WORD

Shannon Cain’s new short story collection, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, comes highly recommended by Jenn. Cain pushes her characters to the edge and then over, exploring the vagaries of life — in particular love and politics — with a keen eye for the absurd.

WORD: Let’s start with the cover of your book — how much involvement did you have it with it? It’s pretty racy as covers go!
 
SC: I’m so glad you asked, I just adore this cover. The University of Pitsburgh Press very kindly allowed me to suggest my own designer: the magnificent Lisa Bowden, my friend and colleague from Kore Press. She founded the press almost 20 years ago, and I’ve been a huge admirer of her work. When I worked on staff there with Lisa — I began at Kore before any of these stories were even written, never mind published — we used to daydream about my book coming out and her designing the cover, a crazy far-fetched vision. But then it happened!

WORD: It’s very striking! There’s not a lot of nudity on US covers; did you worry about bookstores having trouble displaying it?

SC: Striking and racy, yes. I doubt it will show up at Costco. If the wondrous happens and a chain bookstore wants it, I guess that’s a bridge we’ll cross. Maybe a brown wrapper covering that breast? But that would be a shame; it’s a gorgeous breast.

WORD: They did something like that with Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir; it shipped with a wrapper covering the nipple.

SC: Exactly. I feel great affinity with her. But honestly, a bigger problem is getting short stories in stores, never mind what the cover looks like—

WORD: True. Although I feel like the wind is shifting a bit on that. We handsell short story collections quite a bit.

SC: I’ve been hearing this, and it’s tremendously encouraging. Maybe I’ll be one of the lucky ones who happens to be writing in the “right” genre at the right time.

WORD: In the title story, an American woman stumbles upon a tribe apparently made up entirely of sexy bisexuals (although of course this turns out not to be entirely true). I know I’ve read about real societies that have unconventional arrangements — was this story based on one in particular?

SC: Actually it was sparked by a story by Stacey Richter called “Island of the Boyfriends,” in which a woman is stranded on a desert island populated entirely with adoring men. She manages to screw up all her relationships anyway and winds up living as a hermit on the hill. I was interested in having a sort of conversation with that story and with the “alternate society” genre. Also I was (and continue to be) interested in the ins and outs and productive complexities of bisexuality. There’s so much to explore there … the duality, the pitfalls, the joys. I’m a social justice activist, too, so I’m all about finding ways to describe other (more generous, kinder, accepting) ways of seeing the world.

WORD: It makes for a neat contrast with the other stories — in which people are behaving pretty unconventionally, but it’s a more self-conscious form of behavior. There’s that tension between knowing that you’re subverting rules, verses participating in a set of subversive rules.

SC: Right. [“The Necessity of Certain Behaviors”] is a Stranger in a Strange Land story — so the reader gets to see the behaviors as unconventional, along with the character. And yes, in the end I hope it becomes clear that normality is in the eye of the society in which it exists. This story also appeared in an anthology of required reading for undergrads at the University of Arizona, and I got to visit classes and talk to them about it. It was huge fun; this invented society sort of blows their minds.

WORD: I bet! It also reminded me of an Ursula LeGuin story called “Mountain Ways.” Only she’s using science fiction to get the point across, rather than contemporary realism. Are you deliberate about your genre choices, in writing?

SC: I’m deliberate about genre in terms of what’s literary and what isn’t, but within the wider scope of literary fiction, I don’t think too much about it. But still, my stories do tend toward a sort of extreme, plot-wise. I’m very interested in what happens at the margins.

WORD: Right — which also lends them a nice touch of the absurd.

SC: If there’s any genre or tradition working within my stories, it’s political fiction. I admire the great novelists and storytellers whose work changed the way we see the world. Vonnegut, Morrison, Garcia Marquez, Cisneros.

WORD: Clearly writing is a very political act for you. Do you identify as a feminist, or a leftist? Or something else-ist?

SC: Oh yeah, I’m a proud feminist-leftist bisexual loudmouth. A lot of people are bothered by the idea of adopting labels (as is my character in “Necessity …”) but I’m ok with identifying who I am using a sort of convenient shorthand. Especially with feminism — despite its historic failures of inclusion, I think it’s okay and even important to own the language, and to continue to reinvent those definitions.

Cain also has an interesting performance art/novel project in the works, stay tuned for more on that!