 Catherine Lacey Photo Credit Willy Somma  Rita Bullwinkel |
What: Texas Book Festival 2018 program Expect the Unexpected: New Short Fiction Subject: Weird and wonderful, lyrical and unforgettable, new short fiction collections by Catherine Lacey and Rita Bullwinkel work themselves under your skin and will stick with you long after you’ve read the last sentence. The authors: Rita Bullwinkel - is the author of the story collection Belly Up, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award, and is currently being translated into Italian and Greek. Catherine Lacey - is the author of the novels The Answers and Nobody is Ever Missing, and the story collection, Certain American States. She has won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the NYPL's Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of Granta Magazine's Best Young American Novelists in 2017. |
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Rita Bullwinkel said she used to only write short stories. As she continued writing, her short stories kept getting longer. Catherine Lacey said it takes a lot of confidence to go outside the form you are comfortable with. As you get older, you get interested in working outside your comfort zone. Bullwinkel said fiction can work as a mask so she can see things differently. Sometimes she knows the ending of a story but it takes a while to slog through the middle to get there. Lacey said when we're dealing with grief, such as the loss of a sibling, the politeness we show to others is our security blanket that we put on top of what's going on in our lives. Bullwinkel said there's a lot of death in her stories. She deals with the strangeness of leaving a body and then coming back to it. She remembers her grandparents. They were close to death and she was close to them. Lacey said for her it is not scary to write about death. She also has no problem with solitude. There's a cultural shift going on in our lifetime that being alone is not bad. The human experience tends toward solitude. Readers understand that. It's not unpleasant to be alone. Lacey said she doesn't think about any of her characters as human beings. Her stories and characters don't represent a sex or race. They have to address the world the way it is. She thinks about her characters from the inside out. "My characters are ideas." She said her characters' experiences can be related to stories in the readers' heads. Bullwinkel said when writing realism or in memoir, the reader gets an excerpt from a person's life by reading what they wrote. |