A Short Interview w/ Matt Leibel

"Bonus material" for Leibel's short story, "Martha," published on Tuesday, 8/27.

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 “Martha” 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?

An embarrassingly large percentage of my writing practice involves scribbling what is essentially gibberish into notebooks until something “catches”—a phrase, an image, a sentence. Then I’ll draw brackets around it and try to start a new thing on a new page. I think that’s what happened with the first two sentences of “Martha”, and once I had those I thought maybe I had something. I guess I was thinking about a cluster of things: those reality shows a few years back about families with like 20 kids (the Duggars, I think?); the obvious nursery rhyme verses about the old woman with a too-large family living in a shoe; Donald Antrim’s hilarious and dark novel “The Hundred Brothers.” 

I liked the large canvas that having 128 children available to the story gave me to play with (that number definitely comes from tennis major draws) and for some reason imagined Martha as a centuries-old California girl. Something about the no-fucks-left-to-give attitude built into the character maybe emboldened me to escalate the absurdities at every turn, whenever I hit what seemed like a wall, even as I knew I was largely leapfrogging the laws of time, space, biology, and physics. I do love the idea that you mentioned in your introduction, Aaron, that anything can happen in fiction. It’s always a rush to encounter that level of narrative freedom as a reader, say, in the works of Donald Barthelme or César Aira or Samanta Schweblin or Rachel Ingalls or countless others. And I suppose that’s the energy that powered me through to the end of this one, even if by that point I was pretty much operating on, uh…a lot of hot air. 

I'm glad you liked that aspect of the intro, and that it rung true.

I wonder if there was a specific moment that especially opened the story up for you, or felt like a specific example of this "anything can happen" energy? Like, did you ever get stuck, and then something unlocked moving forward, or did anything happen while writing (or revising!) that reminded you that you could (and maybe even should) "go" there, go bigger, weirder, etc.?