Clare Beams’s Bard Fiction Prize-winning story collection We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, 2016) transports us to saltwater marshes that promise healing and schools that promise transformation (in more ways than one), to bodies in decay, tightly corseted, breaking apart, and numbed—worlds singularly strange yet incredibly, vibrantly real. Beams possesses an astonishing depth of imagination and clarity of vision, and she guides us compassionately through this collection that Publishers Weekly heralds as powerful, displaying “what we need from others and, in turn, what we can offer others of ourselves.” Here, Beams discusses time in her stories, patience as process, and her recent debut novel, The Illness Lesson.
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Peter Kispert: The story “Hourglass” invokes, of course, a figure, but also leads the collection and so sort of has us counting down, holding our breath, waiting for time to run out. And there is in that story especially this fabulous exploration of beauty and age and gaze, and the implied dual tenuousness and power of these things. When did you know you had a collection, and how did you arrive at the organizing logic of this book?
Claire Beams: I think I realized I was writing a book, instead of just a group of discrete stories, about half to two-thirds the way through the writing of them—so maybe five or six stories in. I probably would have realized it sooner except that I was simultaneously working on a novel that was supposed to be my “real” work (a novel which now, blessedly, lives in a drawer) and thought of these stories mostly as my creative break. At some point I realized I was a lot prouder of them than I ever was of that novel, and that they were leading me into territory that felt crucial to me as a writer. Which just goes to show how little we know sometimes, as writers, about where the real work actually is. I think I came to see that certain elements—classrooms and their complicated power dynamics, women and their various roles in the world and the limitations of those roles, a kind of slightly shifted historical inhabiting, the slippery territory between surrealism and realism—kept recurring, and that, most crucially, all of these stories are in some way about transformation. That’s when I started thinking about how to organize the parts into a whole. My brilliant editor at Lookout, Beth Staples, helped me put the stories in the best order, when the book eventually got acquired. She also told me that one story didn’t belong—one I’d always sensed didn’t belong, though I’d just sort of hoped I was wrong—and so I wrote an entirely new story (“All the Keys to All the Doors”) specifically for the book at the tail end of the process.
PK: Many of these stories poignantly probe a complicated desire for physical transformation. I’m thinking here of “Hourglass” and “The Saltwater Cure” but also see this present thematically in other pieces. Could you speak a bit to that, as well as what else these stories share?
CB: I do think physical transformation figures in pretty much all of these stories in one way or another. In the stories you mention here, and maybe in “Ailments” too, it’s about the desire to change or assume a new form, just as you say. In others, it’s about the changes that happen to people as they move through the world, partially due to the things other people do to them (I’m thinking of the title story and “The Drop” and in some ways “Granna”). And in others still I think I’m exploring the ramifications of the desire to inflict some vision of your own on the world around you—to transform or reshape things as you want them, or as you think you want them (here I’m thinking of “World’s End” and “All the Keys to All the Doors” and “The Renaissance Person Tournament”). But really every story in this collection explores change and its limits, and its costs.
PK: What interests you about the dynamics of a classroom? A school?
CB: I love classrooms and schools as settings for fiction, I think, because in so many ways they’re these beautifully self-contained theaters of human nature. The power dynamics are so naked—the teacher is in charge; the students are to do what they’re told; the teacher not only directs but also shapes and molds the students—and those dynamics have the potential to be a little troubling, which is always a great quality for fiction. The ways for different characters to stretch and mess with and misuse those power dynamics are almost limitless. And as a fiction writer, you can use a school or classroom setting to keep everyone in a scene, keep them bouncing off each other in these contained spaces, while you sort of see what happens. I find all of that to be so fertile for narrative.
PK: It seems like a hallmark and virtue of your stories, or at least these, that if asked in what time period they are set I would feel reflexively certain and then not really be able to tell you. There is a sense that they are not beholden to any one period or year exactly, and I found myself really loving this element. Is this specific kind of ambiguity something you strive for? How do you set about achieving it?
CB: Thank you! This quality is quite important to me. I’m a writer who often sets stories in the past, and yet something inside me bristles a little when my work gets called historical fiction, and I think you’ve put your finger on exactly why. While I do try to ground my stories in the particular time period they’re set in, and while I try hard to avoid anachronism, I’m not the kind of writer who’s going to give you a vast quantity of detail about, say, what the nineteenth-century silverware looks like. I think more than that, though, probably what’s contributing to that outside-of-time sense you’re talking about is the stories’ strangeness—the fact that, yes, you may be reading a story set in the 1940s, but you’re also reading a story that’s about a new husband’s sort of mythical monstrousness; or you might be reading about the wake of a 21st-century school shooting, but you’re really reading about a woman’s discovery of an impossible and frightening remedy for the pain that now afflicts the town she loves. These are developments that, because they’re a bit beyond realism, seem somehow to be happening in no real time, or maybe every time. And I do think that regardless of what time period I’m writing about on the surface, I’m really using that time period to intensify and inspect some dynamic I’ve noticed in my own present-day world.
PK: Again and again I was floored by the precision, freshness, and utility of the detail in your stories. “The corset gapped the way the lip of a wound does”—one such knockout. But your stories never feel bogged down but unnecessary closeness. How do you know when to zoom in, and how do you that so deftly?
CB: Oh, this makes me so happy. The true answer is that I don’t know at all—I just arrive at a pace and grain that feels right through many, many rounds of trial and error. By which I mean that I write a first draft that’s awful in its instincts on this front (and usually on pretty much all the other fronts) and print it out, and then tear it up with a pen, over and over and over again, for months and sometimes years. I think this approach is effective for me because I find drafting kind of daunting but deeply love revision, and so I can tell myself I’m “just revising” the story when really I’m writing 95% of the words that will eventually be in the final version, all over the margins and on the backs of those printed-out pages.
PK: Your just-released debut novel, The Illness Lesson (Doubleday, 2020), has already been met with wide acclaim, and I’d love to hear more about the transition from short form and the journey to this novel. What was that process like? Was The Illness Lesson ever on the path to being a short story?
CB: Well, the process wasn’t totally linear—since I’d been writing a novel (ultimately a failed novel) the whole time I was writing these stories, it wasn’t like I started with stories and somehow graduated to the novel form, if that makes sense. But I do think I always had the sense that The Illness Lesson should be a novel, just because I wanted it to be about a whole school, and, structurally, about a slow-at-first build to a very scary place. The ability to have that gradual but accelerating buildup, to make the reader live in a world before I showed what dark things that world made possible, felt important. I did sometimes wish I were writing a story and not a novel, just because logistically it seems to be so very much easier for me to finish stories than for me to finish a novel during this particular phase of life. I have a seven-year-old and a three-year-old, and through their babyhoods and early childhoods I’ve found it challenging to claw my way into the concentrated chunks of time that I need in order to hold a whole novel in my head. Stories require that too, but because they’re shorter I find the necessary chunks of time can be shorter too, and widely separated, as long as I have enough of them. It doesn’t take as long to get under the thing again, if you’ve had to be away from it for a while.
PK: I like to ask this, sort of selfishly I’ll admit—what do you think is the best piece of writing advice you’ve received?
CB: Absolutely the most important advice I’ve received is to be patient. Writing as a career and writing as an art both require more patience than I naturally wanted to give them at first. With the career part, you’re often waiting on other people, and so the delays aren’t in your own control. With the art part, I think you’re sort of waiting on yourself—giving yourself the time to really and truly make the thing you’re working on into the best version of itself you’re capable of producing, which often involves giving yourself the time to learn how to do that. Writing is not efficient, and it does not always respond to type-A planning. Which does not mean you shouldn’t make the plan—just that you shouldn’t ignore the voice in your head that’s saying well, that could be better, even if listening to that voice means waiting longer before trying to put the thing you’re making into the world.
PK: What books have you recently read and loved? Any recommendations?
CB: A few recent hits—and, incidentally, all books that came out recently, during this incredibly bizarre time (which is going to be hard on books, along with everything else): Amber Sparks’ brilliant story collection And I Do Not Forgive You, which my enraged heart found deeply satisfying. Mary South’s dazzling collection You Will Never Be Forgotten, which blends intellect and affect so beautifully. And Hilary Leichter’s novel Temporary, which is, in that way of genuine greatness, a true original.
Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. With her husband and two daughters, she lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches creative writing, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
Peter Kispert is an assistant editor at American Short Fiction and is the author of the story collection I Know You Know Who I Am.