Experimental Fiction with Mary Grimm

Mary Grimm (00:00):
This is something that I think every writer experiences, you're at a party and people say, well hey, what do you do? And if you're brave, you might say, I'm a writer. And they go, well what have you written? Do you write like articles? Do you have a book? Maybe you want to write my life story? You know,

Laura Maylene Walter (00:17):
Welcome to Page Count, presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. This podcast celebrates authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, literary advocates, and readers in and from the state of Ohio. I'm your host, Laura Maylene Walter, the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow and author of the novel BODY OF STARS. Today, we're joined by Mary Grimm, a Cleveland writer and teacher whose latest book is the short story collection TRANSUBSTANTIATION. Mary, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here today.

Mary Grimm (00:52):
Hi Laura, and thanks for asking me.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:54):
Yes, of course. So full disclosure, we've known each other in the Cleveland writing circles for a long time and I'm really excited to get to talk about this book with you. I've always been a fan of your writing. And before we get into a discussion of some of the specific stories in the collection that I want to talk about, I was wondering if you could start by introducing it to listeners on sort of a more high level. What was the period of time that you worked on all these stories and how did you see these stories coming together collectively into a book?

Mary Grimm (01:25):
These stories are, you know, they seem to me now to be old stories because I wrote them I would say between 10 and 15 years ago. And it was a pretty experimental period like now to a greater degree. I'm writing what I think of as more conventionally narrated stories, but during the time that I wrote the stories in TRANSUBSTANTIATION, I was fooling around with voice and other formal things. And I think that part of this was because I read a lot when I was young of 19th century writers who were mostly male. Not entirely, but mostly male. And even though I love, I love those writers, I love Dostoevsky and I love George Eliot and I love Chekhov, I love all of those writers so much. But there's a kind of a heaviness of that, mainly male, somewhat patriarchal, third person lordly narration I guess is what I'm thinking. And I started out by trying to imitate that, somewhat ineffectually, as a new writer a long, long time ago. But at a certain point this point I wanted to try I guess to move away from that. And so these stories mainly I think with maybe a couple of exceptions, like "Dove and Ellie," I guess is not formally inventive for instance, but most of these stories I was trying to like push that 19th century envelope.

Laura Maylene Walter (02:51):
Yeah, that's really interesting in that you said you wrote them all between 10 and 15 years ago, which I think is good for writers listening to this to hear about how sometimes you write something and it gets published but maybe not immediately. So I'm curious about that gap of time. I know you have been writing a lot of other things in the years since. Were you looking at these stories off and on or working on them over the years? Were you submitting them? I know one of them was published in the New Yorker, but why did you decide the time is now I guess is the question That

Mary Grimm (03:22):
Was partly on my part and partly on the part of like the greater publishing world, <laugh>, all of these stories actually have been published someplace, you know, in different journals. And so, you know, I wrote these stories and there was this like satisfaction of having them published and even in the case of one of them winning a prize, but I somehow did not think of collecting them until not too long ago. I would say maybe four years ago I thought I actually have enough stories for a collection and then I realized I actually had enough stories for two collections. So I have another one that's shopping around. So I didn't put them together as a collection until then. And then, you know, they made the rounds of a lot of places so it took a while before somebody was interested in publishing them.

Laura Maylene Walter (04:07):
I like to do that too. I call them periods of just production where I'm writing. Right now, I'm looking at some stories, including ones I wrote 10 years ago, that I'm starting to see how they could be in a collection. So I like to produce a lot and then you have a lot of material that you can kind of look at with a clear eye now that some time has passed and decide how they might fit together. So that's really interesting. Which one won a prize, and can you tell us what prize it was? I'm just curious.

Mary Grimm (04:32):
"On Not Cleaning the House," and it actually won a prize for creative nonfiction, although I wrote it as a story. But it was a story about my inhabiting of my house so I could, without bending the truth too much, call it creative nonfiction even though it has a very fictional feel to it

Laura Maylene Walter (04:53):
Since you brought that up, maybe I can ask that now. I ask this question with some reticence because I'm never a huge fan of when people just want to focus on how much of your work is autobiographical, right? Like it's fiction, and there's always an inventive process. Um, but I know in the past you've talked about writing things that could maybe be on that line sort of between fiction and creative nonfiction. There can be that line. So I'm curious how you think about that. Do you write creative nonfiction as well? Do you prefer to put everything under the guise of fiction? Where do you see that line, and how do you straddle it in your writing? I

Mary Grimm (05:25):
I don't write a lot of nonfiction or creative nonfiction. I actually had something published not too long ago that was creative nonfiction, but I really prefer fiction because I don't like to be tied down to the facts. You know, to be really honest. And in the case of "On Not Cleaning the House," the nonfictional part of it was that I was really the narrator and I was imagining the life of the house that I live in. So there was a fictional element, my imagination. But on the other hand it was like very solidly fact 'cause it was like me thinking about my house. But I will say that a lot of my work has autobiographical elements if only of place, you know, so for instance "Dove and Ellie," which I'll be honest is nothing at all like my life, it's more like gothic and strange than my life is. But Dove and Ellie live in my grandmother's house on Daisy Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. And the experience that Dove has where she sings in a bar, that is something that I didn't do but witnessed, I witnessed someone doing that. So that is a very likely, I guess amount of autobiography that might appear in my stories.

Laura Maylene Walter (06:35):
Yeah, I just, I think as fiction writers, even if we're inspired by or borrowing something that is from our lives, it still takes on its own life on the page as fiction, you know, it's transformed and I think everyone pulls something from their lives, but that doesn't mean the story is autobiographical. And I love the "On Not Cleaning the House" story, that was one of my favorites. It goes through this house's 100-plus year history, and there's a photo of a dead infant found in a drawer that has been there, this baby that had been in the house I don't know how many decades ago. And it was just really, really beautiful. And it's interesting to hear that it was rooted in your experience with your house. I have an old house too and I found pictures of a collie dog in the attic, like this faded picture tacked up to the wall, and it really makes you think of who lived in your house before you. So I really love that one.

Mary Grimm (07:27):
One of the ways I thought about the house, although I didn't state this in the story, but I thought about the house as a kind of time machine. That the house as a time machine that you could go back in the past and think about or experience or imagine you know, what other lives might have been like, other lives of people who lived in the house. That dead baby picture, that was like a fact. I did find that, and I didn't know this before then, but that that was like a pretty common thing early in this century to take a picture of someone who had died because it was an expensive thing to do, like having a photo taken by a photographer. And so especially if you had a child who died young, that might be the only photo that you had of that child.

Laura Maylene Walter (08:09):
Yeah, it was really intense. Really, really beautiful. And I think you had a line or a moment in there about speaking of the house as either a time capsule or a time machine. I like that of the layers of wallpaper where if you peel back one layer, like who chose to cover up this flowered wallpaper with this other design, you know, like what decision went into that And you can just almost enter the past just by peeling away layers, which I think is really great. Yeah. And so that story and some of the others in some ways it almost feels like you're exploring liminal spaces and the dream state, like dreams and sort of haziness comes up in a lot of the stories, and I thought we could talk a little bit about the story "Jane Dreaming." The first line is simply, "This is all a dream," which I really like. So can you tell us a bit about that story?

Mary Grimm (08:58):
As you know, I'm a teacher and you sort of have to fight in the creative writing classroom—gently, you have to gently fight—against cliche and overused tropes and the story ending "this is all a dream." It's sometimes very popular with beginning writers, that they want to do something kind of fantastic and amazing, but they're holding out, they're holding out this thing at the end when they're going to like upend your ideas about it. But it was very hard for me to get them to see that this had been done so many times, so many times. So this story is like a rebuke to all of those "it was all just a dream" stories. I had the idea that I wanted to write a story like that and that the narrative would be overturned so that the story was really in the dreams and that Jane's life in the real world is inconsequential. It's the dreams that are really like beautiful and sometimes true and frightening, full of intensity. But her real life is a little bland and sad. So that was what I wanted to do and it was like really fun. It was like a really fun story to write to sort of put that together and make it work.

Laura Maylene Walter (10:12):
I just love the first line, "This is all a dream," because it's coming out and stating it to the reader. It's sort of winking or knowing, like we all know the trope as writers of ending with it all being a dream, but you are telling us upfront, you're preparing us. Like no matter what happens, this is all going to be a dream. And I love how throughout the story, the character seems to wake up, and in another story you might think, okay, I think the dream is over and now we're in her real life?. But we knew from the beginning like, no, she's still dreaming. Things start to unravel again and get very mysterious and floaty and unreal and you're easily reminded like no, this is a dream. We were told. Like, we were told what to expect up front. So I thought that was really cool.

Laura Maylene Walter (10:51):
That was a very fun story. And another one that I loved is actually the title story, "Transubstantiation." And this one is about two sisters who find themselves in this mysterious, empty, windowless, dusty coffee shop where they're alone and they keep asking, are we dead? And remembering a moment when they were girls out on a lake stuck in a canoe, there's this question of what, what is real and what is imagined? Are they actually remembering memories from their lives or are these memories somehow false? Tell us about that story a bit. And did you know from the beginning when you were putting this together, you wanted it to be the title story? How do you think it functions as a title story for the collection?

Mary Grimm (11:35):
Actually I think that it does really function very well. But I'll be honest, when I was trying to come up with a title for the collection, all of the other stories seemed too particular to themselves to be the title story. You know, that they didn't have kind of an umbrella quality I guess. So that was why I chose it. This story, when I started to write it, I didn't really know where it was going, which is sometimes maybe even more than sometimes true for me. And I didn't actually know that it was going to be as weird as it was, I think. Anyway, it was the kind of story which I think happened sometimes to writers where I didn't really know what I was doing. Looking back, I wrote this story not very long after my parents died. And my sister and I had been engaged like really fully in their pre-death care and it was like a really intense time and very emotional. And then you know, they were gone, as it happens to everyone who has parents. And I couldn't write for a long time after that, for more than a year I think, which was like really annoying because my sister who is a poet as you know, my sister wrote furiously during that whole time. She was extremely productive. Whereas I was like totally blocked. But I didn't realize when I wrote this story. But I think that I was actually writing about my reaction or my questioning of the experience of having my parents die.

Laura Maylene Walter (12:53):
Interesting. You sister, of course, is Susan Grimm. I can link to some of her poetry or her work. Well, you mentioned endings and not always knowing the ending, and I saw that in an interview I can link to with the Colorado Review, you said that you are envious of writers who know what the ending is going to be when they start writing. So can you talk a little bit about, if you want to mention any specific stories in this collection about kind of finding the ending or how you arrived at the ending or how it's that mysterious process? Right. Sometimes I don't know, I'm going to be at the story's ending until I'm there. So you know, just talk to us about endings and how you manage them.

Mary Grimm (13:31):
Yeah, I mostly do not know the ending when I start and I am a little envious but maybe not totally envious because I think if I always knew the ending I think I would be less engaged or maybe even bored. I don't know. I don't write that way so it's hard to say. But there is actually a story in here where I did know the ending and I was writing toward the ending and it was actually kind of hard for me to write it because of that. And that is the story "Reading Marley." And the reason that I knew the ending is because the ending, although not most of the rest of the story, the ending was based on a real event that happened to somebody that I knew and I was like really fascinated by it. It was something that is misinterpreted, like writing in the snow and the main character interprets it one way, but then it turns it out that, you know, the writing in the snow was something entirely different, not personal to her.

Mary Grimm (14:24):
So I was writing toward that event and it was kind of hard to do <laugh>. Yeah. And so maybe my brain just does not work that way. And even if I tried it wouldn't be helpful. But like on the other hand, "Dove and Ellie" is a story where I didn't know a lot of things when I started to write it. I knew I wanted to write about this mother and daughter Dove and Ellie and I, I knew that I wanted them to be sort of alone in the world. Maybe a little sad that there was something a little sad about their aloneness. But all of the things that happened in the story, they happened as I was writing it. So I was experiencing the story as much as a reader might experience the story so that their neighbor, the old woman who is their neighbor and who Ellie spends a lot of time with, she sort of like appeared.

Mary Grimm (15:11):
And I didn't know at the very beginning that there was going to be a cousin who was going to be kind of a criminal. I didn't know that Dove was going to sing in a bar at some point. You know, all of those things I guess arose out of this kind of tautness or tension, you know, of the situation that Dove and Ellie are in two women who are floating in the world and trying to find a place in it, which they do in different ways. Like Ellie has all these like routines that she sort of depends on, and she has an imaginary dog and she has her neighbor who inducts her into like the life of soap opera characters. Whereas Dove is kind of dreamy and floating and like imagining a better life, which probably she is never going to be able to manage. So I didn't know where it was going but I, I think it worked out well like structurally in the end.

Laura Maylene Walter (16:09):
Yeah, absolutely. And as you mentioned, Ellie being more dreamy by the end of that story, it is this more like dreamlike state of what happens, and we won't spoil what happens and that fits kind of the overarching collection really. Well I'm the same as you. Sometimes I'm envious of writers who know the ending or who can plot in advance or make an outline. But then I'm also sort of not because like you, I think I would be either bored or I would think, what's the point of doing this if I know where it's going? But you had mentioned, so the Dove and Ellie story, it's less experimental so it's a little more kind of formally traditional, which made me wonder about the collection's order, how you decided to choose the order. Because one thing I liked about it when I was reading it, when I started to get to some of the more experimental stories, it almost felt like as I was reading the collection, I was entering—and I mean this as a high compliment—like a warped dream as I was going along <laugh> and things were getting weirder and weirder. So was that your intention, or what was your thinking behind ordering the collection?

Mary Grimm (17:09):
I don't know if I would've articulated it quite that way, but I like the idea of starting out with "Dove and Ellie" because it was like more straightforward to sort of move toward less traditional or less straightforward things as it went on. Because I would say also that like "Reading Marley" is relatively traditional as well, and I think that 'In Will's Room," which is the third story that that sort of signals that we're kind of like going off the rails a little bit. You know, although not so much as the other stories do.

Laura Maylene Walter (17:39):
Yeah. That is a good entry point for going off the rails, which I like 'cause he's on a plane and sleeping. It's this double liminal space kind of thing where he is in the sky and imagining other things. Well, and speaking of endings, I won't share it because we don't want to spoil anything, but I really loved in particular the last line of "My Sister's Hair," and I love that entire story which is structured a bit differently from the others. It has subheads. Can you talk a bit about that and how the structure came for you and any other behind-the-scenes info you could give us about that one?

Mary Grimm (18:13):
Yeah, I would say that it is a pretty weird story and that it's pretty autobiographical. I did always in fact admire greatly the color of my sister's hair before we both had, you know, white hair <laugh>. I think that for some women you could tell the story of their lives in like what happens with their hair, you know? Which has to do both with fashion but also with like personal decisions that you make about cutting your hair or not cutting your hair or coloring it or not coloring it, you know? So I guess that has always interested me. I could see when I started to write that story that it was not a story that was going to have a plot, although, you know, there's kind of a little line going through it. And if it was not going to have anything even near to a plot, I felt that it needed something that would hold it together or make it seem more cohesive.

Mary Grimm (19:00):
And that was why I used the sections in the subheadings so that it had this feel. I thought of it in a way as if I was writing a newspaper article, although it's nothing like a newspaper article, but that it was like a weird reporting of the facts. Although the facts are the somewhat imaginary and also kind of obsessive facts of this narrator's feelings toward her sister and also toward the world because she's a weird person. And I want to say not a whole lot like me except for that hair thing. Um, <laugh> that she's a little obsessed, that she is kind of drawn in on herself. She rejects new experience. So she's a wonderful unreliable narrator. And I thought it would work best if she was not given a full narrative reign. If instead she sort of came to us in these like curated excerpts,

Laura Maylene Walter (19:50):
I noticed it was grounded in, it opens where she's at the opera and then she leaves the opera. So there is a physical...

Mary Grimm (19:57):
Like a chronology

Laura Maylene Walter (19:59):
...that gives it the anchor, but then it's free to wander and explore in a lot of other areas. So I love it, the weirder the better. Bring it on. And speaking of other strange weird characters, I think one of your quirkier stories is "PMS, the Story," about a young woman who's trying to raise the funds to make a documentary about PMS. So this was really fun to read. What can you tell us about your inspiration for this and what drew you to this character?

Mary Grimm (20:27):
Yeah, I really love this story too. And it was a lot of fun to write. The most difficult thing was making it work. Because it is, this does have a kind of a plot, you know? Making that work instead of just keep piling on like these bizarre things that she does in order to get her PMS documentary done. The inspiration for this story is a little, I guess I was going to say strange, but maybe it's not. I had read, although I think actually reread at this point, Doris Lessing's book THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, which is a great book and I love it so much in spite of the fact that she spends so much time talking about communism, which I tended to skip over, you know, when I reread it now. But one of the things that she's dealing with is like how to write about a woman's life, honestly.

Mary Grimm (21:12):
And she sort of gets at this in different ways. It's a very meta book, but one of the things that her character, Anna, who is the character in a story within this larger story of the novel, her character Anna, decides that she's going to write very honestly about her day without like covering things up or purifying them. And it turns out to be the day that her married lover leaves her. So she writes about that as well. But the thing that maybe bizarrely that impressed me the most about this when I read it the first time was that she writes about having her period. I'm thinking, was it shocking to me? Shocking is maybe not quite the right word, but it was like revelatory. It was revelatory to me. And I think it must have been shocking when the book came out, which was mid-sixties I think, or maybe early sixties.

Mary Grimm (22:03):
And I thought, I want to be able to do that. I want to be able to write about anything now. Like the distance between the golden notebook where Anna and behind her, the writer Doris, are writing about being a free woman and being able to say, this is what women do, this is what happens to women in the world and how they deal with it. And my story is like, there's a really immense distance because it is, I think, anyway, I hope, a funny story. It has like some serious undertones, but how it came out is like very distant from its inspiration. But I'm still going to thank Doris for it, who is one of my literary heroes. Even though, you know, she was kind of a weirdo and <laugh> had bad relationship with her children and blah blah blah. But I still love her.

Laura Maylene Walter (22:50):
Well, and I loved your character. It is a very funny story. It's very quirky, it's very entertaining to read. And it does, again, I don't want to give anything away, but it's not just like quirkiness on top of quirkiness, like something is being revealed slowly. She's telling the truth slantwise about a relationship that she had and you start to realize there's maybe more there than what she was telling. So I thought that was really great.

Mary Grimm (23:13):
That story is a good example of a story that is, except maybe in feelings, is not at all autobiographical with one exception. That the main character has this unhappy relationship with this lush character who has a bar stool with his metal name tag affixed to it Vic. And Vic was based on a real person.

Laura Maylene Walter (23:34):
I admit, I am disappointed you're not currently trying to raise funds to make a PMS documentary.

Mary Grimm (23:39):
I know somebody should be doing it. Somebody should be doing it.

Laura Maylene Walter (23:42):
Someone should. It's 2025, come on. But I want to talk about the "Going to Moonville" story, which surrounds Moonville, Ohio, which is a ghost town in what, Southeast Ohio? I have never been there, and now it's on my list of places I want to go. Tell me about Moonville and how you came to write about this place.

Mary Grimm (24:02):
Yes. Moonville is a real place and the Moonville Tunnel is a real thing and it's still there. It was a railway tunnel, although the tunnel itself is left, but the railway park is like all gone now. And there was a town, Moonville, that was up a little road from the tunnel itself, and it's in southeast Ohio, near to Logan, near to Logan, Ohio. And I visited it with my daughters, my daughter, and her then husband. And I was just like really taken by it because it has this like presence, it's reputed to be haunted literally. It's literally reputed to be not literally haunted <laugh>. I had no haunting experiences. But it does have this like brooding physical presence because the tunnel when you go into it is rather long. I'm always bad about stuff like that. I think maybe I actually say how long it is in there, but it's long and it's dark inside. Once you're in there.

Laura Maylene Walter (24:57):
Did you go all the way through the tunnel?

Mary Grimm (24:59):
Yes. It's not so long that you couldn't do it. Maybe it's like 50 feet. I don't know. And there is this sense also of the town that is gone, except that if you go up to, we didn't, but if you go up to the place where the town, you can find like the foundations of houses and sometimes people find like pieces of broken china, you know? So this feeling, the pressure of the past is like very strong. And there are a number of stories about hauntings at the Moonville Tunnel, and people are always going there and taking pictures of orbs.

Laura Maylene Walter (25:31):
Yeah. That kind of thing. <laugh> Yeah, I was looking it up because I was so curious. And apparently there are four ghosts that have names: The Engineer, The Brakeman, the Lavendar Lady—love that—and The Bully. So I just think that's so funny. And that does seem very rich for a fiction writer, this place with these alleged ghosts.

Mary Grimm (25:51):
Yes. And as I recall, a number of those ghosts are beheaded ghosts who were beheaded by some train accident.

Laura Maylene Walter (25:58):
Yeah. A lot of the train accident situations. Yeah. <laugh>. So I've never been to Moonville, but I have been to an abandoned turnpike tunnel on the Pennsylvania turnpike. I don't know how it is now. When I went you could walk into it, but it was so long that you couldn't see the other end, so it was just completely dark.

Mary Grimm (26:15):
Oh, that would be spooky.

Laura Maylene Walter (26:17):
I walked into it a few feet, but that was as far as I was willing to go, because the ground also was littered with broken glass, you know, you just don't know what's in there. It's too dark. But I know some people do go through it. I've also been—years ago, it's different now—but I've been to Centralia in Pennsylvania, the abandoned ghost town where the fires are underground. And there's just something about these places that are so compelling and fascinating and creepy. It's this post-apocalyptic feeling and in your story, it's not that it focuses tightly on a ghost, but different characters kind of converging in Moonville was was really interesting. So it felt like a fitting location for the last story in the collection.

Mary Grimm (26:56):
It's also the longest one.

Laura Maylene Walter (26:57):
Oh is it? Okay.

Mary Grimm (26:59):
I think so. It was at one time longer. I had like another couple of people who came fortuitously to Moonville at the same time, but I decided that I had to cut them out because—this is like a bad reason in a way, although it turned out well and I think it was a good decision. But the reason that I did it was because the story was unsalable. It was too long, you know? And so I cut out, I think their names were...it's so sad. It's like they're existing someplace in like limbo, you know? But I think their names were Kylie and June, I believe. And they were friends who had an interest in the paranormal and craft fairs.

Laura Maylene Walter (27:37):
<laugh> Like you do.

Mary Grimm (27:39):
Of course. Like you do.

Laura Maylene Walter (27:40):
They go together so well. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it is so sad that, I don't know, I feel like lately to publish short fiction, unless you're writing, you know, science fiction, the length is a real issue. It didn't feel like a long story to me. So I don't know. Was it what over like six or 8,000 words?

Mary Grimm (27:57):
Yeah, yeah. And originally it was probably, I think it was like almost 11,000 words before I cut out ooor old Kylie and June.

Laura Maylene Walter (28:05):
There are like two journals that publish stories that long <laugh>. It's tough. Yeah. Well, I was curious about that too, about I guess your approach to publishing short fiction. And so you said all of these were published in various journals. "Up Late" was published in the New Yorker, and you had another story in the New Yorker in I think what, 2019. I can link to that in the show notes. I mean obviously that's like the pinnacle for a fiction writer, but you've also published in a lot of great small journals. So I'm just curious about your approach when you submit your work. Do you have tiers in your mind of different publications or you're just more tailoring it to each story? How do you go about it?

Mary Grimm (28:41):
For a long time, I've sent everything that I write to the New Yorker first and allow them to reject it. Which is what mostly happens. And I don't simultaneously submit when I send it to the New Yorker, although I do every place else. I do have a kind of a tier, I guess informally, of places that publish work that I think is really great. One of them is the Colorado Review, which one of the stories in here is in the Colorado Review. And I've published, I think I've had three stories maybe in the Colorado Review. There are places that I'm always trying to get into and I have not yet gotten into: the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, you know, like they're like way up there. Otherwise it's kind of scattershot really. I just keep sending them out, sending them out, sending them out. I just told a former student of mine who had written a really, really good story in class for me.

Mary Grimm (29:30):
I asked him if he had sent it out and he said he had sent it out to three or four places and that nobody took it. And so he figured that there was something wrong with it and he stopped sending it out. And I said, oh my god, you know, three or four. And so I told him that I had a story that I thought was a pretty good story, it's not in this collection, called "The Freddie Mercury Sex Tapes," which was rejected 57 times before it was published. So, you know, three or four, don't make me laugh.

Laura Maylene Walter (29:57):
Three or four is nothing. I can get that many rejections for one story in one day sometimes. <laugh> One of my stories was in the Kenyon Review, and I think it was rejected 20 times before it got accepted there, that really, really, really great journal.

Mary Grimm (30:11):
Yes, it's not a matter of like logic. The last thing that I had published in the New Yorker had been rejected by five places before I sent it there. I thought it wasn't their kind of thing, which is why I didn't send it originally, but had been rejected by five places and then the New Yorker took it. So, and you kind of feel like: ha ha.

Laura Maylene Walter (30:29):
<laugh>. Exactly. Well, you've mentioned your students a few times, and you taught creative writing and literature for a long time. You already mentioned students might have stories end "it was all a dream." What else, though, about teaching has either inspired your writing or helped your writing? I'm curious about that connection between teaching aspiring writers and your own work that you're doing.

Mary Grimm (30:55):
One thing is that I really loved teaching creative writing. I know that there are some writers who find that it sort of takes away from their own work. And I can understand that because in some ways you're using the same part of your brain, I guess, or the same part of your imagination when you engage with student work. But I really loved it. I liked doing it. One of the things that was really good for me about teaching is that I'm not a thinking writer. I'm not an intellectual writer. I have an associative kind of brain that skips around. And when I started teaching, I had to become more of a thinker about writing because I couldn't just say to students, this is good, this is bad. Actually, I don't want to even want to say that at all, but I couldn't just make quality judgements because this is supposed to be about learning, you know, about getting better.

Mary Grimm (31:41):
So I had to talk about what they were doing in a way that would be clear to them and would help them see how they could take the good parts of their writing and make them better and get rid of the bad parts. One of the things that is often a problem for beginning writers is that they don't know when they have done something good. They can't isolate the really great thing in their story, which is so amazing. From the other things which are more pedestrian or carelessly written. I had to be able to tell them in a way which was clear and also encouraging how they could deal with that story in order to take it up to another level.

Laura Maylene Walter (32:18):
Yeah, no, I do think that is really important, that it's not just about critical feedback about what to quote unquote fix or improve, but sometimes people need to know like where the energy is on the page or what feels different or special. So yeah, that's, that's really great. So your sister's a poet. I know you read each other's work, and so I'm just curious what you would like to share about literary community, like being in a writing group, or how has interaction with other writers or feedback and reading with other writers, how has that influenced your work over the years?

Mary Grimm (32:51):
That's always been really important to me. And here's where we should confess, right? We're in a writing group together.

Laura Maylene Walter (32:57):
We are, we are. Full disclosure,

Mary Grimm (32:59):
I have almost always been in a writing group and I think maybe now the total of writing groups I have been in might be like maybe a half a dozen, possibly. The idea of these little mini literary communities where you have a group of people who are at least moderately interested in your writing and who have expectations, I'm going to bring my story next time. So you're writing toward that event, toward that discussion of your work, I think is like, probably it was more important for me when I started my first writing group because then nobody else was interested in reading my writing at all, you know? But even though now I have more outlets for my writing, it's still important to have this group of like-minded people, people for whom writing is important. And this is something that I think every writer experiences, you're at a party and people say, well hey, what do you do? And if you're brave, you might say, I'm a writer. And they go, well, what have you written? Do you write like articles? Do you have a book? Maybe you want to write my life story. You know, these are lovely people, I should say. Some of them are my relatives, lovely, wonderful people.

Laura Maylene Walter (34:05):
They mean well, they mean well.

Mary Grimm (34:07):
They don't have any idea of what writing is like. That writing is, could we call it like an interface between you and the world? That's not quite right, but it's a way that you experience the world and turn it and then turn it again and turn it outward. They just don't know. So being in a group of people for whom this is like a really crucial and important activity, I think it's really important to a writer.

Laura Maylene Walter (34:29):
And it can make the whole process feel a little more tangible because we're all just sort of doing this thing alone. And then when we try to get published, we're usually met with rejection on most cases. And so just having people who are also engaged in this, it makes it feel more real. And you can talk about it. And I wrote down what you said about being in a writing group "where people are at least moderately interested in your writing." <laugh> That's a new goal of mine. I just need someone who's at least sometimes moderately interested in my writing. I will take it. I will take it. So what would you like to say about what you're working on now? I know you're working on climate change novellas. What would you like to talk about your current work?

Mary Grimm (35:09):
I'm actually working on two things now. Two projects, I guess. One of them is a novel, which is, I think of it as a noir novel, although it's not classic noir in any way, but it has a noirish feel to me, I guess, which is set at Lake Tahoe and had its inception in a short story that was published in the Colorado Review last year, I think called Sierraville. And it's a continuation of that story and an exploration of those two characters. There are two characters, two women who are friends, Ivy and Oli. So that's one thing that I'm working on. And I'm about, I would guess two thirds of the way through that. And then the other thing is the climate change novellas. I completed one and I have plans for there to be four. And I know kind of what the other three are supposed to be about.

Mary Grimm (35:58):
They all take place in Brecksville, which where I lived when I was a teenager. Part of it takes place in our house there, except that it's in a ruined state in the future. The first one chronologically takes place in the 1970s, which is when I think people general, the public, not necessarily scientists, but the general public was just very vaguely starting to become aware of the idea of climate change. It was like a wacky, eccentric idea. So there's that. And then there's one that takes place in the near-ish future, I guess maybe 15 years from now when things have fallen apart a little bit. And then there is a third one that takes place again farther on when things have become much more dire. And then the fourth one is the story of a comic book, which has been or is being written by one of the characters, which takes place in a completely different climate change earth, where the glaciers have come back and it's very cold, but it's extraordinarily popular because when people are sweating and air conditioning is failing, the idea of this land of ice and snow is like romantically appealing to them. And so this comic is immensely popular.

Laura Maylene Walter (37:12):
I love that you work on so many different types of fiction as well. You've got novels in the works and novellas and short fiction, and I know you write a lot of flash too. Are you able to work on different things at the same time? Do you kind of go back and forth between them?

Mary Grimm (37:26):
Sometimes I can do that and sometimes not. It's not as easy, I guess. But I like having this other project in the works or in the wings because I know that not everybody works this way, but I often come to, in a long project, like in a novel, I'll come to a place where I just have no idea, you know, where it's going. And maybe other people it would work to like just keep writing until, you know, you figured out what you were doing. But that does not seem to work very well for me. So I like to be able to go to something else. I got to a place like that with a novel that I'm working on now, like in 2023, late 2023 because I needed to kill a character, or I thought I did, I thought I needed to kill a character and I didn't want to kill that character and I didn't know how to do it. So I just stopped writing for a while and I started working on something else. And it wasn't until I was able to figure out how to deal with that, that I could come back to the novel. But writing flash though is where, you know, most of my experimental work goes now that my flash tends to be much more experimental, but it's also like this kind of fun thing I could do. You know, it's like a little writing vacation and I'm just gonna write something that's like 300 words or 600 words long.

Laura Maylene Walter (38:39):
Right. And it's like cohesive and it's done. It's not like working on a novel for years of trying to untangle the pieces and yeah. Yes,

Mary Grimm (38:46):
It's very relaxing.

Laura Maylene Walter (38:48):
Well, we're almost out of time. So for my last question, I'm going to ask an image-based question on an audio-only podcast, but I'll, I'll link to it for everyone, but I want to hear about the cover of your book. It's a beautiful piece of art on the cover. So can you tell us about that? Did you have a hand in discussing the cover with your publisher? It seems to fit the dreamy tones of the stories perfectly.

Mary Grimm (39:09):
There was a discussion between me and the publisher about the cover, and they originally proposed another artist, and I didn't really like that other artist's work as well so much. And one of the things that bothered me about it was that it just looked sort of religious to me. And even though "transubstantiation" is a religious term, a Catholic term, the stories are not really religious. So, and also they were really gloomy <laugh>. They were really gloomy, kind of like a lot of browns, you know? So I did pick out the one that I liked, or disliked the least, I guess. But it turned out that that artist didn't get back to the publishers. I mean, they contacted him and emailed him several times and he just never got back to them. So they said, well, we're gonna try somebody else. Now I'm feeling really bad because I cannot remember the name of the guy, this guy.

Laura Maylene Walter (39:57):
Well, I'm looking in the book right now. Mark Dennis.

Mary Grimm (40:01):
Yes. Okay.

Laura Maylene Walter (40:01):
It's wonderful. It's got these flowers, sort of a still life of flowers and fruit and either bubbles or glass, glass balls. It really creates a sense of things becoming other things.

Mary Grimm (40:14):
I love it so much. So then they said, well, we're going to find this other artist. And you know, they sent me like a gallery of photos and this was actually the first one. The first one in the gallery, and I loved it immediately. It's both substantial and evanescent. It feels like things are becoming other things. Yeah. And it's also shiny, you know? I like the shininess <laugh>. So yeah, I really just loved it so much. I enthusiastically endorsed it.

Laura Maylene Walter (40:40):
It's perfect for your collection. So listeners, I'll be linking to TRANSUBSTANTIATION. Do you have favorite bookstores that you would like to recommend for listeners to go out and purchase your book?

Mary Grimm (40:53):
Oh, yes. Locally, Loganberry Books and Mac's Backs are my two favorites, both of which I have been lost in and bought more things than I really needed, but I did need them, you know. And also Bookshop.org. Bookshop.org is a great place to buy stuff online. It links to little bookstores, including my daughter's bookstore. My daughter has a bookstore in Logan, Ohio.

Laura Maylene Walter (41:16):
Oh, that's right. Give a shout out to that bookstore too. I'll link to it.

Mary Grimm (41:19):
Her bookstore is called Treehouse Treats and Treasures. It's a combination ice cream shop and bookstore. What could be better <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (41:26):
And close to Moonville, I take it.

Mary Grimm (41:29):
Yes. You could go to Ville and also you could, it's very close to a place where you could go canoeing, which is owned by her ex-husband.

Laura Maylene Walter (41:35):
Canoeing appears in one of your stories. So I wish Page Count, I wish we could organize like literary adventures where we could all go.

Mary Grimm (41:43):
Oh, wouldn't that be so fun? Wouldn't you love that?

Laura Maylene Walter (41:44):
Yeah. Go out in the canoe, get some ice cream, go to Moonville, go to the bookstore. That's a goal for the future for sure.

Mary Grimm (41:52):
This is definitely something that the Lit should be organizing.

Laura Maylene Walter (41:55):
You know what, I'm talking with them later today. We're gonna get on that <laugh> and work it out. Well, I think ending on artwork and bookstores and canoeing, I think that's a perfect note to end on. So Mary, thank you so much for coming on today and talking about your collection. I really appreciate it.

Mary Grimm (42:14):
Thank you, Laura. This was really fun.

Laura Maylene Walter (42:21):
Page Count is presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review for Page Count wherever you get your podcast. Learn more online or find a transcript of this episode at ohiocenterforthebook.org, follow us on Instagram @ohiocenterforthebook or find us on Facebook. If you'd like to get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org and put 'podcast' in the subject line. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks for another chapter of Page Count.