CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation between Steve Fox and Marcia Williams

April 4, 2023

Writer Marcia Williams talked with Steve Fox about his debut story collection Sometimes Creek which was released in January 2023 by Cornerstone Press. Included in the seventeen stories are "Then it Would be Raining," winner of the 2020 Montana Prize for Fiction awarded by the Whitefish Review, and "Boydlehook," a finalist in CutBank's Big Sky, Small Prose contest.

Marcia Williams: What spark causes you to start writing?

Steve Fox: Probably any piece—speculative or real or not—it's just something at random that I happen to notice. Depending on the day, I have a certain take on it, and I'll hold those seeds or moments of interaction of individuals or something I overhear and pull them together into a scene or set of scenes that I build the story from. With the speculative, I have a tendency to try to explain what seems to be a broken human system. That can be really effective with a younger narrator trying to understand how adults are solving these complex problems. The absurd can help to underscore that adults are addressing symptoms and not dealing with what's causing this situation.

MW: Which writers have had the greatest influence on you and your work?

SF: Probably starting with Dr. Seuss, that really developed within me a love of language and having fun and not necessarily following rules. I think that was a subconscious thing that he taught kids: it's okay to be naughty. It had an impact, to read those stories or have them read to you.

I did study Latin American literature. Julio Cortázar was one guy I really liked a lot and one of the books of his I read, the title translates to Hopscotch. It's a novel, you finish a chapter and there's a number a the end and you skip ahead or back to that chapter. You have the option of reading it straight through but even he notes it's not going to be as much fun as jumping around. I can remember reading it on a bus when I lived in Buenos Aires, watching people come and go each day and trading places on the bus. The story lines are like solutions to a crossword puzzle: you have one answer coming across the page and the other comes down and where they intersect those two stories share that common square, that one letter that they have in common. And then the characters go on with the rest of their day and their lives but in that moment you have a primary character and a secondary character. And nobody is a secondary character in their own story, right? So you value that person as well, at least I do. And I've always wondered what happens to that other character. While seeing all that and reading this book, it just kind of clicked. I was in my early twenties.

Cortazar's no longer with us. But of the writers who are still relatively young and living and prolific, I really like Karen Russell and Kelly Link. I'm not going to say Carver and Vonnegut and all that, but I suppose they're there. I remember a friend once asking me if I'd read any Kurt Vonnegut books, and I didn't really remember reading any of them. He was very upset about it—he was a journalist, living in Madison (Wisconsin)—so he gave me a collection of short stories and it turns out I'd read all of them. Apparently I'd just processed them and they were baked into my subconscious. On the speculative side I like Karen Russell. She made me realize that it’s possible to write stories like she does — terrifying if they weren't so hilarious — but still very real. They occupy these liminal spaces which is what I like to do.

MW: Do you have a philosophy for creating art from life?

SF: Yes, I never really thought about it as a philosophy, but I started putting autobiographical elements in not to create autofiction or memoir, but it's a lot less work to create settings if you're pulling it right out of your memory. I think in my stories the setting is strong and the characters have a pretty powerful connection to it. It's also a good break from writing whatever else to grab a few memories about your life, to re-live and to build a story around that. The story doesn't have to be about memory. And maybe a snapshot of something that happened there. In the story "I Prefer You in Spanish," I do have a memory of seeing a tarot card reader just devastate the person she was reading the cards for in a small square in Spain, and it was a very emotional moment for all involved. Kind of hard to forget that, though it didn't impact me personally.

MW: How did that story come to be set in Spain?

SF: I call that story a Covid story even though it doesn't deal directly with Covid. In fact, I tried to make the piece as timeless as possible; except for the fact they're traveling on trains, it could easily be within the last hundred years. It was a cold night here in Wisconsin in February a couple of years ago. Covid was still killing thousands of people a day. We were sheltering in place. No vaccine, no treatment, no cure. A lot of angry people. And I needed to get away but didn't know where I could go. So I had to break from the rest of the narratives that I'd been writing. They were very character focused, very close. In your head kind of narrating, I needed something a little airier and had to pull away in my brain just go someplace else just for a little while.

MW: Randy Koenig's “Very Large Mouse" is another Covid story.

SF: Definitely. That goes at it directly about the pandemic pantry. It's kind of an absurd sort of story but it goes on that vibe of people just wanting to get back to normal. I think when you use the absurd it becomes clear what was normal and that nothing's going to be normal again.

The other kind of Covid story is called "Goat Milk." That's actually a story I wrote before Covid-19 came to America. Then when Covid came I made a joke, so are we going to have to burn all of our clothes when this is over?

MW: Do you have a favorite piece in this collection?

SF: At the time of the writing, every story is my favorite. I really like my stories, to the point where the characters follow me around in my head all day long no matter where I go, even if I'm sheltered in place. The plot line comes with me; stories just don't leave me alone a lot of the time. They're okay being set aside for a while. I really get animated about what I'm working on at that time. Post publication, I can be reading a page that's been printed—now there's a book with a bar code on it—it's hard not to reach for a red pen. But no, I don't think I have a favorite. 

MW: How did you come to be a writer?

SF: I've been writing stories since I was a little kid. I remember instead of doing the English assignment, I'd write my teacher a story if I liked her—and they were always women—I don't think I had a male English teacher growing up. And one, Mrs. Wilcox, really encouraged me to write, and she actually read one of the stories. It was about fishing in Montana because I grew up reading Field and Stream and every trout picture was caught from Jackson Hole or somewhere out there. Then, writing was just something I could always come back to. About ten years ago I decided it was getting to now-or-never-time in terms of my life and even if I had a talent for it, it was time to develop that. If I were a sculptor or a painter or a soccer player I'd have to work at it, too,  so I attended a couple of workshops and was pretty lucky in the individuals I worked with in the writing lab.

MW: What are you working on now?

SF: More stories. I've always got about four stories in the works and a set of random notes. I turned in a story to our writing group basically the same scene written over and over again. There's a joke I've made that I haven't had time to really write anything brand new but since then, I've started a couple of new stories. I've been a little bit inspired by David Sedaris, I'm reading A Carnival of Snackery. It's his diaries and the entries are really short—who knows how long they originally were—but in print they're really short. I thought, I could do this. So I started taking more notes on my phone like daily things that I notice, jot down maybe my own little writing prompt. But probably in another year or so, I'll have enough stories for another collection.

MW: Any interest in writing longer fiction?

SF: I have an interest, yes. I need to be able to imagine maintaining an arc over 90,000 words though, and find the discipline for the story line. Even if it's complicated or if there are multiple things going on. I keep thinking that probably a few of the stories I have, that weren't included, could become a novel unto itself. I considered maybe going back and editing those and enhancing them because none of my characters ever disappear. I really like characters in my stories, even if I kill all of them.

MW: What about research?

SF: I do some research for my stories but not a profound amount. One of the writing workshops I was in a number of years ago had all kinds of different writers. I marveled at the sorts of things they were writing. One woman researched everything: types of jargon, these people were pickling dill pickles at some hotel just before WWI and she found the recipes for them on microfiche, and then she looked at me and said, "Don't you do that?"  and I said, "I just make shit up." But for "little blind flying mice" I had to look up some things about bats, enough to be dangerous, I guess. I mean, still don't know how long bats live.

"You're Soaking in It" started out as an essay called, "I Was Marketed To." It was intended to be about me as a college student unable to focus on anything because there's so many TV ads crowding my brain. And so I looked up a lot of them, Fabergé, Pepperidge Farms, Palmolive—you're soaking in it—totally. I watched them on videos.  

MW: Some of the blurbs emphasize the midwestern nature of this collection, but I see that as a primary setting for universal pieces.

SF: I think that's a great observation because I agree. There is a certain intensity to the settings that was not intentional, it just came out in the stories. I've had people say, it feels like these stories happen no matter where you're from, right down the street. For the story "Sometimes Creek" I was in a workshop with people from all over North America, Canada to California, Maine, and they'd say, oh, it sounds like a town right down the road or the town I grew up in in New Jersey. So I think there is a universal appeal.