A Short Interview w/ Leah Christianson

+ submissions open on Sunday (12/1) and audio for stories starting to become available!

A few quick notes, before we get to our interview with Leah Christianson about her really wonderful and brilliant story, “Plain Sight,” published last Tuesday.

• Going to open submissions on Sunday (12/1) for the month of December. Have a story in the 3k-8k word range that you feel like might be a fit? Get ’er ready! Have a friend who writes stories that you think are great who might not know about us? Tell ’em!

• We are going to start featuring audio of the authors reading their stories (if and when the author wants to record themselves)! Will be adding them to the archives as they come in. I recorded one for my own story, as a kind of trial run, and think it turned out ok and kinda fun? Check it out, if so inclined?
  
  

• I don’t think a writer/editor/publisher/etc. begging for people to subscribe has ever convinced me to, personally, and this isn’t me begging, but just a little reminder… paid subscriptions go a long way toward helping me pay writers and artists! I’m like 10 (ok, maybe more like 20) paid subscribers away from this “paying for itself.” Which is my problem (insofar as it’s a “problem”), not yours, but… you know. Supporting art and artists is fun and makes you cool! Be cool!
  

---

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?

Leah Christianson: I’m a big fan of The Hold Steady and went on a Craig Finn deep dive early in the pandemic. I fell in love with a track off We All Want the Same Things called "God in Chicago." It’s classic Craig Finn in that spoken word, bar stool rambling kind of way. The speaker/singer gets a call from the sister of a friend who has recently overdosed, asking if he can help her sell what’s left of her brother’s drugs. The song ends on this unfinished note, and I loved that — how Finn doesn’t let us off the hook with a tidy ending and asks us to sit with the unresolved feelings instead.

I wanted to see if I could tell a story hitting similar emotional notes, but with the types of characters I wanted to write about. I’m a sucker for a women-on-a-road-trip-story (coincidentally, I’m querying my first novel right now, which also follows two women on a road trip across a climate-changed American West.) At this time, I was also thinking a lot about found families, the line between platonic and romantic love, and the strange ways we express our feelings—even when we think we aren’t.

Trish and Anna’s surface dynamic was really clear to me right away—what took longer to figure out what they weren’t saying to each other, and why. So while the premise and the bones of the story showed up really quickly, it took literal years of editing, stepping away, and revisiting it to figure out exactly what they meant to each other and how that fit into the frame of the story.

I love a story that grows out of / is inspired by / etc. a song! Or any piece of art really. A kind of ekphrastic story, but not exactly? Is this something you do or use often, or was this specific Hold Steady song a bit of an outlier in that it gave you this idea, or...?