Full of Lit: Anna Leventhal’s First Collection is Pretty Sweet

There are so many great short story writers that one month doesn’t seem enough time to fit them all in; case in point, we’re on our second last Full of Lit contributor, Anna Leventhal, and she’s been called "a one-of-a-kind talent" by Lee Henderson and Tamara Faith Berger says her stories "…’know the things energy can do’." Sweet Affliction, from Invisible Publishing, may be her first full collection but she’s already proven herself as a talented short story writer with a Journey Prize nod in 2008. Get to know Anna and Sweet Affliction a little better below.

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Sweet Affliction provides a series of brief windows into the imagined lives, the imagined inter worlds, of a host of characters who reflect back aspects of the reader. Reading these stories will make you feel things, and remember things – dread, regret – you might even laugh out loud. You might not be like the characters in any of the pieces collected in Sweet Affliction, but you will definitely be able to read yourself into/onto that pantheon, and it will be a pleasure.

The Full of Lit featured story from Sweet Affliction is “Helga Volga” and it’s just really good short fiction. There’s no other way to say it. It has punch, it has economy, and it will really stay with you.

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We asked the author… Anna Leventhal

Tell us what your collection is about in 140 characters or less.
"There is no rest, really there is no rest, there is just a joyous torment all your life of doing the wrong thing." – Derek Walcott

The even-shorter version is #norest #joyoustorment #wrongthing

Do you have a favourite story in your collection? One that gave you more trouble than the others?
I wouldn’t say it’s my favourite but I still get a lot of delight out of “Last Man Standing,” which makes it special since I often can’t stand rereading my own work. But that story took about as long to write as it did to type, and the revisions I made in later drafts were minor. I don’t like being mystical about writing, but it did almost seem to materialize fully-formed on the page, as though from another dimension. I don’t really feel like I worked for it, which is probably why I can’t call it a favourite. More like a freakbaby I’m grateful for.

“Wellspring” was a real medusa of a story, full of tangled snake-heads and every time I killed one two more sprung up in its place. I fought it through what felt like a hundred drafts. I still don’t know who won.

Did you consciously decide to be a short story writer — or did the format choose you?
I think of myself as a writer first and a short story writer second, and I don’t write exclusively short stories. It’s more like I think of short stories as a craft to which I’m applying myself as a writer. I had been writing stories since before I could technically write (I used to dictate stories to the very patient workers at my nursery school – god love a montessori) but it’s always been more about language and storytelling than the short story form itself. It just happens to be the best form for the stories I want to tell.

Who is your favourite short story writer and why?
Too many to choose. Grace Paley, Amy Hempel, Denis Johnson, Greg Hollingshead, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Miranda July. They exploit the medium to its maximum (ha). Each has a completely unique narrative voice that is still supple enough to be applied to a range of situations and characters, so that each story stands alone but also fits into a robust body of work.

What makes short stories so different (besides the obvious) than other writing formats?
The thing people always say about short stories is that you have to be economical and you can’t get away with much, but I think you can get away with a lot. With short stories you’re able to riff on something – a narrative voice or an unusual conceit – that would get tiresome or bogged down in a longer form. Like the central conceit of my story “Moving Day,” that on July 1st, by munincipal law, everyone has to move – it wouldn’t hold up for an entire novel, it’d turn into surrealism or else you’d have to cram in a bunch of logistical details so it could hold water, and then it would just be bad fantasy. But in a short story you don’t have to worry about how your characters got to Mars or what they were doing before they met in a falling elevator. You just get to mash them together and see what happens. You can also run with a narrative voice that might be irritating for a whole novel. I don’t know that I would want to read four hundred pages from the POV of the narrator in Paley’s “The Loudest Voice” but it’s so beautiful and perfect for twenty.

I also think it’s a much more sound-based form of writing, closer to poetry, at least for me. When you’re not worrying about things like character arc and turning point and inciting incident you can really focus on the tone of your story, the feeling and texture of the language and the way the characters interact. It’s much more gut-level and instinctive than long-form writing. Not that all short story writers don’t care about character arcs or inciting incidents, or that all long-form writers do; but in short stories I don’t think about those things until later, and in long-form you have to think about them earlyon or you’ll be screwed.

What would be the title of your memoir, if you were ever to write one?
Unfortunately it would have to be Leventhology.

Anna Leventhal is a Journey Prize-nominated author with a strong presence in Montreal’s literary community. Her work has been published in Geist, Matrix, Maisonneuve, and Montreal Review of Books. She was contributing editor for the Invisible Publishing collection The Art of Trespassing. You can follow Anna on Twitter.

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We asked the publisher… Invisible Publishing

Tell us why you like reading short stories and what struck you about this collection in particular.
Anna just really does the job of a short story writer so well. She draws you in. It takes almost no time at all. You forget where you are, what you were doing, you believe in her characters and buy her conceits. you feel something in your gut, and then she just gets out and lands the plane. I read short fiction for that kind of experience. I sort of concentrated reading experience. I was sold on Sweet Affliction because it delivers.

–Robbie MacGregor, Publisher

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Thanks to Anna and Robbie for answering our questions! There may only be one more contributor to feature but there’s still time to get your hands on Full of Lit, our Short Story Month epub anthology. Click the buy button below to purchase your copy now. Get caught up on all the Full of Lit contributors here.

_______Edited from the original post, published on the LPG blog