Guest Post, Lynn Sloan’s Interview with Patricia Ann McNair

Lynn Sloan is a photographer and the author of This Far Isn’t Far Enough, a story collection, and Principles of Navigation, a novel, chosen for Chicago Book Review’s Best Books of 2015. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, American Literary Fiction, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and included in NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. For many years she taught photography in the MFA program of Columbia College Chicago, where she founded Occasional Readings in Photography and contributed to Afterimage, Art Week, and Exposure.

Patricia Ann McNair has managed a gas station, served as a medical volunteer in Honduras, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and now teaches in the English and Creative Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago. Her acclaimed short story collection Responsible Adults was released in December 2020 by Cornerstone Press. McNair’s The Temple of Air received Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award and the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award. And These Are The Good Times was a Montaigne Medal finalist. She lives in Chicago with her husband, visual artist Philip Hartigan.

This interview is with past contributor, Patricia Ann McNair, conducted by Lynn Sloan, on March 1, 2021. It is in regards to Patricia’s new story collection, Responsible Adults.


Lynn Sloan: Patty, I’ve enjoyed and admired your work for years, so it’s a real treat to have a chance to ask you about your writing and your new story collection, Responsible Adults. Great title. It’s the title of one of your stories, but what it suggests, a bad situation where a sound, responsible adult is needed, can be applied broadly to this entire collection. Reversing those two words of the title to adults responsible also works. In these stories, it is usually the adult, the one in charge, who is responsible for the harm done. When in the process of pulling together this collection did you choose this title?

Patricia Ann McNair: Hello, Lynn, and what a pleasure to talk with you as well! I think you are exactly right that these stories and the situations the characters find themselves in ache for the intervention of a responsible adult. That was something that became clear to me as I started to put these pieces into a binder to see what they might look like as a collection. I hadn’t finished the story that the title Responsible Adults comes from quite yet, and in a way that has never happened before, the title for the collection came to me before I had a story for it. I just liked the sound of it, Responsible Adults, especially as I thought of it in regards to the relationships in the stories. “Who is responsible here” can have a different meaning from “Who is responsible for this?” One implies a sort of blame, an insinuation of guilt, the other assumes that someone is in charge. Each of these ideas speaks to my stories in some way, so, yeah, the title stuck with me. And then I had to find one of my unfinished, untitled stories that might make use of those two words as well. A sort of backward approach for me; I usually like to find a title that has surfaced organically in a story and can do double duty for the collection. But this time the title asserted itself into and onto the book.

LS: Most of your stories involve parents and their children. Though swift and taut, almost all of your stories cover an arc of many years, even when the present moment of the story lasts only a few minutes. In “Good News or Money,” an adult daughter calls her estranged father and leaves a series of phone messages. In “Responsible Adults,” the narrator says, “Time was something stretchy to me, long and short, short and long.” Can you talk about time in your stories? 

PAM: I have always admired the kind of story that makes the reader feel as though the world of it existed before the first line, and will continue in some way after the last one. So as a writer, I need to establish a sort of continuum of time in the pages. Funnily enough, I usually do that through breaking the chronology of the story. A character—if we are trying to make them human—in any given moment has other moments behind them, and more ahead (usually, that is, unless we are talking about Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” for instance). I like to visit those moments that are outside of the story, as a character would. “Good News or Money” features a seventeen-year-old girl who carries a lot of crappy memories that she is unwilling to let her father forget, so she excises them in her phone message. The story is meant to read as though it were happening in real-time, pauses and interruptions and all. And time is something stretchy to me, too, perhaps in this historical moment it is to all of us. In “What Girls Want” I especially jump around in time, in narrative distance, and this is partly because of the way the narrator is willing—and not—to admit their involvement in things, in the lives of others. His self-awareness evolves, his confessions are difficult and sporadic, his culpability spans years.  

LS: In several of these stories, the relationship of care or responsibility is outside the family—a cop in “Serve and Protect,” and a teacher with her own troubles who faces a difficult teenage student in “Regarding Alix.” You teach writing, you’re a professor, you know the complications and limits of responsibilities of a teacher. Did that make this story easy to write or hard? 

PAM: “Regarding Alix” is one of the more autobiographical stories in the book (although all of them have some part of me, some memory or observation or emotional tug of mine). In that sense, it was easy to write because of the closeness I had to the situation of teaching a group of teen-aged writing students at a boarding school. It was right after 9/11. During, really; our first day of the semester was September 11. Making that setting and using that tension—the overwhelming sadness and worry we all felt—apparent on the page was not too difficult. But I am interested in this idea of the responsibility of teachers, perhaps especially right now while we all have to renegotiate the way we teach and interact with our students. There was some of that when the towers went down, too. So much was out of our control, out of the control of our students. It is amazing to me that we survive these things, but we usually do. This current crisis is ongoing, and every day we hear about how students are suffering, struggling. And I can’t help think about us, too, the teachers. We are expected to be the responsible adults here, some would say we are paid to be. And yet, as in “Regarding Alix,” we are not always fully equipped to make things better. I think I veered away from the heart of your question there. Easy to write, maybe, but hard to do. Hard to shoulder my (our, their) responsibilities and to admit my (our, their) failings. 

LS: One of my favorite stories is “What Girls Want” in which the dad blows up a suburban version of the American dream during an afternoon barbeque, alienating forever his wife and young daughter. But it’s his relationship to a neighbor kid, the boy who asked him, “What do girls want?” who later exposes the irrevocable damage the dad has done to himself. I loved this. How did you decide to use a secondary character in such a pivotal way? 

PAM: Some years ago I saw a man I had known in college on the train. He, like I, was nearing middle age, and was a very different human than he was when I knew him. He had been an odd and sensitive kid in college; the man on the train was out of it, rocking and smiling and overdressed for the summer day in a heavy coat. He was a bit of a mess, actually. I carried that image with me for a long time; I saw him more than once, he didn’t remember me, I could tell. I looked for him whenever I was on that line at the end of the day. I suppose I knew I wanted to write a story about someone like him. Someone who gets lost as they become an adult, who migrates quite a ways from the nerdy, weird, interesting young person they were. The first draft of “What Girls Want” started with my recreated character on the train, but that wasn’t working. I needed to explore how he got there. I imagined him as a child, as someone that was both smart and annoying, in that way kids can be especially to some unaware adults. So I had to create a flawed, unaware adult. From there I let the character—Gregory—be more of a wrench than the gears of the story. His role was to mess things up for the main character—or at least to give the main character someone to blame for the things he messes up. The heart of the story is the stepfather/daughter relationship, and Gregory provides a sort of triangulation that pulls at that, creating an uneasy balance. 

LS: People act badly in your stories and they harm others, others who rely on them. While your sympathy, and ours, is with the harmed, you also make us understand the anguish of those who cause the damage. At what point in writing do you explore this side?

PAM: God, we all make mistakes, don’t we? I don’t know about you, but every time I do something stupid or harmful (usually without intention) I hold so much guilt about it! I try not to be afraid of admitting when I mess up, but I also want to figure out why I do, and maybe try to explain it to whomever I have messed up against. I know I start making a story with an awareness of trouble, of bad behavior. That trouble happens before I can figure out much else, but it is never enough on its own to make a very good story. The people I know, the people I grew up with, the adults who were responsible in my life (and weren’t) are multifaceted. They misstepped, they fell and hurt themselves, maybe fell on someone else in the process. But that doesn’t always mean they shouldn’t be able to try to get up and step again. Even as I make my way through this answer, I am aware that there are folks I really do believe don’t deserve a second chance or our understanding. People who were recently in charge of so much, did so much damage. Some part of me does not believe that they are capable of change or betterment or even self-reflection. But in the everyday way of things, people screw up, and in my fiction, I believe it is important to consider why that might be, or what the consequences of the bad behavior might be on the doer, or how they might change because of it. In fiction—maybe more than in life, is this true?—the bad guys need to have more depth than just their badness. In fiction, characters must suffer their wounds. We, their writers, and they, the characters, owe that to the readers. 

LS: As a writer who is always reaching for the next challenge, what comes next? 

PAM: Well, immediately what comes next is surviving this semester of remote instruction. While I am teaching, it is hard for me to sink into the work I want to do, the writing of things other than assignments in a learning management system, comments on student work, complaints in my journal. This has always been the case for me, not just during this pandemic. But! But in just a few weeks I will turn my attention back to the work of a novel-in-progress. I am working on a story that takes place in a lake community in the seventies. There is infidelity, race issues, abortion, nosey neighbors. A sort of wet Peyton Place, you might say. Thank you for asking! 


To order your copy of Responsible Adults click here. Also, be sure to also check out Lynn Sloan’s website as well as Patricia’s website, Twitter, and past work in Issue 3.

Contributor Update, Kelli Russell Agodon

Join Superstition Review in congratulating past contributor, Kelli Russell Agodon, on her forthcoming book, Dialogues with Rising Tides, out April 27th. Kelli, in this poetry collection, “facilitates a humane and honest conversation with the forces that threaten to take us under. The anxieties and heartbreaks of life―including environmental collapse, cruel politics, and the persistent specter of suicide―are met with emotional vulnerability and darkly sparkling humor. Dialogues with Rising Tides passionately exclaims that even in the midst of great difficulty, radiant wonders are illuminated at every turn.”

“Kelli Russell Agodon’s poems in Dialogues with Rising Tides, her strongest book to date, navigate everyday anxieties and dramatic questions of life-or-death with equal doses of pathos and humor, reminding us that our choices in a world of chaos add up to something, reminding us of the responsibility to ‘care for our ghosts.’ Her interior world is lined with fragments of family tragedy while her outer world confounds her, the rising tides of environmental collapse, not a metaphor but a reality. Her oceanic views of the world teeter on the edge of a cocktail or a gunshot. Funny, sad, and a perfect read for unsettling times.”

Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Field Guide to the End of the World

To pre-order your copy of Dialogues with Rising Tides click here. Also, be sure to check out Kelli’s website and Twitter as well as her past work in Issue 3.

Contributor Update, Dinty Moore

Join Superstition Review in congratulating one of our past contributors, Dinty Moore, on his forthcoming book, To Hell with It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno, out March 1st. In response to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Dinty, in his novel, contemplates religion and the feelings of inadequacy it can cause, through a use of various religious texts, stories from his own life, reflections of his childhood, and religion’s own influence. In doing so, Dinty explores the questions of what “the world be like if eternal damnation was not hanging constantly over our sheepish heads” and why “we persist in believing a myth that merely makes us miserable?”

“Dinty W Moore might say, ‘to hell with it!’ But he doesn’t mean it. He’s too good for that, and too funny—Kurt Vonnegut funny—and even with his head in a bucket of county fair chicken, too wise to tempt the fates. To Hell with It is a madcap, deep, hopeful, absurd, learned, solemn, silly, and somehow redeeming look at the hell we make for ourselves, the hell the world offers, and the heaven to be found if only we look in the heart of each of our hearts, plus cartoons!”

Bill Roorbach, author of Life among Giants

To pre-order your copy of To Hell with It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno click here. Also, be sure to check out Dinty’s website as well as our interview with him in Issue 3.

Contributor Update, Robert Krut: The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All On Fire

Today we are happy to announce the news of past contributor Robert Krut! Robert’s newest book titled The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire will be available for preorder soon, to be published this summer. The book was just awarded the Codhill Poetry Award by the Codhill Press. S[r]’s own founding editor, Patricia Colleen Murphy, said Robert’s poems are “filled not only with what is real but with what is possible.”

More information about Robert and his new book can be found here. One poem included in the book can be found in S[r]’s Issue 18, and four more in Issue 3.

Congratulations Robert!

Contributor Update, Erin McGraw: Joy

Image of Joy: And 52 Other Very Short Stories

Today we are happy to announce the news of past contributor Erin McGraw! Her newest book, a collection titled “Joy: and 52 other very short stories”, was just published this month by Counterpoint Press. The stories follow beautifully flawed characters as they experience daily life and the pain, confusion and tension that comes with. Chauna Craig, another past contributor, puts it best in a book review for New York Journal of Books, “McGraw makes us love [the characters] for all their human flaws and fragile hopes.”

S[r]’s interview with Erin from Issue 3 can be found here, more information on the collection can be found here.

Chauna’s review can be found here, and her nonfiction piece for Issue 14 can be found here.

Congratulations, Erin!

Contributor Update, Donald Morrill: Debut Novel “BEAUT”

 

Contributor Update
Contributor Update

We are happy to announce that past contributor Donald Morrill from Issue 3 has released his debut novel “BEAUT,” a winner of the Lee Smith Fiction Prize. The book is available for purchase. Congratulations Donald! 

Check out a sample of the opening pages of the book at 83 Degrees-Tampa Bay

Please visit his website at  https://www.donaldmorrill.com

Contributor Update: Brock Clarke The Price of the Haircut

Brock Clarke The Price of the HaircutToday we are happy to announce The Price of the Haircut by Brock Clarke has been released. The Price of the Haircut, published by Algonquin Books, is a collection of short stories whose excerpt can be found on the authors website.

You can read Brock’s interview with Superstition Review in Issue 3.

Congratulations, Brock!

Contributor Update: Stella Pope Duarte

Van Buren: Arizona's Sunset StreetToday we are pleased to announce that past contributor Stella Pope Duarte will be speaking at the Van Buren: Arizona’s Sunset Strip event. Stella will recall the heyday of Van Buren Street, the only highway linking Arizona, New Mexico, and California in the early 1900s. The event will take place at South Mountain Community Library in Phoenix, Arizona Tuesday, November 7 from 11:30 am to 1 pm. Stella’s books will be available for purchase at the event.

To read our interview with Stella in Issue 3 of Superstition Review click here.

Contributor Update: Michelle Menting

Leaves Surface Like SkinToday we are pleased to announce that past contributor Michelle Menting’s debut collection of poems, Leaves Surface Like Skin, has been recently released. The book has already received praise from poet Sandra Beasley, who says, “Menting has a gift for moody and luminous phrasing: ‘For some, the world is wood tick wicked.’ There’s magic to a collection that does such heavy lifting with a light touch.” Purchase your copy through Terrapin, Amazon, B&N, or through your local bookstore.

To read Michelle’s essay “On Becoming Vegan” in Issue 3 of Superstition Review click here.