Ramona Ausubel<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.17.2″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.0.47″ parallax=”off” parallax_method=”on”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.17.2″]<\/p>\n Ramona Ausubel<\/strong> is the author of two novels and two story collections. Her most recent book, Awayland<\/em>, was a New York Times Editors\u2019 Choice selection, a Finalist for the California Book Award, Colorado Book Award and long-listed for the Story Prize. She is also the author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty<\/em>, No One is Here Except All of Us<\/em> and A Guide to Being Born<\/em>. She is the recipient of the PEN\/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and joins the faculty at Colorado State University in the fall of 2019.<\/p>\n Molly Gutman<\/strong> is a fiction editor at Cream City Review<\/em> and a PhD student in fiction at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in Granta<\/em>, Alaska Quarterly Review<\/em>, Black Warrior Review<\/em>, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n 1. Lots of your stories exist in fabulist worlds, where people grow extra arms to represent their love, or where a Cyclops might write a dating profile. But even your more realist stories still feel slippery\u2014weird, magical\u2014in the way they deal with memory and love and the human body. What does fantastical fiction offer us that other approaches to fiction might not?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think the world is profoundly strange and surprising\u2014the actual, real world. And human experience is an entire universe of strange and surprising, so to add a fantastical element sometimes seems like a way of holding a mirror up to regular life, regular experience and saying, \u201cSee that? Isn\u2019t that that incredible and weird?\u201d I always want to write toward experiences that feel true and sometimes a magical twist makes it easier to see the thing. Sometimes it\u2019s not needed and the world\u2019s own wildness speaks for itself.<\/p>\n 2. What about experimental and citational narrative forms? You have stories that are (or quote from) dating profiles, acknowledgements and museum placards, fictional books, letters, and more. How do you think through these approaches? Do choices in framing and presentation come early in your drafting process?<\/strong><\/p>\n Some of these come from things I\u2019ve seen or read that struck me as very odd. I was in the Egypt Museum in Cairo where there really is a room full of animal mummies and it really does have a plaque listing the people the animal mummies would like to thank. I saw that and thought, \u201cOh, DO they?\u201d And that became a story. Same with the dating profile. I knew I needed the chatty voice of internet advice to off-set the Cyclops\u2019 own story. Sometimes these documents feel like a map I\u2019m laying down to give us somewhere to stand while a large or peculiar situation takes place. It\u2019s grounding. I\u2019m also always thinking of how to set different elements in opposition to one another. A mundane real-world document with an otherworldly character, etc.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/creamcityreview\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/421\/2019\/06\/Picture2-199x250.png\")
In honor of our inaugural 2019 Summer Prizes in Fiction & Poetry, Fiction Editor Molly Gutman conducted a micro-interview with our Fiction Prize Judge, Ramona Ausubel. Read on to learn more about fabulist worlds, Ramona Ausubel’s newest short story collection Awayland<\/em>, and what she’s looking for in a winning story!<\/p>\n