Trying (and Sometimes Failing) to Connect
In which we have a chat with past Missouri Review contributor Amy Stuber, author of the forthcoming short story collection Sad Grownups.
In this interview, Missouri Review intern Jackson Porter catches up with Amy Stuber, winner of the Peden Prize for best short story in a volume year. Her debut collection, Sad Grownups will be published on October 8. Look for it here.
Amy Stuber’s writing has appeared in The New England Review, Flash Fiction America, Ploughshares, The Idaho Review, Witness, The Common, Cincinnati Review, Triquarterly, American Short Fiction, Joyland, Copper Nickel, West Branch, and elsewhere.
She was the recipient of the Missouri Review’s 2023 William Peden Prize in fiction, winner of the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize, and runner-up for the 2022 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her work received a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIV, appeared on the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021, has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appears in Best Small Fictions 2020 and 2023. She’s an editor at Split Lip Magazine.
Jackson Porter: TMR published your story, “The Last Summer,” which was later awarded our Peden Prize for best story in a volume year. Could you talk a little about what it was like to have that story honored in that way?”
Amy Stuber: I actually remember the exact moment I found this out because I was with my family in Mendocino, California, one of my favorite places in the country, and getting the email about this award while being in this beautiful place I loved almost felt like more good than I could handle at once, ha! I was so thrilled and excited and shocked. For years, I’d submitted to the Missouri Review, gotten rejections, some personalized, some not, but I kept submitting, thinking, “Maybe someday” because Missouri Review was really a “dream publication” for me. Both of my kids are writers (they’re 16 and 19), and I’ve told them that writing and submitting results in 99% rejection, and if they aren’t okay with that, they should probably write for themselves but not submit their work too much. So, I guess winning this prize was a reminder to me that persistence does sometimes pay off - not always, obviously, because I could tell another story about submitting 50 times to another dream place and getting only rejections, but this one, this was such a happy outcome. And this particular story, “The Last Summer,” means a lot to me, so it’s always amazing when a journal really sees your work the way you want it to be seen.
JP: “The Last Summer” is in your forthcoming collection, Sad Grownups, which will be published October 8 of this year. Can you tell us more about this collection in general?
Stuber: When I wrote these stories, between 2018 and 2022 for the most part, I was really coming out of a long period of high anxiety and some depression in the years after the super intense young kids phase of parenting. I started writing again after a long period of not writing much in an attempt to process emotions and to feel once again like I had an identity separate from “mom.” (Don’t get me wrong—I love being a parent, and I adore my kids more than really anything, but the early years were hard for me.) Sad Grownups is ultimately about distance between people and how we attempt (and sometimes fail) to connect with each other and understand ourselves in order to find joy and meaning in life. It’s also a bit of a critique of America—how societally we’ve made a lot of the wrong choices, which has left us at some dead ends, and how individuals come to terms with all that but still lead lives that matter.
JP: Beyond the Peden Prize, you’ve also been cited in the Wigleaf Top 50 and other accolades. how have you grown as a writer since then?
Stuber: Writing and submitting is really such a strange process. You can get one great thing (like the Peden prize, which was so amazing to receive) and then a string of hard rejections, sometimes for months. It’s really easy to feel like one step forward, two steps back. So I think one way I’ve grown is maybe getting a thicker skin about rejection and trying to really enjoy the process of writing as much as any aspect of this whole writing life. Also, I’ve definitely learned to trust myself in terms of productivity. In 2018, I was writing a flash fiction every week. I wrote two novel drafts in two years. It was ridiculous. This year, I’ve written two stories and some other random novel pages, but it’s been a slow year. I am not panicking, though, and this is an acquired skill. I know I’ll carve out the time when I’m ready, and I guess I’ve learned to be calm and patient with myself.
Then, with regard to the actual practice of writing: I hope I’ve grown in the last few years! I guess the more I do this, the more aware I am of my own tendencies, tricks, and gimmicks. So it’s easier to ferret out those easy and obvious places I might go in a first draft than it was maybe five years ago. I am also really eager to finish a novel draft that I’m currently working on. I’ve been thinking of it as a collection of related stories because that feels less daunting to me. But real growth for me would be to write something over 200 pages that really pulls you through it but also makes you want to linger on or go back to individual sentences. I haven’t done this yet, but this is the goal.