Owning Anger & Writing Grace: An Interview with Claudia Monpere

Q. Congrats on “After,” a story that impressed all of us at NFFR. School mass shootings are a difficult topic to write about. What was the starting point?

I have always loved Kathy Fish’s incredible story “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” and feel so passionately about the unhealthy obsession with owning firearms in the United States. I wondered if it would be possible to write something with anything like the power of Kathy Fish’s story. The impetus for the story was hearing an outrageous quote by a politician that had to do with the power of prayer and arming teachers. I was determined to write a story that gave the children, both the live children and the ghost children, agency.

A lot of my writing is very dark and I have been trying to write more grace and hope. But I want it to be earned. That’s what I was trying to accomplish with “After.” I wanted the strength of the vines and the way they carried the children to symbolize brave activism, because planting gardens isn’t enough.

This story was unusual in that I wrote the entire draft on the plane to Philadelphia. I often get ideas when I’m outdoors and I’d been in the garden the day before, trying to separate the living vines from those that had died. They’re so strong and they curl so tightly to each other. I think my time in the garden really helped to shape the story. Looking back at my first draft, most of what I wrote on the plane made it into the final version. The one thing I cut was the amount of produce – I  was having way too much fun with the vegetables! The final line, “waiting for the harvest” came during revisions.

Q. Where do you normally write?

Ironically, I have an office for the first time in my life, but I write in the kitchen because there’s so much light and there are oaks and cedars outside. This is going to sound weird, but another place I write is in my car. I have an incredibly long commute to Santa Clara University, where I teach creative writing and first year writing. I love teaching, especially students who hate to write or think they can’t write well, because through working with them they can see some success and find joy in writing. Lately the commute has been 2.5 hours each way, and I commute 2-3 days a week. Often traffic is at a complete standstill. I always have a large notebook next to me, and I try to use some of my commute time for story ideas, revisions, or lines of a story. It’s really helped me. Once I wrote an entire essay in traffic jams!

Q. How did you get into writing flash?

I’ve written in all the genres all my life, but I was focusing on poetry and short stories until a few years ago. I was working on a novel that was driving me crazy, and as summer loomed, I was getting stressed because I’d have all this time when I should be working on it. I got some great advice from a friend, who asked about the last time I was happy and excited about writing. I told her I’d written a flash and it was so much fun. And she said,  “What would happen if you gave yourself the whole summer to just write flash?” That was three years ago and I’ve been in Smokelong Fitness ever since. I really fell in love with the form and the flash community. There’s something so special and supportive about flash writers.

“I love the freedom that fiction gives me to address issues like mental health and abuse, but to do it on my terms, to make up the characters and the plot. Fiction gives us distance from our lives, a new way to explore things that have happened.”

Q. You’ve written a lot of creative non-fiction (CNF) in recent years. What inspires you to write fiction and what draws you to CNF? 

When I begin, I don’t always know if a piece is going to be fiction or CNF. I typically write fiction so that’s how I start. Like many people, I’ve had a lot of trauma in my life. I love the freedom that fiction gives me to address issues like mental health and abuse, but to do it on my terms, to make up the characters and the plot. Fiction gives us distance from our lives, a new way to explore things that have happened.

I’m drawn to CNF when I’m trying to figure out something about my life or the people in it. That certainly happened when I was writing about my brother, who died last year. I love the process of moving from raw emotion to dealing with craft. Many of us write CNF about painful things and the early drafts can be hard to write, even though the trauma may have happened years ago. The process of thinking about readers and how to make the story meaningful for them helps me to distance myself from the emotions. I focus on how to convey emotion without naming the emotion, how to create a structure that’s a little unusual, what details to include, because of course when we’re writing about our lives there is a tsunami of details. I love the craft of writing. It makes me really happy. I also love dark humor; it’s what gets many of us through life.

Q. You’ve also written collaborative flash. What was that like for you?

Yes, I love collab. I wrote “Teeth” with Patricia Bidar and Francine Witte. We had so much fun with that. I was bubbling over with enthusiasm at AWP and I proposed the idea over lunch. We took turns writing sentences and then at one point said, right we need to figure out how to end this story. My collab with Kim Steutermann Rogers and Amy Marques was very different. For “Owl Night,” we started asserting opinions early in the process. We had Zoom calls to sort out characters and their relationships to each other, and then again to narrow down the plot points. Kim has a background in science so she introduced a particular kind of owl that Amy and I fell in love with. I loved both processes and the stories we wrote.

Q. Are you a fan of writing rules? Do you follow or deliberately break any?

I tell my students there are no rules about writing except write what will make the reader want to keep reading. I feel like there should be no rules for creative writing. I will tell you one rule that I heard in my MFA program that really irritated me. The professor said not to have a story where most of it takes place on a phone, because it’s too passive. Ever since, I’ve wanted to write a phone call story to prove him wrong.

Q. Two of your CNF stories that really stand out for me are “The Master of Sugar” and “The Little List of Boys and Men Who Vanished.” They’re both extraordinary pieces with innovative structures. How did they come about?

Sometimes I know the structure for a story at the beginning, sometimes it takes a number of unsuccessful drafts for it to emerge. “The Master of Sugar” was a story that took me years to write. I’d written two long essays about my husband and his suicide that I never submitted, because they were extremely long and messy. But once I started writing flash, I thought maybe there’s something in those essays that could work in a shorter piece. I came up with the idea of writing it in segments while I was driving. I thought, what if I wrote a tiny piece of the story as a play between me and the two police officers in my husband’s garden? Writing about my marriage through the lens of flash made a huge difference. Then the idea of Mousetrap for another segment came to me – I was obsessed with Mousetrap because there are all these steps that always produce the same outcome.

The segments in “The Master of Sugar” mirror some of the different strategies I tried – friendships, health kicks, food – to ease my husband’s depression. It got to the point where I was at a supermarket buying apples for him and trying to figure out which apples would be better for his mental health! It was nuts.

I also think the segmented structure helped me to explore a wider range of emotions than a conventional narrative would have allowed. I wanted to get in my anger at him – for how he treated me, for not getting treatment – but also my love for him and the joy, like when we were at Bass Lake swimming and hiking. I also wanted to get in my confusion – how can someone who has so much going for him just give up on life?

I think as women we are so socialized not to express anger. Anger is such a tricky thing. I have been in situations with family where the anger was so explosive it was scary. All my life, I have cried a lot and it wasn’t until I was older that I realized that crying was my go-to for everything that I felt bad about. Then I was able to pinpoint more precise emotions: anger, sorrow, shame, regret.

For “The Little List of Boys and Men Who Vanished,” I came up with that structure pretty quickly. I had been wanting to write about the weirdness of being eighteen years old and having so much to deal with – two deaths and one disappearance of men I had fallen in love with. I wondered if I could combine the three of them, and a list structure came to me immediately.

Q. What are you working on currently?

I am writing a lot of speculative fiction, motivated in part by the cruel Alice-in-Wonderland world the United States is becoming since the election. I’m also trying to decide which novella in flash idea to pursue: one about a mother with hoarding behavior and her daughter, and one that’s speculative.

Claudia Monpere writes and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her flash appears in The Forge, Craft, Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Trampset, Atlas and Alice, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in such places as Cutleaf Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, and Hunger Mountain. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review and the 2024 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. Her story, “Solar Flare” received the 2023 Smokelong workshop prize and appears in Best Small Fictions 2024. Find her at claudiamonpere.com and @claudiamonpere.bsky.social.