Lucy Ives, "Ersatz Panda"
It’s December 17. Lucy Ives, author of Loudermilk, has a nickname for every cat she’s ever met.
How would you describe your story?
LUCY IVES: It is a tale of mistaken cat identity. Or, it's a story about a person who, unexpectedly, starts to become more reconciled to a major loss in her own life by becoming more reconciled regarding the disappearance and strange replacement of her beautiful neighborhood bodega cat with a gnarly substitute cat. And it's a story about New York City.
When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?
LI: I wrote it in early summer of 2017 after an editor asked me for a story (a request that terrified me at the time). It's the first short story I wrote that I really liked (ever!) and it became the basis for a forthcoming story collection that will be released in 2021.
What kind of research went into this story?
LI: I got very interested in the etymology of the word ersatz and spent a few days reading about it. Otherwise, the story is based on everyday life in Brooklyn, NY, circa 2016–17, and required more plain old existing than concerted seeking.
What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?
LI: I think the short story has an incredible capacity to convey information below what we might term the conscious reading "radar." (I'm thinking of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" here, as one example.) A good story makes us aware, when we come to the end, of how we have been absorbing information about the world and its odd symmetries without noticing this information arriving. A good story surprises us with how much we already knew about what was happening and what was going to happen, even as we did not know we knew it and believed we knew nothing of what would come to pass.
Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?
LI: At risk of being uninteresting, I will recommend my website, lucy-ives.com. It has an unusual design that also says something about how I think about what I do as a writer.
What's the best gift you've ever been given?
LI: A few years ago, I was moving away from New York and at a going-away party, my friend Farnoosh gave me a copy of Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. I don't know why I had never read the novel or how Farnoosh knew I had never read it. It explained a lot of things to me.
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