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Short Story Month: Andrew Forbes’ Lands and Forests
The stories in Andrew Forbes’ short story collection Lands and Forests (Invisible Publishing) might be described as haunting: stories that dig at the emotional core of women and men who mourn, who discover new passions, who face disappointment, who watch a wildfire consume an entire town. As author of The Sentimentalists Johanna Skibsrud puts it: “[…] Lands and Forests shows us what the short story was made to do: delight us, surprise us, and prompt us to more fully recognize ourselves.” We talk to Andrew about the beauty of short stories, writing inspirations, and read the story “Graceland” from his collection.
Interview with Andrew Forbes
All Lit Up: Tell us about your collection in tweet length (280 characters) or less.Andrew Forbes: The book contains one dozen stories about wild landscapes, both natural and emotional, and people who inhabit, shape, and are shaped by them. There are floods and fires, biplanes and trucks, drones and kayaks. Promises are made and broken. Love is found and lost. There is a bear. ALU: If you had only 3-5 nouns to describe your writing style, what would they be?AF: Love, desire, loss, trees, water. ALU: What do you like most about the short story as a form?AF: I love what it’s not. It’s not a novel. It’s not poetry. It’s something beautiful and defiantly self-contained and malleable. It requires attention and awareness, and it rewards with arresting insight. It’s an uncomfortably personal conversation with a stranger, made bearable and occasionally joyful by the awareness that when it’s over you’ll never speak to one another again. It’s an incredibly varied form, practiced by a cross-section of humanity, producing wildly divergent examples so unalike that they strain the margins and test the definition of “form,” but all such producers in agreement that to practice it is akin to pledging adherence to a secret sect. ALU: Do you have any writing rituals?AF: Wake up, pour coffee, get to work. Is that a ritual? I prefer to be alone, I but can manage if that’s not possible. I will sometimes listen to music, usually instrumental; lyrics are fine for editing or revising. Get up every hour or so to encourage circulation. More coffee. ALU: Who are your writing inspirations?AF: A lot of the usual suspects, overall: Chekhov, Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Lorrie Moore. Rick Bass was a big influence on this collection. And I’m inspired by younger writers, like Seyward Goodhand, whose forthcoming collection is frighteningly good.* * *“Graceland” from Lands and Forests by Andrew Forbes
CONNIE’D BEEN SICK about three years.When it became clear that she couldn’t do it on her own, I moved back in. Her sister Georgia came back to Kemptville, too, and she brought her boyfriend Seb with her.We’d been on again, off again for about ten years. Mostly on, but with some off periods, most of which were my doing. I told her early on, “I’m a sucker’s bet.” But then she got her diagnosis and everything kind of snapped into focus. After that, I put her to bed at night and I got her up in the morning and I stood outside the bathroom door when she showered, just in case. When I was working, Georgia would come by. It worked out because she served nights at the Breakaway and my shoots were all daytime gigs.Every so often, if Connie was doing well, I’d wait until she was asleep, then slip out and drive the fifteen minutes into town to have a drink or two at the Breakaway. I could talk to Georgia there,which was nice. We could talk about Connie, even complain about her, and have everything be in bounds, because Georgia was the only other person in the world who really knew what my life was like. It was good to have her around, even for all the trouble i t later brought.Seb, on the other hand, I had my doubts about. He was lazy. He’d started three different courses of study, one at York and two at community colleges, and finished none. He’d been a carpet cleaner and a bouncer and a sandwich artist. After he and Georgia reloca ted from Toronto, the best he could find was overnights at a gas station. He made my spotty employment history look like the CV of a Fortune 500 CEO. He wore stupid jeans and he shaved his head twice a week and he listened to the worst music. “Club beats:’he called them.”What about Hank?” I once asked him.”Hank who?”That became our joke. Seb would have his music, which sounded like someone dropping a tennis ball down a laun dry chute, playing on his phone, and I’d say, “Are you sure Hank done it this way?” And Seb would roll his eyes, and I’d laugh. If Connie was around, she’d howl, too. We did that bit all the time.Once, Georgia suggested Seb help me with shoots.”No,” I’d said. “No way.”But she said, “Just try him out.” And then she gave me those eyes, just like the ones her older sister used to give me—the ones I couldn’t say no to.* * *
