Miriam Gershow is a novelist and story writer. Her debut short collection, Survival Tips, is out from Propeller Books March 19 2024. Her novel, Closer, is forthcoming from Regal House in 2025. Her debut novel, The Local News (Spiegel & Grau), was hailed as “unusually credible and precise" and "deftly heartbreaking” by The New York Times.
Miriam’s stories appear in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction appears in anthologies from Alan Squire Books and Alternating Currents, as well as in Pithead Chapel, Had, and Variant Lit, where she is the inaugural winner of the Pizza Prize. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Salon and Craft Literary among other journals.
She is the recipient of
a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and an
Oregon Literary Fellowship, as well as writing residencies at Playa, Kimmel
Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Wildacres. Her
stories have been listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories of The Best
American Short Stories and appeared in the Robert Olen Butler Prize
Stories. Her writing has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and was a
finalist for the Oregon Book Award (Ken Kesey Award for the Novel).
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work
compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, The Local News, changed my life hugely and not at all. It turned out to be so meaningful to finally be able to say at 38, I have a book! It validated my creative existence and the long, wild choice to be a writer. I’d been getting stories published for years, but something about a book shifted my sense of how I was choosing to make my life and rooted me in it more deeply. Materially, I was lucky enough to get an advance that paid for eight months of maternity leave when I was a lowly adjunct instructor. But I woke up the day my book was published still with all my insecurities and worries and neuroses. A book couldn’t save me from myself, even though I’d deep down fantasized it somehow would.
My newest book, Survival Tips: Stories, spans 23-years of my writing—some of those early published stories are in there!—essentially my whole career. This makes the book feel a lot more familiar to me, rather than brand sparkling new. It’s been fifteen years since my first book, and in hindsight, I was so vulnerable and full of a combination of disbelief and sensitivity when it came out. I was unable to take in the process fully, kind of watching myself go through it rather than going through it. Not so, this time. I’m meeting this book with joy and so much gratitude and loving every moment of the process.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I was squirreled away reading fiction all of my childhood in the seventies suburban white girl pipeline of Judy Blume to V.C. Andrews to Jean M. Auel to Stephen King. It was always going to be fiction for me.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I’m a quick starter! I love beginnings. I’ve come recently to flash fiction, and some of those first appear – miraculously – close to their final shape. Novels never ever appear looking close to anything. I’m slow through a first draft, never quite sure where I’m going and trying to coax the story out. The shape comes later, though revision and more revision. There are always a whole bunch of scrawled post-its and scraps of paper strewn across my desk throughout novel writing.
4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I usually begin with a snippet of character – a situation they’re in, a thought they’re having.
I’m pretty clear on whether I’m writing long or short. Only very occasionally do short pieces end up going longer; often that’s a sign that I can’t quite wrangle my ideas in the way I’d hoped to. It’s also not unusual for a longer piece to run out of steam before I’m done with it. That never usually signals a shorter story; it signals that the story isn’t there. Those end up in my very full recycling bin. I’m not shy about throwing out ideas that don’t work.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love readings. I’m an ambivert – love the solitary writing time, love being in community. I see readings as the public celebration after the long, lone process of writing. I love sharing the work. I’m a former theater nerd. Readings are my stage! The danger is if I read a work-in-progress too early; I’ll take the audience validation to mean the piece is finished, when often it’s really, really not. I can perform it into sounding finished when the page alone doesn’t bear that out.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Hmmm…theoretical concerns sounds very high-minded and I consider myself maybe a more intuitive writer. I feel like I’ve always returned to the same questions, long or short, fiction or nonfiction: how do we find connection and what are the many ways we fail at finding connection and how do we recover from that failure and do better?
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Ideally, the role is truth teller, which feels essential right now in our post-truth era in the US. My first serious writing teacher, Tom Spanbauer, said, “Fiction is the lie that tells the truth,” and I agree fully with that. With fiction especially, there is the potential to transport readers into the humanity of folks who aren’t a part of their lived experience and create empathy and understanding. I don’t mean didactically. I’m turned off by moralistic work. I don’t need a lesson. But that delicious quality of being swept up in fiction, I really do believe it can change a reader for the better.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! I love it. I think an outside editor is the best reason to be traditionally published. You have someone as invested in the work as you are, trying to make it better.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
One of my teachers, David Bradley, said, “Your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness.” Does this count as advice? I return to it all the time. I really lean into my strengths in early drafts. I’d argue all writers do. For me, my strength are are long, multi-clause sentences with parentheses and em-dashes galore; meandering tangents; a wry, clever narrative or character voice. When I come back to the drafts, I can see how those crowd out other parts of the writing: a clear structure, consistent pacing, a deepening of character vulnerability. If I over-rely on my strengths, they create weakness in the overall writing. Revision becomes the time to exercise the skills that aren’t as intuitive. I bring this up all the time with fiction students. It’s such a good lens through which to view your own work.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to the novel to flash fiction to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
In the past couple of years, since I started writing short short work, it has been amazingly easy. After years of failure in selling a second novel, writing flash returned me to myself and my writing and my confidence. There was something so delightful and satisfying about a form that I could draft in a few sittings, and then work and work into meaning. For a very long time, endings were the hardest part of writing because it was the moment you had to make something of what you’re writing or admit you were bullshitting. Often I was bullshitting. But this return to short work, and the discovery of flash and micro, which are so short, and so much about the ending, made me realize I do a lot less bullshitting these days. I have a lot to say. And I’m saying it. It feels really good.
And I find myself longing to return to novel writing after spending any real amount of time in flash, and vice versa. They are such good complements to each other, and each makes me appreciative of and restless for the other.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I wake up, get my teenager off to school, drink some very caffeinated tea (having recently and sadly given up coffee because of my delicate, middle-aged digestive system), and sit in front of my computer. On the best day, I get to work with the writing, spend an hour or two on it, find myself swept up in the momentum, and before I know it, three o’clock rolls around with me in a happy, creative haze as my teenager rolls back in from school.
More realistically, I’m in front of the computer grading my college students’ papers, catching up on emails, setting up book events, scrolling way too much social media, and fitting writing in for an hour or two. The deeper I am in a project, the more momentum it gains, and the more likely I am to be swept up in it at the expense of everything else. Those are the best and most delicious writing days, and I become a relatively absent (or at least spacey) teacher/mom/wife/friend, as a result.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Books. So many books. Literary fiction, graphic novels, story collections, the occasional space opera. Television, everything from prestige streaming series to bad reality TV. Anything away from my desk – walking, knitting, taking a long, hot bath. I need a change of venue if I’m really stalled, to get away from the work so I can at least attempt to return anew.
The question I’m always facing is: am I stalled out because I’m getting to the really hard stuff I’m avoiding or am I stalled out because this story idea is no longer alive in my imagination? I have to fight against the impulse to throw everything out when I’m really stuck.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Childhood home? New rain on asphalt. Current home? Teen boy sweat.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Does family count as a form? My books, most recently, have come from parenthood, marriage, and the ongoing process of trying to make a home.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
So many. I’m just going to give a long list like an Academy Award winner being played off the stage. Authors I adore and who inspire: Jennifer Haigh, Marcy Dermansky, Deesha Philyaw, Rebecca Schiff, Kathy Fish, Mira Jacob, Tom Perrotta, Lorrie Moore, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Gabrielle Bell, Sara Novic, Mary Gaitskill, Kristen Radtke, Dan Chaon. Books that changed my life: The Feast of Love, Lolita, Geek Love, Barn 8, The Great Believers, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Drown, Girl, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Nothing To See Here, The Invisible Circus, The Middlesteins, Notes on a Scandal, Arcadia, A Friend of the Family, Motherless Brooklyn, The Interloper, Fool on the Hill.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I want to write a book where the central character is slowly falling apart, but endearingly or at least really engagingly. Like a slow motion car wreck but with wry humor and a good dose of pathos. I’ve tried writing this book three times, three very different books, none of them very good. For a while, I thought I’d finally put this idea to bed. But recently I came up with a way to resurrect it that has me newly motivated. It might be Sisyphean, but this particular boulder has a very strong pull on me.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Broadway star, though I can’t sing or dance. I can emote.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think it goes back to the early, transporting experience of reading. Books are magic. On the best writing days, the process of making books is magic too.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last great book: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I can’t remember the last film, so I’m going to give you my second most recent great book: My Murder by Katie Williams.
20 - What are you currently working on?
In all honesty, I’m working on the hustle
for Survival Tips – answering
questions for cool writerly blogs, sending out postcards to bookstores and
libraries, composing emails for my mailing list. After that, I’ll get to work
editing my forthcoming novel, Closer
(June 2025), with my Regal House editor. And after that, if I’m brave (or
really dense) it’s back to pushing my boulder up my hill in the form of a new
novel out of the barest of bones of an old, failed one.
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