Shannon Robinson & Darrin Doyle • Interviews

A roundtable discussion conducted and edited by Autumn Konopka and Emma Parzybok
A DISCUSSION WITH SHANNON ROBINSON AND DARRIN DOYLE

Authors Shannon Robinson and Darrin Doyle sat down with Autumn Konopka and Emma Parzybok, Cleaver’s Book Reviews Editors, to discuss their new books, both of which have been described as “dark fiction.” Shannon’s debut short story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin, was published in May, 2024 by Press 53. The collection contains stories that are surreal and fantastical while remaining rooted in a tangible, accessible modern reality. Let Gravity Seize the Dead, released in July, 2024 by Regal House Publishing, is a lyric and atmospheric novella about a family that moves into an inherited cabin only to find that they’ve also inherited the ghosts of intergenerational trauma. It is Darrin’s seventh book.

Autumn Konopka: Emma and I looked at both of your books and we saw some similarities, so our first question is a foundational question. I’m not a big reader of dark fiction or horror, so I’m curious: Is there a difference between dark fiction and horror? And if so, what is that difference?

Shannon Robinson: I don’t even think about the genre as I’m writing it. I just write things as they feel true to my emotions. I’ve noticed that on Google I’m categorized as metaphysical fiction/dark humor. I’ll take that. I think there is dark humor within my writing, and I’m not even sure what metaphysical fiction means. I’ve also heard it categorized as magical feminism, magical realism, or the fantastical. I write both fantastical and realist, although the realist stories often have some fantastical element in it. Darrin, do you think about genre as you write?

Darrin Doyle: No, I don’t. I agree with you. I tend to think in terms of character, story, setting, and things like that and let other people decide what to label it. Obviously, my previous novel has a werewolf in it, so it’s going to be categorized as horror, whether I like it or not. Hopefully, things aren’t so easy to pigeonhole as one category or another. With [Let Gravity Seize the Day], I’m thinking more about literary models that I am interested in. And I’m a huge Shirley Jackson fan. She gets categorized as horror, of course, but I think the term horror feels reductive, sometimes, in the way that people use it. I think it’s more than that. Horror contains drama, comedy, and all kinds of things. So, I’m fine if people want to call it that, but I don’t want people to steer away from the book because of that label either.

Emma Parzybok: I appreciate this conversation about genre; I’m a strong believer that genre is mostly made up, and as long as the work is great, I’m on board. I do think there’s something interesting happening with horror. Or maybe the larger idea I’m interested in is about things that conjure fear… I have a stepson; he’s 10 and really into Five Nights at Freddy’s, a video game with a bunch of animatronics in a pizza parlor who murder kids. It’s very scary… and I became really interested in the way he was placing things from his life into this universe. It seemed to provide a place to vent certain things that are difficult to put into language or things that are complex and actually need a resting place. So, I’m interested in the way that certain genres, metaphors, or fantastical scenarios can hold things that, maybe, if we told them straight, we couldn’t hold in a way that really illuminated their experience. Both of you, in your works, are using different metaphors or different kinds of stand-ins to signify other things. How important is it for the audience to know what the metaphor means? If these stories operate through metaphor or act as stand-ins for real-life quandaries, how important is it that the reader knows what you’re thinking?

Shannon: If readers have different interpretations of my work, that’s a success because I don’t want it to feel like it is strictly an allegory. If there is one meaning you need to decode or a one-to-one correspondence, it’s not as exciting. I just want to evoke feelings that resonate. Not that it could mean anything, but that it could mean many things. When you were talking about your son’s engagement with that video game, it made me think of something I’d written years ago about Bruno Bettelheim’s uses of enchantment. He talks about the function of fairy tales is for children to be able to read these stories and feel those deep feelings that won’t necessarily be named. They get to have those feelings and that darkness contained within a story. And I love that idea that you spend time with this emotional turbulence or these things that are deeply unsettling that perhaps you can’t even name, but ultimately, that’s what you’re exploring within fiction.

Emma: When you’re writing, how close do you feel to the thing that’s informing the metaphor? People can interpret in multiple ways, but how close do you feel to your own experience that’s bouncing you into it?

Shannon: Very close. Sometimes, some of the stories are autofiction that’s been translated through the fantastical. So I’m sort of layering those two things and using the fantastical as a way of introducing that metaphorical range that has a deep branch to it. What about you, Darrin?

Darrin: I totally agree with what Shannon said. And I would say, yes, magical realism, fantastical, horror – anything that’s beyond the possible we know – has the potential to communicate a lot of things in a way that might be a little harder to get at with strict realism. They open up allegorical possibilities in a wonderful way, and that’s why I’ve always liked them. I’ve always loved fairy tales. I’ve always loved writers like Franz Kafka who aren’t necessarily following logical things and real things. I do think it’s important that the writer not dictate what those things add up to. Hopefully, they add up to way more than you intend. There’s a term called overdetermination of literary analysis, which means that a symbol or something doesn’t just mean one thing. It means many things, and it depends on the era in which you read it, your life experiences that you bring as a reader when you read it, and so on. It can be wonderful. I think the writer’s job is to just to make it as believable as they can—the characters, the situations, anything like that—and all the rest will fall into place.

Shannon: Yeah, one of my favorite workshop comments was, “I don’t think this zombie story is very realistic.” What he was saying was, I don’t believe the character, but I thought it was such great feedback.

Darrin: You need to sell it even more when you have to make those fantastical things absolutely concrete.

Emma: You have to teach the reader how to read your work a little bit, too. I think sometimes with the fantastical people think, Oh, well there’s no rule so you can just throw anything into it. But, actually no, you have to inform the reader about what the rules of this world are that you’ve created. There are still rules; it’s just that the rules have shifted.

Darrin: Yeah, that’s why a lot of times with magical realism stories, the first paragraph will dictate what kind of world is laid out. And it doesn’t do it in a backdoor way. Some of them do; they arrive at it more gradually. But a lot of them put you right in and tell you what kind of world you’re in.

Autumn: Our next question ties back to the rules of the story or that idea of the piece teaching you how to read it. Looking at both of your books, I was very aware of length and curious about how length interacts with the stories themselves. Shannon, you’re writing in short stories, and, Darrin, your book is a novella. They’re both shorter forms, so I wondered if limiting length impacted the focus of the story, your ability to tell these more fantastical stories, or the way you create these worlds.

Darrin: The novella form, in particular, really helps to write something that’s supposed to have an intense momentum and be driven by heightened stakes and heightened emotions almost from the get-go. There’s not a lot of time to linger. So it’s always been one of my favorite forms… [It’s] good for horror because it forces the writer to eliminate. It’s the same in short stories, obviously, and ideally for novels too. Cut out anything that is distracting from what Edgar Allan Poe called “the singular effect.” I could feel when I was writing this book that everything was of the same cloth. There’s no room to stray into distracting backstory. There’s some backstory in it, but everything feels like it’s moving forward.

Autumn: I definitely noticed that in the opening. There’s such a concision to the language, and you give that backstory in three or four pages, but it’s also really compelling and beautifully written.

Shannon: I hear what you’re saying about intensity. The shorter form is more intense. I read an interview with Ling Ma a little while ago, and she said that, in the short story, she feels the craft is more on display. Or there’s pressure on craft the shorter a piece is.

Emma: Now I have a question about tone. We’ve been talking about horror or dark fiction or surrealism or whatever you want to call it. It feels like a lot of that is tonal: this conversational daily life paired with this eerie or strange or hard to name or foggy whatever it is. So, I’m curious what you all think of as the building blocks to tone. I was thinking a lot about how location feels important often in some of these stories to create an experience. I’m often writing with a tone, but it’s not necessarily consciously crafted. I slip into it like a dress and walk around. So I’m curious how much you consciously craft tone, how you would define tone, how you’re thinking about it in your work, and how it comes through in these stories.

Shannon: I guess I don’t think about it, particularly in first person. I think a certain tone comes across, and I know that I tend to sound ironical; there’s a little bit of sass mouth to some of my narratives. That said, I never want to seem dismissive. I don’t want to have distance from the situation of the characters. So, I guess I’m always conscious that I want to keep a warmth in the writing. So, to the extent that I think about tone, I’m thinking about that.

Darrin: For a lot of my books and stories, I work at the tone and the voice. Once that feels right, it clicks. Then it pours out so much easier. I think it all starts with point of view, like Shannon alluded to. People are pretty used to writing in first person, and you can embody the character. But third person has a voice, too—depending on how close it is, how distant it is, or if it’s flitting from character to character. I read Noy Holland’s short novel Bird, and her sentences are just so beautiful. Not a one was predictable. As I think about tone with my book, Let Gravity Seize the Dead, I was striving for that. I want every sentence to be coming at the subject differently and create a kind of uncanny feeling through the weird wanderings or vocabulary. So, style, vocabulary, and distance from the characters – all of that is part of tone, and for a lot of my books, it’s a huge priority.

Emma With tone, word choice feels really important to me in a way that I can’t always articulate. I used to teach English as a second language, and I learned a lot about tone from second-language speakers because they’ll mistakenly use a word, and it’s so tonal. For example, instead of saying “standing in the shade,” second language speakers will say, “I was standing in the shadow.” It’s so poetic. They don’t mean for it to be. They’re just literally saying I was in that dark patch over there where the sun is not shining, but it sounds to native speakers like poetry. There are so many examples of these little linguistic choices that second language speakers make that suddenly infuse all this weird meaning and strange surrealism. I think about that a lot when I’m trying to write tone. If you make a slanted word choice, it does so much to shift how that sentence reads.

Darrin: Exactly. That’s a great way to say it. It helps me to almost break down what I know about the way to describe something and rebuild it into something that’s slightly off and different and it gives a great effect.

Shannon: I guess tone is also knowing your character. If your prose is wrapping itself around a particular character, what quality does that take? And how is that inflecting the prose?

Autumn: The point about second language learners made me think of a thing that I noticed, Darrin, in your sentences. There were quite a few places where the initial subject was dropped, and sentences began with the verb. I am by no means a solid Spanish speaker, but in Spanish, there is often no subject. You start with the verb because the verb tells you who the subject is, and we don’t do that in English a lot. I loved that quality. It moved. It kept it going so much.

Darrin:Thanks for noticing that. Once you establish it, you can do sentence after sentence of hitting the reader with the verb. I always tell my students: the verb is where the action is. That’s it. It’s the most important word in your sentence at all times, and it can do so much work. It can bring emotion. It doesn’t just describe the action. It can often tell you physical things, too. It goes back to the tone that we were discussing. Those small choices of punctuation, word choice, and sentence structure are just all the building blocks for tone, right?

Emma: We have two silly questions for you both to close with. Shannon, I noticed someone summed up a story in your book as being about a talkative bird that inhabits a woman. So, if you were going to use a bird as a stand-in for yourself, which bird would you use?

Shannon: I like pigeons—or doves, actually. Doves are adjacent to pigeons, and yet they have this subtle grace to them. I think they have a beautiful voice as well as a surprising voice, and they make a beautiful sound with their wings as they take flight. So, I think they have unassuming but surprising dimensions.

Autumn: Darrin, I looked at your website and at the end of your bio, it says “He knows what skeletons do.” So… what do they do?

Darrin: I would tell you but I’d have to kill you. No. I put that in because my son, when he was about three, as most three-year-olds do, would say the wildest things. His older brother was a couple of years older, and one time, he was like, “Simon, you know everything.” And my older son, Simon, was like, “No, I don’t know everything. I don’t know what, like, Japanese things say?” And Charlie thought for a second then he said, “But you know what skeletons do.” We didn’t know what the heck he meant, and we let it slide. It was just the weirdest thing to say. Now, I like to co-opt it for myself because it’s mysterious.

Darrin Doyle was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He has worked as a paperboy, a janitor, a mover, a telemarketer, a door-to-door salesman, a Kinko’s Copy Consultant, a porn store clerk, a pizza delivery guy, a prep cook, a magazine store clerk, a technical writer, a freelance newspaper writer, an English teacher in Japan, and finally, a professor and an author. Darrin has a brown belt in Tae Kwon Do and wishes he had stuck with it a little longer to get the danged black belt. He hoards and plays lots of musical instruments: guitar, piano, drums, mandolin, banjo, bass, ukelele, and a diatonic 4-string stick dulcimer.He lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and teaches at Central Michigan University. He knows what skeletons do.

Shannon Robinson’s work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Water-Stone Review, Nimrod, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has 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 the 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. Currently, she teaches creative writing and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with her husband and son.

Autumn Konopka is a writer, mental health advocate, and trauma-informed teaching artist. A former poet laureate of Montgomery County, PA (2016), Autumn’s poetry chapbook a chain of paperdolls was published in 2014, and her debut novel Pheidippides Didn’t Die was released in 2023. Autumn is a Philadelphia native, and as a Reviews Editor for Cleaver Magazine, she is particularly interested in books and authors that represent the city’s unique impact on the literary landscape.

Emily (Emma) Parzybok (she/her) is an essayist, satirist, and poet from Seattle, Washington. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Cleaver, The Satirist, The Syndrome Mag, Points in Case, and the anthology Uncertain Girls, Uncertain Times, a collection of inspiration and encouragement for young women. She was a 2022 Jack Straw Fellow. She is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at Columbia University in New York. She is a Book Review Editor for Cleaver.