by Hannah Grieco
You always know when you’ve encountered a story by Melissa Ragsly. The ache she leaves you with is distinctive, her mastery of language so smooth and effortless that you don’t even realize you’ve been wounded until the end of the story. If you long for vulnerable, sad truths–Ragsly is the author to read.
Her new collection We Know This Will All Disappear came out from PANK in March, gathering high praise despite the difficult launch timing. And here you’ll find some of her best-known stories, connected with a voice she describes as “confessional.” I read the entire collection in one day, unable to put it down, then found myself returning for weeks to specific stories that called to me depending on my mood, on how wistful or angry or defiant I felt that day.
Recently I got to speak with Melissa about We Know This Will All Disappear, confessional storytelling, and the process of putting together a flash collection.
Barrelhouse: How long did it take for We Know This Will All Disappear to form, from first story to publishing?
Melissa Ragsly: The first story I wrote was Tattoo, which was 2014. I realized in 2019 that I had enough for a collection, so it took a solid five years of experimentation to get the stories together for the collection. It didn't occur to me I was writing a collection because I’m just not a good planner like that. I was at a point where I figured I had enough stories, let me look at them and see how they work together and I think in doing that, I realized what made them fit together as a collection and I think that’s voice. A confessional way that these pieces are written and how the characters are trying to admit things to themselves.
BH: What do you think drove you to write so many pieces that felt confessional? Your voice, even as different characters, often feels (reads?) so vulnerable that I often had to remind myself that I wasn’t reading creative nonfiction!
MR: I’m willing to be vulnerable and honest. Because whatever I write, whoever reads it will have a relationship with it, an extension of me. Do you want to spend time reading and thinking about things that are emotionally withholding? I think I’ve had plenty of that. In real life and in picking up a book you put right back down. Withhold in plot, in action, make a reader deduce and fill in gaps, but make the work grounded in voice. So create that voice that feels like it’s telling you secrets. All the secrets. Short stories and flash, you have this brief time with a reader, it’s like an affair, like an hour in a hotel room and you have to put it all out there before you tuck it all in and go back to your life.
BH: What was the first story you *knew* would be in this collection?
MR: I think it was the first story, “All You’ve Heard Is True,” a story that eventually became a flash after a long time of trying to figure it out and thinking it would be more traditional length, 5000 words or so. I had written and published a few flashes, but I think with this one, I realized that in envisioning a longer story but condensing it down, I was accessing the character at a level I understood better. And I think once I saw that character, someone who runs away from her life , basically to get away from the things that had happened to her as a child, an uncontrollable situation. She ran far, out to the edge of the country, all the way to California. It doesn’t matter where to go to escape things you don’t want to deal with, their shadow follows you. Because the shadow is you. And so I looked at all the other stories I’d written and that same shadow element felt present. In reading Chelsea Hodson’s book, Tonight I’m Somebody Else, she touched on this idea of a shadow life and that stayed with me as well. It feels like there is something about these characters that follows them, but it’s an inaccessible thing, always disappearing when you turn to catch it. It’s a grief for your own life.
BH: That ache, that grief for your own life, is so relatable for many of us. When you write a story, for example “That Motherfucker” where the main character is experiencing a pregnancy loss, how do you approach such big subjects in such small spaces? That story reached out widely to grief, shouted it to the world—in less than 2 and half pages! Talk to us about condensing it down.
MR: I think, again, voice is really key here because you can get across a big concept, feeling, or some truth larger than you can explain in two pages. The way a story is told through voice feels like a waterline and there’s always this dip under and breath up. It’s treading that line constantly, maybe that’s where tension comes from, the holding and taking of breath. That grief is all the water below, it’s deep, it’s dark, you can’t see shit. But when you're close to the top, treading above, that’s when the character is dealing with the action of the story. She’s having an ectopic pregnancy, she’s bleeding and cramping, alone in an emergency room and she’s dealing with this ridiculous thing, she can’t get one boot off, it’s stuck. While she’s dealing with the bad timing of everything, all that grief is there below, but the distractions here, the distraction of life, is always there to bring you above surface. I think any good flash has a way of condensing down all the elements of a story. Flash is a marinated story. Even if the story has a character at the surface taking those breaths, they’ve been in the water for a long time, soaking it in.
BH: Were there any stories of yours that you loved, but just didn’t quite work with the others? That you were really sad to leave out?
MR: I wasn’t sad to leave stories out. There were a few that I didn't think were strong enough. Ones that were published, but I still didn't think were ready to be included. I have a story from years ago about the Penn State sexual abuse scandal, Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno, and it was published but god I’d love to redo that story. At some point in the future. I don’t think tonally, it would have fit in this collection. It was written before any of these stories and I think I was still trying to figure out how to write a story only I could write. When I read that one, I read me trying to copy some other voice, and I’m not good at doing that. I remember one of the first writing classes I took when I was committing to being a prose writer. It was formatted so that we would read an excerpt from a story and then write our own story in that same voice. It was based on mimicry. So if it was third person, distant and cold and the language was sparse, we’d have to use that voice in our piece. I could see the value in those exercises, but it never felt comfortable or like I was making progress. I don’t want to write to mimic other people. So the Penn State story never felt like me.
BH: Is this collection in *your* voice, or is it just the *your voice* for this one book?
MR: I think that my voice does tend to be that “I’m telling you a secret, this is just between us” sort of one. It’s a default perhaps. I’m working on a novel now and it’s multi-POV, all first person. It’s been an eye-opening thing to write these different characters experiencing the same story and manipulating the voice so that they are distinctive, not only in tone but how much would they reveal? I think a writer can have a style, a voice, that they are comfortable with, but it’s never static. It has to fit in. I am flashing back now to playing that game, Perfection. You have a minute to put all the right yellow plastic shapes back into the right holes otherwise they pop up and scatter around the room and you lose. That’s like writing a novel.
BH: Talk to us about the process you went through to getting “We Know This Will All Disappear” published?
MR: I put together a collection that included both the short stories and the flash pieces and separately, I put together a chap book that was flashes that fit together on their own. So I had two things to submit that had overlapping stories. I didn't want to search for an agent with a collection, I know that hurdle and I figured it would be more suited to small publishers and contests. I gave myself a few months of submitting and thought if it didn't get selected I would just take more time to work on it. Maybe put it away for a year while I work on other things. The chapbook version was a semifinalist and then the full collection was a finalist at two contests at the same time and I got the call from Pank in December. So it was I think about six months from the time I decided to gather all the stories together, name it, order it and read through it one last time and submit it until it got accepted. Six months to get accepted, five years to write.
BH: Tell us about the project you’re working on now?
MR: As I mentioned, it’s a novel, multi-POVs. It’s set in England 1990 about musicians first forming bands and booking shows and trying to be taken seriously. When I first started writing and plotting out what I thought would happen, this was going to span seven years to a whole decade, and now it’s about seven days. I can accomplish and touch on all the same things but it’s condensed and more intimate, so yeah, I guess that’s my wheelhouse.
BH: What book is next to your bed right now?
MR: I’m reading a lot at once, it takes me forever to finish a book. But two right now that are top-of-pile are Perfect Tunes by Emily Gould and Person/a by Elizabeth Ellen. I was attracted to Gould’s book because it is centered on a female musician, which I’m writing about. What I didn't realize when I started reading was that it’s a book that spans a lot of years, the character drifts away from creating and then circles back to it, something I was sort of thinking of when first drafting my book, until I condensed the time and decided to focus on the exhilaration of that pre-career period. I felt like I couldn’t write a story that took place over such a long period of time and keep the flow and pace charging ahead and that is the trick of Perfect Tunes, it keeps moving forward and is effortlessly absorbing. It’s been the first book I have almost finished in quarantine! Person/a I am savoring. It’s delicious. I’m wrenching on every page. It makes me ache. It takes longing and regret and squeezes it out of every god-damned word. I love it.
BH: We appreciate you taking the time to speak with us! And one final question, perhaps the most important one. What’s your favorite Swayze movie?
MR: My favorite Patrick Swayze movie is Point Break because it makes me feel like I can surf and rob a bank. These are attainable goals for me by merely watching the film! Someone hands me a presidential mask and a board right now? I'm golden. Dirty Dancing is great, but it does not make me feel like I could run and leap and someone will catch me. And I nominate Point Break not only for best Swayze movie, but for best Swayze hair.