Coloring in the Lines: Caitlin Horrocks on mythology, space, and haphazard storytelling

Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This Is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selections. Her novel The Vexations was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2019 by the Wall Street Journal. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story, as well as other journals and anthologies. Her awards include the Plimpton Prize and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony. She formerly served as fiction editor of the Kenyon Review. She teaches at Grand Valley State University and occasionally in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the writer W. Todd Kaneko and their three noisy kids.

On Friday, November 12, 2021, Caitlin Horrocks joined The Interlochen Review editors Kaydance Rice, Sam Haviland, and creative writing major Annalise Harter for a virtual conversation about her novel The Vexations and her short story collection Life Among the Terranauts. 

Kaydance Rice: Throughout several of your stories there’s a lot of emphasis on setting and the communities in which the characters live. How do you approach this relationship between setting and character? 

Caitlin Horrocks: It’s a great question, but it’s a big question. When writing some of my earlier stories I realized, belatedly, I was writing a lot about characters in isolation, and I had at least a handful of stories that could’ve taken place anywhere. I would realize late in the revision process that I needed it to be somewhere, so I would throw in some place names so it would have at least some kind of setting. And I don’t think that’s always a bad thing, sometimes that’s a perfectly valid choice for a story. But it was something just for me that I wanted to become more mindful of and work with in a more deliberate way in my fiction. 

Thinking about that relationship between characters and place, I think in the stories in this book in particular I was drawn to these more unusual places. Growing up in a suburb shapes a person and all of us are always shaped by our situation and our setting and where we are from and where we find ourselves and where we maybe end up by choice or maybe not by choice. In these stories, I found myself drawn to settings that felt more unusual to me and were placing particular stress on the character. Maybe the character had not realized that their place was putting a particular stress on them. It was home or it was a space that had seemed natural to them, and the story is looking at a moment where they realize that the place is trapping them in some way or exerting some pressure on them that the characters need to deal with. I think that happens in “Norwegian for Troll,” in “The Sleep,” in “Chance Me” with Arcosanti, and in the title story in a very literal way the place has trapped them.

Thinking kind of deliberately about people in settings, I was interested in some weird settings. Like alright; I want to do a biodome story; let’s do some kind of weird experimental architectural colony story; let’s do the Peruvian jungle lodge story. I’m interested in this place and interested in seeing it play out in the lives of a character or characters. I work in a very circuitous way. Maybe I can put the settings into three piles. Stories where the setting isn’t as important, stories where I thought of the setting as unusual in some way and wanted to just play within the story, and then stories where it’s not an obviously unusual setting but it’s about a moment where the character realizes the setting is putting a pressure on them that they weren’t previously aware of. 

Sam Haviland: There are lots of references to religion and mythology in your stories—​​Igor as Adam in “Life Among the Terranauts,” the Nisse in “Norwegian for Troll,” and I personally really loved the ending of “Murder Games” with all those references to Greek mythology and weaving. In almost every story there’s something. Do you think these connections to mythology and religion affect reader interpretations and/or emotional resonance? 

CH: On some level that one would have to be a question for the reader.

SH: Well, I’m wondering because, in the writing world, a lot of us love to incorporate mythology and religion into our work all the time, and maybe it’s not about the reader, but more about your experience with incorporating mythology into your work and reading it in other works and what effect do you think it would potentially have on the reader, or what does it have on you while reading or writing. 

CH: I think a lot about that division of responsibility between writer and reader. What is the line between the things I am consciously doing and putting in and whatever the reader is going to make of it? So your first way of phrasing that question wasn’t wrong. 

I think a lot of the references to faith, to religion, mythology, and just belief systems of all kinds, are coming out of my personal experience. One of the things that motivates me as the writer is an exploration of things that I don’t automatically understand, that aren’t part of my lived experience or aren’t second nature to me. I’m deeply agnostic, I don’t have any answers. My day-to-day experience of the world is something that is random and haphazard and is not governed by any system that I feel a deep belief in or recognition of personally. As a kid, I wanted one badly, but at this moment in my life, I don’t feel that. I think in my stories I am interested in characters that do feel the presence of a pattern or a higher power or are thinking about it. I’m interested in characters that don’t just have a traditional Christian worldview but who see other patterns of divine order or reason for how things happen, a circularity and rhythm to life. Faith can shape decisions in interesting ways. Because it’s not a part of my life I’m interested in seeing it work its way through stories in different ways. 

Maybe I had that initial reaction of “I don’t know for the reader” because I do think issues of faith and divinity and myth are so personal, moreso in other ways that we engage with a character or a story. Those references feel like ones that I can put in there but I am ultimately going to have very little control over the way a reader takes it. Whether it gels with their own experiences or with their other reading or other aspects of their life. 

Annalise Harter: I observed that several of your stories such as “Zolaria” and “Life Among the Terranauts” use the plural “we.” Do you find your approach to characterization changes when you use “we?” If so, how? 

CH: Is the approach to characterization different? In a way no, which surprises me to hear myself say it, but I think so much of how I personally work with character is starting with very little, with some kind of image or moment or conceit, and then just writing my way into that character or that experience. And the process of brainstorming and drafting and figuring out who the person is and what the story is going to be are all kind of the same process to me. In that sense whether I start with an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ that process looks the same for any given story. 

Once I’ve written my way into the story more it’s different. The ‘I’ is a single person. But with the ‘we’ I have to start immediately trying to manage how cohesive or not it’s going to be. I start looking for how I’m going to pull off the trick. Can you have a whole town speaking with one voice about a range of experiences over the course of many pages? No, not really. Once I’ve written my way partway into the story it’s the process of managing the suspension of disbelief with the ‘we.’ Finding moments where the ‘we’ fractures or comes together. What are the insider/outsider dynamics of the ‘we’? There’s a set of questions that I’m asking myself that I’m not usually asking with an ‘I’ narrator.

SH: During your visit to Interlochen, you told us that you were determined to write stories of varying lengths for Life Among the Terranauts. And earlier today in the interview you mentioned noticing things about your stories, realizing you needed to ground them more in the setting. And I’m wondering how you approach challenging yourself with self-imposed goals and limitations, like deciding to have settings that inflict conflict upon the characters. You just seemed very disciplined in that respect and I’m interested in that.

CH: Sure, maybe it’s the writing teacher part of my brain that I turn back on myself a lot. I don’t do a lot of sports but I’m very much a believer in “spot” training. You find the thing you need to work on and then you try to deliberately build that muscle group. And for me, I think it doesn’t require as much discipline as it might sound. Going back to the difference between short stories and a novel project, in short stories there’s so much room to try new things and walk away if it doesn’t work. There’s not as much emotional investment. It’s a form that lends itself to trying new things. 

For me, it’s more pleasurable than not. It doesn’t require a ton of discipline. I don’t have to drag myself to the page and do this thing I’m terrible at over and over again until I can do it. If it felt like that I wouldn’t do it—it’s more like hey, I haven’t done this and there’s no reason I couldn’t.  Thinking of this process specifically with flash fiction. I still don’t write that much of it, I used to not write any, but I would watch tons of my writing friends write and publish a lot. I was jealous partly because they were getting lots of publications out of their flash and then they also seemed to just be having a ton of fun with it. I wanted in on it. So I have now written and published a handful of flash fiction, but I have also since slowly come to the realization that I just don’t have many flash-sized ideas. Or when they’re small enough they feel too insubstantial to me, or when I think they’re small enough they end up being bigger. Even the stuff that’s short for me tends not to be true flash length. It will often creep up to 1500 words, 2000 words, 2200 words. 

I will also come up against the limits or temporary limits of what I know how to do or what I enjoy, so flash fiction is no longer a thing I’m trying to force myself to do more of. If it was really really hard to make myself do it I would like to think that I would keep assigning myself things in these dutiful ways, but I don’t think I would. 

SH: Are there any differences between the way you write or revise speculative and realistic fiction? What are these differences and what do you think causes them?

CH: I’m not coming up with any differences, which feels potentially like a missed opportunity. When we think about speculative fiction, one of the differences from realistic fiction is that anything can happen. We aren’t constrained in the same ways by the world of the story or the relationship that the people have with the world around them. If we can bend all those rules, surely that bendiness should echo through the revision process in different ways. But I can’t personally think of a situation where that’s been true. I think of my writing and revision process as following a kind of similar pattern for the realist and the speculative stories. So either I’m just not seeing these moments that could’ve opened up the story differently, or potentially I try to stay pretty open for a long time for both types of stories about where that world might go for those characters or what the rules of the world are. And then by the time I have that initial draft that I’m ready to go back and revise, it feels like that framework is kind of equally present. I’m at at that point that I’m going to rewrite the rules of that speculative piece or that realist piece. I can’t think of major differences. 

AH: How does the process of world-building differ for one of your short stories versus the historical backdrop of La Belle Époque Paris in the Vexations?

CH: For me, the difference between a short story and a novel gets very obscured by the fact that the novel was historical fiction. That I was so aware of trying to get down on the page so much of the research that I was doing, trying to kind of digest the research in a way that suited a fictional narrative so that it didn’t feel like I was just regurgitating a bunch of facts at people. I was spending so much time trying to make aspects of the world line up with issues of timeline. 

Take a question like “okay, the family’s sitting down to dinner. What are they eating? Who cooked the food? Is it the lady of the house? It’s probably not the man. Is it the wife, the mother, the maid? Is it carryout? What are they wearing? What are the fabrics?” Thirty years before the time span of the book they would have had one answer and then thirty years after the time span of the book would have another answer. And then in the time span of the book, because it was a time of such social and economic upheaval, all of those ordinary questions would depend on “well where exactly in the period are we,” and “how much money does the family have,” and “where do they live,” and, “how fashion-forward are they,” “how do they see their own class or their own level of technological savvy,” and it was maddening for a while, but then I tried to lean into it as another way of delineating character, another way of exploring the complexities of the relationships the characters had with each other. 

The novel was the only place I could have done that. I think short stories can be incredibly complicated and densely packed; I think short stories can do a lot. But the novel became the sort of larger canvas where I was working out a lot of that—the world and just putting so much of the research I had done into that world. So when I think about world-building in the book, I think about the years of research that were being wrangled to come up with it. When I think of short stories there’s definitely research. There’s definitely research in the “Chance Me,” the Arcosanti story. There’s research for “Paradise Lodge,”  there’s things where I’m looking at maps and reading about real world places. 

I think of a quote from Michael Chabon I heard, he was saying “you need just enough facts to make the lives sound true.” And I didn’t necessarily take that advice from a historical fiction standpoint — I think it’s great advice — but I think I do take that very much to heart with short stories in particular. So world-building in a short story you need just enough details to make the world feel true. That sort of sense of just enough. What’s the beat here that’s going to stand in for the longer description we might get if this was a novel? What’s the single thing that’s going to allow us to just get on with it and do the rest of the story? So I think world-building for me in a story is very compressed. It’s sort of about the selection of very particular details. And for the novel, just more capacious, more long-winded. There was room to just figure things out. Include more, more of everything. 

AH: Also in The Vexations, what are the considerations that go into giving voice to characters based on real people? Are there ethics you consider? 

CH: For me, definitely. I think there’s a range of ways you can do it and I don’t think the ways other writers have done it are wrong. I read a huge range of historical fiction while I was working on The Vexations and certainly read books that were very very loosely based on a historical person and did not feel any kind of obligation to that historical person. These books very strongly identified themselves as their own thing about its own fictional version of whoever it was. I’ve read books about people who are still living. I read this book titled Sway by Zachary Lazar that’s basically about the early days of the Rolling Stones, which sounds weird and fanfic-y. But it’s really not that way at all and if I were him I’d be worried about getting sued on a basic level. Then also, how to navigate these real people who are very much alive and have an outsized public presence already. 

I definitely felt a certain kind of obligation or loyalty to the facts as I could find them or as I knew them about these people. I made a set of rules for myself. I didn’t want to contradict anything that I understood to be true or that was true as far as I could tell. I kind of wanted to set the goalposts for myself; I would color inside the lines of what was known about these people. If we know that these people sort of knew each other, I would feel free to invent their conversations, to imagine them in a room together to think about how that friendship or frenemy-ship would be together. But if I knew that they were not in the same spaces, if I knew that their paths never crossed, or they did and had nothing to say to each other, I did not write those scenes where I think another writer could have. I didn’t feel free to do that. There's plenty of fiction in the book but it kind of starts where the nonfiction stops. 

AH: When writing The Vexations, how did you go about pacing a novel about Erik Satie’s life? What did you consider to leave and what to include?

CH: Also a big challenge for that book. When I was very first starting to think about that book it was very biopic in my head. It was sort of like a Great Man, Cradle to Grave, I need to please the superfans out there. So I was sort of thinking about it like a discography. We’ll need to see all the greatest hits. We’ll need to see this piece of music that represents this period and then this piece of music that represents this period and so on. And I was really sort of parceling it out based on the music. It became very clear that was not going to work. 

He was just really a difficult guy and I struggled with how long the reader is going to want to spend with him as he navigates a kind of similar set of concerns. He goes his whole life in endless artistic experimentation which I have deep admiration and love for. He also spent his entire life feeling he should have been better known than he was and making a lot of bad decisions that put him all the farther away from the success that he wanted. A lifelong pattern of ruinous financial decisions, isolating himself and pushing people away. And it felt like if the book was just that then I didn’t know to make that work. Maybe somebody else could have but I didn’t know how to make that version of the book work. Writing him like this, then this, then this, was not working. 

So I ended up writing my way into characters who were around him — who were having the same questions about him that I was having. That’s when the book kind of exploded into having multiple main characters. It’s when his sister became a very big part of the book. From there, the question of what to put in and what to leave out was sort of managing her alongside the other main characters. Because she ended up having her own very eventful life. There were pieces of the book I let her walk away with but then had to make sure they were being balanced by what I was giving other characters to do. Questions like Conrad, Erik Satie’s brother who did a lot of work keeping Erik alive and solvent. So he’s a really important emotional part of the family but he didn’t have that much to do. He got up in the mornings, he went to work, he made money, he gave money to his brother, he had a wife who was very dear to him, they did not have children. Sort of managing who needs to be in the book in an emotional way but doesn’t have as much plot ground to cover was another set of challenges with the book. 

KR: How did you approach temporality in The Vexations and the continuous crossing between timelines throughout each of the perspectives? 

CH: I don’t even know if I should admit to this part. I was kind of drafting, drafting, drafting, I looked at this big stack of pages I had, I looked at the number of years I covered so far and I was like “alright unless this book is gonna be 1200 pages long I need to pick up the pace a little bit.” In a more perfect world, I would’ve gone back and put everything into a more elegant balance. 

His bohemian youth takes up more space than huge slots of his later life. And I can justify that, in the arc of his life, but it also came about because I was just saying what I had to say and spending a long time over certain settings and moments and character interaction. And I was like, we have a life to cover, can I be more ruthless to see where those handoffs are between characters, managing temporality, where are certain sections sort of starting and stopping?

Something I thought about—and in the end didn’t end up being super troubled about—was how neat the rotation would be between characters. There were outlines I made that had a very clean rotation between characters, a more equal relationship of years, trying to keep it clean and consistent. All those outlines ended up not being workable; the story itself just immediately started pulling that apart. I would realize I wanted to spend more time with this character here. Or I really liked the idea of following the end of one section, I wanted to switch point of view and then start immediately afterwards. And with another section I wanted it to jump years in the future. 

So back to your question about temporality overall, partially giving up the sense that time was going to be a neat schematic, that time was going to break down in particular ways and being okay with the idea that we were going to leave characters behind for long periods of time and pick them back up again much later. For a while there was just one long Suzanne section in the book which was true to Erik’s experience of her life. That was the way I had been justifying it. That was one place where my editor was like “you can’t be asking the reader to invest thirty pages in this one person and then we never see them again.” And then he was like, “you can, but your reader’s gonna be mad about it, do you want them mad about it?” And I said no, and I was perfectly happy for the excuse or the opportunity to go back to Suzanne. And I know your question was about time but I think the time ended up depending on the way that the character got managed or presented or what were the really key moments that I wanted to show these people at different moments in their lives. 

KR: How did you approach describing music throughout The Vexations?

CH: With trepidation. At the same time that I was asking everyone I knew for historical fiction recommendations, I would ask just pretty much everyone I knew for recommendations of books that wrote about music.

For me, the most useful thing to do was just to keep reminding myself of which character was doing the describing, that it wasn’t about how I, the author, necessarily would describe a piece of music or describe sound, that it should be about the way that that character would hear it. So I have several characters in the book who are not particularly sophisticated listeners of music. They’re listening to it in a very casual way which made me feel more at ease with how they might do it. So I just maybe needed a little bit of description or what is strange to them about the sound or what do they like or not like or how does it compare to them for other things that they have heard. 

For the characters who did have maybe a more sophisticated understanding of music, for any of the composers, could I talk about the music in terms of its intention? Did I know what the person was trying to do? And I could talk about that. And then maybe how they felt it had or had not delivered on that intention. And always trying to not write just abstract descriptions of sound but to think about how is that piece striking the ear of that person at that time and write it that way.

AH: I have a more practical question. How did the publication process look like for each of your books and between these books, how did the publication process shift?

CH: Sure. So, my first book emerged out of my MFA thesis. It’s not exactly the same but a lot of the stories are the same. After I finished my MFA, I took a version of the thesis and started sending it out to contests. I didn’t have a novel. I didn’t have any part of a novel at the time so I didn’t think I would get anywhere looking for an agent. I just sort of started sending out to contests. I won one with a university press and was like “yay!” the book’s coming out. And then over the course of many months, the whole situation unraveled. The press was almost shut down in budget cuts and then, “Oh no we’re saved! Oh, no we’re not. Oh we’re saved! No we’re not.” And then the last of it was like, “Okay, we’re going to be shut down right after we do your book. Your book and one other are going to be literally the last books we ever publish. All our staff’s already been fired, except for one person.” And there would’ve been no marketing, no promotion. There would’ve been a stack of books in my basement. I didn’t even know what they were going to do with the books. 

And I was asking for advice. Everybody, saying, “You know, it’s a book. You know, I would be able to put in my bio, I had this story collection published.” And I would have copies of the book. But, probably no one is going to hear about this book. I’ll give copies to my family and that’s who will hear about this book. Do I trade that for the unknown of is it going to find another publisher or what happens to it otherwise? And I got conflicting advice. There were people on both sides. I ended up choosing to pull the book. 

Then by that time I had an agent. The agent was like, “Well, let’s give it a shot.” She sent it around to some bigger houses, New York trade houses. We got much closer than I thought we were going to. I thought we would just hear, “Oh, it’s like this little short story collection by this person no one has heard of. No, of course.” And instead we got a lot of rejections that were like, “Oh, we really love this but we don’t think it will earn enough money. Let us know when she has a novel.” The first rejection like that I was so flattered by. It was as nice as an acceptance, or not that nice, but I was very flattered. By a half a dozen of those, I was sort of like,  “If you love it so much, why don’t you publish it?” But the big presses were not biting for financial reasons. 

And then I had a colleague who knew someone who knew someone. I was getting ready to start querying smaller presses and doing the contest route again. And then somebody said Sarabande runs a yearly contest for story collections and I was going to enter that. And then a colleague was like, “Well, I know someone. Do you want me to explain the situation and just ask if they want to take a look at it now, like outside of the reading period.” I said, “sure.” Then, the editor there took it. 

And I mean, I was thrilled. I had very modest expectations. It’s a small non-profit kind of literary press. I didn’t expect them to be able to do huge things for it. But it was like a total fairytale, the number of things that kind of did happen for it. It got attention that small press story collections don’t usually get. So it was a total lark. It went from not being published anywhere, to then exceeding my expectations for it. So, it was lovely and fun and low pressure, and how ever it did was just going to be a bonus. 

And then, the other two books. I had another collection mostly done. I had been chipping away at this novel for a while. My agent was leaving the business and wanted to hand me off to one of her colleagues. And the colleague said, “Well, before we decide this is a good fit, could you show me what you’ve been working on? I hear you’ve been working on a novel for a very long time. Could you show me what this is?” And I sent him the collection and the novel, like the first hundred pages. And I thought, best case scenario, he’d say, “Yeah, alright. Keep going. I think, sure, I’ll sign you.” Worst case scenario, he would say, “I don’t think this book is working at all.” Or, you know, “I don’t think it’s going to work for me. So, you need to go out and find a new agent.” And instead, he said, “Oh, if you want, I think I could sell both of these right now.” I was like, “Okay. Sure.”

There was way more interest than I thought there would be for a story collection and a partial novel. He was setting up conversations with editors that I thought would be a little bit more adversarial. You know, I thought the conversation would be like: “Okay, author. Please assure me that you know how to end this in a satisfying way.” And they weren’t. There was this just sort of beautiful trust. They were already kind of in chase mode of like, “I think I want to acquire this so I’m just going to talk you up rather than trying to pin me down on other parts of the book.” And I just wish for every writer to have conversations like that where they are just kind of in courtship mode, saying nice things about your work. It was lovely. It was especially lovely at that point where I had been beating my head against the wall of this novel for a long time. And then we had multiple bids, which stunned me, and we sold it to Little Brown. 

I assumed they would publish the story collection next. I became aware that that was maybe not going to happen when I got an email asking, “Can you think of an author who instead of going story collection, novel, story collection, has gone stories, stories, novel, and then sold really well?” And I was like, “Oh, if you are asking me, it’s because you can’t think of anyone, isn’t it?” And indeed they were like, “Okay, rather than going stories — stories — novel, we want to go stories — novel — stories. So we’ll just wait for you to write the novel.” Which took me a long time. It took me a couple more years to finish the novel. By the time it came out, I was kind of a basket case, because I had just been working on it for a really long time, working on it mostly in isolation. I wasn’t working with a regular writing group, or turning it in to workshops or anything. It was just me with this kind of huge project.

My editor is a brilliant editor but the process was kind of chaotic. And there was money on the line. They paid me real money for this one and I knew that they wanted to make it back and I didn’t know if they would because I turned in this kind of long book about a weird French composer. 

By the time we got to the stories, I had already lost them money and the sky had not fallen. So, even if I didn’t sell another book after this one to a big house, I would enjoy this one. And felt that I could – it felt less scary. Some things that could go wrong had already gone wrong. So with Terranauts, I could go back to the lessened expectations and the more familiarity I had with the house, with some of the people I was working with, and just relax a little bit more and have a little bit more fun.