In February’s Web Exclusive flash fiction, “Fish Jokes,” a woman is challenged with articulating exactly what her former boss did to her that was inappropriate. In order to convey Annie’s struggle to recollect what happened, name it, and support her own reaction to it, author Kate Reed Petty created an ingenious modern trope that everyone can understand: the hunt for an elusive email buried in an endless inbox.
Erin McReynolds: There is a genius to the many levels of want in “Fish Jokes”: At the surface, Annie is searching her inbox for a critical email that may help explain to a male friend why her former boss is inappropriate for the job. She is hoping to avoid using her own language, her own memory of the events, and her own gut feelings about them—doubting that they will be sufficient. Also, she is frustrated by the mechanism of the Gmail search engine, which we all know requires you to get the terms exactly right or you’ll never find what you’re looking for. How did this idea come to you?
Kate Reed Petty: I think I spend too much time on my computer. Just now I was thinking about how to answer this question, and I caught myself searching in my email to see if I’d sent an early draft of this story to friends and maybe included a note about the original inspiration. I didn’t find any relevant emails (one never does!) but then I realized—that’s where the idea came from. It’s something I do all the time.
To be pretentious for a hot minute: I’m also interested in the gaps between our real memories and the stories that are easy or comfortable or funny to tell other people. Those gaps are deeply relevant in conversations about rape culture, but they’re also pretty fundamental to being human.
Also, I’m fascinated by the ways we’re figuring out how to incorporate technology into stories. Like, a lot of movies now have little text-message bubbles that appear on the screen, Pop-Up-Video-style, to move the narrative forward (it’s all over High Maintenance, for example, but it’s also everywhere). Contemporary technology is still fairly uncharted territory in literature, and I’m excited to see humans’ weird habits of livestreaming/emailing/sexting show up more in our fiction.
EM: I want to dig into this technology thing because we receive many submissions where you can tell the author is trying to include this relevant new way of communicating, but it can easily become distracting. What guidelines do you think are important to follow when incorporating technology in fiction?
KRP: The technology has to be a baked-in part of the narrative, either emotionally or practically. If you think about science fiction, the connection is natural—the technology is part of the story, and the main characters have to use the technology (or get around it) in order to get what they want. The temptation in literary fiction is to throw a piece of technology in as a prop, just to place the character in the contemporary world, which is when it feels flat and hollow. If a character is going to send a text or perform a web search or use an emoji, it should matter to either the plot or the emotion.
Your question also makes me want to go back and look at how technology crept its way into novels over the past two centuries. Who was the first writer to put a car in a book, and how did we get from there to The Great Gatsby? We need like an OED of technology plot points.
EM: You submitted this story quite a while ago, but we happened to get to it just as #MeToo was reaching a fever pitch. What did you hope people would take away from the story when you first wrote it, and how has that developed now that it’s among these conversations?
KRP: When I sent this to y’all in early 2017, I remember thinking, “This is so relevant right now.” I think Roger Ailes was on my mind, and Bill O’Reilly was fired around that time. Unfortunately this is something that keeps being relevant.
Post-#MeToo, my political feeling about the story is the same as when I wrote it: I didn’t include any specific gross details about the boss’s behavior, and I didn’t let the harassment totally ruin Anna’s career, because those are two issues that often get litigated—and which really don’t matter. The point is that it’s gross and damaging and clichéd to assume your colleagues are sexually available to you.
I also realize that I sort of dodged a big part of your previous question about where this idea came from: I’ve worked in office settings myself, and have fielded this kind of email. Reading #MeToo stories, I was comforted to hear these other people tell stories about men being not only gross, but gross in a way that was pretty hackneyed and obvious.
EM: Same here. I’ve bounced for 20 years between restaurants and offices, and while the former is fraught with out-in-the-open abuse of all kinds (a conversation unto itself) the latter allows the victim to be harassed in secret, and creates a culture of silence and fear. And people think working in corporate offers nothing in the way of writing material!
KRP: It’s so true. And I’ve also worked in restaurants and you are SO right, and the harassment in restaurants in a way freaked me out less because it was grosser but less secret.
And corporate culture is super fascinating. I’d totally read a lot more books about it.
EM: I’d like to think that some of the more common responses to sexual coercion and rape accusations, such as “Well, did they explicitly say ‘No’?” and “Why didn’t they report it?” are diminishing as people acknowledge and appreciate how difficult, even impossible, it is for victims to do this when the power balance is so deeply not in their favor. How can stories like this help?
KRP: This is something I think about a lot, because I worry that stories don’t actually help. But I do think that reading gives people space and time to listen to someone else’s point of view in a way they can’t do IRL.
Tangentially related: I served on a jury for a rape trial this past fall, and it was both upsetting and compelling to be part of a roomful of people debate whether or not to believe a woman’s testimony. Because we all had to agree on the verdict, it turned into a really deep and nuanced conversation—maybe my proudest moment was during a really serious impasse, one of the men said, “I guess I need to hear what the ladies have to say about this.” And then he believed what we said. But to get to that point, the four women in the room had already shared fairly personal details about our families and lives and even some of our sexual experiences. It would be nice if stories and books could do some of that work for us.
EM: Well said. If men pick up those books and stories, right? Which depends largely on the culture of literature—reviews, media coverage, awards, etc.—expanding to include a more equal showing of female authors, and authors of underrepresented demographics, generally. Do you feel optimistic or disheartened by the current state of affairs where that’s concerned?
KRP: I’m an optimistic person, which is sometimes embarrassing because there are always more negative statistics and anecdotes showing how our culture can still be really shitty. But I do feel inspired and excited by how many smart, edgy, bold, totally new art works by all kinds of people are getting out into the world, and how there are audiences celebrating them and calling for more. Right now I have a stack of books I can’t wait to read, all by writers who aren’t white men—I can’t keep up with the amazing books being published right now.
There was an inspiring discussion about this on the first episode of a podcast by the film company A24, which I just listened to. It’s a conversation between Greta Gerwig and Barry Jenkins, and they both talk about how long it took them to give themselves permission to dream of being directors, because they had so few examples—and now imagine all the high school kids who aren’t even thinking twice about what they’re “allowed” to do.
What about you—do you feel optimistic or pessimistic?
EM: A bit of both. I recently blew up at two creeps making rude sexual comments at a friend’s bar. I kept saying “You know your time for treating women like this is over, right? The world is changing” . . . which sounds optimistic. At the same time, I went claws-out cuckoo on them, afraid and enraged at the injustice, which sounds like a pessimistic response. I am seeing more work from authors in marginalized communities, and I’ve sat through publishers’ presentations where it seemed like there was this awareness that books by women, people of color, and LGBTQ authors—and readers within those groups—were growing too numerous to ignore (and people were genuinely excited about that). And yet it’s slow going, and it’s not enough.
What are you working on now?
KRP: Fighting social injustice! Last winter I finished a novel called Women’s Fiction, which is also about technology and rape culture, which I’ve been editing and sharing with friends, and hope to share with everyone. Now I’m working on a novel which about climate change and the decision to have/not have children. It takes place in a near-future America, where rising sea levels are erasing cities on both coasts; the heroine is newly separated from her husband, and goes home to help evacuate the town where she grew up. It’s another issue that’s perennially relevant.
EM: Holy shit, I can’t wait to read both of those. We’ll keep an eye out for them!
Kate Reed Petty lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Ambit, and Nat. Brut, and she has been awarded a “30 Below” award from Narrative magazine. Recipient of a 2017 Rubys Artist Grant, Kate will be a writer-in-residence at The Mount (Edith Wharton’s House) as well as at Bloedel Reserve. Her children’s graphic novel, Chasma Knights, a collaboration with artist Boya Sun, is forthcoming from First Second Books in May 2018.