What makes a great short story collection? In Debutiful’s latest Q&A series, Inside the Collection, short story writers will take readers through their writing, editing, and sequencing of their debut short story collection.
In The Age of Calamities, writer Senaa Ahmad gives readers a collection of mind-bending, absurdist, funny, and speculative short stories. Each story plays with tropes and structure in a brilliant way. Prior to releasing her debut, her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Best Canadian Stories. Ahmad has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, the Speculative Literature Foundation, and the Carl Brandon Society’s Octavia Butler Scholarship.
In our first “Inside the Collection” Q&A, Ahmad dissects her debut short story collection, The Age of Calamities.
I love short stories and wish publishers took more chances with them instead of asking, “Sounds great… but do you have a novel?” I want to start off by asking, Why short stories?
I started writing at a fairly young age, so I’d tried my hand at writing both short stories and novels. I lived deeply in my imagination as a kid, and I was also convinced that I’d become some kind of celebrated teenaged author, which of course never happened.
I was a hungry reader even then, but short stories crystallized my preoccupations as a writer rather than a reader. I adored Ray Bradbury’s work, and the fairytale anthologies of Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow, and later I’d become enamored with writers like Angela Carter, Sofia Samatar, Italo Calvino, George Saunders, and Kelly Link.
I love the confined parameters of the short story, how those parameters allow for conceptual experimentation and an intensity of voice and atmosphere and language, a little bit like a zoomed-out poem. You will forgive a poem for doing a lot of unusual and beguiling and confounding things that can’t necessarily be sustained across the breadth of a novel. A short story feels like a variation on that theme.
Can you walk readers through the timeline of this collection? What was the earliest? The most recent?
I wrote the collection between 2018 and 2023, with many stops and starts, sometimes setting aside a story for a year or two before returning to write another draft. The first few stories were drafted during a six-week summer workshop, the Clarion Writers Workshop, after a grueling year where I’d written very little.
Clarion was a strange, wonderful, hermetically sealed experience in California. I came into it knowing I wanted to start a conceptually linked collection that took historical figures and stuck them into odd situations. Those first stories I wrote set the tone for the rest: structurally peculiar, a little madcap, a little metafictional.
I wrote the last first draft in 2021, “It Was Probably A Very Nice Day,” about the Romanov sisters. I kept revising the stories for another two years.
When did you know you had a collection? And why these stories?
At some point in late 2019, I had a big parcel of stories, probably enough to fit the legal definition of a collection. But I kept poking away at new stories. I envisioned one last story, a Platonic ideal of a story that would tie the collection together beautifully. In hindsight, I was trying to express a dissatisfaction with the execution of the stories I’d already written, or their quality at the time.
There’s the eternal challenge of bridging the gap between what’s in your mind and what appears on the page. I’m paraphrasing, but Laura van der Berg talks about revision as an opportunity to return to the experimental space of a story, to re-discover some of the possibilities that get closed off in the previous draft. I was often unhappy with a first draft, especially in the days or months after I finished it. But then I’d go back and feel a tug, a sense that it was doing something I was interested in. I’d have a clearer understanding of how to shape it further, like I’d received instructions on how to return to that experimental space.
That would get me to another draft, and so on. By 2022, I felt confident I could get the stories to where I wanted them, with a little more time and consideration.
What was the “easiest” story in the collection to write? What made it work?
“Let’s Play Dead” was the first story I wrote for the collection, and it arrived in approximately the right shape from the start. It’s a story where Henry VIII keeps trying to kill Anne Boleyn, but he never seems to succeed.
In planning the story, I’d meant it to be a darker and angrier story about survival as a kind of weapon. But the absurdity of the premise opened up a lot of space for humor, a nice surprise which also felt necessary to ventilate some of the grimness of the story’s events.
What was the “hardest” story in the collection to write? What made it so difficult to land?
I wasn’t even sure I’d include “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” in the collection until I took another stab at it in 2023. I wrote the first draft back in 2018 as a straightforward interactive story, with prompts you could follow at your peril. But I knew I wanted it to feel more labyrinthine and less linear, while still preserving the video-gamey, moody quality of a lab assistant wandering the Los Alamos desert in search of Oppenheimer.
I kept getting stumped by the structure of it in revisions. I was also thinking a lot about accretion of plot in a story like this, how many different avenues you can take the reader down before you lose them completely.
Writing the draft in 2023 was a protracted but surprisingly pleasurable experience. I decided to jettison the work I’d done in previous drafts, beyond the first few pages, and start again. But sections of earlier drafts crept in anyway, and it’s hard to imagine the story without them now.
I’m fascinated by the sequencing of story collections. Why and how did you land on this sequence?
I must’ve tried almost every possible configuration. I knew early on that “Let’s Play Dead” would start the collection, because it gave the readers a sense of what to expect from the rest of the stories. I found that it helped to have a lighter story as a follow-up, to offer the reader some breathing room.
Certain stories diluted the effects of others when placed consecutively, or felt like they were replicating the same movements. I read the beginnings and ends of each story to see how they lined up next to each other, a strategy I borrowed from Kelly Link. I re-read the collection from start to finish more times than I care to admit.