Ander Monson, "I've Thought About Taking Up Another Life"
It’s December 14. Ander Monson, author of The Gnome Stories, will get to the sports pages eventually.
How would you describe your story?
ANDER MONSON: It’s been a bit since I revisited this story. Coming back to it I was again beguiled by the weird interplay between the story of Diana’s disappearance and the obsessive speculation of the narrator. So much of what I like about it is the friction and distance between these two surfaces, when they touch, and what sparks they generate.
When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?
AM: I wrote this story as part of a novel project I’ve been working on, low key, for part of the last decade. Henry’s backstory pulls from some of the Satanic Panic frenzy of the 1980s, a subject that’s fascinating to me as someone who lived through that time, played a bunch of D&D when it was still somehow transgressive, and had to negotiate my dad’s questioning of just what the hell this thing we were doing was, as big hunks of the culture lost its mind to fear and speculation. This era leaves me with so many questions, and I haven’t read enough fiction set it or around that time. Most of my stories start with a voice: that’s the thing I put in the gas tank, and then I drive, and see how far I can go. And this one definitely did, and so I got to its end and then started building it out to intersect with some of the other stuff I thought was important to the novel, but could never really get it to work with the book—or maybe the book never really worked with it—and it felt complete and working on its own. I used to write really short stories all the time, but now when I find myself working in fiction I write really long, maybe because I can find more depth when I discover a voice that compels me, or maybe I’ve just evolved my sense of what a story can do when you’re in it.
What kind of research went into this story?
AM: None that was explicit. Most of the research was happening in the stories around this one in the novel. In a way this one is a pure exercise in speculation and what speculation can do to people.
What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?
AM: A short story is a daily dose, or in the context of an advent calendar, a daily door through which you might find anything, which is the thing I love best about them. The US RDA is one a day for stories. They don’t recommend this for novels and definitely not for poems, though essays can be similarly beguiling, if at an angle. Defined by its relative brevity, the rules for stories are similarly unclear. You can do anything you want in one. And because it’s a quick assignation we have with a story, I love how encountering one can inflect or tint the reader’s day. It’s like what we proved we can do with a far-off asteroid or whatever bound for earth: a story doesn’t need to blow it up completely (though it can); it just needs to alter its trajectory enough to change the reader’s future, though sometimes you won’t know how it’s been changed until much later.
Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?
AM:
— My website: otherelectricities.com
— The books of course, or if books are too much of an investment, how about some t-shirts: angermonsoon.threadless.com
— The Assessment Matters Institute for Assessment Matteration: Where Assessment Really Matters: assmatters.org
What’s the best gift you’ve ever been given?
AM: The gift of fire. My wife gave me a weed-burning propane torch a few years ago that I love using to burn weeds but also to torch black widows after they took over the yard last year after an unusually rainy season. I hate spiders, and I really hate a lot of spiders, especially those that endanger the neighbors’ kids and pets, and when I wield it I get that Ripley in Alien feeling at a much lower dose, but that’s enough for me, as I try to drive these little xenomorphs toward the airlock where I’m going to blast them into space and go back to hypersleep for the long flight home.
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