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 Perverts, writer Mac Crane explores the messy intersections of desire, shame, intimacy, and identity through seventeen audacious stories that push queer life to its exhilarating and unsettling extremes. Set in worlds where people pay to reenact hate crimes, ogle mythical performers, or blur the lines between fantasy and exploitation, Crane’s characters search for connection in places most people would rather ignore. Equal parts provocative, darkly funny, and unexpectedly tender, Perverts argues that those living on society’s margins often see its contradictions most clearly. Crane is also the author of the novel I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Indie Next pick, and Lambda Literary Awards winner, as well as A Sharp Endless Need. Their fiction has appeared in Literary Hub, The Sun, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Joyland, and elsewhere, and they have received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, American Short Fiction, and the Vermont Studio Center.
In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Crane takes readers inside their debut short story collection, Perverts.
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 wish that too, so so much. I always advertise short story collections to my reader friends who aren’t writers, especially those who are parents. I’m like, they’re bite-sized! They’re perfect for sleepy-time bears! You can read one on a lunch break! I’m always surprised by how many people don’t know that short story collections EXIST. Anyway. Short stories are the best. When I first gave myself permission to be a Writer™, I threw myself into reading literary journals. The big ones like Paris Review, of course, but also countless online indie journals. I read as many short stories as I could. I was fascinated by them, their compression and power, their instantaneous presence of character and world. Short stories, more than anything, are my playground. Often my speculative, exaggerated, near impossible playground.
Can you walk readers through the timeline of this collection? What was the earliest? The most recent?
Okay, I just saw this meme that was like “I’m the opposite of machine learning, I’m human forgetting,” and that is me. But I am going to try!!! I wrote “Julie & the Butch” what feels like one million years ago. Some other older stories are “Harmony,” “The Futurewives™,” “The Failed Messiah,” and “Siren Island.”
I always dreamed of publishing a collection, but I wasn’t sure if I ever would. And more to the point, I was not intentionally writing stories that were in conversation with each other and would make sense to put in a book together. But as is the writing curse, I tend to circle the same few themes in everything I write: shame, the fine line between pain and pleasure, performance, the psychology of sex and the erotic, etc. So, I admitted to myself that I was compiling a collection and added some stories like “Smear the Queer,” “Alex Adams the Dyke Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” and “The Perverts.”
I looked at those pieces and was like, oh yeah, I’m really into re-imagining canonical stories (I would say childhood except “Emergency” is a nod to “Emergency” by Denis Johnson, alas)—I should lean into that. Once I had the name, Perverts, thanks to Venita Blackburn at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, I was able to add some later stories to add texture to the collection, like “Your Damning Yelp Review,” (shorter, experimental form, The Magic School Bus re-imagining), “This Isn’t What I Signed Up For,” (a dissociative micro collaboration with predictive text), and “Catcher,” (shorter, a bit more fantastical, Catcher in the Rye re-imagining). And that was that. I did try to close out on a Waiting for Godot + Frog and Toad re-imagining but my editor thankfully nixed it. It was no good.
When did you know you had a collection? And why these stories?
I knew I had a collection when I accepted the unique mix of humiliation, audacity, and ambition it takes to see one through. 2022, 2023, maybe? Perhaps parenthood prepped me for that particular condition. Why these stories? Because they are my little perverts, and I am proud of them. Alone, they can only do so much, even if they can move or inspire a reader—but together, they clarify; they force you to question what you think you know about identity, desire, judgment, moralizing, and beyond.
What was the “easiest” story in the collection to write? What made it work?
“Smear the Queer” was the easiest to write, craft-wise and process-wise, despite being the most difficult content-wise. It’s about queer and trans hate crimes turned capitalistic venture, guilt, desire for connection, what it means to give someone permission to harm you, and what we are willing to pay for the idea of belonging or family. The story basically fell out of me close to its final form. I wish I could tell you what made it work. Maybe the very nature of how traumatic the story forced me to hyperfocus on the craft, the tightness of the story. Detached myself to get closer sort of thing. The distancing itself causing a closing of the distance.
What was the “hardest” story in the collection to write? What made it so difficult to land?
“Catcher” was pissing me off for a while, because I was having trouble balancing the speculative and the grounding details. I kept overwriting and then underwriting. And I think I kept writing into a message or a takeaway, which is very unlike me.
I’m fascinated by the sequencing of story collections. Why and how did you land on this sequence?
My writer pal helped me a lot. We talked about the character arc and the narrative arc of the collection as well as how the transitions between stories are working. You know, it’s like the art of the mixtape. Are these transitions hitting? How are the tones and themes playing off of each other? What story does this thing, as an entity, want to tell? Perverts as an entity is the story of desire and permission. It closes on an endless orgasm.