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 I Am the Ghost Here, writer Kim Samek shows readers contemporary life with a twist. Each story strips down the rituals and technologies that structure modern existence and bends them into the surreal. Prior to realising this, her short fiction won a Pushcart Prize and has been featured in Guernica, Ecotone, Electric Literature, North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, swamp pink, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, The Threepenny Review, Story, and ZYZZYVA. She also was a writer and television producer whose credits include MTV’s Catfish and PBS’s WordGirl and earned her Emmy nominations.
In our latest “Inside the Collection” Q&A, Samek dissects her debut short story collection, I Am the Ghost Here.
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 studied the short story as an undergraduate in the Stanford Creative Writing program and quickly became a fan, but I graduated from college with the notion I would write a novel. I worried it would be a waste to world-build for a story. I must have felt that way because it required so much effort to come up with an idea that I imagined I’d need to use it on a long, important work. I then spent years working on a novel I didn’t finish.
During the bleakness of the pandemic, I turned to short fiction because I needed something to occupy my mind. Suddenly I became a prolific writer. I credit the form. The short form allows for experimentation because there is no pressure of time wasted. If I go down the wrong path or take on an idea that is too ambitious, it is easy to shelve the idea and start a new one. I’m a writer who thrives with that kind of freedom. I’ll try anything if I know I can toss it out.
Short fiction is one of the best vehicles for idea-driven work and it lends itself well to surrealism and absurdism because the voice can easily be sustained. I’ve only recently realized the books that most inspired me were short story collections. Many of the books that my friends and I passed around just after college were written by authors who were primarily known for their work in the short form. Maybe it was a different time, but I felt that some of the best surreal or off-kilter story collections could tap into the weirdness of being alive in a way that a novel might not. A novel can be weighed down by elements of plot or lengthy periods interiority. Ultimately, that mood is what I’m looking for most when I’m reading. There’s a particular bittersweet note that reminds me of music. The short story might be due for a resurgence as we venture deeper into stranger times.
I am so grateful to my agent and to my publisher, The Dial Press, because they did not ask me for a novel instead.
Can you walk readers through the timeline of this collection? What was the earliest? The most recent?
I started writing these stories in 2022 and wrote the book in just over a year. “Egg Mother” was the second story I had written and the first story I published. It tackled some identity issues I’d experienced in that time.
The fourth story I wrote was the titular story, following a woman whose brother is no longer able to inhabit his own body and hires a puppeteer to take over. The fifth or sixth was “The Garbage Patch.” I had never published fiction, so I sent the stories to literary journals through Submittable to see what would happen.
Ten of the stories were plucked out of the slush pile in total. “I Am the Ghost Here” and “The Garbage Patch” were accepted by Guernica and Ecotone on the same day. That was when I thought I could have something. I worked with a few smart editors to refine the stories. I didn’t get an MFA, so this was an important step in the process. I’d been working in isolation at the time, so it was helpful to get feedback.
Soon after my second story, “I Am the Ghost Here,” was published in Guernica, I received e-mails from agents. “The Milf Hotel” was the last story, written around that time, in February of 2023.
When did you know you had a collection? And why these stories?
I started to think of the work as a collection when the agents reached out. I felt fortunate to have an opportunity to receive that type of feedback while I was assembling the stories. I read through the stories and saw that they were in conversation with each other and could form a cohesive work. When one aims to sell a short story collection, there’s a question of whether the characters should inhabit a shared universe. These stories naturally fit together. They were written in the same time period, in response to a political and social moment. I was asking one question: how did we get here?
I selected these stories because each added to the scope. I wanted the book to be a portrait of the anxieties of modern times and to examine the feeling of living in an irrational world, with large corporations as the primary engines of progress. I threaded climate, labor, bodily autonomy, and identity throughout the stories.
What was the “easiest” story in the collection to write? What made it work? What was the “hardest” story in the collection to write? What made it so difficult to land?
This collection contains the stories that were easier to write. That was the contract I’d made with myself when I started—life was too bleak to want to suffer. I shelved the stories that required major restructuring. I’ve since finished some of those.
Though these stories were not difficult to write when compared to some of my other projects, I spent a lot of time building them out, polishing, and adding stakes. I don’t want to make it sound as if I didn’t work on them. It’s more that the ideas came to me somewhat intact. I find that when I set up a story with the correct elements, it writes itself to some extent. The elements come together quickly when there is a conflict, a desire. In the revision, sometimes a single new line or two can elevate a piece, so it’s the attention to detail that improves a story. I was very interested in the small edit.
“The Garbage Patch” is an example of a story that I wrote quickly, in the matter of a few days. I knew I wanted to write about a woman who craved plastic and dreamed of visiting The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I would have lost the magic had I decided to take it through many restructuring drafts. I wrote quite a few endings for “Muscle to Muscle, Toe to Toe” before I found one I liked. That was the most difficult ending to find. It was trial and error, ending and expanding and ending again until I found the note.
I’m fascinated by the sequencing of story collections. Why and how did you land on this sequence?
This was the only sequence that felt right to me. I started with the story that was the most open-ended and introduced the theme identity.
“Egg Mother,” the second story, continues developing the theme of identity and loss of bodily autonomy in early motherhood—both stories are meant to get the reader on the same page as the characters who feel like they’ve woken up in an unfamiliar world. This mirrors the emotional experience of entering the pandemic and losing one’s community. From there I worked in stories about climate and labor.
“Trash Heap Hero” and “Everything Disappears When You’re Having Fun” are placed one after another, as sister stories. The former follows a trash heap firefighter who battles blazes that break out on recycled products sent to Thailand. In “Everything Disappears When You’re Having Fun,” I write about two people who are trying to figure out what to do with a poorly manufactured mass-produced chair that sends people to ecological disasters in other parts of the world. The victims are swiftly returned to a life of other concerns.
I kept these themes alive even when the story did not deal directly with a particular topic. For example, most of my characters work in the gig economy—sometimes with strange jobs. If a story focused on a different topic, I often threaded labor through by giving the main character a job as a gig worker.
I alternated the themes and tone. The funniest stories are spaced out. I took care in juxtaposing the personal and the political. There are stories about the new pressures on modern mothers, about bodily autonomy for women, about daughters who want to be seen. They are very human stories. Climate is part of the tapestry, mirroring how I experience life. There are moments of alarm and moments in which the ash falls and you go about your day.
Even the most well-intentioned people can’t process climate change outside of limited moments. There is more to life. People want to connect and be seen, they have bills to pay, they worry about jobs. Where does climate change fall under Maslow’s Hierarchy? I find that tension interesting.
Is there any story that didn’t make the cut that readers can read somewhere online? [it’s okay to skip this if you don’t want to share or there isn’t one]
I have a flash called “Skinny House” at Electric Lit. It’s a surreal take on a housing crisis.