A Short Interview w/ Anna Vangala Jones

"Bonus material" for Anna Vangala Jones's short story, "The Legend of the Convenience Store Cashier," published on Tuesday, 9/19.

A quick note on submissions: I completed getting through the last round of submissions this week! Submissions will re-open for the month of October 1st. If the last round of submissions was any indication, they’ll open again in January after that. Thanks!
—Aaron

The plan for Short Story, Long is to feature long short stories, each paired with original art. A new story will publish every week, on Tuesdays, and then, in between stories, we are going to 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 “The Legend of the Convenience Store Cashier,” 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?

Anna Vangala Jones: The funny thing about my stories is that they rarely start out as an idea, whether concrete or abstract, from which I then create a narrative. It’s more often that I’m doing something else and then a disconnected scene pops into my head where I can see the place and the characters and their interactions and body language. Or I might hear what they’re saying to each other.  All of this helps their personalities start to form for me. When this happens, I’m sensing it all as an outsider. So, I then start to figure out whose POV or perspective I’m wanting to experience it from. At this point, I’m jotting it all down in fragments and bullet points and sentences in my notes app as they come to me until the people and their situation start to feel alive for me. 

In this story, the first thing that came to my mind was the vision of the groups of teens hanging around in the convenience store parking lot smoking cigarettes and watching and eavesdropping on each other as well as the cashier inside. The next was the scene out in the woods and this unexpected occurrence of seeing someone you barely know outside of the only context in which you’re familiar with them and how strange and personal that feels. Like when you were a kid and ran into your teacher at the mall? As I rushed to write down essentially what became the beginning and the ending before I forgot them, I then had to wonder how does this all connect—where is the story here? And that’s when I started to realize the story was less about the cashier and more about this group of friends that are watching him from afar and what the versions of him that exist only in their imagination might reveal to them about themselves. 

I tend not to realize what pieces of my own life and past inform the story until it’s already written or sometimes even after it’s published. Then I’ll say to myself, well yeah my friends and I spent most of our time together at our local diner and certainly shared inside jokes and myths and legends about the many people we came into contact with daily but who we didn’t really know outside of that diner. But somehow I didn’t think of that so much when I was actually writing it. 

AB: I love that!

I also love the “we” voice in the story so much. Do you know when that came in? Was that there from the beginning?Anything you can say about what you enjoy about it?