Winnipeg author Lauren Carter talks to AW’s Lucy Black about her new collection of stories.

LB: Congratulations on the publication of your short story collection.  Your use of language is quite lovely.  Expressions such as “tucked into a pleat in time” and “watching the crescent moon pierce the sky” elevate the writing to such a fine standard.  Please try to explain to us how such wordsmithing takes place for you – is it the work of a moment or the result of editing and polishing? 

LC: It varies. Sometimes I’m absorbed in the moment of the story and the perfect language will arise. At other times, I write into what I call ‘gaps’ in stories (places where more embroidery, characterization, detail is needed, and the imagery will arise). I’m a poet as well as a fiction writer so the pursuit of unique, crystalline imagery is always part of my writing process but usually this imagery arises best when I’m not trying too hard, when I get out of my own way and just let my body and my mind do the thing.

LB: The stories in your collection deal with some very difficult topics, including such things as infertility, death of a child, infidelity, and death of a spouse.  Please share with us how the subjects of your stories come to you and how you decide which stories to tell.    

LC: I’ve dealt with many difficult traumas through my life, some of which I represent in my fiction, changing details to create “the lie that tells the truth,” as Camus said. Some traumas I have not experienced and for those I use my empathic nature to explore what that might be like (ie. becoming a widow). In terms of story subjects, I don’t intentionally decide what stories to tell—rather, they arise in me and I start to write. This might be through a moment of inspiration (the spark that started Tenderloin was, simply, a cab driver in San Francisco reacting to the address I wanted to go to by telling me with warning in his voice that it was in the Tenderloin,  a tiny scene that I’ve included in the story). Sometimes the first lines start to spin in my head and I grab them and go and see where they lead me or, at other times, a character steps into my thought process (such as Julian who appeared to me one day when I was substitute teaching). 

LB: Your stories contain a broad array of characters – all very different from one another.  Please share with us how you develop your characters and what helps you to shape them.

LC: The fundamental thing that helps me to shape characters is empathy. I step into their shoes. I enter a creative trance and allow the story to come through. I try to become them. I think this is why I am so much more comfortable writing first person than third. Having said that, sometimes I of course need to do more work on character motivation or details of their biography or physical aspects of who they are. In that case, I’ll do writing exercises to get to know them better or interviews with them or just scribble details of their lives to better learn their biography. But this more conscious, analytical work on “who they are” always comes after the first draft for me. The first draft is when I try to connect with the emotional truth by approaching it through feeling, empathy, instinct, the gut, the amygdala, rather than through the frontal lobe where rational, logical thought exists. Perhaps this is easy for me to do because, as someone with PTSD, I spend a lot of time attempting to manage the more primitive, impulse-based parts of my nervous system.

LB: Tell us about your decision to write this book. What inspired and/or motivated your interest in the subject matter?

LC: Places Like These is a collection of short stories that I’ve written over the past 20+ years. The oldest one is Home Wrecker (written in the early 2000s) and the newest is Grass Fire (written in the summer of 2020). They were written separately, without the clear intention to compile them into a collection, and most have been published in literary journals, so it wasn’t until I pulled them together that I began to see common links: the attention to trauma and psychological conditions and how all of my characters seem, in some way, to be trapped while also wanting to escape the limits of their lives. This thematic focus – my oeuvre, you could call it – echoes through my other books, as well. It is subject matter that motivates me on an subconscious level: I write what and who arises. As I build my body of work, the commonalities are surprising to me sometimes. 

LB: During the course of your research, did you participate in any type of literary pilgrimage or research trip? If so, please elaborate where you went and how that informed your project. 

LC: These stories are informed by many trips, most taken for reasons other than writing. I went to Ecuador in the winter of 2000 needing a break from my life because of a broken heart and a job I was considering leaving. That experience informed the story Extraordinary Things several years later. My travels in Argentina—when I, like Ruth, was almost attacked by wild dogs in an abandoned chapel—became the story Culture Shock. My mother and I took my sister to Lily Dale, New York for her 40th birthday and, years later, when I found myself living in northern Manitoba, I wrote about a grieving widow visiting that same place. In San Francisco, I spent a week on a Deep Writing retreat with Eric Maisel and, while I was working on my novel This Has Nothing To do With You during that time, the story Tenderloin eventually emerged. My experiences going on press trips and working as a travel writer grew into the story That Lift of Flight. I suppose all of this is to say that most of my trips, travels, life experiences eventually filter into my writing… While I usually do go on writing retreats while engaged with a project, either of my own making or more formal (ie. Sage Hill), I also find that life has a tendency to percolate into new, fictional interpretations, no matter what I’m doing or where I’m going. This book, especially, was informed by travel of all sorts.

LB: What are the key resources that you reference when working on a manuscript?

LC: I adore books on writing craft and creative process. If someone sent me to a desert island and told me to choose a few books to take with me, I’d opt for these:

Fearless Creating by Eric Maisel—I found Eric when I was near a nervous breakdown while writing my first novel, Swarm. I didn’t understand what was happening and one day I googled ‘anxiety and writing’ and found his work. He is a psychologist and a writer who explores the role of anxiety, depression, perfectionism in artists of all kinds. This book truly saved me from abandoning that novel and succumbing to hard emotions by normalizing what was happening and teaching me skills to navigate my process.

The Making of a Story by Alice LaPlante—an excellent writing craft guide that I use again and again for my own work and when teaching.

The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass—this book by a successful New York literary agent emphasizes the craft and style elements involved in bringing characters solidly to life so that readers can connect through empathy and emotional engagement (something I like to think ChatGPT and other writing AIs will never be able to do).

LB: How was the title chosen for this book? Who had input and what were the deciding factors?

LC: I originally called this book Extraordinary Things, after the story of the same name. This title speaks to the urge to escape and focus on the extraordinary things of the world, beyond ourselves (an intention that always fails: “no matter where you go, there you are”). But when I took a closer look at the collection, I realized that the title Places Like These worked better. It also speaks to the theme of travel contrasted with the feeling of being trapped which all the characters share. The stories take place in a wide variety of ‘places’ — San Francisco, Argentina, Ecuador, Arizona, Northern Manitoba, Toronto — but some characters are also stuck in unextraordinary circumstances and places: small towns and quieter situations. In the story Places Like These, the narrator confesses her hope in coming to ‘places like this’ (the spiritualist community of Lily Dale): to be called on, singled out, and told that everything is all right. I think that every character in this book is longing for this, hoping to get that reassurance, recognition, care for their injured selves, in a wide variety of places in the world, so this title made more sense to me.

LB: If you were to give a young writer a piece of crucial writing advice, what would that be?

LC: Often I’ve answered this with foster tenacity. Study your craft, connect with other writers, explore writers that feed you, submit work, accept the inevitable rejection of your work. Doing this has helped me push forward and keep producing work, but I now temper this with the advice to work on developing self-compassion. We live in such a grind culture these days that it’s easy to think we aren’t doing enough, achieving enough, striving enough if we aren’t working 24/7 (even if that work is simply updating the Instagram feed). This, combined with the required self-discipline and management of being an artist, can easily lead to burn out and an emboldened inner critic. So, I recommend learning how to love yourself and utilizing tools (and if you don’t have them—find them) to support and care for yourself within the difficult creative life. Develop a relationship with your inner critic, guard against perfectionism, be kind to yourself (and this doesn’t always mean not writing when you don’t feel like writing—it can also mean prodding yourself to write, even if it’s just for 10 or 20 minutes because you know you’ll feel better once you do).  

LB: Do you use visualization at all when you are writing? Can you see what is unfolding in the story?

LC: Yes, I allow the story to unfold within my head. I see it as it’s happening. Usually this “seeing” is centered on a single person because I also need to see inside them—which, I suppose, is more of a connection to emotional truth than a visualizing. I have to align myself with their emotional state. I liken this to an actor’s process: finding emotional circumstances in ones own life that can be used for the character’s reactions. Often, in this book, the feelings I’m drawing on are those of feeling trapped, helpless, unsure how to proceed, or else overwhelmed by strange environments. This is perhaps another reason that these stories take place in many different places: because those are the times in my own life when I’ve felt unsure of where I’m standing, a bit insecure and unsettled and unsafe. I suppose I’ve paired those emotional circumstances with fictional circumstances (betrayal, grief, confusing desires, etc). All of this could be described as visualizing, I suppose, but for me it feels deeper than that. It doesn’t just happen in the mind but also the body, the gut; it’s a visceral experiencing of emotion paired with description and character action and thought. 

LB: Is there a character in this book that you think will turn up in another writing project?  Please explain.  

LC: Three of the stories in this book feature versions of characters that appear in my novel This Has Nothing To Do With You. In fact, THNTDWY started as a fourth linked short story and then it kept going. Mel first came to life for me through these stories (Empty Nest, Rhubarb, and Stories). Her biographical details are different in the short stories but the essence of her feels the same to me. She’s the strongest character I’ve ever worked with (clearly, since she grew beyond those original stories) so it wouldn’t surprise me if she appears again, wanting another story of hers to be told. 

Author Bio

Lauren Carter is the author of four previous books of fiction and poetry, including This Has Nothing to Do with You, winner of the 2020 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. She has also received the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Her debut novel, Swarm, was longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads. Carter’s stories and poems have been published widely in journals and longlisted multiple times for the CBC Literary Prizes. Her short story “Rhubarb” won the Prairie Fire Fiction Award and was subsequently included in Best Canadian Stories in 2015. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. An Ontarian transplanted to Manitoba, Carter lives just outside of Winnipeg, where she writes, teaches writing, and mentors other writers.