Jules Hogan Interviews Caitlin Horrocks
Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice titles. Her novel The Vexations was named one of the 10 best books of 2019 by the Wall Street Journal. Her stories appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story and elsewhere. She teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
From Fiction Editor Jules Hogan: This interview was conducted via email, over a period of time that spanned from just after the election to just after the insurrection on Capitol Hill. Congress has voted to impeach a single-term president for a second time. The pandemic has killed almost four hundred thousand Americans, with no sign of slowing down.
In this political and cultural epoch, it can be difficult to feel like your work matters. That there is some sort of salience, or resonance, with a piece you wrote years ago, maybe even decades. Caitlin Horrocks isn’t immune to this fear, but her forthcoming collection, Life Among the Terranauts, is a book that matters. When I first read Terranauts, I was haunted by the mirroring of our own world, our own fears.
The first story in the collection, “The Sleep” focuses on a town called Bounty, where residents decide to hibernate through the winter. The question at the center of the story—how can we survive? reverberates throughout the collection.
I began by asking Caitlin about this idea of survival, how it found its way into her work. How has this question changed with the beginnings of the pandemic, and our own inability to survive?
Caitlin Horrocks: When I first assembled a version of this collection back in 2015, I felt reasonably good about the individual stories included, but I frankly wasn’t sure what the connective tissue between them was. I don’t think a story collection needs to be linked, and as a reader, I’d rather have a grab-bag-type experience than a book where the stories feel too much the same, but still: I was worried that the book might not make sense as a book.
When I returned to the stories last year, I was finally struck by the theme you mention, of survival, especially in how characters make a decision to stay or leave where they’re rooted, and what that staying or going might look like. The theme was pervasive but embarrassingly unintentional.
I think I may need more distance from our plague year(s) to have a worthwhile answer to your second question, but it occurs to me that part of what’s being rejected by people who refuse masks, or will take to the streets over indoor dining, is a refusal of the kinds of adaptation that interested me in these stories, along with the moments of reckoning or recognition that some kind of change is necessary.
JH: This theme of survival seems tied to ideas of the future, our inability (or ability) to predict the future, the rituals and faiths we ascribe to. I’m thinking particularly of the story, “Better Not Tell You Now,” in which a group of young women chase their future to terrible ends. Particularly, the question “can you promise us we will be happy?” struck me as salient in the present time. How do these ideas of survival and happiness or joy cohabitate?.
CH: I want to make very clear that I don’t think having kids automatically grants a person any special insights or emotional expansiveness, but in my case, kids have changed the way survival and joy “cohabitate” in my mind. I look at that question in “Better Not Tell You Now,” which I first drafted when I was older than the teen protagonists but younger than I am now, and think how I wish I knew the answer for my kids (or think I want to know the answer). I’ve always understood that I can’t guarantee my children’s happiness, but I think part of me assumed until relatively recently that I could offer them more-or-less the same chances at happiness, or comfort, or stability, that I’ve received in my lifetime. But I can’t. That was true even before the pandemic.
I got pregnant in January 2020 with what I thought would be our second child, and emerged from the March ultrasound where I found out I was carrying unexpected twins to find the waiting room full of patients and staff glued to the TV, where the governor was announcing a statewide shutdown. The universe has laughed at everyone’s best-laid-plans in 2020, but it might have laughed extra-hard at mine.
JH: Of course, our fate or future is not all up to chance, but also a consequence of our choices, which is another thread that weaves through this collection. Certain stories, such as, “Norwegian for Troll” and “Paradise Lodge,” seem to be concerned with choice and our control over our own survival. Especially, the choice whether to leave or stay, and the repercussions of these choices. If you could speak to the intersection between fate and choice, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
CH: There is indeed a lot of leaving vs. staying in the book. In my personal life I’ve done some of both, but I’ve been firmly in staying mode now for a long time. I got a tenure-track job, then tenure. My husband got a job, then tenure. We live in a 100-year-old house. My wanderlust kicks in hard some days, but mostly I’m grateful for the stability. I may have written so many peripatetic characters because their choices are the ones I’m not currently facing, that I don’t currently have.
I think exploring fate vs. choice is also a way of exploring what expectations we have for our own lives. A character’s choice to stay or go is informed by what they think is even possible. They have to be able to imagine something different or better before they make the leap towards it, and our imagination is shaped by our situation. What looks like choice is still constrained by fate (and by fate I suppose I mean the chance of their circumstances vs. a cosmic predestination I don’t really believe in).
JH: Many of these stories are intrinsically tied to place—whether a small town in Michigan or a Peruvian forest. The Vexations took place in France, in the 1800s. How do you find yourself recreating these different times and places in such rich detail? Do you only write about places you’ve lived or traveled to? In an interview with Pulp, regarding Vexations, you say the research “was important, but was in some ways, was also procrastination.” Did these stories flourish from that procrastination?
CH: I’d like to think so! I tell my students that no words are ever wasted—they’re the words you had to write to eventually arrive at the words you choose to keep. I think the same is (usually) true of research—anything you learn via travel or reading or conversations or googling will inform your understanding of a place, whether or not the information gets mentioned in the narrative. I read so much about France that never ended up explicitly on the page, but I think it’s there in the book in its own way.
The exception here is when the research prevents you from writing at all. I kept promising myself I’d start writing once I’d consulted one more source or learned more about one more aspect of Satie’s life or work or era. But surprise surprise—I was never going to know everything about 80 years of French history, and at some point you have to dive in and do your best. I once heard Michael Chabon say, of historical fiction, “You need just enough facts to make the lies sound true,” which has always struck me as useful words to live by.
JH: I marveled at the depth and complexity of character both in Vexations and Life Among the Terranauts. Many members in the literary community are discussing the place of diversity and identity in fiction, and I am curious about your personal view on these questions. In the interview with Pulp, you discuss not wanting to feel like a “literary grave robber," while writing The Vexations. How do you find that balance within your stories for Terranauts and more contemporary subjects?
CH: I don’t have the answers on this one, either about the balance in my work specifically or about the larger literary conversation, but I’ll say that I try to proceed from a few different personal beliefs:
1) That as fiction writers we can and should write outside our own exact experiences and identities.
2) That the world I live in is diverse and complicated and I want to try to explore and represent that world on the page.
3) Exploring is different from publishing. My advice above, “to dive in and do your best” does and doesn’t hold here. By all means try and do your best. But be open to the idea that your best attempt to write a particular character or community may not be good enough to merit an audience, and you have the potential to do harm to that audience, or to obscure other, more expert, voices.
4) Alexander Chee’s advice on this subject is gold: https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/author-alexander-chee-on-his-advice-to-writers.html
JH: You’ve published two wonderful collections of stories and a rich and complex historical novel. How do you balance writing longer pieces versus stories? Do you find the two competing for time? Do you have a preference for one genre over another?
CH: Before I began The Vexations I was used to having multiple projects going at one time, and it had never been a problem before. But I found the novel really challenging, and kept backing away from it, promising I’d return after completing one last story, or one last essay. Many of the stories in Life Among the Terranauts were written while I was supposed to be working on the novel. What made the novel easier was committing to it and immersing myself in its world without the distraction of other projects. So that’s one way not to balance longer and shorter pieces. I don’t think I have a preference for one over the other—they have their pleasures and their challenges, and some of those are shared, and some are different. Their competition for my time is dwarfed by the competition between writing anything vs. every other demand in my life.
JH: You’ve mentioned travelling to places for research—how has your research been affected by the pandemic? How do you go about researching stories under the confines of our current world?
CH: The last year has been so personally challenging for me that I haven’t been writing or researching enough to have an answer to this question. My love of travel, and travel-as-research, took a hit five years ago when I had a child. When the pandemic hit North America, I was pregnant again. So I was already, voluntarily, entering another stretch of life where travel and writing would be temporarily much more difficult. I had big plans for those final months of only having to wrangle one child. You can guess how well those played out. Now my husband and I are trying to survive new twins + lack of childcare for our preschooler + online teaching (we’re fortunate to have jobs, and to be able to teach online: no complaining about that). There isn’t a lot of story research happening around here right now. My current project is survival.
Jules is an MFA student at ASU and fiction editor of Hayden's Ferry Review. They are the 2021 Fiction Meets Science fellow at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany. You can find their stories in Split Lip, Pithead Chapel, the Yalobusha Review, and other such wonderful journals.