A Short Interview w/ Lindsay Hunter

"Bonus material" for Hunter's short story, "Female Anatomy," published on Tuesday, 4/30.

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 “Female Anatomy” now if you haven’t already!

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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?

I was listening to a podcast in which people called in and confessed things, and I heard one where this woman had been walking her dog off leash and a man pulled a gun on her. She became obsessed with guns after that, with protecting herself, with imagining scaring the man as badly as he'd scared her. I thought, wow, I need to write about her. As I was working on that story, I had a thought zap me one day: what if your male doctor told you that you didn't have a clitoris? What would that mean, especially if you'd been sexually active--had you been enjoying sex, or had you been enjoying that you were being used for another's enjoyment? Do you know your body as well as the men who treat it like an object know it? I thought it had a sort of companion question to that first notion - the idea that, having been terrified by a man, you'd want to terrify him, or prove that you could. In a way, both were efforts at exploring and proving the humanity of Alma, a woman. These alternating timelines seemed like two sides of the same fucked-up coin.

Love that one of the instigations behind this story was a podcast story. Which was the case for your (amazing!) Hot Springs Drive, too! Has that kind of "grabbing stories from the news/world/etc." always been true for you, is it relatively common? Or more just happen to be true for these two things? Is there something especially interesting or helpful or inspiring about that, when it happens?