Robert Earle’s short fiction has appeared in more than 100 literary journals. He is the author of She Receives the Night (short stories); Nights in the Pink Motel (a nonfiction account of a year in Iraq); and The Way Home (novel). He also was contributing editor of Identities in North America: Search for Community. For twenty-five years, he was an American diplomat. He has degrees from Princeton and Johns Hopkins. He was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania and now lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Randal Eldon Greene: Hello, Robert Earle.
Your collection, She Receives the Night, is a masterful book. All of your stories in it are about women. Did you set out to write a collection concerning the female sex and gender or did this theme of being a woman just pop out from amidst the stories you've written and published?
Robert Earle: I have not done an analysis of how many stories I have written about women and how many I have written about men. I guess the distribution is about 50-50. One day I thought that some of my stories about women would make a strong collection. That was the origin of She Receives the Night. The stories I included were written and published over a number of years with no thought of ultimately bringing them all together.
Randal Eldon Greene: I am wondering, when did you began writing and when did you see your first publications?
Robert Earle: I began writing short stories when I was a teenager and have continued writing short stories ever since. My first stories were published in school and university literary magazines and then I had one called “The Violent Dreams of George Spain” published in Mississippi Review, which continues to be a great publication with a national following. After that, earning a living and family responsibilities got in the way for a while, but eventually I began publishing in literary magazines on a regular basis. The short story market now is much larger than it was when I started out; online journals give all kinds of work opportunities to be read. My view has always been to keep writing and keep sending things out. Persistence matters. It’s absolutely true that editorial choices are a “subjective” matter, as rejection notes often say, so I scan calls for submissions in Poets & Writers and try to match what I’ve done with a given publication’s stated interest and preferences. But I don’t think about where a story might be published beforehand. That comes later, sometimes much later. I have had stories accepted on the day of submission, and I have had stories sent back to me with a “no thanks” many times. If I think a story needs some tinkering before it’s likely to find a home, I almost always start by seeing if I can shorten it. This can be tricky, but looking over a story some months after I think I have “finished” it usually produces good results.
Randal Eldon Greene: You have this wonderful line early in the story "Monkey Girl" about an artist who makes wood engravings. It read: 'Each provocative print was unexpected, but permanent once seen.' I feel like this is a great way to describe my own experience with She Receives the Night. What do you think is the essential kind of thing that a story needs to make it both provocative and permanent once read?
Robert Earle: Making a story both provocative and permanent once read isn’t easy, and there surely are many ways to do it, but to me this question focuses on what I would call framing a story. In other words, what is the best way to begin a story and what is the best way to end it? I would point to two ways of beginning a story that might be provocative and two ways of ending a story that might achieve permanence in a reader’s mind.
Beginning a story in media res can be quite provocative because something is going on about which the reader lacks information; keeping some information back as the story unfolds also can be provocative, spurring a reader’s engagement and curiosity. But there is another way of beginning a story that I find provocative, namely, offering a few paragraphs that don’t seem to be headed anywhere in particular…and then coupling these paragraphs to the storyline at hand, i.e., the action. At first the opening paragraphs may bewilder, but that moment of linking them to the storyline can provide a stimulating jolt.
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