In 2017, I spent a week teaching a prose workshop at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. It was there that I met Molly Reid, a writer and doctoral student who served as the Writers’ Center intern the summer season that year. I quickly came to know Molly as an excellent literary conversationalist, not to mention an accomplished writer and someone who’s just plain fun to be around. (Anyone who launches a narwhal pool float in Chautauqua Lake has my heart forever.) During the week I was a writer-in-residence in Chautauqua, Molly and I shared plenty of wine, made a failed attempt to visit a Lucille Ball museum, and passed hours talking about books and writing.
That week, Molly told me about her completed short story collection, which she’d recently sent to a few contests. As it turns out, only weeks after I left Chautauqua, she received the call that her collection, The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary, had won the BOA Short Fiction Book Prize. The Rapture Index was published this May, and ever since reading and falling in love with this dark, strange, and incredibly sharp collection, I’ve been eager to ask Molly some questions about it. I’m so pleased to be able to share our interview below. Let’s get to it before the end times come:
Apocalypses, the rapture, hauntings, falling epidemics, wildness, and beasts—this collection is full of dark wonders. Can you talk a bit about some of these themes, how they came about, and how this collection came together? Did you research or consciously set out to explore some of these themes, or did they emerge over time?
Molly Reid: “Dark wonders” is my dream aesthetic. With these stories, I basically just followed my obsessions. I’ve always been drawn to the rapture of Christianity—the idea that the good people would one day simply disappear, sucked away into everlasting pleasure, leaving the rest of us to suffer in agony. My parents were uninterested in religion, but when I was young one of my favorite books was an illustrated collection of Bible stories. There was a time when I was fervent, a zealot. As an only child, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a brother, and then kill him and have his blood speak from the dirt. I’ve also always been obsessed with the body (who isn’t?) and the pursuit of physical rapture.
The title story of the collection, “The Rapture Index,” is based on a real internet site that adjusts its predictions about the timing of the rapture based on such things as oil prices, plagues, volcanoes, and the mark of the beast. This story was one of the first I wrote, a little more than ten years ago now, but the index is still up and running. I love the idea of a rapture index in both its tracking of the apocalypse and trying to somehow scientifically categorize the experience of rapture as ecstatic feeling.
This interest in spiritual and physical passion has followed me into adulthood, and ghost stories are to me a natural extension of this; both ghost stories and Christian morality tales ask questions about what we owe each other, about the nature of existence and what is “right”—ghosts return usually for vengeance or to right some wrong, as Jesus returns to forgive us our sins, as the stories of the Bible teach us that there are consequences for our bad behavior. Ghosts automatically make us think about the body and its materiality. And animals seem to be an essential part of this as well, helping to define what it means to be human, the struggle to separate the “animal” part of ourselves from the more civilized part. Most of the research I did was about the different animals in the collections, a lot of which I didn’t use but that got me into the kind of head space I needed for the story.
The structure of this collection, notably the bestiary stories sprinkled throughout, is quite innovative. How and when did you first conceive of these bestiary stories, and what was your process behind creating this structure?
Reid: As I was writing some of my animal fables, a friend pointed out the bestiary as a possible model, and when I began to research the tradition of the bestiary, I got really into it. The medieval bestiary combines natural science, storytelling, and Christian morality in this really interesting (and occasionally creepy) way. Because the artists and writers working on the bestiary had sometimes never seen the animals they were describing, they’re often wildly inaccurate, misinformation passed along from artist to writer, sometimes borrowed from travelers’ tales or older misinformed texts, a game of telephone that sometimes got a few things right but not others, or sometimes presented entirely made-up or mythological creatures as real, such as the griffon and the unicorn. You can see in the traditional bestiary this fascination with the physical animal body along with the desire to tame or control it, often with religion. For example, as T.H. White presents in his The Book of Beasts, a beaver is described as an animal that, when hunted, mainly for its valuable medicinal semen, bites off its own testicles and throws them in front of the hunter to persuade the hunter not to kill it. (Hence, man should cast off his sin before the devil, etc.). I love this kind of gritty lewd physical description and the attempt of the writer to make it into a moral fable. I feel like you can see the entirety of human struggle right there, fascination with what we don’t understand, our attempts to control and civilize it, and the spinning of story.
I realized that I was trying to write my own bestiary, one that attempted to look at the types of animals we have included and shaped in our more sanitized, suburban spaces, and how those animals have in turn shaped the stories we tell, about ourselves and our culture. (We might have more scientific knowledge about non-human animals, but we still get a lot wrong). Even when I’m not writing directly about animals, my interests are generally located in the body and our more instinctual, physical selves—sex, food, violence—and the ways we navigate these things in our relationships and community.
I adored “Apocalypso,” in which a couple waits out the end of the world (“Nobody tells you how boring the apocalypse is”) and “3-D Printing: A Love Story,” in which 3-D printers go wild (“The printer printed other printers that kept on printing”). These stories, along with others in your collection, have high-concept plots but focus closely on the relationships at the center of each story. How do you balance showcasing your characters’ interiority while also crafting an eye-catching premise? What other writers working in this vein do you enjoy reading?
Reid: My stories either begin with character or premise/conceit. Both “Apocalypso” and “3-D Printing: A Love Story” came premise-first, out of things that were happening in my life—I was working as a freelance writer at a design agency and sat right next to a 3-D printer for a few weeks; I stayed at a strange deserted Mexican resort and felt like it would be a perfect place to live out an apocalypse—but premise only takes me so far. I’m not really interested until I find a voice and character that takes over and surprises me.
There are so many writers who I love that do this much better than me: Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, Etgar Keret, Kevin Wilson, Manuel Gonzalez, Carmen Maria Machado are just a few of my favorites. I’m also lucky enough to have been in a doctoral program that indulged this kind of thing and that was full of writers who showcase characters’ interiority while also crafting an eye-catching premise, writers who are definitely going to be recognized as literary rockstars any minute now, including Juli Case, Gwen Kirby, Katie Knoll, Brenda Peynado, and Dan Paul.
I also loved “All Men,” which is something of a choose-your-own-adventure story, a fairy tale, and a feminist call to arms all in one. (In other words: a true dream.) Can you talk about the process of drafting this story? How did you piece together the disparate sections—did you have a clear vision of the final form from the start, or did that evolve over time?
Reid: Like most of my stories, it came about as the product of the compost pile of my life at the moment: I was doing research into Baba Yaga and reading a lot of translated Russian fairy tales for my novel (an avenue I ended up not exploring), and at the same time I was taking a narratology class and writing a paper about choose-your-own-adventure stories. I was thinking about Vladimir Propp’s approach in scientifically breaking the Russian fairy tales into their necessary parts, the idea that there’s basically a universal structure, a formula (not every Russian fairy tale has every part but they always go in the same order). I was like, Would there be a way to tell a story like this out of order? What if the hero/heroine met the “helper” before the “challenge”? And then I was also thinking about the unruliness of Baba Yaga as a character and cultural figure, how no storyteller can really capture or contain her, and then also about women in fairy tales generally and the expectations placed on them by the tale and the reader—I feel like I’m not really answering your question. In this case, I think the form came to me before I started writing, but there was a lot of thinking and reading before that point. I will also say that it was really difficult to have all the different permutations of the story make sense based on reader choices, and I didn’t succeed entirely (though that was also part of my intent, the rules of necessity being broken). I have a lot of respect now for people who wrote those Choose-Your-Own Adventure stories of my youth.
Which story in this collection was the most challenging to write? To revise? Which came the easiest, and why do you think that might be?
Reid: This is a really hard question to answer. I’d say that in general, the flash pieces came really fast—usually all in one sitting—but I revised them quite a bit. There are some stories in the collection that were difficult because I’d been trying to write them, trying to write about the true emotional experience at their core, for a long time, and they went through many different permutations trying to get at that core, in particular “Adventures in Wildlife” and “Come Closer.” I feel like when I start with an image, place, or voice that won’t leave me alone, the story comes easier. But at the same time, the stories that are most difficult to write often end up being the closest to my heart. I think those two stories are my favorite of the collection.
You published many stories in literary journals prior to The Rapture Index’s publication. Can you describe both your process and your philosophy for submitting short fiction?
Reid: I try to separate as much as I can the process of submitting from the writing. I actually wish I was better at submitting than I am; it goes in waves. But ideally, when I’m on top of my game, I try to have each story out to five places at any given time, and when a story gets rejected, I take that as an opportunity to submit it to another place. I have a color-coded spreadsheet that is full of rejection (orange), some encouragement (pink), a few acceptances (green), and a handful of withdrawn (blue). I also try to really celebrate the acceptances, and even the positive rejections.
Can you tell us about your experience of winning the BOA Short Fiction Prize? Where were you when you got the news, and how did you react? What’s it been like to work with BOA?
Reid: Winning the BOA prize was delightfully unexpected. I had sent the collection out to contests the year before (including BOA’s), and nothing. I took the next year to revise some stories, swap some out, and restructure it. The editor of BOA, Peter Conners, called me when I was at Chautauqua (I was there interning for the summer with their Literary Arts program), and I was definitely in shock during that conversation. I remember I kept thinking, and I think saying out loud, But I haven’t even had my coffee yet. The BOA team, including Peter and Ron Martin-Dent, has been really generous and easy to work with. One thing I was grateful for was the ability to choose the art for my cover, which I know is not always the case. I was lucky enough to have met artist Elizabeth Albert at an artist residency, VCCA, a year or so earlier, where I fell in love with her animal paintings. I contacted her and she agreed to let me use an image of one of her paintings for my cover, and I was so thrilled because it’s perfect.
We met at the Chautauqua Institution in 2017, when you served as an intern and I was visiting for a week as a writer-in-residence. For the benefit of those who’ve never been to the Chautauqua Institution, can you describe the writing programs available there, as well as what you learned during your time working there?
Reid: Yes! I was technically an intern for Chautauqua Literary Arts when we met in 2017, but I came back in 2018 as a Doctoral Fellow, so I spent a total of two summers there. In addition to all the other amazing arts and lecture programming at Chautauqua, Chautauqua Literary Arts hosts visiting writers each week to give a reading, a talk, and hold workshops. Anyone can sign up for the workshops (which meet Monday through Friday, two hours each workshop), and there are now even more opportunities for assistance and scholarships. Atom Atkinson, the new Director of Literary Arts, has done amazing work in keeping the program vital and inclusive. There’s also an incredible writers’ festival that takes place in the beginning of the season that’s a lot of fun and fairly affordable and always has an incredible lineup of faculty and visitors (this year’s keynote speaker is Jericho Brown!).
I learned a lot there over the last two summers. One thing is the range and depth of literary talent out there, along with the real hunger for people at all stages of life to engage with the world through writing. Coming from academia, it was really nice to experience a different kind of literary engagement.
You recently earned your PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati. How has the PhD program influenced your writing or your creative process?
Reid: This might sound weird, but in my PhD program, I learned to take myself less seriously and be less precious about my writing. Part of this I think came from just being around writers of tremendous talent, writers often much younger than me, just crushing it. Also, being around those same writers and seeing them take real risks, sometimes failing, but then getting right back to the business, the hard work, of writing. Another part of this is the faculty at the University of Cincinnati. Chris Bachelder, Michael Griffith, and Leah Stewart are all very different in their writing styles and approaches to writing, but they’re all smart, generous, and egalitarian. There was very little genre snobbery, very little talk about ART and its unfathomable machinery. In particular, in large part due to Leah Stewart’s Forms class and novel workshop, I learned to think and talk about plot, which sounds like a basic, obvious thing, but one that had always eluded me. I don’t know how I would possibly write the novel I’m writing right now without that shift.
You also worked on the Cincinnati Review during your time in the program. How did this editorial work inform your own writing? What is the most valuable lesson you learned from literary editing?
Reid: I think one thing this editorial work has done is it’s trained my brain to switch into evaluative/critical mode quickly and more efficiently. Though I’ve worked for other literary magazines before, being a student editor for the Cincinnati Review was more prolonged and intensive. I feel like it worked critical grooves into my brain that are beneficial in revising my own work. Reading so much slush also informs, reminds, and reaffirms my ideas about the ways writers can engage a reader, as well as common missteps.
What advice do you have for writers working on their first story collections?
Reid: I think most MFA programs focus on short stories, and so students often graduate from such programs with a handful of stories and think about trying to sell it as a collection. Though there are certainly exceptions, I don’t think this is the right move for most people (of course, this depends on how long the student has been writing when they enter an MFA program, what stage of their career, etc.)—I really believe, especially for writers whose first book is a short story collection, it’s important to think about the book as a whole and how you as the writer can make it a cohesive reading experience. As much as we’re told not to do this in workshop, I think it’s really important to think about theme. What are you trying to say with these stories, what version of the world are you trying to present? Because the answers to these questions will guide the other choices, like structure and pacing, both in individual stories and as a whole.
Finally, what’s on the horizon for your writing career?
Reid: Oooh. I wish I knew! I’m working on a novel, my first, which has undergone about five rewrites at this point. I finally think I’m on the right track, however, and I’d just like about two months alone in the woods to finish (an unlikely scenario). I’m headed to Gettysburg College in the fall, where I’ll be serving as the Emerging Writer Lecturer for the academic year. There, I’m sure I will write many more ghost stories.