Introduction:
Raised in Ottawa, Ontario, Shannon Robinson holds an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. Robinson received Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, a Hedgebrook Fellowship, a Sewanee Scholarship, and an Independent Artist Award from the Maryland Arts Council. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with her husband and son. The Ill-Fitting Skin (Press 53, Spring 2024) is her debut book of short stories.
Robinson’s stories are uncanny, witty, uncomfortable, and always playful. There’s a woman who gives birth to rabbits. There’s a woman who lets a bird rent out her womb like an apartment. There’s a Choose Your Own Adventure story which shifts from coming-of-age narrative (“To avoid becoming like your mother when you grow up, turn to page 77”) to hallucinatory experimentation (“The Time Bender begins to spin, and a deep whirring drowns out the screams of the villagers, who, at that very moment, have drawn within cudgel’s reach of the module”). Robinson relishes changes in register: sometimes shifting mid-sentence from campy humor to dazzling revelation, and back again. Nancy Drew down the rabbit hole.
We conversed over Zoom in February 2024, I from my living room in Vermont, and she from her bedroom in Baltimore, Maryland. Our conversation ranged from postmodern fiction to horror films, Dungeons & Dragons, Elvira, and Beatrix Potter.
John Barger
JWB: Danielle Evans made this observation about The Ill-Fitting Skin: “Robinson shifts seamlessly between approaching the world with a visceral clarity and building fantasy worlds that illuminate the strangeness of our own.” It seems especially true in the opening story, “Origin Story,” about a mother whose child turns out to be a werewolf. Right from the get-go you prevent us readers from getting our bearings.
SR: At first, I wasn’t sure that “Origin Story” was the right choice to start off the collection. I thought it would risk losing the reader because it’s fantastical. Sometimes that can be a tougher entry, a harder sell than realism. People want to feel a little more grounded. But my agent, Amy Bishop-Wycisk—she has a great editorial eye—convinced me: with “Origin Story,” the name itself suggests it should go first. And it does set the tone for the book, which I think is preoccupied with nurturing and various failures surrounding nurturing.
JWB: I love the balance you strike between real and fantastical. “Origin Story” begins with the son biting the mother. When the kid turns out to be an actual werewolf, I took that to be a metaphor for, or exploration of, neurodiversity, perhaps autism. But you let the story off-leash, away from the literal.
SR: I was moved by something Kelly Link said in an interview. She talks about the desirability of having a capacious metaphor. You want your story to have a metaphorical dimension; you don’t want it to be just simply a one-to-one correspondence—a limited allegory. The way Link describes it, the reader shouldn’t feel like there’s a magic decoder ring that will unlock the story, providing one definitive meaning. I wanted the story to suggest not just anything, but many things. It can suggest that the child is neurodivergent, or that people are pushing some kind of diagnosis, some kind of pathology on this kid who is difficult, who’s acting out. But it’s also about parents feeling like they’re completely at sea. Under the best of circumstances, parenting can seem fraught. How do you manage a child who is challenging, troubling, and alienating? In this story, the child is being cast as monstrous. A parent’s identity can get caught up in that—they feel like the monster, like the failure. And in this story, it turns out that, yes, the kid is an actual monster. [laughs]
JWB: From a literary perspective, the mother is unreliable, and—as in many of your stories, in the best possible way—disarming.
SR: The mother, like the son, is a “monster.” That’s where it comes from. She’s his villain origin story. It’s all on her: or at least, that’s the way she’s made to feel. Writing this story, I thought about the ways in which mothers can be shamed, alongside their children—I’ve felt that. When my brother read this story, he said he felt it was in part about him, about his growing up with ADHD or “hyperactivity” as it was called then. There wasn’t a lot of sympathy for kids in the ’80s who had any sort of different psychological makeup. And that had a profound influence on him, and vicariously on me. That history was definitely in the background—consciously, unconsciously—as I wrote this story. In some ways “Origin Story” is a fantastical portrait of my brother’s experience.
JWB: I got the sense that the stories in The Ill-Fitting Skin were autobiography, but I also enjoyed the feeling of the author constantly pulling away from the real, toward ineffable, mystical spaces.
Shannon Robinson
SR: I’m interested in grafting autobiography to the fantastical. Which seems paradoxical, right? I’m not aware if you know, but I’m not a werewolf living on a werewolf reserve with my son. [laughs] I guess my question is often, how do we talk about things that defy easy articulation? The fantastical seems like a great way to do that. To say, this is something that’s difficult to pin down: I’m going to reach beyond this world into something else. Into the magical, the supernatural, the otherworldly.
JWB: Can you speak to your influences? There’s so much quirky, gallows humor in this book. And slapstick. Did you watch a lot of TV as a kid?
SR: Yeah. [laughs] Growing up, I was a huge consumer of crappy sitcoms—stuff like M*A*S*H and Three’s Company and Facts of Life. And I loved Elvira’s Movie Macabre, where Elvira would play these B-movies and talk over them. Bad horror films fascinated me. Classic horror, too, like The Changeling, Dead of Night, and The Stepford Wives. As a little kid, I was really into Beatrix Potter. She’s a Victorian ghoul! She has these delicate, beautifully wrought pictures of animals that are quasi-anthropomorphized. That might seem very twee, but the stories are all about being predators and prey. [laughs] That’s definitely an early influence, along with Choose Your Own Adventures—I read every one I could get my hands on. And the novelist Beverly Cleary was another early influence: Ramona Quimby, in Cleary’s Ramona books, was a messy female protagonist, who both longs for the feminine but sort of imperfectly embodies it. Later on, Margaret Atwood was a major influence. When I had mono as a teenager, my school’s headmistress—who I was kind of in awe of—came by with a bag full of books by Atwood. I read them all. They just blew my mind. I’d never read books like hers. I think Atwood was playing with genre at a time before that became mainstream. She was elevating what people thought of as non-serious writing. I remember reading Lady Oracle, which is about a woman who becomes sort of a bright light on the Canadian poetry scene. She’s this poet with a mystical bent, but her secret persona is that she writes women’s bodice-rippers. [laughs] And Lady Oracle includes sections of her bodice-rippers, these cheesy historical romances. They graft right onto the book’s themes … and they’re really funny. It’s genius.
JWB: While reading your stories I kept thinking of Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” You address the familiar in innovative ways. Defamiliarizing them. In “Birdie” there’s a bird renting out the womb of the main character. I took this to be about miscarriages, and grief. But slant.
SR: At the start of “Birdie,” I wanted that moment to be incredibly weird: when the main character says, “Oh, yes, you can live inside me!” It defies us being able to say exactly how it works. You have to sign up for it and go with it. In Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” you can’t really pin down what the bug—the Ungeziefer—looks like, but you go with it. I hope that the emotions in “Birdie” are convincing enough, and that you can just picture the bird in the space without being overly preoccupied with logistics. We simultaneously picture this going on inside the woman, and yet somehow, it’s outside the womb as well. But that’s pregnancy, right? Profound things are going on inside you, and you feel that, you connect with it. But at the same time, you’re watching yourself go through this. It seems impossible. Pregnancy seems like an impossible thing.
JWB: While writing, do you consider your reader?
SR: I always read my drafts out loud. If I can’t get through the sentences without stumbling, that means something is rhythmically lacking. And awkwardness on a sentence level is often an indication that I’m not clear on what I’m trying to say on an emotional level. I think about what’s going to be entertaining for the reader, what’s going to be funny—but I also think about how not to make it seem like I am trying to tell jokes. People ask what our weaknesses are as writers. Mine is wanting to be liked. It’s important not to push the reader into an artificial space where it seems like I’m quipping, or glib. And I fret over how to get to the important moments more efficiently: am I spelling it out too much? Or am I assuming too much? Maybe some things need to be told rather than shown. And then when you have to tell, telling is difficult because, God, you don’t want to waste the reader’s time. It can’t seem contrived.
JWB: To me “The Rabbits” does not feel contrived, though it’s about a woman giving birth to real rabbits!
SR: Those are real rabbits.
JWB: If I understand, “The Rabbits” is set in 1709, the date of your fabulous epigraph (“Ye Pregnant Wives, whose Wish it is, and Care / To bring your Issue, and to breed it Fair, / On what you look, on what you think, beware”).
SR: The epigraph is actually from a book published a few years earlier than the events of the story. It refers to this theory that was widely held in the eighteenth century by the medical community, that whatever pregnant women looked at would influence the physical appearance of their children. So insidious! But yes, Mary Toft was an actual huckster of that era, although she appears to have had only one notorious caper in 1726. There were all kinds of broadsides written about her—about Mary Toft, Rabbit Mother. She was a con artist who simulated giving birth to rabbits … the physical details are kind of gruesome. People were taken in, prestigious figures in the medical community. Later, when the hoax was exposed, she was sent to prison for a time, and people lost their reputations. I thought it would be interesting to write a story where Mary experienced the rabbit births as a miracle, rather than her being a fraud.
JWB: That’s how I read it. I didn’t think she was huckster. I love the ending. She’s in prison and I felt for her. It’s a breathless, gorgeous ending.
SR: Maybe she should have been released from prison and had an actual child—like the real Mary Toft did. In my story, Mary hasn’t been able to conceive. She’s had multiple miscarriages. That’s part of the reason she’s so delighted with the rabbit births: it says that she can actually have children, of a kind. She gets her wish, but they’re bunnies. But they’re her bunnies. Not so ideal, right? It turns into a nightmare—that’s what I was writing into. I know there are a lot of women who feel like giving birth was traumatic. Women whose birth plans were ignored. They didn’t feel in control. I was very interested in that. Years ago, my mom was an obstetrics nurse. She said that she sometimes worked with another nurse, an older woman, who wanted to save these women from sloppy episiotomies and being roughly handled, so she would not wake up the young male intern, and she would deliver the baby herself. She would claim it was what’s called a “precipitous birth,” which means it just happened. “Another precipitous birth,” she’d say. She took these professional risks because she wanted to spare the women from being strapped down and shaved and treated … not with great respect. That said, I had a really good experience giving birth. But I know a lot of women haven’t.
JWB: I love the way you reveal characters. In “You Are Now in a Dark Chamber,” Megan wants to be part of a certain friend group, and needs to play Dungeons & Dragons with a group of boys to get there. One of the boys, at one point, is lighting matches and flicking them into the grass.
SR: And we all know that kid, right?
JWB: I was that kid!
SR: He’s “playing with fire,” but it’s also just matches, right? He’s not setting the world on fire. He so wants to seem tough. He is not powerful, but he likes the idea of it a lot. [laughs] My stories typically center on female characters, and so I really wanted to write a story with male protagonists. And I liked the character of Megan so much that she could have taken over the story. It was hard for me to not protect her—I had to let something terrible happen to her, and it hurt. I rewrote the ending a few times, and now she’s not as forgiving. In the original version, she’s showing George a picture she made of herself as an elf warrior, angling for a compliment, for some redemptive connection. There’s this weird moment of semi-erotic tension. If it were a movie, they would have kissed: a gesture towards 1980s films like Stand by Me and Goonies. Instead, she essentially tells him he can take his non-apology and fuck off.
JWB: Now for my corny question. What is your hope for fiction writing?
SR: I hope it survives and isn’t swallowed by AI. I was looking through a series of would-you-rather questions to use as an icebreaker for my intermediate fiction class: one of the questions was, would you rather live in a robot or a zombie apocalypse? As if we’re not in the robot apocalypse, right now! [laughs] Maybe that’s a facetious thing to say. But I find it disconcerting that there are going to be computers that can write books—that can do so already. And so there might be a perception that we don’t need these stupid meat puppets anymore. [laughs] Maybe there’ll be a whole series of books written by AI: thrillers or romance novels or what have you. That’s where it will start. And maybe there’ll still be an interest in stories written by humans.
JWB: Human writing will become a niche market.
SR: Artisanal! [laughs] … So, in the long view, that’s what I hope. But right now, at the same time, it feels like a good time to be a writer. There are all kinds of platforms for writers, online places to share your work and discover great writing, lots of brilliant books being written. That’s going on at the same time while I worry about robots taking over our melting planet. You know: war, starvation, capitalism as death cult, climate disaster, all that going on. [laughs] But I’m also like, “Damn, that was a good short story collection.” Or, “What a beautiful poem. I think I’m going to share this poem.” This is how we survive.
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