Jennifer’s collection of stories WHEN TRYING TO RETURN HOME was published this week. From the interview:
It’s wild to say this because it’s 2023, but the first story was written in 2009 in my undergraduate class at the University of Pittsburgh with Geeta Kothari. The story was “Last Saints,” which appears in the collection in a strongly edited form. I didn’t think I had a collection until about six years later when I was in my PhD program and had accumulated a few stories from my MFA and from writing on my own. I had about four published stories—“Last Saints,” “The Missing One” (then called “Bagmen”), “Torsion,” and “Fevers”—and I thought perhaps it was time to start thinking about a collection. The themes came later. I originally titled the collection Where I’m Bound , because all of the characters were inextricably bound to some place or somebody, but then I wrote a poem for my collection Scar On/Scar Off called “When Trying to Return Home,” and I decided to turn that into a piece of fiction. After I reread the new work, I thought it fit into my short story collection. I realized all of my characters were looking for home in idealized people or places, so I changed the title. I later wrote “Good Guys” and “Liberation Day” and chose to interlink some of the characters and locations. But ultimately the stories came first, then the themes.
Interview with Jennifer Maritza Macauley
And see her read live and online March 2nd for the Kimbilio Reading Series
