Greg Levine-Rozenvayn
A Conversation with Amber Sparks

We had the privilege to correspond with Amber Sparks, who shared insight into the process and craft of fiction. Our discussion revealed her generosity and understanding of the human condition, all of which is reflected in her most recent collection, The Unfinished World and Other Stories. Sparks’s previously published works include a collection, May We Shed These Human Bodies, as well as collaborative work, The Desert Places and Shut Up/ Look Pretty. Links to Sparks’s essays and short fiction can be found on her website, ambernoellesparks.com.

12TH STREET: Each of your stories seems to have a unique structural DNA. When creating your works, does the form come during the writing or the revision process?

AMBER SPARKS: It’s a little bit of both, but mostly during the writing process itself. Figuring out the structure is about 80 percent of the key for me to actually unlocking the story itself. It’s rare that I can write a story without knowing the form it will take. The form definitely drives the storytelling. Sometimes I’ve sat with a story I want to tell for five years until I find the right structure!

STREET: There is a debate circling the literary community regarding perspective. Who is allowed to write from whose perspective? In your collection, The Unfinished World, all perspectives are accessible. Would you like to weigh in?

SPARKS: Oh my. Well, there are wiser heads than I am regarding this stuff. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, as I suspect most writers are. As a middle-class white woman, I know I have a great deal of privilege, I don’t want to only tell the stories of people like me. Anyone who’s read my books knows I don’t tend to describe what my characters look like—in fact, I don’t even know, in most cases. Which in the past I’ve hoped would allow anyone—any color, any background, any gender, cis or trans, to jump into the story and feel like it could be about them. But I’m starting to feel, in the age of Trump, that really isn’t enough. So I’m struggling now with the idea of representation, and whose story do I have the right to tell, and what’s the best way to do that—no easy answers but I’m rethinking a lot of my previous thoughts on the subject, that’s for sure. Representation is so important, now more than ever.

STREET: In an interview with Curtis Smith, for the literary journal JMWW  (February 1, 2016), you spoke about how motherhood changed the way you write children. How do you tackle the process of writing from a perspective that is different than yours?

SPARKS: Motherhood has definitely made me more sensitive, I think. Maybe more afraid, more superstitious, almost. I used to be braver, I swear. Or maybe it’s just empathy. I’d throw children in harm’s way all the time in my stories—and now, though I still do, it’s only with a great deal of thought and caution and the idea that this is really necessary. I think I’ve always written children decently, because I’ve always remembered and retained the weird sense of being a child, particularly an outsider child. There’s a feral sense I’ve always written from, and that’s never really left me. But I think I’ve gotten much better at writing from a parent’s perspective. Of course, the price I’ve paid for that insight is about eight billion percent less time to write, ha. But I’m slowly learning to figure that out.

STREET: You seem to want to talk about uncomfortable truths, most obviously in your story, “The Process of Human Decay.” What are your motivations for delving into human mortality?

SPARKS: I’m a little obsessed with death. Though really, I’m just mostly baffled everyone isn’t. We’re GOING TO DIE. AND NOT BE HERE ANYMORE. EVERY ONE OF US. How can everyone not be thinking about that 100 percent of the time? I think that because I’ve spent my whole life thinking about it, I’ve come to sort of embrace it as one of the pillars, maybe THE pillar, of artistic achievement. Who would bother to do anything if we went on forever? Our legacy, in whatever form, is key. I wrote about work so much for the same basic reason: What are the things we choose to do with our time here, and what do we choose to leave behind? I certainly think you can’t write about beauty or love or sex or just about any other damn thing unless you’re writing about death. Even eating candy is really about death. I’m going to eat this piece of chocolate, though it’s bad for me, because we all die, and while I’m here I’m going to enjoy myself despite the risks. I will eat this chocolate because we die.

I guess what I mean is I don’t find death morbid—I certainly find it fascinating, and the way cultures view it as fascinating. We used to talk much more openly about death when people died at home, when infant mortality was so high. We think now that we’ve somehow conquered death, but we haven’t—we just avoid talking about it. I think that’s silly—it’s so much more comforting to make it part of your life, every day. And certainly part of your art. I guess I don’t necessarily need the reader to grapple with mortality as much as just sit steeped in it. That probably makes some people hate my work, ha. But that’s fine. The thing I most wish I’d written, aside from books, is the show Six Feet Under. I’m watching it now and the structure, the way it’s set up…my god, I wish I’d written that. It’s perfect.

STREET: Diction and form read at the forefront of your prose, perhaps inviting your readers to glimpse your craft. In your story, “The Logic of a Loaded Heart,” you utilize the structure of a mathematical word problem to echo the calculations made by the characters. What came first, John’s story or the word problem form (or neither)? How did you come up with such a fresh way to tell a story, or, in other words, when and how did this interesting story tell you it needed to be written?

SPARKS: I love that you mention that—I love for craft to be right up front, in the open, for the reader to see. No tricks, no strings, no false fronts. It’s all right there. John’s story, in this case, came first—I really wanted to write this piece, which is actually based loosely on a real story. But it isn’t at all the kind of thing I usually write about—and it wasn’t funny at all when I just used a straight narrative form. I was very dissatisfied with it. Then I thought, it needs to be utterly devoid of emotion in the telling, because that will highlight the absurdities. What’s the least emotive form I can think of? Recipes? Maps? Ah, a math problem. And it just opened up from there. Whenever I use a form like that, I usually open it up at the very end, let the story overflow the form and reject it, in a great swell of something more. And that’s what I did here.

STREET: In the story “We Were Holy Once,” a thrilling window into the workings of a fringe family, the narrator says, “Aint that just like a woman.” I can’t help but read this as a societal critique, loaded with your nuanced adaptation of Biblical reference. What do you believe to be the role, or importance, of storytelling in our current political climate?

SPARKS: My stories are packed with feminist and social critiques, and I don’t mind saying so. I’m just way too opinionated to write without my opinion dripping all over the stories, mucking everything up.

I’ve told the creation story many times in different stories, and of course I wrote a whole book about it with my friend Robert Kloss and our illustrator friend Matt Kish, The Desert Places. I think it’s THE story, and you can mine it endlessly for not just beginnings, but also for politics and what it says about us still.

I think storytelling will continue to be of paramount importance, because of course that’s how we describe and learn about ourselves, and it’s how we make decisions, and it’s how we see candidates and understand policies. We writers will have to keep telling stories—of marginalized people, of oppression, of parts of the country. And also, yes, stories about other things, too, because hope is political, too, and sometimes we need an escape before jumping back into the fray.

STREET: In 2015 you posted on Real Pants that you consider failure as a springboard for creativity. I see an echo of this idea in “The Cemetery for Lost Faces,” in which you write, “The happily-ever-after is just a false front. It hides the hungry darkness inside.”

SPARKS: The Unfinished World itself was a failed novel, and with my editor’s help, became a novella I’m quite proud of. The book is marked with absence of stories that got cut, like abscesses, because they weren’t quite working. And other stories were born as challenges to those failures. I think sometimes you don’t always know when a failure is no longer a failure—which is why it helps to have friends that will be honest with you. And time and distance helps, too. Sometimes if you stick something in a drawer and look at it later, you’ll see something you can cannibalize that’s more beautiful than anything you could have hoped for with the original piece. I strongly believe in cannibalizing one’s own work, mining the failures for the nuggets of success.

STREET: What is your writing process? How do you tackle a collection of stories? Do you have multiple stories floating simultaneously in your head? Does your practice demand focus on one story before moving on to the next, or do you write in tandem?

SPARKS: My collections have always been just that—collections of previously written stories, mostly, curated to work in a single book. I always have about six, seven, or ten stories I’m working on at once, mostly in my head, because I’m always trying to find the form that will crack them open. Once that happens, I can write a story fairly quickly. But they spend months or years rolling around in my head until then. Sometimes it’s a place, sometimes a character, sometimes a story. But I can never really focus on just one, anymore than I could be reading just one book.

STREET: Why short stories?

SPARKS: Ha! I wish I knew. They certainly don’t pay, do they? It seems to be what I was meant to write. I tried poetry, and am trying novels, but it always seems to come back to stories. Maybe because I was raised on fairy tales? They’re my primary influence, and I suppose what everything starts to look a little like when I write.

STREET: In “The Janitor in Space,” the only two words of dialogue that are spoken aloud by the Russian astronaut are: ‘gde vy’ (‘where are you’). By virtue of the employment of the Russian language in dialogue, you were gambling a bit. How confident were you? And how were you able to conjure the feeling of loneliness in an unfamiliar language?

SPARKS: You just made my day! I used Google translate (I know, oh my god) and asked a Russian friend to verify, but she’s not a writer, and I really had no idea if that was at all conveying the feeling I wanted in Russian—I was just hoping. I was also hoping that even if people didn’t read Russian, which I assume most don’t, that they would still get the gist of what that meant. So, whew! There are one million character details I don’t know a thing about that I have to research, because I tend to write about history, past eras, people who do unfamiliar jobs, etc. I do so much research. The Unfinished World, the novella I mean, was two years’ worth of research. But of course I love it deeply. That’s why I do it. I probably should have been a history professor. Nothing makes me happier than doing historical research for a book. Sitting down to actually write the book is less exciting.

I think I tend, lazily, to write characters much like myself: people who sort of float on the fringes, of things, who have some tenuous connections to the world—not total loners, but they feel utterly disconnected and at odds with it most of the time. They’re never sure of anything, themselves or anyone else, and the world is a fairly ridiculous place to them. They’re terrible at decisions, even small ones. I do like to challenge myself to write big thinkers, doers—people who charge ahead. I very much loved my story “Birds with Teeth” because I loved writing about [the protagonist] Cope. Or the sister in “We Were Holy Once.” Or Cedric in The Unfinished World. I love writing characters like that because they’re so big, they loom large, they seldom consider others, and they have few moral scruples. They never question themselves. They want everything. They’re so unlike me. It’s lovely to live in their skin and feel for a minute that I might want everything, too.