A Short Interview w/ Elaje López
"Bonus material" for López's short story, “Summer,” published on Tuesday, 3/18.
A couple real quick notes, before we get to the real stuff:
Three months and I’ve been keeping up with my weekly reading log of my daily short story reading. Last couple of posts have also turned into some slightly longer form blogging about teaching and beginnings and language and word choice. If you subscribe to SSL, you like short stories, and so you might dig it, too?
I’m going to be at AWP this week! If you’re around, find me and say hi!
I finally have the 400+ submissions from the last open submission call whittled down to the double digits, so will probably open submissions again in… May?
Reminder that stories are always free; interviews with authors are an added bonus for paid subscribers. Paid subscriptions help me pay writers and artists!
If you haven’t already, reading “Summer” now… and then read our short interview about the story!
"Summer" by Elaje López
It happened the first time Summer had worn her hair in a ponytail. The first few days sitting next to her, Layla observed Summer’s everyday outfit–a tank top, jean shorts, sneakers, her blonde curly hair tumbling down her back. She never pushed it behind her ears or moved it out of her face. She only ever played with the ends, braiding them three strands at a time so that at the end of a particularly boring class session she would be left with tiny little braids, microscopic enough that only Layla, who was watching the movements of her fingers, would have noticed them.
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?
Elaje López: This story has been cooking in my head for so long. It started out with the seed of me wanting to write a story about a girl who grapples with her desire for another girl and has no way to really put it into words or understand it. The context of the two main characters being dancers and training together was kind of a natural outgrowth of that initial idea. I grew up doing ballet and was in dance studio and performance spaces my whole life. It wasn't until I was in college and existing in those spaces with a bunch of amazing openly queer people that I really started to unpack the depth of dance as a homosocial space and the complexity of the feelings that had created for me growing up that I never really came to terms with or understood when I was still a teenager. I had a really close friend in high school who was on dance team with me, and they were the only openly queer person on the team at the time. When we were both in college, I remember us having this super cathartic conversation about that experience and how we both were experiencing so much closeness with the girls we danced with, physically and emotionally and socially, while also feeling the awkwardness and self consciousness of desire that all teenagers experience. And I really wanted to capture those feelings that are so raw and uncertain in this story through that medium of dance.
One of the things that so pulled me into the story was the way you write about dance. It is a world I don't really know anything about, but I feel so pulled into it here by this story, which feels like it renders and captures it so evocatively and wonderfully. Have you written about dance before? Were there any specific challenges or joys about trying to capture the movement but also the space and the thinking about, and just all of it?
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