A Short Interview w/ Austin Ross
+ a few other Short Story, Long announcements!
A few quick notes, before we get to our interview with Austin Ross about his really wonderful and brilliant story, “Lobsters,” published last Tuesday.
If I may start with the self-promotional (and I might not be me if I didn’t), today would be a perfect day for you to reread my own story, “Home for the Holidays,” set on Christmas Eve and published by X-R-A-Y last year.
OK, OK, lingering in the self-promotion for just another moment: I read a short story almost every day this year, and as we head into 2025, I’m gonna keep it going and I started a side project/offshoot Substack to keep something of a reading log:
Next week, rather than a new story, we’re going to wrap up the year with a collection of a bunch of SSL contributors’ favorite story collections of the year!
Have been continuing to upload audio of authors reading their stories in the archives. With this update we’ve got four more, all bangers (as both stories and the authors’ readings of them!)
Submissions are open for one more week, until the end of the year! Looking for stories in the 3k-8k word range; I pay $100 + commission original art (and also pay artist $100) to pair with accepted stories! Spread the word!
Reminder that stories are always free; interviews with authors are an added bonus for paid subscribers. Paid subscriptions help me pay writers and artists!
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?
Austin Ross: This story actually started because I had grown so bored of myself and my own writing. Nothing I was writing seemed like it was working and it was all so dull to me. I wanted to write something that would reinvigorate me, and this idea of “withheld information” intrigued me—one of the characters knows something about one of the other characters but can’t tell anybody. So then I was thinking: okay, what’s the most egregious, over-the-top example I could think of? And the idea of a pastor who finds out one of his members is running a porn account came to mind. He can’t tell anybody because then everyone would ask how he knew about it in the first place. He has to maintain appearances. And that concept intrigued me. I didn’t want it to be withheld information from the audience—that almost never works and is annoying as a reader—but I wanted to bring the reader in right away to the complexities of what this would mean for this pastor and how he’d navigate or attempt to navigate it. And then it ended, as probably 90% of my stories do, with a gun going off. I’m fairly predictable that way, I guess.
It’s funny, I think you’ve said some version of “This story actually started because I had grown so bored of myself and my own writing” about all of your longer stories (“A Hungry Bear Does Not Dance,” “The Beach Leads All the Way to the Sea,” and now this) I’ve published! Something about you finding ways to reinvigorate yourself really works for me!
I’ll get at smaller moments of pride in a later question, but I have been thinking a decent amount lately about those moments/stories/ideas where we recognize we’re onto something. “The idea of a pastor who finds out one of his members is running a porn account” is so good! Did you know, kinda as soon as you had that idea, that you were probably onto something? If not, was there a moment in the story where it did spark in you, kinda showing itself and making you feel like, oh, yeah, I’m onto something here...? And, either way, can you talk at all about recognizing those during creating?
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