A Short Interview w/ Ben Loory + a bonus story!

"Bonus material" for Ben Loory's short story, "Man Woman Egg Bird," published on Tuesday, 6/20.

The plan for Short Story, Long is to feature long short stories, each paired with original art. For the first month or two, a new story will publish every week, on Tuesdays, and then at some point in July will likely move to every other week. 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 Ben’s story, “Man Woman Egg Bird,” now if you haven’t already!

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Aaron Burch: When I asked you for a story, you at first said you didn't really have any, and then you followed up, saying you had an idea. That you had a handful of stories that you've been working on for your new collection that were "very different / expanded versions of stories" that you'd published forever ago (but didn't really know what to do with them, other than include in the book, because technically they (or at least a version of them) were previously published. I wonder what made you revisit them? Either in general, and/or, for now,  "Man Woman Egg Bird," specifically?

Loory: For me, stories are never DONE-done until they actually appear in a printed collection. I don’t think I’ve ever included a story in a collection that was exactly the same as it had been when it previously appeared in a journal or magazine. The only question is how much it will have changed. With most of my stories, the changes are pretty small—a few words or lines here and there—but others change more dramatically. Often I will have finally figured out something about the ending, or there will be additional scenes or sections, or just plain different things will happen at different points. These days when I write a story and I think it’s done I usually don’t send it out to journals for at least a year or two, because I know that it’s probably still going to change as time allows me to see it more clearly. But the stories I published back in 2009-2010, when I was just starting out, were appearing before they’d had time to “settle” in my mind and (I quickly came to see!) often still needed work. Sometimes a lot of work.

So, yeah, for instance, I published “Man Woman Egg Bird” in a PDF-only journal called Cantaraville back in 2009, and I always loved it, but it also still always felt a little inexplicably wonky around the edges to me, so I kept working on it. I was going to include it in my first collection, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, in 2011, but it wasn’t quite right yet, so I didn’t, and kept working on it. Then I wanted to include it in my second book, Tales of Falling and Flying, in 2017, but I still couldn’t quite get it all ironed out… so I kept working on it. So anyway, now, in 2023, the story is finally done! Even though I actually published “it” (as what is now a vastly different story) back in 2009. I don’t know, Aaron—it’s a process! But I never leave a man behind. It’s really important to me that the stories in my collections be as perfect as I can possibly get them. It just sometimes takes a really long time.

AB: One thing I love about your stories is the formatting, where paragraphs are usually very short, often only a sentence or two, and then there's often lots of section breaks too. It's maybe a small thing (or maybe it's a huge thing!) but is something I definitely ascribe to being one part of your "voice" and always affects the speed and rhythm of how I read your stories, in ways I really love. I wonder if you know and can identify at all how or why you landed on that? Do you remember a moment of figuring that out as something you really liked and that felt "right" for you?