Clare Beams, "Milk"

It’s December 6. Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson, has had enough mutton for at least a fortnight.

How would you describe your story?

CLARE BEAMS: It’s about an unusually old, possibly magical wet nurse who seems to bestow special gifts on the babies she nurses, and who’s starting to question what the cost of those gifts might be.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

CB: I wrote the first draft of “Milk” in June of 2018, when I was just a few months past the end of breastfeeding my younger daughter. I think I wanted to capture the intensely weird, visceral experience of breastfeeding before I got too much distance from it. I was also waiting on the first round of notes from my editor on my novel The Illness Lesson, and this story—the first I’d written since publishing my story collection in 2016—made me remember how much I love making something move without having to get back under the weight of a whole novel every time I return to it. (I love writing novels too, but they’re harder, at least for me.)

What kind of research went into this story?

CB: Maybe a year before I wrote “Milk,” I came across a reference to a long-ago wet nurse who’d lactated well into her old age, and I remember feeling that little tickle of fascination that often tells me I might write about something someday. When I was starting the story in earnest, I read up a little on historical wet-nursing, but only until I could kind of see where I wanted to go.

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

CB: Really good short stories can achieve this seemingly impossible balance of closure and openness, I think. A short story can suggest much more than itself while still having the heft of perfect finality.

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

CB: My website is clarebeams.com.

What’s the best gift you’ve ever been given?

CB: An ongoing great one: every year my husband has a calendar made with pictures of our family from that same month of the previous year (so the December 2022 page has a collage of our December 2021 pictures on it). I love looking at where we’ve all been and thinking about where we might all be going.

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