Amina Gautier on Building a Story Collection
In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast
First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Amina Gautier about her new story collection, The Best That You Can Do.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: So, when you set out to write short stories, were you thinking that you were working toward a collection, and did you already have them mapped out in terms of how you wanted to structure this? Or do you write a few and the structure comes later? Or maybe it’s something else entirely?
Amina Gautier: No way. I had no idea. I didn’t map anything out. I am the most disorganized, unorganized person on the planet. I always figure out the structure and the thematic unity later once, all the stories are complete and I look at them and see if they speak to each other and how they speak to each other, then I find stories that are not speaking to each other, and I have to excise those. So, more than half of these stories were written from 2016 forward, but quite a few of them were written over 20 years ago. Part of the reason that they’re so short, like all of the stories in this collection, are under 2500 words, is that I wrote them between the longer stories that I was writing. So, I can never write the same thing. I can’t write in the same point of view or in the same theme more than once. So, after I write a first-person story or a long story, I have to change point of view for the next story and change length. So, in between all the traditional length stories that I was writing from 3,000 to 8000 words, I would write two or three little ones just to kind of cleanse my palette. I kind of think of these stories like parsley.
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Amina Gautier is the author of four short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, The Loss of All Lost Things, and The Best that We Can Do. Gautier is the recipient of the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the International Latino Book Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award, and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction.
