“The Ill-fitting Skin”: Shannon Robinson Speaks on Anger, Transformation, and Discomfort with an Ill-fitting Skin https://ift.tt/Zfv7Mk6
Shannon Robinson’s award-winning debut short story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin, mixes the surreal with the real as it tackles identity, motherhood, and womanhood. This memorable book is engaging, dynamic, and brimming with inventive stories. In these pages, readers will find a mother caring for a young werewolf boy, a woman balancing painting pet portraits and staging a family intervention, a (sometimes) couple partaking in zombie culture, and a group of teenagers struggling to navigate the world inside and outside Dungeons & Dragons.
Shannon Robinson’s work has appeared in TheGettysburg Review, The 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. Currently, she teaches creative writing and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with her husband and son.
It was a pleasure to talk to the author about, among other things, the surreal, humor, and form.
It’s so cool to chat with you, Shannon. Let’s jump right in. Since The Ill-Fitting Skin is your debut, will you tell me how the book came to be? How long did these stories take to write? How did you land at Press 53? You won a pretty awesome award.
Thanks! I’m so pleased to be the 2023 winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. I wrote (and rewrote) these stories over the course of about twelve years, starting during my MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Some stories were published in literary magazines along the way; other stories are more recent, and I wrote them specifically with a collection in mind. Many publishers are leery of taking on short story collections (Why? Why? Okay, we know why … still: Why?), but small presses tend to be more open to the genre, so I started knocking on those doors. I was impressed that Press 53, which has been operating for nineteen years, publishes almost exclusively short story collections and poetry, so I entered their contest … and hurrah!
One aspect of your collection that captured my attention within the first few stories is how the stories move from the surreal to the real so easily. In the first 50 pages or so, we have werewolf children and a woman birthing rabbits, but we also have two very real stories, absent of the surreal. One features issues related to pregnancy and a D&C, and the other is about, among many things, identity, hard work, and strength. As a writer, do you tend to lean toward being most comfortable with presenting the surreal or the real?
I operate in both modes, and I feel like there’s a lot of cross-over between them. Even if I’m building on a fantastical concept, my intention is for the story to feel grounded in emotional authenticity — for there to be some familiarity within the unfamiliar. I think we often strive to simplify the narratives of our lives, but fiction is a good place to resist that impulse — to explore our ambivalence, complications, and darkness. The fantastical provides a great way of reckoning with such material, much in the way dreams do, that is, with playfulness and open-ended metaphors. Within my realist stories, the fantastical makes itself known in the form of references (mythology, fairy lore), activities (Dungeons & Dragons, zombie cosplay), or simply in terms of the uncanny: our “real” experience of life contains our attachment to imagined realms … and isn’t life itself so terribly strange?
Another feature of your writing I appreciated throughout the collection is the humor on display. These are some heavy stories, right? I mean, you explore those big kinds of issues: what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a parent–and especially a mother, what it means to know and understand one’s self. What do you see as the role of humor in your work?
I find the term “comic relief” suspect: I don’t think of humor as escapist but rather as something that enhances our engagement. Granted, my characters aren’t usually laughing with delight. There’s definitely an edge to their humor, some recognition of an uncomfortable truth, some defensiveness in response to absurdity that’s pretending to be otherwise. I suppose that quality applies to the third-person narrative voice when I use it. Once you start talking about what’s funny, everything starts turning into smoke … but I think of humor as being linked to the unconscious: dreams are often hilarious, right? (Yes, dreams again.) That’s our uncensored mind, making rapid associations before our sense of propriety and logic can shut it down. In writing humor, there’s a certain amount of contrivance (with fine-tuning, fussing with word choices, etc.), but I find it flows best when I’m not being too deliberate about making it funny.
I have to ask about “A Doom of Her Own,” which has the shape of a gameplay-style story. How difficult was it to write? There is so much movement! And jokes. And connections. And layers.
I grew up with Choose Your Own Adventure stories, so the form appealed to me. Do you remember those books? (“If you go with the aphid leader, turn to pg. 24. If you insist on trying to escape now, turn to pg. 57.”) I loved being able to make choices for the main character, who was always “you” … even though “you” would often end up stuck in some ridiculous plot loop. Or dying. I thought that sense of frustration and mischief would lend itself well to a story about a toxic romantic relationship. The original 80s series had lots of fun/cheesy settings, so I initially tried to settle on one that seemed especially apt, but then I decided to just do a mix of several settings and combine those adventure plotlines with the plotline about the relationship. The movement from page to page asks the reader to make metaphorical connections — to trace the emotions, rather than literal action, which is deliberately jarring and can seem like non sequiturs. In putting the story together, I was inspired by something I’d read about the composition of The Beatles’ song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” which contains a glorious mash-up run of fairground calliope music: the sound engineer cut up various reels, threw them in the air, and then taped them together at random. That’s what I did with my various vignettes, which I’d sliced into slips of paper — I tossed the bundle in the air and then picked them up from where they fell. I started with a randomized order and then played around with how I might direct the reader from page to page. I kept a list to make sure that no one page got neglected or overused as a landing place.
Although “Origin Story” is a close second, my favorite story is “You Are Now In A Dark Chamber.” It has this perfectly real balance of youthful cruelty and playful (and false) naivety, and it also has this very, very real layer of outsiderness that Megan has to deal with just by being a girl trying to join a Dungeons & Dragons game. Will you share the genesis of this story?
I’m so glad you enjoyed “Dark Chamber”! To an extent, this is another throwback story: in the 80s, I knew boys who played D&D. My thirteen-year-old son is now into the game, and he plays the old-school edition. I’ve always found the D&D monster lore really appealing, so I wanted to draw on that somehow. Then Stranger Things came out, and while I enjoyed the D&D element and the 80s nostalgia, I was struck by how anachronistically enlightened the boys seemed, how utterly sweet — unlike so many of the boys I’d known! That gave me a push: I was inspired to write about the junior misogyny of the era. I’m concerned generally with how women can get objectified and diminished in gamer/fantasy contexts, so that was definitely at play in the writing of this story. Megan is not the only one who is bullied; the boys are hard on each other, and by pushing Megan out, they miss a chance to have a different kind of dynamic. My son acted as a creative consultant: I ran things by him to make sure I was getting the D&D stuff right.
There is some really great fantasy world-building in the story. Do you play?
I’m not a D&D player, but I do paint the miniatures. I’ve got tiny brushes and a special lamp with a magnifying lens … if that sounds like a line from a Weird Al song, so be it. I love that D&D is cool without being cool: it’s mainstream, it’s popular, but it defies appropriation from nerdcore sincerity. This is not a game you play ironically. Maybe the closest I come to role-playing is an enduring affinity for dollhouses: years ago, my dad made me one that I loved (now lost), and I’m currently fixing one up. I also enjoy making and wearing costumes. Give me an occasion for a costume, and I will be there in yet another wig.
I want to go back to my mention of “Origin Story.” It opens like this: “Never bite back. That’s what all the parenting websites tell you. None of this tit-for-tat nonsense, however tempted you may be. Giving a mixed message is not the danger. The danger is that you will be making yourself all too clear.” For this reader, it’s just the absolute perfect opening to the story, for sure, but also to the collection. These sentences point so smartly to the complexities and dangers of parenthood, which the book, of course, explores.
I am probably an over-analyzer of ordering in any story collection I read, but did you always plan for this story to be the opener? What do you see this story as establishing for the collection?
Analyze away! I really did sweat the choice of opener. I did not originally plan for the werewolf story to go first: somehow, I thought starting with such a fantastical, genre-y story would risk losing the reader, but my agent convinced me otherwise. It’s irrational, but I thought a realist story about motherhood, “Miscarriages,” would be more palatable, and then I could … I don’t know, ambush readers with the weirdness later on? As if the entire collection is not flying a weirdo flag. But as you suggest, the story sets up themes that will echo and ricochet through the collection as a whole: parenthood — and motherhood in particular — and nurturing, which is traditionally a facet of ideal femininity; anger and transformation; discomfort with an “ill-fitting skin” — some externally imposed identity or set of expectations.
Thank you for your time, Shannon, and congratulations on the release of your debut collection!
FICTION The Ill-Fitting Skin
By Shannon Robinson
Press 53
Published May 03, 2024
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