Let's Deconstruct a Story

Wendy Rawlings discusses her story, "Coffins for Kids," with host, Kelly Fordon. "Coffins for Kids" was first published in The Kenyon Review https://soundcloud.com/the-kenyon-review/coffins-for-kids-by-wendy-rawlings-read-by-allison-hetzel, and later in her 2019 short story collection, "Time for Bed" (LSU). Please read the story first before listening to our discussion. The PDF is available at www.kellyfordon.com/blog.

Wendy Rawlings is the author of three books of fiction: Time for Bed, The Agnostics, and Come Back Irish. Originally from New York, she has lived in Alabama for the past 21 years. She teaches and directs the MFA Program in creative writing at the University of Alabama. 

Kelly Fordon and Susan Perabo discuss Susan's story, This is Not That Story. The story is available in The Sun Magazine and linked on Kelly Fordon's blog.

Bio: Susan Perabo’s most recent books are The Fall of Lisa Bellow (2017) and Why They Run the Way They Do (2016), both from Simon & Schuster. Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, andNew Stories from the South, and her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including One Story, Glimmer Train, Story, The New York Times, The Sun, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her work has been featured on the podcasts Modern Love and Selected Shorts. She is a professor creative writing at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.

Why They Run the Way They Do: Stories and The Fall of Lisa Bellow are available at Bookshop and Amazon.

Kelly Fordon’s latest short story collection  I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020) was chosen as a Midwest Book Award Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Her 2016 Michigan Notable Book, Garden for the Blind, (WSUP), was an INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House, (Kattywompus Press, 2019) was an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist and was adapted into a play, written by Robin Martin, which was published in The Kenyon Review Online.  She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and has received a Best of the Net Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in three different genres. She teaches at Springfed Arts and The InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit, as well as online, where she also runs a monthly poetry and fiction blog. www.kellyfordon.com

Abide by Ellen Birkett Morris

published July 2021

Seven Kitchens Press.

Welcome to "Let's Deconstruct a Story" where we read a story and then "deconstruct" it with the author. In order to get the most out of our interview, please read Treena Thibodeau's story first here: www.kellyfordon.com/blog.

Treena Thibodeau's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Able Muse, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Pithead Chapel, and Barrelhouse. The director of the online reading series TGI (www.tgicast.com), Thibodeau's fiction has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Tin House Summer Conference, and the Gulkistan Center in Iceland. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and resides in Queens.

Let's Deconstruct a Story is hosted by Kelly Fordon whose latest short story collection, I Have the Answer, (Wayne State University Press, 2020) was chosen as a Midwest Book Award Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Her first book, Garden for the Blind, (WSUP, 2015), was an INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House, (Kattywompus Press, 2019) was an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist and was adapted into a play by  Robin Martin, which was published in The Kenyon Review Online.  She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and has received a Best of the Net Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in three different genres. www.kellyfordon.com

Welcome to "Let's Deconstruct a Story!" This week I'm talking to Wandeka Gayle about a story called "Prodigal" from her new collection, "Motherland and other Stories."

First, please read "Prodigal" by Wandeka Gayle

And then enjoy our discussion!

Kelly Fordon

Bio: Wandeka Gayle is a Jamaican writer, visual artist, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Spelman College and the author of Motherland and Other Stories (Peepal Tree Press, 2020). She has received writing fellowships from Kimbilio Fiction, Callaloo, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She has a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  Other writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Transition, Interviewing the Caribbean and other journals and magazines. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Motherland and Other Stories is available at Peepal Tree Press, Amazon, and Bookshop.

Kelly Fordon talks to Esperanza Cintrón about her award-winning collection, Shades, Detroit Love Stories, a collection of interconnected short stories published by Wayne State University Press (2019). The conversation focuses on the first story, "The Beard." To read the story please visit www.kellyfordon.com/blog. For more about Esperanza Cintrón, please visit her website here: http://esperanzacintron.com/.

Esperanza Cintrón’s Shades: Detroit Love Stories is a short story collection that is distinctly Detroit. By touching on a number of romantic and sexual encounters that span the historical and temporal spaces of the city, each of these interconnected stories examines the obstacles an individual faces and the choices he or she makes in order to cope and, hopefully, survive in the changing urban landscape.

Shades begins in the 1960s by following two young black women who are determined to find joy in their lives even as they struggle to make ends meet. Their lives continue to evolve under triumphant and disappointing conditions—falling in and out of love, giving birth, raising children, and struggling to "make it" despite disappointing and tenuous love affairs and relationships. The setting throughout the eighteen stories shifts as these women age and their children extend the timeline, reflecting on the city’s social and political changes over three decades, as well as the pitfalls, tragedies, and opportunities these linked families encounter. Cintrón favors an everyday vernacular for her characters’ voices in order to reflect the complexities of their working/middle-class, ethnic, and racial identities. Divided into two sections, Eastside and Westside, the collection gives a nod to the sometimes contentious geographical split marked by Woodward Avenue. Cintrón takes readers through city streets—from neighborhood bars to burger joints—while painting lyrical portraits of the unique and multifaceted characters whose honesty shatters the illusion of endless love and happily-ever-after fantasies, as they clash with the circumstances of economics and race.

Cintrón’s stories capture the rhythms of language and the poetry of the people and will interest readers of fiction or poetry who seek to understand love. https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/shades

Joseph Harris and Kelly Fordon discuss the first book from Harris's thrilling interconnected narrative, You’re in the Wrong Place. Charles Baxter stated that "Joseph Harris has a particular feeling for the Detroit suburbs and the slightly stunted lives of the young people there. . . . You’re in the Wrong Place isn’t uniformly downbeat—there are all sorts of rays of hope that gleam toward the end."

The book, composed of twelve stories, begins in the fall of 2008 with the shuttering of Dynamic Fabricating—a fictional industrial shop located in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale. Over the next seven years, the shop’s former employees—as well as their friends and families—struggle to find money, purpose, and levity in a landscape suddenly devoid of work, faith, and love. In "Would You Rather," a young couple brought together by Dynamic Fabricating shares a blissful weekend in Northern Michigan, unaware of the catastrophe that awaits them upon their return home. In "Acolytes," a devout Catholic clings to her faith as her brothers descend into cultish soccer violence. In "Memorial," an ex-Dynamic worker scrapes money together for a tribute to his best friend, lost to the war in Afghanistan. In "Was It Good for You?" a cam girl deconstructs materialism with her aging great aunt, a luxury sales associate, and an anxious, faceless client. And in the title story, simmering tensions come to a boil on a hot summer day for a hardscrabble landscaping crew, hired by the local bank to maintain the lawns of foreclosures.

In turns elegiac and harrowing, You’re in the Wrong Place blends lyric intensity with philosophical eroticism to create a singular, powerful vision of contemporary American life. Readers of contemporary fiction grounded in place need to take up this collection.

The story "Jack" is available at www.kellyfordon.com. The book can be purchased at Wayne State University Press here or Bookshop here.

Please read Rachel's story, Advice for the Haunted, on my website before listening to us "deconstructing" it. https://kellyfordon.com/2020/10/31/rachel-swearingen/

Rachel Swearingen is the author of How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, winner of the 2018 New American Press Fiction Prize (October 1, 2020). Her stories and essays have appeared in VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

She is the recipient of the 2015 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, she was named one of 30 Writers to Watch by the Guild Literary Complex. She holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University and teaches at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. https://www.rachelswearingen.com

You can find this fantastic book at Bookshop here or Amazon here.

Laura Van Prooyen’s collections of poetry are Frances of the Wider Field (Lily Poetry Review Books 2021), Our House Was on Fire, nominated by Philip Levine, awarded the McGovern Prize (Ashland Poetry Press 2015), and Inkblot and Altar (Pecan Grove Press 2006). She is also co-author, with Gretchen Bernabei, of Text Structures from Poetry—a book of writing lessons for grades 4-12 (Corwin Literacy 2020).

Laura has over 20 years experience teaching poetry and writing in a variety of academic settings including: Dominican University, Henry Ford Academy: The Alameda School for Art + Design, Chicago Public Schools, Del Valle High School, and University of Illinois at Chicago. She also facilitated therapeutic writing sessions for soldiers with PTSD in an Intensive Outpatient Program for three years at Brook Army Medical Center.

Having been raised in a tight-knit Dutch community just outside of Chicago, Van Prooyen now lives in San Antonio, TX. She earned a B.A. at Purdue University, an M.A. at The University of Illinois at Chicago, and an M.F.A. in Poetry at Warren Wilson College. Laura serves as the Managing Editor of The Cortland Review and teaches in the Low-Residency Creative Writing MFA Program at Miami University in Ohio. She is launching Next Page Press, with the first title to be released late 2021.https://lauravanprooyen.com/

Host, Kelly Fordon, latest book is a short story collection called I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020). Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, (WSUP, 2015) is a 2016 Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist in the short story category. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House, (Kattywompus Press, 2019) was chosen as an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist for poetry and was adapted into a play by Robin Martin, which was produced in Michigan in 2019, and published in The Kenyon Review Online.  She is also the author of three poetry chapbooks. On the Street Where We Live won the 2012 Standing Rock Chapbook Award and the latest one, The Witness, won the 2016 Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook and was shortlisted for the Grand Prize. Her work has been published widely in literary journals and has received a Best of the Net Award, as well as Pushcart Prize nominations in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She teaches at Springfed Arts and The InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit, as well as online, where she also runs a monthly poetry and fiction blog. www.kellyfordon.com

#letsdeconstructastory is all about unpacking short stories to see how they work on a cellular level. It's a place for writers to geek out about the work of other writers and hopefully add some new tools to their own toolbox.

Here's how it works:

1.  Please read the story first.

2. Listen to our discussion of the story here or on Apple or Spotify.