The Problem of the Story

Hi Friends.

Claire published a short story in The Walrus. Her first ever! At age 50! Never too late for firsts, my friends. To publish your first anything.

The publication of something new often stimulates reflection in a writer. What we learned from writing it, at the very least. I love to chat with Claire about writing (or really anything) so I tracked her down this morning, to congratulate her and see if she had any lessons to share.

I sat on the back porch and texted with her. The dog was waiting for his walk. There’s been wildfires here for weeks and the air has been thick with smoke and this kind of plastic scent, too. My clothes smell of it, and the dog’s fur, too. There have been wildfires in Canada, too, where Claire lives. But we didn’t talk about that. We talked about writing instead.

I told her I liked it so much that she had published her first short story at the age of 50. Claire said lately she was focusing on getting better as a writer, rather than thinking about where she’s at in her career. “It’s been the best thing,” she said. “It means I’m loving sitting down to write every day.”

She spends a lot of time in the book-length milieu, so how had it felt to write something so short? “I had no idea what to do with less length,” she said. This intrigued me.