Miriam Grossman is an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia. She was the winner of the 2018 ALSCW Meringoff Award in Fiction and has published work in Literary Matters. She is currently at work on a collection of linked short stories. Her KR Short Nonfiction Contest-winning essay “2004” can be found here. It appears in the Mar/Apr 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “2004”?
I have a lot of very vivid memories from my childhood—the piece is set in 2004, when I was twelve—closely connected to food and eating (and its avoidance). The piece was structured around a series of memory snapshots in my brain. Visually and emotionally I’d remember every detail of the scenes but I hadn’t processed what they meant on a more complicated level, or why they were still lodged deeply in my mind. In that way, writing this piece was a process of discovery.
The passing of time is made explicit in this piece by structuring the majority of the paragraphs around different months and seasons of the year. Does your work typically adhere to such linear plot progressions, or were you surprised by the way this essay found its way into orderly transitions?
My work actually doesn’t usually follow a linear plot progression; I like to dip in and out of the realm of memory a lot. I wanted to use a more linear structure here to highlight the broad strokes of the way the narrator’s relationship to her body evolves over time.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
I’ve always been fascinated by medicine—basic biology and the psychological experiences of patients and doctors within the bounds of medical encounters. There’s so much there in terms of physical agency, the intimacy of putting one’s body into the hands of a stranger, and the way memories are recorded physically. I’m also interested in the literal details of how surgeries and medical interventions work, and the body as an interconnected system—the way if one tiny thing goes wrong (a tiny gene mutation or misfiring nerve, etc.), the system’s functionality totally shifts. So, I do a lot of thinking and researching to that end.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
An undergrad professor was the first person to tell me that a writer needs to let his or her characters drive the story instead of moving them around at will. Sort of a simple piece of advice but it’s been important for me to keep in mind.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
Right now my main project is a collection of linked short stories about a big Jewish American family, set over the course of about fifty years. I’m really interested in the way intergenerational change happens, and how memory and tradition are passed down and transmuted in families, so it deals with those questions, among others. I’ve also been thinking about the way these characters mentally couch historical trauma in order to survive. The vehicle of linked stories allows for a lot of creative flexibility, which has made the project fun to work on.