A Short Interview w/ Sienna Zeilinger
"Bonus material" for Zeilinger's short story, "Tools of Ignorance," published on Tuesday, 4/9.
Welcome back! I took a “bye week” last week because I got sick and it’s the end of my semester and it was all just a little bit too much. But we’re back!
First note: it’s time for another short story club! Basically a bunch of us (30-40?) hop on Zoom and chat and rave about a story that I chose because it’s one of my favorites. Anyone who is interested is welcome! Message me here or DM me on Twitter or IG or wherever you want and can find me!
“That Was Awesome” Short Story Club #3
Thursday, April 25, 8pm ET
“Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain” by Danielle Evans
(I have a PDF if anyone wants one.)
Short Story, Long features long short stories, each paired with original art, published every other week. In between stories, we feature some kind of “bonus material” for each — an interview with the author, outtakes or trivia about the story, etc. The stories are always going to be available for all, for free, with the “bonus material” saved for subscribers only. Paid subscriptions help pay writers and artists.
Read “Tools of Ignorance” now if you haven’t already!
Aaron Burch: I'm kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?
For me, there's always a conceptual stage that has to happen first, before anything gets fleshed out. I've been thinking about the idiom "tools of ignorance" ever since I first heard my high school softball coach say it. It comes from this catcher named Muddy Ruel who played in the '20s—he was trying to say that catching is so dangerous, and a catcher has to wear so much equipment in order to be protected, and so it seems like anyone smart enough to be able to play the position well shouldn't be stupid enough to subject themselves to it. I was interested in playing that idea out to some sort of absurdly literalized extreme: when can ignorance be a kind of armor against not just the dangers of the world, but also against the danger of meeting our full selves? And I don't think there's any time when we're more simultaneously invested in creating and avoiding our full selves than when we're teenagers. Especially if we're queer. Teenagerhood feels very queer to me. I think I wanted to reflect that sort of disorientation in the thing that happens on the field, where this experience of falling in love that's commonly coded as beautiful and excellent is maybe one notch more surreal—bizarre and absurd and often funny and sometimes inconvenient—and nonetheless still beautiful and excellent.
Do you write about sports often? I feel like these worlds of sport and writing can too often feel unrelated and with too little overlap, though that is of course overgeneralized and to some degree prescriptive. But I love how writing about sports can help us access and think about self and interactions in so many different ways. The downside, as someone who read baseball submissions for 20 years, can be that it can lend itself to a kind of play-by-play that doesn't really work for narrative, but when done well, it can be such an amazing vehicle for story!
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