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 All This Want (And I Can’t Get None), writer T Clark captures the feverish hunger and dizzying pleasures of Black girlhood and queer coming-of-age. Set largely in and around a working-class neighborhood just outside New York City, the stories follow young Black girls, women, and nonbinary characters as they navigate the uneasy space between adolescence and adulthood, desire and restraint, and the people they are and the people they might become. Prior to publishing their debut collection, Clark’s fiction appeared in Joyland, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, The Offing, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. They also received fellowships and support from the Omi International Arts Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Vermont Studio Center.
In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Clark takes readers inside their debut short story collection, All This Want (And I Can’t Get None).
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?
Many reasons! I, too, love short stories. I love to be in that size of a moment with a character, relying on subtext to make sense of the world off the page. I love that (excluding sequels, spin-offs, larger worlds) the beginning of a short story is the beginning of a life, and the end is the character’s end. That’s it. A short story is like eavesdropping on a bus- you catch the part of the conversation that’s offered to you, then somebody gets off, and that’s it.
Practically, I studied creative writing in school, and stories fit best in the traditional workshop model. I love writing stories; I’m really interested in hitting the hot moments as precisely as I can, and getting out of there immediately.
Can you walk readers through the timeline of this collection? What was the earliest? The most recent?
There’s a version of “Nutcracker” I wrote for an HS creative writing class in 2006, at a time when I worked at a sporting goods store and had a crush on my coworker who had a girlfriend (ha). In hindsight, this was a wild move; one of my coworkers was in this class, and her dad got his hands on the story. He said, naturally “what the hell is going on in that store?” Much of the version American Short Fiction published of that story in was drastically different from the HS draft, but the foundation was basically the same. The first draft of the “Justin” story and a wildly different version of “Red Hot Door” were drafted in college, too.
A big chunk of the other stories were first drafted in graduate school. The most recently written story is “Dark Times”- I started it in 2018 while living in Wisconsin, a few years after my seven month Provincetown stint. I need to step away from a setting to really fictionalize it on the page. I also needed to spend more time in the sun before I could do anything.
When did you know you had a collection? And why these stories?
I thought my grad school thesis might have been a collection; it featured many of the
stories that are in the book, but without the gifts of time, hindsight, and editors. I signed
with my agent pretty early in the process, and over the years, the collection just went from possible, to close, to almost, to a collection worth shopping.
I have so many unfinished story drafts- some are two paragraphs, others are twenty pages. In some ways, the large pool I’d created slowed me down; I kept trying to force some stories to work, but they ultimately needed more time. In this process, I realized that I don’t view any of my work as unredeemable or unusable; if I feel like a story is no good, I reason that it’s no good yet. I throw nothing away, and tinker and tinker and sometimes, I am satisfied.
What was the “easiest” story in the collection to write? What made it work?
The title story “All This Want (and I Can’t Get None)” poured out of me almost fully formed. I originally wrote it using an exercise my writer friend Marta Evans introduced to me (and I now use it as a prompt in almost all my classes): choose a pre-determined set of time as a container (the four seasons, the twelve months, a laundry cycle, etc) and use the time markers as section headings. So I used the periods in a school day. The opening line popped in my head, and over some meditative walks, I found the story. I drafted it in a couple sittings. I showed it to a few people and they helped me with some very important details, and I revised it, and that was that.
Similar deal with “Nutcracker”- I had that draft from high school I mentioned, and during the first semester of graduate school, I wrote a new version feverishly over a couple nights right before workshop (as was my way). The memory of that time is all over the place, but I remember after I finished it, I felt so dizzy and out of it that I went to the hospital. They gave me a shot for dehydration, and now I get to say, “I once wrote so hard I went to the hospital.”
What was the “hardest” story in the collection to write? What made it so difficult to land?
I’ve struggled with the final story in the collection for a long time. There’s a grad school version of it where the cousins are boys, and they drive upstate to meet an internet girlfriend who gets them into more trouble than they ask for. It ended up being about age, and consent, and class and predatory men. At some point, I realized it was more interesting to tackle an overtly queer version of the story. I tried aging G and Netty up, to have a story in the collection with older characters, but I couldn’t find their adult voices. I think the ending of the story does the work that aging up might do. How does time change pov? How do we fail at accountability? What is it like to commit to your victimhood despite counternarratives? I’m happy with where we landed, but it took some work!
I’m fascinated by the sequencing of story collections. Why and how did you land on this sequence?
It’s actually not something I spent a ton of time thinking about before the time came. Many of the stories have thematic similarities, so we wanted to make sure those themes have room to breathe. While the stories are all different and feature different characters, there are some overlaps in age, interest, family structure, etc that we tried to be conscious of. This is an area where I had a few opinions, but really trusted the people on my team to chime in honestly. Next collection, I’ll surely have some clearer ideas!