Interview by Kathryn Kulpa
Five and a Half Questions for Michelle Ross on SHAPESHIFTING (Stillhouse Press)

Michelle Ross has published short fiction in Cleaver (“Lessons,” Issue 13; “My Husband is Always Losing Things,” Issue 23; “Night Vision,” with Kim Magowan, Issue 34). She spoke to us recently about her new short story collection Shapeshifting.

Kathryn Kulpa: This is such a strong collection! One thing I really like about Shapeshifting is the diversity of points of view, style, and even genre. There are short, flash-like pieces, longer stories, realistic and often funny pieces like “After Pangaea,” with the parents sleeping in cars to keep their place in line to sign their kids up for kindergarten, and darker, more disturbing stories like “Keeper Four” and “A Mouth is a House for Teeth.” Did you worry that the stories might be too divergent, or that publishers might want a more uniform voice?

Michelle Ross: Thank you so much, Kathryn, and thanks for talking with me about the book!

I can’t say I worried about the range of the stories in that regard. Many years ago, I accepted (and have since embraced) that I’m a writer who needs to work in a variety of forms and styles.

Sometimes I’m in the mood to write realistic fiction, and sometimes I’m in the mood to write more speculative fiction. Sometimes I’m in the mood to write short and sometimes long. Sometimes funny, sometimes more serious. Sometimes to borrow forms, sometimes to follow more traditional story structures. I don’t try to restrain myself in that regard. I’m not even sure I could. Rules and restrictions bring out my rebellious nature. Also, I think writing is at its best, not to mention more fun, when it’s playful. So I follow whatever interests me at the moment. What I think unites these stories are their concerns, the questions they ask. If there’s anything in terms of range that I was a little uncertain about early on, it’s the inclusion of the couple of stories that are written from the point of view of daughters—“The Sand and the Sea” and “Life Cycle of an Ungrateful Daughter.” In a book of stories that take the point of view of mothers, these stories diverge a bit. However, in “The Sand and the Sea,” the protagonist is a mother herself and a central question she considers is how her relationship with her mother might have been different if her mother had received the mothering she’d needed. In “Life Cycle of an Ungrateful Daughter,” the daughter imagines her mother’s perspective. Another outlier is “The Pregnancy Game.” The girls in that story are not quite teenagers yet; none of them are mothers, either. Yet all these stories grapple with questions about motherhood in one way or another. Ultimately, I felt these stories not only belonged, but that they made the book stronger.

KK: I agree! The theme of motherhood, viewed in different ways, is an anchor for the collection. Sometimes the stories are written from the point of view of daughters with difficult mothers (“The Sand and the Sea”), young girls enacting motherhood (“The Pregnancy Game”), or women who have taken on a caregiver role in some other way (“Keeper Four”), but often the point of view character is a mother. Are there stories you think you would not have written if not for your own experience of being a mother?

MR: I probably wouldn’t have written most of these stories if I hadn’t first become a mother myself. I don’t think I would have been drawn to write about motherhood if I weren’t grappling with motherhood, if it weren’t something that occupied my mental energy. The only story in the book that I drafted before becoming a mother is “Life Cycle of an Ungrateful Daughter,” and that one is from the point of view of a daughter imagining her mother’s point of view.

KK: “Keeper Four” and “A Mouth is a House for Teeth” are stories that really resonated with me, and both have dystopian elements that seem especially timely right now, although I’m guessing they were probably written before the pandemic. Can you talk about the origin of those stories?

MR: “A Mouth is a House for Teeth” is easy to recall. That story came to me more fully than most stories do. That is, I knew before I started writing that I wanted to capture the intense feeling of isolation that I felt in early motherhood. I was no longer going to the office each day. I was no longer going anywhere, really. On the one hand, I was very much taken with my son, and, sure, I had him as a constant companion. On the other hand, he couldn’t speak, and the relationship between mother and baby goes one direction—it’s all about the baby’s needs, never about the mother’s needs. My partner worked long hours some days. He worked out of town some weeks. When he wasn’t working, he often seemed to be disappearing to go run errands that took longer than they should. I recall feeling kind of out of my mind sometimes because I was so damn exhausted and so alone. To really capture that feeling, I felt like I needed to exaggerate. I needed to put the mother in this story alone in a house with her child for years. I needed her to not be allowed to leave that house ever.

“Keeper Four” emerged from a few different scraps. One of those scraps were scenes I had cut from a failing story—scenes of a woman trying different tactics to get a bear to eat. Another scrap was a book that someone had gifted my son: Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom. The book’s photos and stories are endearing, yet at the same time, something about it nagged me. Some of the unlikely “friendships” in the book were, in fact, mother-child relationships—a dog mothering a monkey, for example. From this nagging was born the idea of humans experimenting to develop a drug to try to induce this mothering behavior in women. Also, I wanted at least one story in the book to be from the point of view of a woman who rejects motherhood, so “Keeper Four” naturally became that story. Why is the story so apocalyptic? I think that nearly every time I set a story in a corporate office, the story tends to get a little apocalyptic. Corporate offices and apocalypses go together like peanut butter and jelly.

KK: I’m always interested in the decisions that go into putting a story collection together. I know that, in addition to writing solo stories, you also collaborate with Kim Magowan. Were there any collaborative pieces you wished you could include in this collection? Or other work that was originally part of this book, but ended up being cut for thematic or other reasons? At what point along the way do you look at stories you’ve published and say, “Hey, I think I’ve got a collection here”?

MR: I see the collaborative writing Kim and I do as separate from my solo stories. We have a manuscript of collaborative stories we’re peddling right now to presses, in fact. Also, I just generally tend to work on multiple projects at once even within my own work. As I was writing the stories for Shapeshifting, I was also writing stories for my forthcoming collection, They Kept Running, as well as stories for a few other projects that are still in progress. Selecting the stories for Shapeshifting was mostly straightforward because I knew early on, when I hadn’t written even half these stories yet, that I was working on a collection of stories that interrogate motherhood. Thus, I was writing stories with this book in mind. But along the way, I also kept a list of all the stories I’d written that were motherhood related and I went with my gut about which stories felt like they should be in this collection and which stories felt like they belonged in They Kept Running. The story I was most uncertain about was a flash titled “Manhandle.” Stillhouse Press ended up making that decision for me. The editors felt it didn’t belong in Shapeshifting, so now it’s in They Kept Running.

KK: You publish a lot in journals, both flash and longer work, and I’m amazed by how prolific you are—especially considering you’re also a working parent. Do you follow a writing schedule, or write at random moments when an idea strikes you? Do you have a writing group, or do you ever take workshops for inspiration?

MR: I get up at about 4:30 each morning and write for a minimum of two hours. Same goes for weekends. I don’t have a writing group per se, but Kim Magowan is the first reader for everything I write. Yasmina Din Madden, who I’ve known since we both got our MFAs many years ago at Indiana University, has been one of my regular readers lately, too. Once in a blue moon, the three of us do a mini flashathon together, sometimes with other writers, such as Brittany Terwilliger. I don’t take a lot of workshops, but I have occasionally turned to workshops or other courses when I’ve felt like I needed a little change, some inspiration. “The Sand and the Sea” came out of the Kathy Fish workshop I took some time ago.

KK: Finally, I just wanted to say how perfect the cover design is! Did you have any say in it?

MR: Thanks! I think so, too. Stillhouse asked me to send them images of a few book covers I love and to write notes detailing what I like about those covers. The designer then created two very different cover options based on that information as well as, I assume, their feeling about the book. This was the cover that immediately snagged me. There was no question for me that this was it.

KK: Thanks so much, Michelle! Shapeshifting is available from Stillhouse Press.

Michelle Ross is the author of the story collections There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You (Moon City Press 2017), winner of the 2016 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and Finalist for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Short Stories, and Shapeshifting, which was selected by judge Danielle Evans as the winner of the Stillhouse Press Short Story Award and is forthcoming in 2021. Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, The Common, Epiphany, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, TriQuarterly, and other venues. Her fiction has been selected for Best Microfictions 2020 and the Wigleaf Top 50 2019, as well as won prizes from Gulf Coast and other journals. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review and was a consulting editor for the 2018 Best Small Fictions anthology. A native of Texas, she received her B.A. from Emory University and her M.F.A and M.A. from Indiana University. She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband and son. She works as a science writer.

Kathryn Kulpa was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film (Paper Nautilus) and has had work selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021 (Pelekinesis Press).  Her flash fiction is published or forthcoming in Flash Frog, 100 Word Story, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Wigleaf, and she serves as chief flash editor for Cleaver Magazine. Kathryn has been a visiting writer at Wheaton College and has led writing workshops at the University of Rhode Island, Stonecoast Writers Conference at the University of Southern Maine, Writefest in Houston, Texas, and at public libraries throughout Rhode Island.