Writer and editor Adam Soto has long been a part of American Short Fiction‘s editorial team. As one of our assistant editors, he regularly read submission to the journal, wrote copious feedback for authors, and helped determine which stories would ultimately appear in our print edition. So, when we made the decision to bring on another web editor this spring, Adam was a natural choice for the role. This month, he joins our longtime web editor Erin McReynolds as our website’s co-editor, and together, they’ll determine which stories are published here at ASF Online. I recently emailed with Soto to ask about his work, his approach to editing, and his aspirations for the magazine.
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Nate Brown: Adam, we’re so thrilled that after having served as an assistant editor with us for so long that you’re stepping up to the plate as a new web editor who’ll be working alongside web editor Erin McReynolds. While we know you around these parts—you’ve been a member of Austin’s literary community and of our team for years—I want to start by asking you about your own fiction writing. You’ve got a novel coming out next year. Can you tell us a bit about it?
Adam Soto: Joining ASF was one of the first things I did after coming to Austin, and it’s really been like being part of a family, so I’m really grateful for all the time I’ve had with organization, all the stories I’ve read through the years, and I’m really moved to have the opportunity to contribute more to what the journal is doing, which is something special.
The novel is called This Weightless World, and it’s out on MCD/FSG fall 2021. It’s a sentimental sci-fi, a kind of Contact for misanthropic millennials. January 1, 2012, Earth detects an alien signal from a planet 75 lightyears away and a group of characters—a Chicago Public School teacher; one of his students, a musical prodigy; and his ex, a programmer who dumped him for a gig at Google—anticipate a major paradigm shift, an alternative to late stage capitalism, the neighborhood’s cycle of violence, an escape from their own personal guilt. I mean, aliens are supposed to be game changers, right? Habit, human nature, laziness, and fear, however, prove to be a greater obstacle than the 75 lightyears between us and them, and when the planet suddenly falls silent, leaving us alone in the universe once again, collapsing the distance between who we are and who we hope to be feels harder than ever. While the characters sort out their lives, our planet’s biological clock keeps ticking, our dependence on technology distorts our sense of reality, and our most vulnerable continue going mostly ignored. If all of that sounds too depressing, I should add that there are also loving pen-pal letters and lyrical dispatches from deep space woven throughout.
NB: It’s funny, Adam, but I remember you from back in your Iowa City days, when you and my wife, Thea, were MFA students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Was this a project you were working on back then, or is the novel more recent than that? And how does the novel compare to the work you were writing then?
AS: I remember the two of you as well. I started the novel on January 1, 2012, so, right before the start of my last semester at Iowa. Marilynne Robinson was going to be teaching a novel workshop in the spring, we’d all been in a novella seminar with Peter Orner, so all of my friends had suddenly pivoted from writing short stories to writing novels, and I thought, I wanna get me some of that!
I was staying with my parents for the holidays, and I had a dream featuring an image and a wordless interpretation. I saw this fuchsia-colored planet and felt that not only I but the whole human race was being shunned and shamed by it, like the planet was Earth’s twin and we just weren’t going to be friends. With absolutely nothing else to go on, I set up my laptop in my parent’s kitchen, took a look around the room, and typed the first thing that came to mind. “So, this dude wakes up on Jan. 1, 2012…” Most of my work, up to that point, had focused on alienating readers. They were mainly plotless, kind of nihilistic, and tried really hard to redeem themselves with lots of catchy sentences. It had never occurred to me that I could cut back on my affect and keep alienation as subject matter. It took me three whole drafts (re-written, top to bottom) and four years to figure out what the story was about, three years working with my amazing agent, Marya Spence, to turn an 800+ page sprawling tome into an actual novel, and it’ll be another year and a half before my editor, Danny Vazquez, and the rest of the team at MCD/ FSG and I turn it over to the public.
NB: Did you have any particularly great workshops or instructors at Iowa? What ideas about writing have stuck with you? And for those considering an MFA program, do you have any advice on what they should expect to take away from the experience?
AS: My very first workshop there was with the late James Alan McPherson. He was so funny, sage, and generous, and my workshop group became my best friends. Peter Orner was also very inspiring. He taught me a lot about teaching and reading. Teaching and writing were the natural byproducts of reading and paying attention to others for Peter, and this has proven vital to me as a middle-school English teacher. Michelle Huneven, however, changed my life. The way I saw it, I was just this kid who got into this really nice writing program for one reason or another, but, somehow, Michelle took me seriously and told me to take myself seriously. There’s no shortage of people taking themselves seriously in MFA programs, so, I guess my advice is to expect to find something out about yourself. A lot of people find out they don’t like teaching; hell, some people find out they don’t like writing that much, at least not enough to spend the rest of their lives trying to get published. Either way, no matter your age, or where you’re coming from, you’ve got to let the MFA years be formative in some way.
Back in the day, there used to be this expectation that you could join a program and graduate with a book deal, or at least a “cushy” teaching gig that’d hold you off until you got a book deal, and because it was more of a rite of passage, these programs could get away with being deeply unfeeling. I felt nurtured and supported, but I know a lot of people who didn’t and who don’t. But I think if everyone comes in expecting more, and if everyone is willing to accept that that something more probably isn’t going to be more book deals—taking on publishing is a whole other nightmare—then I think a lot of the criticisms of MFA programs could be addressed, and not just by faculty and directors but by the student communities that hold them accountable. Because there’s no real promise for what you can expect, especially from program to program, until you start laying out those expectations. For starters, funding and diversity.
NB: In addition to writing, a big part of editorial work is reading submissions. What kind of work grabs you? What excites you? What do you love coming across in submissions?
AS: I like something that commits. Something that assures me that it wants to tell me something, even if it’s reluctant to, even if it fails to. Commitment is huge. To voice, a structural procedure, a deep study of character, a memory being pulled apart, a woolgathering.
NB: Our web exclusive stories have long been capped at 2,000 words (though this is changing), and I’m wondering what you think the short form—whatever you may call them: flash fiction, micro fiction, short-shorts—offer that longer works do not? What are the advantages of really short work?
AS: Whenever I get a new album, I always start with listening to the longest song. With short story collections, I always start with the shortest story. This is something I’ve done forever. Whatever they’re called, I’ve always been attracted to these brief things, and, over the years, reading them, writing them, I’ve come to appreciate their different intended effects. You read one of Babel’s Red Cavalry Stories and the story’s length isn’t really the first thing you notice. Similar to your feelings after a shorty by Chekhov, you’re struck by the wholeness of the experience, the funny asymmetry, the dropped details—as in the details the writer does and does not drop. Compare that to a sprint by Thomas Bernhard, one of Lydia Davis’s illuminating punchlines, or a haunting by Peter Orner, and I think you get a mixture of dedications to singular things, which is rare in our Wikipedic, FOMA world. And the fact that that one thing can be so many different things—grief’s manipulation of time, light’s impression on a memory, an anecdote, extensive alliteration—is really a gift. Such dedication taken to greater lengths is often awkward or dull until it ventures into the obsessive and becomes genius again.
NB: Are there writers whose stories you find yourself returning to over time? If so, who are those folks, and which stories do you think demand re-reading?
AS: Mavis Gallant, constantly, and especially her early and long story “The Cost of Living.” I love that long story for its failure to commit, for dragging out what it means to say for pages and pages, for pretty much being a 36-page novel. Leonard Michaels’s Nachman stories and his list story “In the Fifties.” Anything from Joy Williams’s Escapes, but especially “White” over and over again. Andrey Platonov’s “The Motherland of Electricity” (it teaches you how to build a generator), James Alan McPherson’s “The Silver Bullet,” and, more recently, Sara Majka’s “Saint Andrews Hotel,” “Especially Heinous” by Carmen Maria Machado, and Brandon Taylor’s ASF story, “As Though That Were Love.”
NB: Jesus, there’s so much good work in there. That Brandon Taylor story has really stayed with me. I taught it at Johns Hopkins last semester, and it made a couple of students (and me) cry. Taylor has so much to say about loneliness and the unbridgeable spaces that exist between people, even those who are dear friends. Come to think of it, the Williams, McPherson, and Majka stories you mention are sort of about that, too. Would you say that the tension between isolation and collectivity, between personal spaces and social spaces are of interest to you? Based on what you’ve said about your own novel, that seems central in that work, too.
AS: Yes, definitely, definitely, the isolated and the collective, isolated collectives, and, now that we’re all getting a taste, the collectively isolated. And that tension, too, I think you’re right, between the singular and the collective, I’ve always been fascinated by where it pops up, how places and moments of intimacy can leave us feeling so isolated, how fractured our alliances and coalitions can be, how hard it is to come together behind a common goal. But most of all, over the years I’ve become obsessed with characters who, against their better judgment, still seek community, and I’m really attracted to the tensions that arise when those seekers interrogate their intentions or test the authenticity of their communities. One of the unique features of our world today is our ability to not only witness but quantifiably measure the efforts being made by ourselves and others as we vie for each other’s communion—it’s something both beautiful and grotesque. And that reality really takes the characters in TWW for a ride, from pulling them out of their recessional depression to overloading them with worldly concerns to leaving them feel completely isolated.
NB: American Short Fiction has been around since 1991. Why do you think that journals like ours—large and small, from all parts of the country and the world—abide? What role do you think we play in the broader literary culture, and has that role changed over time?
AS: Like the few healthy corners of the internet, lit journals are places for spaceless communities, folks looking for a common thing; in our case, a certain flavor of fiction. With every issue, you’re excited to share in the discovery of someone new, eager to read someone familiar, and happy to sustain the practice of an old art form. And before the internet, and now through the internet, lit journals have always offered deeply reflective but also relatively immediate reactions to the worlds we live in, which is something I’m excited to play a part in as a web editor. As a utility, we broaden the spectrum of representation in culture, and although our nets require wider and wider casting, what we discover here increases the expectations we have for other literary institutions, as well as the world at large.
Adam Soto is a co-web editor at American Short Fiction. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a former Michener-Copernicus Foundation fellow. He lives with his wife in Austin, TX, where he is a teacher and a musician. His debut novel, This Weightless World, is forthcoming from MCD/ FSG fall 2021.