Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum presents "Likes" with Danzy Senna

hi everyone welcome and good evening my name is nell pepper and on behalf of harvard bookstore i am delighted to introduce this virtual event with sara swanyan bynum presenting her new story collection likes in conversation with danzi senna i hope you're all well and safe thank you for joining us virtually tonight through virtual events like tonight's harvard bookstore continues to bring authors and their work to our community and our new digital community during these challenging times every week we'll be hosting events here on our zoom account and just like always our event schedule will appear on our website at harvard.com and you can sign up for our email newsletter for more updates this evening's discussion will conclude with some time for your questions if you have a question for our speakers at any time during the talk tonight click on the q a button at the bottom of the screen and we will get through as many as time allows and in the chat i will be posting a link to purchase copies of likes on harvard.com as well as a link to donate in support of this series and of our store your purchases and financial contributions make events like tonight's possible and help ensure the future of a landmark independent bookstore in harvard square so we thank you so much for showing up and tuning in in support of our authors and of the incredible staff of booksellers at harvard bookstore we sincerely appreciate your support now and always and finally as you may have experienced in virtual gatherings recently technical issues may arise if they do we'll do our best to resolve them quickly thank you for your patience and understanding and now i'm pleased to introduce our speakers sarah suanyan bynum is the recipient of a whiting writers award and an nea fellowship and is the author of the novel's miss hempel chronicles a finalist for the penn faulkner award and madeleine is sleeping a finalist for the national book award and winner of the janet heidenger kafka prize danzi senna is also a recipient of the whiting writers award and is the author of the novel's caucasia symptomatic and new people which i loved very much the memoir where did you sleep last night and the story collection you are free her first novel caucasia won the stephen crane award for best new fiction and the american library association's alex award and was a finalist for the international impac dublin literary award tonight they are discussing sarah swan yen bynum's new story collection likes the nine stories in likes blur dreams and fables with the thrum of the current moment the washington post praises likes is a short story collection you should read slowly but it's so good each story at such a high wire level that you'll wind up tearing through it and wishing for more and now i am so honored to turn things over to our speakers the digital podium is yours dansy and sarah now i am going to turn it over and i will say while i am vamping this is that danzi i actually only see you at the moment so um folks as i as i mentioned some technical issues may arise we were having some connectivity issues uh before uh if you'll bear with us sarah one moment up and spirit is connecting to audio all right i'm so sorry we just lost internet for the whole house oh my goodness so i'm actually on my phone now oh my gosh that seems perfect i'm sorry but thank you so much no i'm not your phone okay my husband's okay okay okay sorry i'm so sorry you guys oh no it's all right take your time we're all here well i can just read it from the blog that's fine i can just read it from the book because will you just give me the book and i'll just read it's just the world we're living in now this is it yeah okay hi sarah okay are we all we see we're live we can hear you and see you thank you so much i'm sorry it was such a huge i am going to turn it over to both of you but i'm i am around okay thank you now okay hi sarah and i are in la and we feel so far away but we're so um close in spirit and one of the great you know pleasures of my life as a writer has been these friendships that i've forged with people like you sarah you're one of a very small group of people who i have this kind of like creative literary friendship with where we share our work and i have just been having the best time reading this book because i saw it incubate and i saw it come into fruition from the very beginning and um and it's just amazing to read it all as one collection now it's like having heard the singles and then you get to see the album and how these things are talking to each other um so those of you haven't read it yet it's just an incredible book and um just i think that nell used the term high wire act and it's like a book that does so many things i don't know how you do them with point of view with just this incredible eye for the contemporary world that feels very timeless at the same time what you do with race motherhood marriage breaking and entering the waldorf school is just phenomenal so i want to hear you read some from this before we before we talk but i think everyone would love to hear you read some of this collection um which i've just been sort of submerged in for the last week and loving nancy thank you and and i feel so indebted to you because you were a key early reader for so many of these stories and you helped me find my way through so many of them and also asked me questions and pushed me and challenged me um as i went so i feel as if the stories grew so exponentially as as a result of having you as an early reader so it really feels like it's coming full circle um to get to talk to you about them now uh so dancing i have been in a writer's group together is it for the past five years i think it's longer now but there are several books that have come out of there and um yeah and and we also have these like one of the things i miss most in covid is sarah and i have had these like three four hour brunches or breakfast and we we would just sit and talk about our work but inevitably it would just go on and on to these other places so yes it's been a while we've been working to together and sharing our work so the story i'm gonna read um just the opening from uh is a story with characters who live in south pasadena and the choice of south pasadena as their uh hometown was completely inspired by dansy moving there and getting to discover this wonderful pocket of a community that really sort of feels like it's been frozen in time in some sense um so so it was sort of like an inside joke that i decided to place the uh narrators of this story in south pasadena the story is called julia and sunny our friends our very good friends are getting a divorce julia and sunny lovable and loving whom we've adored from the beginning when we were all in medical school the past few years have been difficult we know that we've known that for a while it's not news to us that there have been problems some counseling a furnished short-term apartment but still it is a shock julia and sunny both in our wedding and the same with us for them all those ski trips the late night card games the time we hiked the inca trail and threw up repeatedly in the high altitude there are kids now and if any of us went in for that sort of thing we'd be godparents that's the kind of close we are or were there are moments when we feel as if we don't know them anymore julia's family owns property in new hampshire right on a lake a place the four of us have been going to for so long that we can't help but think of it as ours when we were in school it was close enough that we could go up anytime we wanted but now with julia and sunny living in missouri and us in south pasadena it's no small feat to get there every summer as we have the third week of june without fail it was at the lake house two summers ago that julia began talking about letting some air into the relationship those were her words she sat on the splintering bottom step gnawing on a coffee stirrer and swatting at the black flies frowning saying that she'd been depressed over the winter and started taking lexapro lexapro we tried not to let our eyes meet julia had always been so sparkly and with all that energy loping off into the dawn her orange nylon jacket bright in the mist there was nothing she loved more than to run and swim to travel in possible distances by bicycle to sign up for half marathons on holiday weekends she always wanted us to join her but never shamed us when we didn't she never noticed when her running shoes tracked stuff all over the rug but for an athletic person she was mystical too full of superstitions and intuitive feelings during our second year exams she brought each of us a little carved soapstone animal she'd found in a global exchange gift shop behind the pizza parlor and insisted that we give them names hers named thug looked as if it could have been a taper with the help of our animals we managed to pass our exams to do well on them in fact and we celebrated by having a dance party and eating too much ethiopian food and then years and years later felt unspeakably touched to discover thug sitting on the windowsill of their guest bathroom looking fine that was julia sentimental and fond likely to invest in animate objects with meaning always sneaking off to exercise the julia we knew and it was hard to imagine that person in the grip of a dark midwestern winter writing herself a script for anti-anxiety meds she tossed her chewed coffee stirrer into the grass and said listlessly it'll bio degrade right when asked what she meant by some air she sighed i don't know i'm still figuring that out where was sunny when she told us this he must have been off somewhere with the kids it's easy to allow that to happen he's good with them naturally one of those rare people who manages to still act like himself when he's around them our son henry has formed a strong attachment to him somewhat less so to their daughter coco who is 18 months older and a little high strum they don't always play well so having sunny there to facilitate was helpful maybe necessary he kept them occupied with owl droppings and games of uno he coated them in deep-free bug spray and took them into the woods hunting for edible plants that we then choked down as a bitter salad with our dinner wherever he might have been with them that afternoon he wasn't at the house to add his thoughts on letting the air in julia was the one who started us wondering and for a long time afterward hers would be the only version we knew sarah knows that's one of my favorite stories in this whole collection and um that was just a great um reading from it one of the things i love so much about the stories in this collection and in your work in general is the kind of crazy things you do with point of view um that i haven't seen before and i feel like it's a very adventurous book in that way and this story the point of view is so interesting that it begins with this we this plural and it's so perfect for this material because it's like this couple that um is telling the story but there's an eye underneath it and this kind of um twistedness comes out like all of your stories have i think this deceptive luring you in and it feels like this very nice relatable universe that's sort of um something we can all kind of enter very easily and then the the the darkness creeps into the story and you all have to read it to i'm not going to give anything away but um can you just talk about point of view because you you you really do things with it that i haven't seen before in all of these stories and it's sort of interesting like i i'm always bringing your stories to my students to say you know look at what sarah bynum does here but i'm not sure anyone else can do that so well point of view is one of my abiding obsessions um it's it's it's something that i love tracking and paying attention to and other people's work uh and it's something i love teaching too i i can't um count the number of times that i've taught that wonderful um section of james woods book about how fiction works when he talks about close third person and the free indirect style um it's just it's just like one of the elements of fiction that is like the most endlessly interesting to me and i think one of the reasons that i'm so drawn to point of view is because i feel like it's one of the tools that um feels sort of unique to us as fiction writers um sometimes when i'm trying to like evoke a landscape i'm just thinking to myself oh gosh like you know carrie fukanawa could do this so much better than me with just like a digital camera like you know but but but point of view and and the way that point of view can shape a story i do feel like that's one of those um qualities that is unique to fiction so so i think that's one of um the reasons i just i i love thinking about it love teaching it love playing with it in my own work um and for a long time um when i when i first when i first got to graduate school uh my very first story that i turned in was a sloppy attempt at having this kind of roving omniscience um and it and the point of view drifted from one character to another and i i was um really quite scolded for that um and after that experience i buckled down and determined that i was going to commit to a point of view i was going to go deep in that point of view i was going to stay faithful to it so for a very long time um i wrote in just the close third person um and and of course it's such a it's such a wonderful point of view to practice writing in because there is so much flexibility and versatility with close third person but like for 20 years that is all i wrote in oh really yeah yeah like yeah absolutely never um diverging from that close third person past tense and i think in part it was because i felt sort of so um humbled by that first workshop experience right and so so that's what i did for years and and also that is what i tended to teach especially when i was teaching undergraduate writers who were just figuring out the form of the short story i would always sort of make the argument that the short story generally speaking really isn't large enough to accommodate more than a single point of view that's so funny that you said that because you're the one that breaks that rule and i'm always like but sarah bynum doesn't just tell it from one point of view i always tell that rule and then you're the person i give to them who's breaking it and doing it beautifully yeah one of the things i absolutely insisted on that rule for years too but then at a certain point you get tired of your own yeah you get tired you get tired of your own broken record you know right i mean one of the things that's so amazing with this story in particular is that you get it this thing i've never read anyone write about before where a cup two couples become friends oh sarah are you there yeah two couples become friends and and the sort of all the longing and transference that goes on in that kind of coupling friendship and then when one of them breaks apart how much of a threat that is to the identity of the couple that's still together and that dynamic is so interesting and like i felt so uneasy with this story in a way that i just loved like i think as readers we really want to feel anxious and uneasy and you do that so well like it feels like this we this voice keeps speaking and you're you're sort of feeling something's really cracked about it but it's not acknowledging it so it's it's really remarkable i remember reading um a newspaper article about a study that had been done that found that divorce is considered contagious uh in the sense that when divorces start happening when a divorce happens within a friend group there's like a higher likelihood that other divorces will follow um and it just made me think about like how sort of um fragile uh uh you know a marriage is fragile to begin with um which makes them so interesting to write about there's like an inherent instability there um the the very sort of institution of marriage um but then when you think about marriage within the context of a community of marriages um and how much um you know a a marriage's soundness might rely upon that sort of uh shoring up that happens when you are in community with other married couples um so i think that was part of what what prompted that story but i think it was also um like being at a a period in my life where suddenly i did feel as if many um close friends and and many um people whose weddings i had been at many people who i had known um sort of the course of their marriages like i was at a point in my life maybe about um you know five or six years ago maybe a little bit longer than that when it seemed like um you know one after the other i was i was learning you know the really hard news about those marriages ending um so so it seemed at the time almost like epidemic and of course you know it's it's just like those other stages in life where it's like you have those summers where you go to four weddings um and then the next thing you know you're just like constantly on baby soros like sending you know it's just like another one of those life stages where where um you find yourself kind of experiencing it collectively um but i was i was interested in in thinking about that experience from a plural uh point of view i of course kept thinking it was almost like a cult of marriage like that these people were the defectors of the cult because the weave became so ominous i loved that yeah yeah yeah and i and i and i think that um that that was something i really wanted to suggest that they're they're the the that these friends choice to end the marriage was something that i hope like the reader sympathizes with like that there that that even as the narrator is filled with so much bewilderment and loss i hope that the reader can see that what the friends chose to do by ending the marriage um you know is very sympathetic and understandable well what i love too is though it seems to be this character telling about this couple the whole story is really about her so it's like it's just so daft and beautifully done and it kind of um i mean one of the things we've talked a lot about in our four-hour brunches and our writing group is the relationship of autobiography and our lives to our fiction and um just that sort of alchemy that happens when you take something and you turn it into fiction and the kind of dangers of that and the the process of that and um i mean we've joked in our group that like where we better become part of the family of writers because we're not going to have any family left this was one of the jokes we made i think my mother's in the audience so hello my mother's there too good but i was just wanting to hear you talk about that like how does it how does it happen for you that movement into fiction why does it happen how do you find that place where it becomes something other yeah um i feel as if fiction is the place for me where i can think the most clearly um and i think that's why i'm always drawn to it when i'm puzzling out the the mysteries or the conundrums that are most you know when i'm feeling just really troubled or disturbed or perplexed um for instance when i had like several good friends all getting divorced around the same time um you know when when i'm sort of confronted with something in my real life that i can't make sense of fiction is the place i turn to because it somehow clears a space where i can think about it harder than i can when i'm trying to make sense of it in my own life um so it's sort of kind of this sounds like a very um sort of sterile analogy but it's sort of like like a story kind of becomes like the lab space uh where you know you can just kind of like clear off the counter and begin to uh think about these puzzles um in in in a in a different light um but so so so for me it's almost as if like with the very first sentence the the the alchemical process starts right um but then i know that it can be so disconcerting for readers especially readers who are family members or who are neighbors or who are friends who are part of my life to then recognize certain details within this fictional space um and my brother had a great way of describing it um many years ago he said it's it's like walking into a strange house and then seeing some object from your childhood home sitting there um and and just that kind of uncanny experience of like i know that that teddy bear that teddy bear like that or the wobbly right but here it is in this house that i've never stepped foot in before um so so i i i i understand how um i i i i feel grateful for um my family and friends and for for uh being willing to sit with that sense of disturbance but to sit with that those moments of of uncanny recognition while entering into the house that is fundamentally new and strange to them yeah i think other writers yeah no i love that because for me it's this same i mean we've we've talked so much about that and that sort of for me to to understand when i'm writing it that it's not me this figure i'm creating on the page so that i can free up the story to be what it needs to be um but i loved watching you know these stories like these little sparks of reality become something else in your stories um and i was just wanting to um to talk about the famous amazing story the burglar um and just how that's another story that's just so incredible that that was in the new yorker and it has four different points of view in it and it goes from this um woman who goes home to the burglar to the husband to the character in the husband's novel in the husband's tv show we're in l.a i keep forgetting but i was interested i mean one thing i haven't really seen talked about in your work but that interests me so much is the way that you write about race um i think is so interesting and delicate and unusual um like one of the things i notice in your stories is that you you sort of um sneak it in in a way that i think like a lot of readers will assume the characters white unless told otherwise and then you know like in the earl king and in several of the stories it's like this this world you're writing about like the the universal isn't white and we should make no assumptions about who this narrator is and you do it in such a beautifully sort of subtle way so i just was curious to hear you talk about that i think that's part of my own secret re-education agenda um speaking of thinking of the cult success um but you know for so long um as a as a reader and as a writer i would always make that default assumption that unless a character's race is established immediately then the voice the protagonist necessarily was white was cis was hetero uh like and you know pretty early on i'd be able to figure out if it was male or female right right um but that all you know as a as as a as a reader those were all of the assumptions that i brought to me that unless stated otherwise that was the given right um and with my second book um i i was writing about a character who's a multiracial character and i didn't identify that character's race right away um it it appears about halfway through the book um and i got a lot of pushback on that choice yeah like i definitely um heard from readers and in some cases reviewers who felt as if they'd sort of been duped somehow or that you know there'd been a bait and switch that happened um you know like we thought we were reading about a white woman only to discover um you know sneaky yeah so getting that response made me think much more uh about this question and and made me think about um what are ways that uh we as writers can um sort of de-program readers from always making that assumption um when when they embark into a narrative um because i i just shaved and i'm sure you've experienced this too i would just like sort of chafe at the expectation that i had to get this information up front um because i was like there's no organic way that's also a mixed writer's dilemma too in a funny way you know what i mean you're either like which side are you on where are you coming from and they don't assume the same things as if they can look at the author photo and tell exactly who's telling who's the author right yeah yeah yeah so i i think that i didn't want to feel uh obligated to identify my character's race right off the bat um and and so i think with these stories i just it sort of became um one of the one of the the again kind of forms of play in the story but but how can i um sort of continue to up end readers expectations about who is speaking um so for instance there's another story where there's a first-person narrator and she um is narrating from a very sort of domestic space um and and sort of seems to be a stay-at-home wife um and then maybe about a third of the way into the story we learned that she's married to a woman tv director um and that was again like just like a interest in wanting to kind of destabilize that ground um so that maybe readers don't always kind you know so maybe readers are just thinking about how to um let go of some of those defects i think it's quite radical the way you do it like i really think it's it's very um beautiful that you just up end that whole expectation in this really organic feeling way um and that story in particular that you're talking about is one of the most la stories i've ever read and i felt i was just really interested in how cause both sarah and i have grown up in new england we lived in brooklyn at a critical sort of early well 20s in our 20s and then we ended up like domesticating ourselves in l.a right and this collection has like a lot of movement between those three spaces i feel la you know i noticed the most in in here but it does move a lot and um and i was just i it's funny because i think of story collections and traditionally being bound by a location but you're kind of writing about people who have chapters in different places like the certain geography of your stories is people who move and they displace themselves and they're not from the place they're in or they're they're going to leave the place they're from um and i i it was just really fun to see that trajectory in the stories and all of those different places that are a part of you coming out in here yeah and i do have one boston story uh in the collection that i didn't even think i thought i thought uh the collection would be as you said sort of primarily los angeles focused and then there are a couple of stories that take place um in new york or that make references to new york and so that's what i thought the collection was going to be and then at the very last minute i started writing this long um much longer story uh that takes place in boston uh yeah that's the longest story in here yeah yeah and i always wondered like oh does this not fit in with the others because there isn't that kind of um geographical coherence right um but i did feel that um so many of the other concerns in that story overlapped with or spoke to the la and new york stories that i thought okay there's there's room for a boston story also like the most la thing is to be from another place oh my god like that's part of like the identity of l.a is to have grown up or lived in some other place right yes and there's such a big community of expats from massachusetts here from brookline i go to the farmers market and all i see are like patriots hats so so there there just seems to be some kind of logic to it but but i think in particular that movement from new york to l.a interests me um and i also think because it does tend to signify a movement from being a starving artist to wanting to get paid to make your work and the conflicts that can arise when when you are negotiating that transition like how do i go from being an indie documentary filmmaker in brooklyn to making kids shows for nickelodeon you know and what gets lost in that translation and what also gets gained um so so that that movement doesn't just feel to me like a sort of geographic movement across the country it also feels like this interesting movement um as in you know along that kind of spectrum of art and commerce yes no i feel that and i completely i mean it's just i love that character in that story of the sort of um she's she's desperate now for work i mean the desperation to remake herself and um her sort of gritty new york self and falling away into trying to get work and it feels really um just so deep about those different locations and how what different that idea of chapters in our lives too and the remaking of ourselves in different spaces um and i i probably should open it for questions but i just wanted to ask one more thing about just you you riding in this moment and um it's a kind of very noisy moment that we're living through with like the plot is kind of so loud in the real world and it's also gone from like realist fiction to dystopian fiction in the world and we're here trying to write our stories and our novels and i'm just interested in what that's like for you and also like writing through the kind of noise of social media and that kind of endless feedback of the world yeah yeah um well one of the stories um in the collection was a story that i wrote right in that period between the november 2016 election and trump's inauguration in january and i was trying to write a story that had nothing to do with that that had to do with with uh being a middle-aged parent and had to do with um [Music] a young girl and and her social world and you know so i was really really trying to to focus on a much more kind of domestic story and i would go to the huntington um and i would be ready to work i would sit down in my carol and i just could not stop compulsively reading the new york times and the atlantic and the new yorker and all of the various news sources trying to make sense of what it just happened in this election um i just i just i could not stop myself from reading that i couldn't stop myself from thinking about it and i kept getting angry because i was like here i am in this beautiful library where the world can be kept at bay like here i am in this sort of sanctuary where you can quiet the noise and yet you know i had internet um and like i just i could not keep myself from from consuming that and so at a certain point i realized like this story that i thought was just going to be about a family and i thought was just going to be about parenthood i had to open it up to let in the noise um and that's interesting that the noise is part of being a parent right now um and that if i am going to be trying to think about um what it means to to be middle-aged and to be raising kids like i also have to be allowing that cacophony um to be felt within the story and sometimes you know heard within the story so like you know in that particular piece like i was taking all of these um excerpts from trump's speeches and and sort of trying to play with his abuse of the english language um but but but that was four years ago like now i'm like we were texting last night like did you just see what happened even even that even four years ago seems like sort of so civilized by comparison i mean like a world that made more sense so so four years ago i was like okay i can let in the cacophony now i i there's there's there's no inside and outside anymore um and and the cacophony doesn't even come close to capturing the the degree of chaos that has overtaken us so so i i have i have you i haven't i haven't been writing fiction um i don't know i don't know how to write fiction right now um yeah but the funny thing is that i i love reading it more than ever now and it feels like actually the antidote to a lot of the sort of bad feelings i'm having reading social media or the news fiction feels like a space that's like um a kind of bomb and reading your story collection i felt like that you know just i loved being in the world of something in which complexity was allowed to exist in which um you know the the sort of life that we all live that's sort of um we can't articulate in any other way but story and leaving all of those messy pieces out there um has felt like a little kind of antidote to what what i'm experiencing so reading has been really um helpful reading fiction in particular yeah yeah i mean i've been reading um rereading the prime of miss jean brodie um because i've been doing this really um fun online book club with a public space uh and it's true it has felt like this this antidote to be able to disappear into muriel sparks i mean there's just like such wonderful acerbic wit and sense um in in her storytelling and in her sentence building that it had it has it has been a great solace yeah and our attention spans are at such you know are being attacked so much in this time that reading long form like this and immersing ourselves in these details and stuff feels good too yeah and then of course the irony is is that as part of the book club i'm supposed to create like twitter posts about the book and i've never used twitter before so i've never worked within the constraints of the 280 characters um so that's become this this fun constraint to work with it's like okay how do i express my thought with abbreviations and hashtags yet within 280 characters and it's almost kind of felt like you know writing haiku or something like that with very these very uh rigid limits you have that's true yeah well we might as well be interested in it because it's not going anywhere like we sort of have to deal with the world we've been handed right um i want to make sure people have time for a question and answer so um nell did you want to join us sure yeah i'll hop back in uh thank you so much this is this conversation's just been such a joy sarah thank you for your tenacity through technical issues different kind of cacophony but yeah thank you this has just been so fabulous to listen to so actually the first question to come in was from fanny howe so i'll just start um so hi um uh she asks who are some of the writers whose work with pov has inspired you most oh fanny that's such a good question and and actually can i take a moment to say and dancing i meant to tell you this um fanny did you know that in karen russell's novella that just was released this past week which is called sleep donation um that there is like a beautiful passage where the narrator talks about her favorite poem being a fanny howe poem and then they quote the poem um and it's the the line is about um is it about symptoms of a dream it's it's but it's a i'm sorry i'm i'm not doing justice to the um to the line but i was so excited to see your work appear in karen russell's wonderful novella um so so um fanny thank you for the question and and i think the writer recently that has um been the the sort of greatest source of agitation and excitement for me in terms of point of view is mavis gallant um and in particular uh her story um which which i i think is probably one of her her most beloved stories um the ice wagon coming down the street the way that point of view is handled there um was something that that that just knocked the wind out of me um and the final story in my collection was sort of my attempt to like go into the lab and try to figure out how mavis gallant was handling point of view and also handling time in that story um so so she's she's she's been really important to me all i mean the muslim wife is another story that that um i keep going back and rereading i mean her her work has been um yeah really you know really really um stirring uh uh for me um but also reading muriel spark right now and seeing the way she uses omniscience uh is is just radical um that that she uses it to jump backwards and forwards in time so suddenly um and and to in fact kind of give away major plot points very early in the novel um and then she sort of like will step back and offer a kind of wonderful sociological portrait of spinsters and scotland in the 1930s and then she'll zoom in and get very intimate with a 10 year old a 10 year old girls in her fantasy life and so just seeing how muriel spark within this very very short novel i i like things that are short um but how her incredibly agile use of omniscience makes this very short novel feel so much more expansive than it's 150 pages would suggest thank you fanny thank you um i'm going to combine a couple of questions here so uh we have a couple of questions about um advice to writers who are starting out in short fiction um and like new to short stories and also kind of in a publishing space that tends to favor novels and longer form works you know that's always been like such a truism within the publishing world that no one wants to publish stories um but you know my senses is that you write what you you write in the form that you most like to read and if you are someone who truly loves to read short stories and that's a form that you gravitate to when you go over to your bookshelf when you're at the bookstore like if you're heading towards alice monroe like if that's the thing that's making your pulse quicken like listen to that that's like the form that you should be writing in um and not worrying about the marketplace i mean i know that sounds um very cavalier to say that but i i feel as if writing is is is such an uncertain and precarious uh path to be heading out on to begin with that to do so with sort of practical concerns about the marketplace uh is is um almost sort of quixotic because it's it's it's it's it's already such a a sort of um wonderful leap of faith to be pursuing this and my sense is just pursue it in the form that you love most and not to allow uh these kinds of conventional wisdoms about about um publishing trends to determine how you proceed what do you what do you think dancy am i just being totally well no i i totally agree you have to spend that many hours with these pieces of work then you better be excited by it on a personal level because and i i feel like stories are kind of a great form for this moment like short novels and short stories i feel like that's that's what people can handle i don't know so i'd say write more short stories they're such a pleasure like yeah and we have uh one anonymous question coming in how did you choose this title i chose the title in part because one of the stories has this title um the story that i was mentioning before about uh that that i started writing right after trump selection um and and initially that story was titled likes because the daughter who's who's 11 almost 12 uh spends a lot of time on her instagram and her instagram feed becomes a window into her character and into her interiority um so the the format of instagram and the idea of um seeking a sense of self through social media um was was what prompted that story being called likes um but i kind of hope that that this story i'm sorry that the title for the book as a whole maybe can expand to be a little bit broader than just about likes in a social media context but to be more uh generally about um likes in the old-fashioned sense of of of preferences and affections and favorites um so so i i i hope that it sort of has both connotations that there's both this very um kind of contemporary uh social media specific meaning but also a more timeless sense of you know what what what are the things that that make us happy and i think we'll do one more question um how do you find your way to the heart of each story do you have the different points of view in mind when you sit down to write or do you simply start drafting with an image or a voice you want to explore um i'd actually love to if both of you don't mind responding to this i'd love to hear what you both have to say about it but nancy do you want to start with that one um i i just you know i don't even know how i start i have amnesia about everything i've ever finished which is why it's so scary to start again i don't remember who wrote the books and where it happened um but i think i just start with um a character and some situation in short stories which i don't write as often as sarah but i i find them so difficult and amazing to write when i do um i like to go to a place where i have kind of like a stable reality that gets destabilized in some way and watch the character respond to that and um i've been teaching a class right now sarah um where the whole idea that we're trying to explore is about logic and story and we're using we started with an amy hempel essay um and and she talks about how like stories are logical and what you decide to do next and the story has to do with what happened before and i was just kind of interested in that idea and whether that's true and so we've just been exploring that but yeah go i want to hear what you say i i rarely have a plan of action when i start out um so so often choices about point of view end up evolving as i'm going i mean an exception was for instance the the mavis gallant inspired story where i went in you know with like kind of a specific mission um but in the julia and sunny story that i started reading with um i really thought that that story would remain consistently in that first person plural voice for the entirety of the story i sort of thought like okay this this is this is the the mode um that the point of view is going to remain in and it was only as i kept writing further and further into the story that i began to hear what you were talking about dancing that even within this united front like even within this couple who are so on the same page and who are so simpatico that even within this unit that there was an individual eye that was sort of murmuring underneath it um and i think part of the discovery for me in the story was realizing that that individual i within the couple within the plural narrative voice one needed somehow to surface um but i didn't realize that the point of view was going to shift in that way i i really thought it was going to remain more consistent so so um so so generally speaking i don't um know ahead of time what the the um road map is going to be um or with like the burglar uh the story that has four points of view um one one of those points of view um sort of the most um i guess uh supernatural of those um that was something that came as a surprise i didn't realize that that fourth voice was going to join the story until it did thank you thank you both so much uh sarah and danzi thank you for this conversation uh and uh sarah again thank you so much for just rolling with all of these technical questions we were able to hear you and see you and listen to this beautiful conversation this was such a joy and thanks to all of you out there for spending your evening with us uh pleased to learn more about the book and purchase copies of likes at harvard.com i have posted the link in the chat and on behalf of harvard bookstore in cambridge mass have a good night keep reading stay safe uh be well and and thanks to you both so much thank you sarah dancy thank you thank you take care