That’s not how we read: a conversation with author Astrid Blodgett
“I’m interested in what goes on in people. Especially the quieter ones, the ones who have been hurt, the ones who are hurting.”
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The promotional life of a book is generally short: a year of sporadic reviews and interviews, maybe a festival appearance, with the possibility of a brief extension if the book gets nominated for a prize. After that, in book-marketing world, it’s over; we’ve moved on to the next shiny new book.
But that’s not how book lovers read. Sure, we read new books. But just as often, we’re discovering and delighting in books that have been out for years. In this segment, I want to celebrate books the way we, the book lovers, actually read them: on our own schedules. Because great books deserve more airtime.
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I’m thrilled to kick off That’s Not How We Read with a conversation with fellow Edmontonian and master of the short story form Astrid Blodgett. Her most recent collection, This is How You Start to Disappear, was published in 2023 and was shortlisted for a Writers Guild of Alberta short story book prize. It’s a gorgeous book that everyone should read.
The twelve stories in TIHYSTD “explore the consequences of grief and denial and single moments that change perceptions, lives, and attachments forever. A child negotiates adult behaviour when an injured dog is put down. An older sister bribes a younger one to go on her first date. A family canoe trip launches from Disaster Point. A woman wants to hurl her granddaughter’s birthday cake out the window. This Is How You Start to Disappear shows all the heartbreaking ways we evolve when coping with change or trauma.”
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LG: Astrid Blodgett! Tell me, do you have any obsessions that inform your writing that would surprise people? Are they constants that you visit in different ways over your writing career, or do you pick them up and then toss them aside once you’ve written the piece?
AB: I probably do (have obsessions), though none that would surprise anyone. I’ve been trying to move away from these obsessions just to branch out, but I seem to return to the same themes, women and girls being “erased” or “disappeared” in their relationships. Or people ending up in situations they didn’t plan to be in and saying to themselves: How did that happen? And: What now? (Or simply remaining confused.) Both have been a fascination of mine for far too long, and maybe this will be all I write about. I suspect I have a similar pattern in the telling, and I’m trying to break away from this too. All good challenges!
LG: The thing about our writerly obsessions, I think, is that they stick with us because we know there is so much to plumb. Like the way some of us would examine a bug when we were kids: we’d get up close, note the colours and the number of legs or segments, poke it with a stick, flip it over, touch it, watch how it walked or crawled, put something in its way to see if it would crawl over or around, or back up or stop, and so on.
AB: This is absolutely right; there is so much to plumb! The close examination of the bug. Poor bugs.
LG: In TIHYSTD, there’s one utterly memorable story (“The Night the Moon Was Bright and We Ate Pigs and Brownies and Drank Fizzy Beer and Didn’t Remember Much at All, in the End”) with multiple levels of disappearing, and you layer them with a light hand and a sure touch. Beginning with the mother, who says, the morning after all the things happened (no spoilers here; read the book), “It wasn’t what I thought. I mean, I had an idea. But not that.” And her husband says, “Oh, you knew. You don’t go to a thing like that and not know.”
It’s a quick back and forth – they aren’t fighting – but it hit me hard. It was tossed out in such a reflexive way, like the “you asked for it” concept is as hardwired in us all as the shape of the earth. And that throwaway line – that given, of females being thoroughly examined by others but only insofar as it assigns them culpability for whatever happens to them – resonates throughout the story in all the more overt ways the girls are disappeared, often while also being deeply – but one-dimensionally – scrutinized.
AB: I love this – “as hardwired in us all as the shape of the earth.” So much is hardwired in us, poor humans that we are. I think you’ve nailed it though – as writers we try for these things that are so much part of us that we can fold into a story. And how true, how girls are often simultaneously disappeared and scrutinized.
LG: There’s a lot of scope to explore within the disappearing theme, and I don’t think you fall into predictable patterns in your stories. In the opening story, “These People Have Nothing,” the disappearing is more about memory and parenthood. And it’s different again in “This Will All Be Over Soon” – a story that, btw, when I finished reading it, made me say out loud, “Holy fuck, Astrid!” and then just sit on the loveseat for a while staring into space.
AB: Those kids. What they get up to. What they think they want.
LG: I haven’t even begun to talk about your obsession with writing characters who look around and wonder how they got where they are. That surprise, that feeling of not being in control, or fully aware of what they’re choosing or rejecting and what it all means. I love this, too, as a writer. All this to say, your obsessions are working, please carry on.
AB: Mostly now I just have to say a huge thank you. So … why do we write what we write? I don’t know. We just do. I’m interested in what goes on in people. Especially the quieter ones, the ones who have been hurt, the ones who are hurting; and I’m fascinated by the ways that in fiction we can write around them/their worlds and a reader will form a picture of these worlds in their mind.
LG: Have you learned more about yourself as a writer after reading reviews? Or are you methodical about creating and revisiting themes within a story collection?
AB: Most reviewers articulate what I’m trying to do far better than I can, so this can be very helpful! I’m not methodical; I would rather not be. I know readers appreciate a themed collection or a novel in stories, but this is not how my brain works. I don’t always know my intentions or my meaning. So much I leave to the imagination and I don’t always know exactly what my imagination is trying to tell me, but I trust it and follow.
LG: I love to hear that you’re not methodical during the writing process, because your finished stories are so beautifully put together. I’m not methodical either, when writing short stories, though I’ve had to be more so with my novel. And I think that might be why we both delight in a thoughtful review – we were just writing on topics that grabbed us, and when a reviewer points out the connections, we think, “Well, obviously,” though we might not have been able to put it into words until after the collection was done.
AB: Exactly! Just a bunch of topics that grabbed us by the organ of benevolence (as Dickens called it) and didn’t let up. And thank goodness for the reviewer who sees the connections!
LG: Do you like doing readings? What are your favourite excerpts to read aloud?
AB: I don’t love doing readings but I am getting more comfortable at it. I wish I was comfortable. I love attending readings and hearing writers read and talk about their work; I think this just comes more easily to some people than others.
At my Edmonton launch I read the opening of “The Night the Moon was Bright”; I remember this mostly because my brother was at the back making wisecracks about it to one of my walking friends; he knew the jumping-off points of the story (just to be clear, there’s no Miranda in real life, no one who goes through what she did), and every now and then he would make a comment to my friend about what he thought would happen next. At another event I read bits of “The Kite,” the weird poetic story set on an island, a totally made up place I wanted to be in Alberta but isn’t, as far as I know (I wish we had such places; I was vaguely thinking of the island on Lac La Biche that you can drive to via the causeway; we visited it once simply because I was intrigued by the idea of a causeway. But that’s another place altogether.) I also love reading from “These People Have Nothing” because it’s set near a place that’s dear to me and because I have a fondness for the characters. I know, weird, given that they are not real. I read from the story set at the Idylwylde Library at that very library; loved that!
LG: If you were ever accused of plagiarism, who would you like to be accused of copying? And how and what do you read?
AB: Great question! Maybe Claire Keegan or Gaetan Soucy. At the moment. In ten years, my answer might be different. I mostly read short stories. I do read novels (including graphic novels) and nonfiction (memoir, essays) and poetry, but I can only take so much (of nonfiction or massive novels) before returning to the short story form. I feel like I’m sinking into a comfortable bed or a hammock or something. This is not to say the reading is easier; the form is different and my neurons seem to leap around differently in short fiction.
I loved Kathryn Kuitenbrower’s Walk Softly, Brother, Kasia Van Schaik’s We Have Never Lived on Earth, A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, The Time In Between by David Bergen, The Ghost of You by Margarita Saona, Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades, I (Athena) by Ruth DyckFehderau, Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lot by Sarah de Leeuw, Chemical Valley by David Huebert, What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad…
LG: I love this list, and your description of how your neurons jump around differently when you’re reading short fiction! I’m also a huge reader of short stories. I loved A Manual for Cleaning Women, too. Another favourite of mine is Oh, My Darling by Shaena Lambert. We could swap titles for days.
AB: I should add that this is the current list, books read in the last few years; it will likely evolve. I loved Oh, My Darling as well. We could absolutely swap titles for days! There are of course others but the list would get too long!
LG: Are there any characters you’ve written that haunt you? That you miss, or that you think about revisiting in another story? A screenwriter I once took a course with talked about putting your character up a tree and then throwing rocks at them. Do you ever want to put one of your characters up a new (different or similar) tree, and throw fresh rocks at them?
AB: That’s a good question. Not really. I am sometimes haunted (or deeply intrigued) by a character when I am writing (and rewriting and rewriting) the story. That said, there are one or two secondary characters in my most recent collection I might give their own story; I love it when this happens, when you realise the character who was there in the background has more to say.
LG: I hope you know I’m now going to leaf through your book again and try to guess who might get their own story. Then when your next collection comes out, I will present you with the list and we can laugh about how wrong/clever I am.
AB: Ha ha ha.
LG: What are you working on now? Do you hate it when people ask you that question? Are you superstitious or otherwise reluctant to talk about what you’re working on while it’s in draft form?
AB: More short stories! I don’t hate it when people ask though many of my friends do. I’m not superstitious. I don’t think anybody wants to steal what I’m writing. It’s not that sort of material. Nobody asks me to elaborate anyway, so it’s easy to say “writing short stories.”
I can’t find the quote right now but a writer once said that it’s better to read the story than have someone describe it to you; if the story is described, that basically wrecks it. In other words, I can only talk in generalizations about what I’m writing. I can say: the human condition. Matters of the heart. And so on.
LG: I tend to worry that if I talk about an idea before the piece is fully formed, something might take the wind out of its sails. That the person asking might wrinkle their nose at my answer and say, “Hmm, interesting,” in a tone that implies they don’t find it at all interesting. Or that some helpful person might say, “Oh yes, and the trained macaw will be the killer!” when I was trying to describe something entirely different. I worry about other fingers accidentally messing with something that’s still fragile.
AB: Exactly – you are likely to be sent somewhere else altogether!
For me it’s that sometimes I don’t know the story until it’s written. The story unfolds in the writing. And the writing may take you somewhere you didn’t plan to end up. You may not like it but more likely you will. Or you may get two stories out of it…
LG: Do you belong to a writing group? Does it rock? Are there amazing smart people in it who you adore?
AB: As a matter of fact, I do, and it does rock, and the other writers are amazing and I adore all of them! I so appreciate careful readers who offer thoughtful feedback. What a great motivator.
(Editor’s note: Astrid’s fellow writing group members are Leslie Greentree, Rea Tarvydas and Danica Klewchuk.)
LG: Is there any piece of writing advice floating around out there that really pisses you off?
AB: Nothing really pisses me off (in that department), but I puzzle over the “write what you know” idea. Sometimes we write to find out more about what we don’t know. Or at least float around in that muck for a bit and come out understanding a bit more (and a bit dirtier, but whatever). If we only wrote what we know, after a while we’d run out of stuff. And we’d give up a way of deepening our understanding of things that interest us.
And also I’m at the point where I think if the advice is not useful to me I’ll just ignore it. I mostly pay attention to the useful advice. I’ve had lots of fantastic advice over the years, the best being: Keep doing what you’re doing. And: Read a lot. Go for walks (it stimulates your writing brain, so my dad said, among others). And: Rewrite.
LG: This is so fun, I could keep talking with you for hours. Thanks for hanging out with me, Astrid. PS: As per one of the stories in TIHYSTD, I did play the fainting game once when I was in elementary school and it was freaky.
AB: Ha ha ha! Maybe I knew you when we were in elementary school, in a parallel world.
Learn more about Astrid Blodgett and buy her books here.