The Ill-Fitting Skin by Shannon Robinson
Press 53, 2024
Jane Satterfield: Shannon, congratulations on The Ill-Fitting Skin—it’s an exciting debut collection, and I’ve loved spending time with these witty, powerful stories of female experience. The goth cover with an image of a partially veiled woman’s face is incredibly striking and so apt for the collection. Was this a happy accident or is there a story behind this choice?
Shannon Robinson: I’m so glad you enjoyed the stories! As for the cover… as you know, publishers often keep authors at arm’s length from the cover design (possibly to prevent us from becoming intractable divas), but Press 53 invited me into the process. Claire Foxx, their fiction editor, has a degree in design; I shared some images with her that I thought suited the book, and then she came up with a mock-up using an image she’d found—that gorgeous, spooky photograph of the veiled woman. Her veil is a like a bandage, but it also seems vegetal, or like a membrane—it evokes “the ill-fitting skin,” something externally imposed but near-inescapable, normalized to the point of seeming organic. Initially, the lettering was white, so I suggested hot pink: I thought it had a Vivienne Westwood/Jamie Reid feel to it. Sexy and punk. Feminine and confrontational.
JS: I know it’s not unusual for short story collections to come together over a long period of time. Did your earlier stories shape your sense of goals for collection? Did you uncover tricks or make discoveries about sequencing a collection of stories?
SR: Some of these stories date back to my MFA, which I completed in 2011, and the most recent are from the past year. I’d been placing stories in literary magazines along the way, but I only had a goal of a short story collection in the vaguest sense. At some point, I knew I had enough work for a book. Of course, no publisher wants a random grab-bag of stories (if they want a short story collection at all…), so part of the trick in curating a collection is identifying and articulating those themes and sub-themes that suggest a cohesive whole. You have to imagine how you might describe the work to an agent, what your book-jacket summary would sound like; this involves revisiting your stories and taking a bird’s-eye view of your own imaginative territory. I could see that I have certain preoccupations (maternity, nurturing, female agency…), which have inflected my stories over the years, so fortunately, I didn’t have to discard much, although I did make revisions. As for the sequencing, my agent, Amy Bishop Wycisk, was incredibly helpful in suggesting an order for the stories that provided an emotional arc, and it was her idea to begin and end with fantastical stories about motherhood.
JS: Which is your favorite story, and how does it speak to the collection’s overall arc or themes?
SR: Currently, my favorite is “Charybdis,” and I probably feel closest to that story because it’s the most recent. It’s the third to last of the stories, and the main protagonist of this story is middle-aged, older than the other stories’ main protagonists, who are all female, with the exception of they boys in “You Are Now in a Dark Chamber,” and more self-possessed—confident, but not uncritical of herself. (Isn’t this where we all hope to land in our fifties, if not sooner?) While none of the stories have characters in common, you might imagine these women as alternate versions of each other, reincarnations, echoing through time and life-stages; they share struggles common to female experience. In “Charybdis,” the narrator thinks back on her college-aged fling with a man who had a micropenis: she didn’t reciprocate his interest, and he ended up stalking her. The story speaks to women’s perceived responsibility for the feelings of others (and of men in particular), but it’s also about shame, anger, memory, and desire—all things that resonate through the entire collection.
JS: Could you talk bit about your thinking in structuring the collection? I imagine one of the challenges of putting together a book of short stories is working toward variety. I love how “Doom of Her Own” plays on strategies of YA Choose Your Own Adventure-style books and explores these as a metaphor for making bad relationship choices. Given its possibilities of multiple outcomes, was this an especially challenging story to plot?
SR: Yes, too much variety can tilt into that “grab-bag” effect I was talking about earlier… but I hope that my various departures feel purposeful—that they share common thematic destinations. I’m sure I’m like most writers: with each story, I like to take on some new challenge, and for me, this often involves playing around with form. “Doom of Her Own” only started coming together when I fully embraced the possibility of metaphoric movement: rather than settling on one plotline, I pulled in several, each one drawing inspiration from some different setting/scenario from the classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The protagonist may find herself in a time machine, at a circus, in a haunted house (again and again)… all while trying to find the exit from her shitty relationship.
JS: Pedro Ponce, a fine writer who shares your interest in the fabular tradition, once told me his stories often begin with a sentence that springs from some real-life incident, sometimes with an autobiographical taproot; then he changes one thing (maybe the narrator, maybe a tiny descriptive detail) so that the story takes off with its own twist into the uncanny. Does that process resonate with yours?
SR: “Autobiographical taproot”—I love that! What Pedro Ponce describes sounds very similar to my own process and paths of inspiration. With my fantastical stories, I’m always trying to get at something that feels close to my own experience—which may seem paradoxical. But I find the fantastical provides an excellent vocabulary (in terms of image, subtext, suggestiveness) for messy and fraught emotions. The fantastical is metaphorical and freely associative, full of that playful, unsettling truthfulness that we often see in our dreams… when they’re not broadcasting nonsense. And even then, there’s often something revealing amongst the nonsense: see Roz Chast’s I Must Be Dreaming. I recently picked it up, and it’s a hoot!
JS: Your stories shuttle so seamlessly between realism and the surreal. I’m thinking particularly of “Origin Story” which frames motherhood in terms of lycanthropy. At the same time, it’s a powerful exploration of the ferocity of a mother’s love for a child whom the world deems a monster. Do you see a contemporary tradition of the gothic, of fictional worlds that incorporate the monstrous, the spectral, and/or the uncanny?
SR: Absolutely, there is a contemporary tradition: Toni Morrison’s Beloved immediately springs to mind, as does Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child and Rachel Yoder’s Night Bitch. As long as there’s been literature, we’ve been producing accounts of the otherworldly—and in particular of that which frightens us. I think of monsters and ghosts as outsiders that we secretly know are insiders. They’re projections of ourselves—our fears, but also our anger, our grief, our propulsion toward physical corruption, our mortality. One of the oldest monster stories in the English language is Beowulf: Grendel is bad news, but then his avenging mother is so much worse! While styles change, elements carry forward and can reflect contemporary concerns. When Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she was surrounded by so much male ego … the monster isn’t the mother, but rather the absence of one. In many ways, it’s a book about male presumption.
JS: “Rabbits” and “Miscarriages” are viscerally powerful. To what extent to do you see body horror as a vehicle for exploring female fertility and questions around reproductive health? Horror, more broadly, also appears in “Zombies” where the protagonist embraces her role of the other woman and ups her sex game; the role-playing aspect of Zombie parades and parties is a hilarious backdrop. Is horror a genre that speaks to you as a writer or a mother?
SR: I’m not the first writer to pair body horror with fertility, pregnancy, and birth… and I won’t be the last! Those experiences can be wonderful, but they can also be fraught. You’re dealing with uncanny transformation, with life and death. I remember “the quickening”—that first time I felt my son moving in my womb—and it felt magical, yes, but bizarre. Gestation involves being two people at once—how freaky is that? And then once the child is born, the strangeness doesn’t stop: just have a look at kids’ drawings, and you’ll see what I mean. As for horror, well, the stakes alone of being a mother are terrifying. My son asked me the other day what was the worst dream I’ve ever had, and I couldn’t tell him, because it involved him.
JS: To what extent do you rely on research for worldbuilding in your stories? I noticed a rich vein of research that forms the psychological backdrop of plot: there’s the beleaguered sister who stages a somewhat hapless intervention for her musician brother in “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” the gender dynamics at play in D&D in “You Are Now in a Dark Chamber,” and the hoax-style spectacle of Mary Toft’s births in “Rabbits.”
SR: I enjoy researching particular backgrounds for the stories I’m working on because it sparks my imagination, and it allows me to me create a convincing sense of verisimilitude, which I think readers find appealing. But while I think having a good grasp of the details is important, you shouldn’t feel too beholden to them. I’ll finesse or depart from fact if it serves the narrative—and that can even be a feature of the story. I had my D&D story vetted by experienced players of the game… but I also wanted my dungeon master, Nathan, to be shifty and competitive, so there are times when he’s distorting the rules. Mary Toft, the protagonist of “Rabbits” was an actual historical figure, an eighteenth-century fraudster: in my version of events, her miraculous birthing of rabbits is real—except everyone thinks she’s a liar.
JS: I know you enjoy celebrating Halloween through ingenious decorating and assembling costumes of your own design. At the same time, clothing crops up in Ill-Fitting Skin, whose title itself suggests a sort of costume for whatever lurks underneath. Do you have favorite story in terms of this aspect of identity?
SR: You know me well—any excuse for a costume! You were there to witness the triumph of my Bjork swan dress. I’ve always loved dressing up in general. I went to a girls’ school, and so I wore a uniform every day for eight years: that might have something to do with it. I appreciate the potential power and symbolism of clothes, their performance aspect (I think of RuPaul’s claim, “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag”). In my story “Dirt,” the narrator wears a “sexy” maid costume to please a client, and that becomes the titular “ill-fitting skin”: I enjoy how bedraggled the outfit is by the end, how it’s so cheap and sleezy, and yet seemingly indestructible. As a haunter of thrift shops, I also like how clothing can carry history. In “Secondhand,” the narrator, who works in a Savers-type store, begins finding long-lost pieces of clothing from her childhood amongst the donations. She takes them home, only to find them poltergeisting around her apartment (albeit behind her back). They are some very badly behaved madeleines! Nostalgia can be a disturbing portal, because the past is not always pleasant.
JS: Can you talk a bit about your influences? Are there books or stories from childhood that stay with you?
SR: As a kid, I was into fairy tales and Greek mythology and ghost stories—strange, short narratives filled with fantastical shenanigans. And I was a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure books, which romped in that territory. I loved Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables: Ramona and Anne are both so luminously themselves, so imaginative and kickass. They have raggedy edges, even as they long to be girly-girls—I could identify. I loved Beatrix Potter’s books, all so beautifully illustrated and savagely funny. I wouldn’t have put it this way, but I liked the edginess, how we never lose sight of how Potter’s anthropomorphized bunnies and kitties and mice are all predators and prey. I was also really into an odd little book by Rumer Godden called The Doll’s House, which sounds twee, but was actually very dark (Sample line, referring to a character’s demise: “Birdie did look beautiful in the flame.”) I believe Kate Bernheimer and Kathryn Davis are also fans.
JS: Desire is a common thread throughout your stories. The Ill-Fitting Skin is honest about sexuality and how our impulses waylay us. Your narrators feel vulnerable and authentic. Are there strategies you’ve discovered or models you’ve used for creating such perfectly pitched narrative voices?
SR: Years ago, I read an interview with the poet Maggie Ginestra where she referred to embarrassment as a “divining rod for the good stuff,” that’s always stayed with me. For my narrators to sound vulnerable and authentic, I have to be vulnerable and authentic, which means not shying away from potential self-exposure. I teach creative writing to undergraduates, and I’ve found that they sometimes stand in their own way, unwilling to risk seeming weird or immoral, weak or dysfunctional, even with the distance that fiction affords. I say, turn on that tap and see what comes out. But while I think certain kinds of discomfort can be productive, I don’t think anyone should strain to seem transgressive. For instance—it’s okay to be chaste; it’s okay to give your characters their privacy. We don’t need to follow them into the bedroom to believe that they are lovers.
JS: The narrator of “Charybdis” offers some witty comments about what makes good fiction work. Several of your protagonists are writers or academics. Is there something about the writer’s life or identity that seems either fraught or more broadly resonant?
SR: I was initially leery of including writer characters in my writing, but clearly, I got over it! I suppose my concern was that it would seem precious or distracting—like I’m turning to wave at the camera. And now I think, so what? I’m on friendly terms with the meta, the autoficitonal… and at this point, I appreciate that writing is not a precious business. Writers are observers and searchers; they strive to understand and communicate that understanding. And hopefully, even people who aren’t professional writers can identify with this, since we’re all storytellers at heart. (Thomas King said, “The truth about stories is, that’s all we are.” That sounds about right.) There can be negative aspects to being a writer—vanity, clever-cleverness, a tendency towards attention-seeking behavior, artistic failure—all of which my characters variously embody.
JS: “Birdie”—the book’s closing story, where a lonely woman takes wing after taking in a bird lodger—made me think of Celtic tales like those in The Mabinogion. Was reading folktales part of your early or later academic training? Are there folktales or fables you’ve found inspiring?
SR: I’ve never formally studied folktales, but I enjoy them. I like the trickster figures in Celtic lore, and likewise in Aesop’s fables, and I think there’s a trickster element in “Birdie”: the woman thinks she’s doing this “poor creature” a favor by deigning to let her live in her belly, only to have the bird completely appropriate and transform the woman’s interior—body and mind. The bird herself perhaps owes a debt to the talking birds in Grimm’s fairy tales: “The Juniper Tree” and “Cinderella” specifically. The birds are helpful, but oh so strange. (From their graveyard perch, Cinderella’s pigeons tattle on the stepsister, who’s chopped off part of her foot to make the glass slipper fit: “Rook di goo, rook di goo! / There’s blood in the shoe. / The shoe is too tight, / This bride is not right!”) There’s an ancient notion that birds are emissaries from the world beyond this one, hence that creepy feeling you get whenever a bird seems to be watching you.
JS: What projects are you working on now?
SR: Right now, I’m working on a novel about a Victorian baby killer, and I have a few short stories incubating.
I wish I could tell you that I’m also cleaning out all the piles of paper that I’ve allowed to build up in my study over the past few months … but I feel insufficiently inspired to take that on. Only with my cats share that space, and they don’t mind so long as there’s still room on the window seat for them.
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Shannon Robinson is author of The Ill-Fitting Skin, winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Joyland, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2011 she was the Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Other honors include Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, a Hedgebrook Fellowship, a Sewanee Scholarship, and an Independent Artist Award from the Maryland Arts Council. She teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.
Jane Satterfield’s newest poetry books are The Badass Brontës (a Diode Editions winner, 2023) and Apocalypse Mix (Autumn House Prize, 2017). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry from Bellingham Review, the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize, and more. Sections from Satterfield’s Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (Demeter Press) received Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize, the Faulkner Society/Pirate’s Alley Essay Award, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. Satterfield lives in Baltimore, where she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.