Go Forth (Vol. 46): an Interview with Aimee Parkinson

Go Forth is a series that offers a look into the publishing industry and contemporary small-press literature. 

Aimee Parkison’s most recent book, Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, won the prestigious Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, and is currently available from FC2. Her other books include Woman with the Dark Horses, The Innocent Party, and The Petals of Your Eyes. Her fiction has appeared in such journals as North American Review, Fiction International, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, among many other journals. Stephen Graham Jones, who selected Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman for the Catherine Doctorow Prize, wrote: “Underneath, there’s a real emotional core, a dynamo surging way down deep…” I spoke with Aimee via email.

—Brandon Hobson

BRANDON HOBSON: Many of the stories in Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman are very short, some only a couple of pages long. Do you favor writing shorter pieces than longer stories? And do you find yourself doing more line editing as you go when you write shorter pieces?

AIMEE PARKINSON: I do a lot of line editing, especially on shorter pieces. Heightened sensitivity to language and tone is necessary for creating flash fiction, almost like the sensitivity I imagine Roderick Usher and other Poe characters having: “His heart is a lute strung tight; as soon as one touches, it resounds.”

BH: The first story in your collection, “Code Violations,” is not only concerned with urgency in a small space, but it’s also in a way an introduction to these stories all dealing with the idea of urgency and violation in some particular way it seems. In the writing process, do you find yourself focusing on maintaining this urgency, and if so, how?

AP: Without urgency, art is in trouble. I attempt to create urgency through diction, tone, situational irony, conflict, and surprise—an unusual or arresting detail—but the best way to maintain urgency is by raising questions in the reader’s mind and keeping those questions unanswered until logic will no longer allow.

BH: Do you often stress urgency to your students in your writing classes? Do they tend to struggle with it?

AP: I almost always find myself stressing urgency, as so many workshop stories struggle with it. A quick, easy way to stress urgency with student writers is to encourage them to start close to the conflict, in the middle of the action, and to “raise the stakes.” Of course, that’s workshop speak, but almost everyone tends to get it when thinking about revising fiction. An indirect and often more complicated way to stress urgency is to ask a very simple direct question that is often extremely hard...