"A Not-So-Secret Handshake": A Conversation with Elise Levine
“If you’re thinking this is one of those stories that go nowhere, where you don’t know where this is going—where I don’t know—rest assured, I’ve got this, the old head really is on straight.”
The stories in Elise Levine’s latest collection, Big of You, are great travellers. They move through time, scene, and setting like water, seamless and fluid, burbling with questions of personal identity and what it takes to change one’s present or put to bed one’s past. From Arnhem to outer space, Levine’s characters lift off the page—some via hot air balloon, most via distinctively humorous, quirky voices that showcase her trademark wordplay and mastery of language.
There is a playfulness that counteracts solemn moments throughout these stories, a whiff of whimsy permeating the collection as a whole. “It takes all kinds,” my mother likes to say of the world, of the people in it, and all kinds are represented in resplendent complexity through Big of You, including a 19th century photographer, a fantastic beast, a competitive cluster of student composers, and one unlucky casino worker.
Big of You creates then proceeds to explore the space between realist and fabulist fiction, making room for messy characters who seek to change their circumstances, their histories, and sometimes their identities entirely. It’s a romp through an imaginary wonderland with many markers tethering readers to the truth of our human lives—the pain of personal loss, the complexities of caretaking, and the extraordinary work of fashioning ourselves anew. Levine and I connected over email to discuss how she crafts such memorable characters within a story-world that pays careful attention to its reader; we also spoke about toying with expectations and genre, and what fun it is to pepper familiar landscapes with the absurd.
Katherine Abbass: I find speculative fiction a great vessel for social/political commentary, though things can get dark real quick. You manage to maintain levity through much of this collection, be it with a dash of absurdity, a punchy voice, or an otherworldly twist. It makes me think back to my earliest writing days, where the goal wasn’t to publish but simply to play. In that “anything goes” space, I have so much fun.
I’m curious about your approach to infusing this collection with the surreal and introducing absurdist elements to your stories. Is this kind of experimentation a means to an end? A tool? A toy? More specifically, I wondered if stories like “Space Station” or “Roadside Attraction” grew from a single bizarro seed, intentionally planted? Or maybe you scatter these surrealist seeds a bit more haphazardly throughout the narrative, like a chaotic gardener?
[T]he fabulist elements serve as a metaphor for how my characters cross and bend borders within themselves, and how they perform those selves for others and for their own occasionally misperceived solace.
Elise Levine: Most of the surreal, speculative, and absurdist elements in these stories arose organically, fused to character from the outset. I saw these elements as a technique for capturing lives lived—through states of unsettling confusion and sometimes awe and wonder—beyond the usual measured boundaries of what constitutes personhood. I was especially interested in the ways in which people shift in their understanding of themselves over time, and the fabulist elements serve as a metaphor for how my characters cross and bend borders within themselves, and how they perform those selves for others and for their own occasionally misperceived solace. What is monstrous in these characters can mutate from the good, and the good from the monstrous.
“Space Station” and “Roadside Attraction” are the latter two parts within the story “Cooler.” Unlike many of the other stories, “Cooler” began with an idea—or, rather, a question—about what might constitute "coolness." From there, my ideas about form and style immediately followed. I knew before I began writing that I would use an overall three-part, loosely connected form to suggest distance and detachment as one way of representing "cool." I’d also have the main characters in successive parts increasingly confront what "cooler" might mean. And I’d play up the language, foreground it to the hilt in an ironized "cool" germane to each character, including the use of clichéd retro language that the characters try to adopt in hopes of elevating themselves—but with the reader in on how the "cool" doesn’t land.
The disconnect is funny—and the humour also (I hope) reveals the characters’ complex emotional weather, their internal landscapes, exposing the sadness that lurks behind the language, the contending with grief and loss, including the loss of agency.
I revised each part of “Cooler” only about a million times, trying to get closer to the effects I was after. Throughout the process, I kept play and pleasure forefront. They’re central for me in writing fiction—in shaping language in service of character and in bringing the reader into the characters’ worlds. Fingers crossed, the play and pleasure comes across for the reader too.
Katherine Abbass: That brings to mind the end of the second part of “Cooler,” in “Roadside Attraction”: “Speaking of twitchy. These claws, these fangs. If I weren’t so chill, I’d say Jere for real needs to take a gander and understand, as I do, how tables can turn … ”
I love the threat that’s implied here, the reminder of the narrator’s potential for self-actualization, really—even if it’s been lost. It made me think of the translator from “Dig!” and his assertion that translation is “about movement. One language, one space, shifts to another.” I’d argue that transformation, too, necessitates movement, and throughout Big of You, that movement is often an internal shift—something felt, not seen. What kind of change or transformation did you experience as a writer while moving through these stories?
For the collection as a whole, it’s as if I built a house with a number of rooms, and connecting hallways and staircases as I was working through questions about personhood.
Elise Levine: Thanks for pointing out that moment in “Dig!” I think the changes I myself experienced as I worked on each story were, on a mundane level, akin to the pleasures of solving a puzzle—or constructing a piece of furniture, albeit a strange one for which no design blueprint yet exists. It’s the satisfaction of making an object. For the collection as a whole, it’s as if I built a house with a number of rooms, and connecting hallways and staircases as I was working through questions about personhood. I can’t say I arrived at any easy answers, but the questions have come into sharper focus for me, especially given this historical moment and what’s led to it.
KA: As a writer, I feel heartened by the idea that answers may not be what our questions really need, in the end. Sometimes it’s just enough to sit and have a think on something you hadn’t considered too much before. Do you think of the “hallways and staircases” as attempts to answer those questions your collection explores?
EL: The rooms and hallways offered modulations of the questions and connections from one to the next. What are the ways in which we inflate and also deceive ourselves and others? What do we most desire but can’t always name? And, perhaps most centrally, what do our strivings and failures reveal about the worlds in which we live?
For me, the reader is always at the table. Writing entails a double vision in which I’m both writing for myself—for what I think the story might be, for what I see, and for the kind of reader I am—and for what the reader needs to know and when.
KA: The Literary Review of Canada dubs you a “maestro of pacing,” and I too felt the “reveal” in many of these stories came at the perfect time. Each narrative progressed beat-for-beat alongside the reader’s capacity to absorb new information, and callback details (like the Shetland turtleneck in “Arnhem”) revealed character at a rate that made it easy to connect dots across scenes and pages. Your choice to position the reader and narrator on the same side of a discovery also makes the reader feel considered and supported as they move through the story.
When you’re writing, at what point does the reader take a seat at your story table? Where in the process do you start to consider their experience of your story, or write with special consideration for them in mind?
EL: For me, the reader is always at the table. Writing entails a double vision in which I’m both writing for myself—for what I think the story might be, for what I see, and for the kind of reader I am—and for what the reader needs to know and when. From the moment I lay down those first words, I’m asking myself questions from the reader’s seat. What will they see when they read this? What can I highlight for the reader by slowing down, through the use of scene, and where can I serve the reader best by quickly covering necessary ground using summary and exposition? Where can I best use a character’s seemingly off-hand observation or casual action to expose their incriminating lack of self-awareness?
I also strategize—also, typically, through multiple revisions—where and how much backstory I need to fill in important background, and how to keep the present action moving forward, or an important through-line taut. What handholds or breadcrumbs (both metaphors work) can I offer the reader? What can I withhold until later, for the sake of immersion in the fictive moment? Overall, the main question from the beginning is: How can I shape the reader’s experience of moving through the performance that is the story?
KA: Short story writer Kirti Bhadresa, who wrote An Astonishment of Stars, describes drafting several versions of the same story, each one written from the perspective of a different character, in order to determine the best point-of-view. The stories in Big of You are told by different narrators, though all but one are written in first person. What kind of work goes into choosing a narrator, and then differentiating their voices?
EL: That sounds like a great workshop and a fine idea. For Big of You, yes, the stories all feature the first person—with the exception of the story “Return to Forever,” which cheats a bit by using the first person plural point of view to convey both the lovely and unlovely aspects of a long-time friend group, three senior women who take a trip together to the desert, minus a fourth friend now in a memory-care ward back home. My initial idea involved this plural narrator, their voice, and the form (mostly long, single-paragraph sections to suggest fusion and melding), though I did tinker with the voice as I was drafting and redrafting the story.
As with “Return to Forever,” I can’t say my narrators choose me—they’re characters I construct—but typically the ideas for them do just pop into my head, out of the blue. And somehow I just know that, each time, there’s a story there.
Creating and differentiating voices can more typically involve a lot of back and forth for me. I make notes on approaches to syntax, diction, register, especially as I come to a greater understanding of the characters and their situations. I try out, through many drafts, how these stylistic elements might work—and also when I might shift my approach, to help alert the reader to heightened, important moments.
KA: Is there anything you feel you sacrifice by choosing “I”?
EL: I think any point of view involves sacrifices, limitations, and necessaries. The most glaring sacrifice, but also quite interesting to me, in using the first person is that I’m losing some ability to show what’s going on outside the narrator’s perceptions, and need to take pains to show them as unreliable, at least in some ways. (There’s the adjacent issue that some readers find an unreliable narrator, especially a complex female one, uncomfortable to deal with—which, oh well.)
Another tricky aspect in using first person is the danger that the narrator will come across as too “talky,” yakking away at the reader for no good reason. One key is to find ways to impart why the narrator feels the urgent need to speak—or confess, or figure something out.
KA: Writers often speak of characters having a “mind of their own” and taking over when pen meets paper. Are you more of a fingers-meet-keyboard kind of writer? It was easy for me to imagine a spirit or figure, like the nameless immortal being, dictating her story to you as you wrote it. Can you talk about where the voices of these characters came from? Ancient whispers? Fever dream? A walk in the park? How loud were they in your ear while you wrote?
I think of novels as forays into the unknown, the dark yet thrilling woods, while the short story is my foundation, my equally thrilling home.
EL: I love that you can imagine a spirit figure communing with me! I’d be all ears for that. In my case though, while my initial ideas for the characters usually blow in out of nowhere, I intentionally build their voices. I do this based on my growing awareness, usually through multiple drafts, of the multiple facets of selves the characters might have themselves constructed over time.
And by the way, I’m a pen and paper person for notes, keyboard for the in-earnest drafting, then handwritten notes on print-outs—and so on.
KA: I’ve learned, through my own search for an agent, that publishers tend to favour novels over stories. What is your relationship to the short story as a storytelling form, and has that relationship changed in response to the success you’ve had as a novelist—or essayist, or poet?
EL: My first book was the story collection Driving Men Mad. My fourth was the collection This Wicked Tongue. And now Big of You is my sixth book. So I keep circling back, with great pleasure, to the short form. I think of novels as forays into the unknown, the dark yet thrilling woods, while the short story is my foundation, my equally thrilling home. I love the compression and, at the same time, the short story’s ability to offer narrative and stylistic range—in a taut, pressured way. It can also sit well between poetry and the novel, serving the lyric and fabulist idioms nicely, and explorations of form—not that the novel can’t do these things, too.
But the story collection mostly has a smaller readership than for novels, and for this reason it’s important to keep in mind that readers of short story collections tend to be very committed, passionate even, about the form. These are people who read closely and come packing a love of language and nuanced character and literary history. They make writing short stories feel like a not-so-secret handshake. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
