Free Flirt: The Interviews by Lorna Jackson Page A

I don’t feel that way. And I think one of the things I learned as I looked through this collection, as I was putting it together in essence, kind of going through it last spring, and seeing what fit together where and what was like something else and if anything needed to be nicked out of the slick because it repeated something, one of the things I noted was how much the stories, albeit in an unanticipated way, credit the virtues of family. In a story where the greatest source of solace for the woman is her mother, and even in a story where this sort of creepy guy kind of blunders into the family, the family still, even though the wife has been expunged, the family – which is to say the father and his daughter – is still a kind of image of integrity and hope. So, no. I think you could find other images, too, which say that what these people in these stories are playing along the edge of is not the dissolution of family, the dissolution of marriage and fidelity, at all.

    â€”I read your stories with eighteen-year-olds, one story per term, and I’m gladdened by their response. These are slim boys who have yet to work the green chain. They made the swim team and went to the finals in Kelowna. Their dads and moms are teacher/homemakers. The dog is a retriever and older sister, Sarah, is in South Africa on a Rotary exchange. Maybe they know a girl with an eating disorder, a friend split apart by a drunk driver. They keep away from the kid in the dorm who went professional and made the Vancouver Ravens lacrosse team.
    â€”Thank-you for doing that.
    â€”For many, it is their first exposure to random sex and petty larceny and Mercedes ragtops the colour of fruit and guys like Earl or Frank in fiction, and they seem to think, Hey, I never knew it was okay to write about that stuff!
    â€”Young readers can definitely get some news in short stories.
    â€”What needs to happen before readers take to the short story as easily as they do to novels?
    â€”I don’t really understand that. I really don’t know.
    â€”Is it too precious a form? Do all the rules and regulations scare readers into thinking they must find a cut jewel and stick it on their finger? Or did Alice make writers go too pastoral or domestic and write only about lonely women and their unfortunate choices? Do you favour the urban edge vis à vis short fiction?
    â€”I don’t understand why readers don’t read short stories with a great deal more alacrity than they do. I don’t get it. It’s just something culturally that I don’t get. Every time I even try to hazard a guess about that my sense of conviction runs out from under me. I don’t know.
    â€”This time last year, every male writer I know had an anecdote about partying with Candace Bushnell. Do you have such a story? Last year, men on either side of the country, on the same weekend, were e-mailing me about having partied with Candace Bushnell.
    â€”Shame on them. What an indiscrete thing to do.
    â€”Talk about it?
    â€”Put it on the e-mail.
    â€”That’s what we’ve come to.

    â€”Well, so to speak, I guess it is. I have no recollection of Ms. Bushnell, though I’m sure she’s a very nice person. I’d like to meet her.
    â€”Do you have anxieties about writing in the first person from the narrative perspective of a guy who has sex with eighteen women after his little boy dies, or a guy who thinks Canadians and their sport are boring? Are you afraid friends and family might confuse author and character?
    â€”Absolutely not.
    â€”Is that maturity, or did you never have those anxieties?
    â€”I don’t give a shit.
    â€”And did you never give a shit?
    â€”If I did I made myself quit.
    â€”One more question, Richard, then my time’s up. Who’s writing better short stories than you are?
    â€”Well let’s see. Uh, Alice. Alice certainly. Yes, Alice.
    â€”Does Faulkner still have no