A Short Interview w/ Katie Darby Mullins
"Bonus material" for Mullins' short story, "Grand Pas de Deux," published on Tuesday, 12/12.
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 “Grand Pas de Deux” now if you haven’t already!
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?
This story started because I recently became obsessed with ballet again. I’d danced some in my youth, but that’s not where the obsession came from. I have Ehler’s Danlos Syndrome, which means the collagen in my body is coded wrong— which means I am hyper flexible. This actually made me a natural at ballet in some ways (I have incredible turn out and my wingspan is larger than normal), but it hindered me in others (I can’t feel what is a stretch “too far,” so sometimes I bend back so far as to look grotesque). So the reason I couldn’t stop thinking about it of late is I’ve been doing my old ballet warmup routine before I run, and now that I belong to a gym, I’ve been in front of a mirror. I haven’t, in decades, had a full-length mirror, and all the sudden I realized that the human body is nothing but angles and geometry, a mess of degrees and lines.
That got me thinking: human relationships are also little more than a mess of degrees and lines, if you change the words to “stakes” and “boundaries.” These two women are both in a situation where they’ve both been, to go back to the metaphor, hyperflexible with their boundaries because they cannot risk the stakes: Lisa has ignored her husband’s infidelity because she can’t risk losing her family unit, and Maria has ignored that she is not a priority to her lover because she needs the affirmation that someone loves her. The other thing that brought this story to my mind is, like I’m always telling my students, if you don’t understand someone else’s choice, write about it. I knew someone who had chosen to be in a relationship with a married man, and I cannot fathom a situation that would make me do that. I’m so rigidly uncomfortable with infidelity in all its forms (…just end the relationship!) that I wanted to try and humanize the choice to participate in an affair, even if I couldn’t tap into it emotionally. I hope that I was able to do that somewhat with Maria: I don’t like moralizing, in fiction or in real life, so this was my personal exercise in empathy.
You touched on this a little, but I was curious what came first, the idea for the structure/form or the story itself. This sounds like an almost kinda backwards way into a story… although perhaps every entry point into a story is unique to itself. Is this “normal” for you or did it feel different even when having the idea and starting to work on it?
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