really enjoy that part because I’ve worked so blasted hard on these stories and here’s my chance to share them. I try my best to give my stories the voice–intonations and pauses and even accents and such–I imagined them having when I wrote them. Every now and again I have a reading where I can really feel people listening to me.

You home-school your children. On a daily basis, how do you balance their schooling with your writing?

It’s madness, really. I rise very early–4ish–and write until my husband goes to work. That’s my main writing time. Mine are little, 6 and 2, so I don’t even try to write during the day when I’m home with them. My mother-in-law and her husband keep them for a few hours twice a week and sometimes I can get an entire Saturday morning. Once a year, I go off to the beach by myself and write to exhaustion. I meet my writing group there for a retreat. That’s the second week in October…less than two months away now. Can’t wait!!

What does your writing space look like?

I share an office with my six-year-old. The walls are a bizarre shade of pink–if you’ve ever seen what pink Play-dough looks like, that’s the color. On my side, there are bookcases and a secretary where my laptop sits most of the time. It’s mildly messy, with two boxes of half-scribbled legal pads in easy reach. On my daughter’s side, there’s an old desktop where she checks in with her webkinz pets and a long table covered in half-finished art projects.

Contact Susan: ydot50 AT hotmail DOT com

Read:

“Radio Vision”
published by Turnrow

“Springtime on Mars”
published by Mental Contagion

“Inertia”
published by Isotope