A Short Interview w/ Abigail Oswald

"Bonus material" for Oswald's short story, "You Are Still Allowed Your Dreams," published on Tuesday, 10/8.

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 “You Are Still Allowed Your Dreams” now if you haven’t already!

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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 years I’ve kinda had this weird sense that I’ve got lookalikes walking around out there. I’d meet people and they’d tell me they knew someone who looked just like me—it’s happened a few times. So the idea of having a double was already personally intriguing to me, and then every now and then I’d see a movie like Enemy or Cam or Perfect Blue and think, huh, I should really explore this idea in my own fiction at some point. And then one day I did. 

But I think the strangest doppelganger experience I've had actually happened after you accepted this story—exactly a week later. I was at a library a few towns over and one of the librarians came up to me and started referencing this conversation I had no memory of, books I’d never read. It took us a minute to work out that she’d mixed me up with somebody else. The funny thing was that now I’d written this story, and I’d just gotten word that it was about to go out into the world, which added an additional layer of surreality to the experience.

That reminded me of this interview I did with Julia Langbein, where she talks about this idea that sometimes fiction becomes more autobiographical after you write it, in a way that you can’t quite explain. Has anything like that ever happened to you?

Interesting! I'm not sure I've had anything quite like that... but versions, certainly. I don't think Year of the Buffalo is "about" divorce, but that's there in it. Or, maybe it is about divorce, but that's in the second or third tier of what I think of the book as about. I was still married while writing the book, but that relationship had ups and downs and was on and off, and of course I was drawing on those "off"s, but also every other breakup I'd gone through, and every breakup and divorce I'd talked about with friends, seen in movies, read about, etc. I was divorced by the time the novel was published though and in a weird way it almost feels like it was about or in response to what hadn't actually happened yet when I was writing it?

I noted this in my intro, but right from the get-go, I love the way this story is "about" and handles this teenager seeing and experiencing the world in that early stage of the internet — through these blogs and message boards that were a kind of pre social media. Can you talk about capturing that moment in time for this story? What about it was maybe interesting to write about or opened up this character or the world of the story for you?