Interview: Writer Rachel B. Glaser
I will think, "I bet astronauts have strained social dynamics," or "what if there was a rock star that was also a flower?" Then I will write a one page thing and forget about it for awhile.
Matty Byloos conducted this interview over email with writer Rachel B. Glaser, who lives, writes and works in Philadelphia, PA (although she may have moved to a different city since this interview began). We’re pretty sure this took more than a year from beginning to end, and we enjoyed every minute of it.
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Author Rachel B. Glaser
I had a number of strange experiences last year. And the year before that one was nothing dissimilar. I just wrote that sentence and I already hate it. Oh well. My point is, I also had some fantastic things happen, some of which included bits of strangeness. And many of those fantastic things involved discovering new writers. Reading Pee on Water was one such fantastic thing.
The sentences in Rachel B. Glaser’s collection of short stories are, quite literally, legion. By this I mean, they are not unlike a major unit of the Roman army consisting of both infantry and cavalry troops numbering as many as 6,000. I don’t mean that for every one sentence a normal writer might pen, Glaser puts down 6,000 instead. That would be ridiculous. But the stories are nuts and not reducible to being nuts, which in my mind, is the very best that fiction can do. It can ground break. It can mind blow. It can language bend. It can idea. It can — you get it.
So I reached out to Adam Robinson and Publishing Genius to get in touch with Rachel herself, in order to pick her brain a little bit for all of us, in the hopes that we might learn something about her, about fiction, about short story writing, about a lit lady with much greatness already under her belt, and undoubtedly more to come.
If she’s got a novel in her future, I’m first in the queue to read it.
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NAILED: Talk to me about your writing process. What triggers a story? How consistently do you work on things? Do you find it’s easier to work on more than one thing at a time?
Rachel B. Glaser: Usually a premise or challenge triggers a story for me. I will think, “I bet astronauts have strained social dynamics,” or “what if there was a rock star that was also a flower?” Then I will write a one page thing and forget about it for awhile. Other times a story starts from an assignment. My friends and I will have a deadline for when a paragraph or page is due, and I will write something (anything) to complete the assignment, to entertain my friend. Then months later I might look back at what I wrote and see there is something more there than what I have found, and try to work with it. I used to work on one story at time, but that was when I was in a workshop and a story had a due date. These days I am working on many stories at once, but slowly.
NAILED: The best times that I can remember being in a workshop, strangely enough, I felt like I couldn’t wait to bring something rad in to make my fellow writer friends laugh. And it wasn’t like I was being too light about the work itself — I just had such love and fondness for these guys and gals in the group, that Wednesday nights became like these, let’s see how much we can make each other laugh, and then we’ll know we’ve accomplished something. Which brings me to a couple of questions —
1) How do you see workshops? Do they conflict with the generally-one-person-show quality of being a writer and needing alone time to do the work? Do you find they are always helpful, or are bad workshop groups actually counter productive?
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2) A lot of your writing made me laugh. Really laugh. Are you generally a funny person, or do you find that your humor has more time and space to become activated when it’s on the page? Do you think that your work is funny? A rock star having to cope with also being a flower seems a funny place to start, but maybe a serious treatment of the subject would make it even funnier. Do you think through these things in an analytical way as you are drafting stories?
Glaser: (1) I love workshops! I haven’t been in a consistent workshop for the last year, and after 7 years of continual workshops, it is difficult to be without one. Feedback and deadlines really help with my productivity and revisions. I have never really had a ‘bad’ workshop group. I have been in conservative workshops, and a few uneven or awkward workshops, but still those have been of great use.
(2) I’m sometimes a funny person, especially when I’m around people I like. Writing is one of the only times I’m funny when I’m by myself, but it’s not something I’m aiming for necessarily. If I’ve written a line or a scene that is funny, there are usually funny lines or scenes that grow out of that, like I’m in a funny conversation with the story. If I’m writing something I find funny, it really compels me to work on the piece, but I have trouble trying to just sit down with the goal of writing something funny.
NAILED: When you were putting together your short story collection Pee on Water, what kinds of things did you take into consideration? Some writers approach it like a band assembling the 12 tracks on an album, but that doesn’t work for everyone. Others have connections between stories, so there is a kind of natural flow. Either way, it can be rife with potential problems. Do you have a sense of how people read your collection, and did you think about that when you were putting it together?
Glaser: The stories in Pee On Water were the strongest stories I wrote between 2006-2009. I wanted to order them in a way that would show their variety. I put dissimilar content and writing styles next to another to create more surprise. I knew I wanted the story “Pee On Water” to be first in the collection or last. Last seemed appropriate because of the epic span of the story. Putting “The Magic Umbrella” first was a risk. Someone could start reading it and assume it was a book for children, but that story’s wild shifts seemed like a fun place to start.
NAILED: How did you end up spreading your effort across the marketing and promotional aspects of having a small press book out? It seems to be such an integral part of working with a small press — that you both have the opportunity to promote a book however you like, and that you probably have to in order to get the book to have a life in the world.
Glaser: Yes Matty, it definitely is an integral part of working with a small press. One of the pros and cons of working with a small press is this hands on quality in terms of creating, selling and promoting the book. It takes a certain amount of nerve to promote your own product, whether it’s emailing friends, or walking into local book stores and asking if they will carry it or sell it on commission. Other ways to spread the word of a book — publish new work in journals, give readings. It’s always smart when I have copies of Pee On Water in my car, or with me when I’m visiting New York or somewhere — just to be able to hand it to someone I think might enjoy it. It was clear from the beginning that getting people to read the book was far more important than making money off the book. Adam Robinson (Publishing Genius Press) has gotten a lot more savvy in terms of press and promotion. His continued remarkable publishing of great new books brings attention to his press, and this success is part of the cycle.
NAILED: Are you into performing and doing readings? Tell me a great tour story or about some time doing readings. I like it when writers are really candid about being nervous, or barfing or whatever, or having to read to a room with only three people in it, and how they talk about working through those complicated / uncomfortable experiences. It seems that writers miss out on a lot when they don’t perform or read their work for people, but that doesn’t make it easy.
Glaser: I enjoy giving readings, especially with writers I admire. I can’t think of any great tour stories off the top of my head, but the last three readings I gave were all very memorable and fun. I read for a series called “Death Hums” in New York at Webster Hall, and it felt great to read in such a great space (“The Balcony Lounge”) and they gave everyone a free drink and there were these velvet cubes everyone was sitting on.
The reading I gave after that was at Flying Object in Hadley, MA where I teach Creative Writing Classes. This space is really great because so many varied things take place there. The reading was for Jubilat’s new issue launch and there were many great short readings all interspersed with the raffling off of many local treasures. Arda Collins’s tomato sauce, dance lessons with Chelly Christle, a sweatshirt signed by James Tate. It felt like a really creative birthday party for everyone.
Lastly, I got to read in Providence at Brown University where I took my first fiction classes. The reading also had a panel component and I had a great time talking about writing and publishing with Joanna Howard, Mike Young, Matt Salesses, Matt Bell and Lily Hoang. I typically do not get nervous before a reading, except for the 10 minutes or so before I go up, during which my stomach gets a little fluttery and bewildered.
NAILED: Why don’t we go ahead and wrap this bad mutha’ up here: What are you working on now / next?
Glaser: Right now I am finishing up my first screenplay which I’ve been writing with the writer Noah Gershman. I’m also working on a novel about these two girls named Paulina and Fran who become obsessed with the same person.
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Thank you for the great conversation, and for the year’s worth of our time to do it! One of the best and funnest and longest on record for either of us!
Rachel B. Glaser is a writer living in Western Massachusetts. Her first collection of stories, Pee On Water, was published by Publishing Genius Press. Minutes Books put out her poetry chapbook, Heroes Are So Long.
Learn more about Rachel B. Glaser at her official blog, where you can find a number of amazing NBA portraits.
(Author Photos courtesy the author; Moonstone Art Center)