Signing my Checks as Mrs. Franz Kafka: An Interview with Peg Alford Pursell (fiction ’96)
An excerpt from Signing my Checks as Mrs. Franz Kafka: An Interview with Peg Alford Pursell (fiction ’96), published by Connotation Press.
Signing my Checks as Mrs. Franz Kafka: An Interview with Peg Alford Pursell
Our readers are in for a treat this month with your three excellent hybrid pieces, “Schematics,” “Laundry,” and “Exposed.” In “Schematics,” I feel we have the perfect hybrid, story and poetry intertwining effortlessly. I love so many lines in this piece, like: “He’s in the particles she breathes in this study, his epithelial cells, the thirty thousand scales of skin that had flaked off his body per minute. Dust, those bits of a self shed.” What is your process in writing short hybrid pieces like these? Are they cut down from longer stories? Or do they evolve from a single line or phrase?
Thank you so much, Jonathan. I don’t have a particular method for writing short hybrids. Often, the genesis is the sound of a phrase that comes to me from who knows where or why, a mysterious process that I love, and runs through my head and asks to be written down. Sometimes, as in the case of the example you cited, I’m captivated by information I’ve come across, and that starts the engine turning. An arresting image can form the impetus. Occasionally, I still whittle away at longer stories to carve out a story that satisfies me, but it seems that’s less a frequent process these days.
