Short story writer Bill Hemmig joins me today to chat about his new literary collection, Americana: Stories.
Bio:
Bill Hemmig is the author of Americana: Stories and Brethren Hollow, both published by Read Furiously. His short stories appear in Read Furiously’s Life in the Garden State anthologies, The World Takes and Stay Salty. He has had stories published in the journals The Madison Review, Philadelphia Stories, Pink Disco, BarBar, and Children, Churches and Daddies (cc&d), and he is a three-time finalist in the New Millennium Writing Awards. He is a native of Reading, PA and now lives in Bucks County, PA.
Welcome, Bill. What do you enjoy most about writing short stories/children’s books/novellas?
Since I have a full-time day job (as a college administrator), writing time is at a premium and writing short stories—and to date one novella—allows me to complete something in a manageable stretch of time and while the themes I’m exploring remain immediate concerns. Also, all my short stories are experimental in some way, and so building a short story collection allows me more space to play around with styles, tenses, points of view, and approaches to narrative than writing a novel would.
Can you give us a little insight into a few of your short stories – perhaps some of your favorites?
I’ll pick three of my favorites from the collection. In “Getting Out,” a man who grapples with obsessive compulsive disorder and whose former partner has just moved out, is going through his morning rituals preparing to leave for work, and with no one to observe him falls into compulsive behaviors that he’d been working on controlling. I deal with OCD myself and the story is exaggerated, but not as exaggerated as I’d like to think.
“Nobody Likes to Be Sick” is, I think, the most experimental story in the collection. In it, a children’s librarian comes down with an undiagnosed illness that causes visual and aural hallucinations that become a surreal mashup of his feelings about his family, his pets, his job, the pop culture of his youth, and children’s literature. I’m a librarian but not a children’s librarian, I had a similar illness once but I’m of a different generation than the character in the story, so the pop culture references are different, and I don’t have a family. I do think a psychologist would have a field day with this character, who is mostly not me, I swear.
Several years ago, I visited Venice and fell in love with it. Chatting with a friend about it afterwards, he remarked that he was there once with his wife, and they had quite opposed opinions of the city. That conversation became the basis for “The Americans with the Camera,” in which a couple visiting Venice start comparing notes on their reactions to the city until they realize they’re actually talking about their marriage.
What genre are you inspired to write in the most? Why?
I call my stories literary fiction. I don’t write in specific genres per se, but I do find that some of my stories have an undercurrent of genre even though they’re not “genre” fiction—action/adventure, true crime, horror—but always under the surface. My editor calls my work “absurdist;” I don’t quite see it, but maybe my brain works in absurd ways and, having always had the same brain, it seems perfectly normal to me.
What exciting story are you working on next?
Right now I’m working on a story about a mismatched bunch of oddballs who meet at an isolated campsite and get themselves into a series of increasingly absurd (oh, yeah!) situations.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I don’t remember. Always? I’ve written stories since I first learned to make words appear on paper. In middle school my two favorite things were the works of Shakespeare and the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows. And the two writing projects I worked on then—neither of which I finished—was a novel about seventh graders based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, and a five-act play about vampires.
How do you research markets for your work, perhaps as some advice for writers?
I started out combing through Writer’s Market and making note of all the journals that frequently get stories published in the Best Short Stories series or The Pushcart Prize. I also noted journals whose descriptions of what they’re looking for seemed to be a potential match. If you can familiarize yourself with the contents of the journals you’re considering that’s great, but realistically most of us don’t have much time for that. Eventually I moved on to the online Duotrope, which easily lets me do very specific searches for opportunities, and regularly reports on new publications and which publishers have just opened for submissions. I don’t have much luck with contests (although there’s one that’s named me a finalist three times), and those entry fees can do a number on your finances. Most importantly, if you get a rejection that invites you to submit future work, take them up on it!
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I write all my first drafts in longhand, on legal pads. I enjoy the physical act of writing, and crossing out, inserting words, drawing paths of arrows to where sentences are to be relocated, and pulling out a sheet of paper to write a paragraph that should have appeared two pages ago. After that it’s double-spaced Word docs all the way. And mostly I can decipher my terrible handwriting.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? In elementary school I wanted to be a doctor (and medical professionals do turn up in my stories with some regularity).
In middle school I thought it would be cool to be a music teacher and in high school I wanted to be a visual artist (neither profession has turned up in my stories yet). It wasn’t until college that writing became my primary focus, which in retrospect seems strange to me. I like to say that I became a writer because it’s the only thing my parents didn’t make me do.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Fun fact (unless you’re a graphic artist, in which case don’t read any further): the cover art for Americana was created by artificial intelligence (AI). My publisher fed two images into an AI app: Norman Rockwell’s painting “Freedom from Want”—the one with the happy family gathered around the Thanksgiving table—and that meme that’s been going around with a cartoon dog sitting in a burning room saying “This is fine.” I think the graphic mashup that resulted captures the spirit of the book quite well.