Why has the short story attracted you and why does it work so well for you?Ĭarmen Maria Machado: I love reading short stories. You’ve done so much to stretch and bend and play with it and put other forms into it. Lynne Barrett: I want to ask you first about the short story form.
On the Saturday morning of the Book Fair, while announcements and music competed outside, and crowds extended for blocks in every direction, celebrating reading, writing, books, and community, we found a quiet nook in the stacks of the Miami Dade Wolfson Campus library. Machado is now writer-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife. She does this with a boldness and freshness that makes the reader feel these stories have never before been told. She writes about sensuality, pain, betrayal, the grotesque, and the beautiful, focusing, as her book’s title suggests, on women’s bodies as centers of experience. Her fiction draws upon the traditions of horror, fantasy, and the fairy tale, but at the same time reflects pop culture and our moment’s most pressing questions. Many were selected for award anthologies including Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, and Best Women’s Erotica. Machado’s stories, appearing in such magazines as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Granta, and Tin House, had blown readers away. Of course, overnight acclaim is not really sudden. On Saturday afternoon Machado would take part in both a reading by the fiction honorees and a panel on writing and identity. After the November 15th National Book Foundation’s awards ceremony in New York, all of the winners and finalists in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature came to Miami for a Friday evening celebration at the Book Fair. Her first book, the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, was published by Graywolf Press in October, accompanied by raves from established writers from all parts of the galaxy of fiction, and was chosen as a National Book Award finalist. Carmen Maria Machado came to the Miami Book Fair last November surrounded by the buzz of the book world.
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