Maggie Shipstead, "Acknowledgements"
It’s December 5. Maggie Shipstead, author of Seating Arrangements, would like to start by thanking the academy.
How would you describe your story?
MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD: As a story told from the point of view of a lavishly arrogant, profoundly deluded, wildly insecure male writer. I think it's a comic story, and I often say it's a mean story, which it is, but I think justifiably.
When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?
MS: I wrote it in the spring of 2017, when I was a visiting writer at the University of Tennessee teaching a fiction workshop for MFA students. For better or for worse, that experience churned up a lot of memories of my own MFA program and my two additional years in workshop as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. I was my worst self by the end of every semester in workshop, just a total small-hearted goblin of frustration and pettiness. My character flaws were mostly to blame, but maybe probably also the effect of prolonged exposure to obnoxious writer behavior like that of my narrator pushed me over the edge. Writing this story went quickly because the voice is one that has been slowly, painfully etched into my soul over the years by prolonged exposure, and once I had the idea to imitate it, I was off and running.
What kind of research went into this story?
MS: I've read about a million pieces of fiction written in some version of the lofty, mannered, self-consciously literary voice that I use in the story. It's a voice that is weirdly ubiquitous and bafflingly often praised and makes me insane because of how it vibrates with ego. Within the plot, I've used own experiences and borrowed from anecdotes shared by other women writers and, of course, invented. Let's just say a few of my male writer friends have said things like "Ha ha, hope that story wasn't about me!" I've offered no reassurance. What I should do is send them a link to Carly Simon's "You're So Vain."
What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?
MS: I think short stories can have an exquisiteness to them that's unsustainable within something longer. I also think stories are a way to use, for instance, a voice that's really only tolerable in small doses, like a bite of food with a flavor too strong for an entire meal.
Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?
MS: Lots of my travel writing and a handful of my short stories can be found at www.maggieshipstead.com. I'm also quite active on Instagram: @shipstead.
What's the best gift you've ever been given?
MS: My mom not only took me to Europe the summer I was thirteen, she let me choose what we did. Which is crazy! I had read some article in an old National Geographic from the ‘60s about a monastery in the Great St. Bernard Pass in Switzerland where the monks raise dogs, and we went on a multiday train and bus quest to get there more or less because of my whim. I travel a lot by myself and on assignment now, and I think her main gift to me was the realization that you only get to see places if you decide to go to them. It sounds super obvious, but that basic moment of decision and the engagement of willpower is a necessary first step.
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