Interview with Flannery O'Connor Award Winner Colette Sartor
Elephant seals, true crime, and ghosts!
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Today I’m sharing an interview with Colette Sartor, friend, fellow Los Angeleno, and one of my favorite fiction writers. Her debut story collection, Once Removed, received the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award and was published in September 2019.
Once Removed was also shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize and received the NYC Big Book Award, among other honors.
Along with writing fiction, Colette teaches creative writing for the Writers’ Program at UCLA-Extension and is the executive director of CineStory, an organization that mentors emerging screenwriters and TV writers. She is also a former entertainment lawyer.
Colette shares so much in this interview about fiction-writing and sticking with it despite the daunting challenges of the writing life. I hope you’ll brew a cup of tea or coffee and settle in.
Christine/Bookish: True crime and aspects of the noir permeate a number of the stories Once Removed. Would you say that noir is a key influence on your writing? If so, which writers in particular?
Colette: I grew up reading thrillers, mysteries, and horror. Nancy Drew bored me when I was a little kid, but I loved Agatha Christie novels and their comforting, predictable formula.
As soon as my mom would let me, I started on Stephen King novels. I used to read them at night under the covers with a flashlight even though they scared the shit out of me. His were the books I used my allowance to buy in paperback so I could bring them everywhere and read them over and over. My copies of The Stand and The Shining—which moved with me from apartment to apartment for years—were in tatters by the time I gave them away and bought them in e-reader form.
As I got older, my tastes became more literary, but I still crave a propulsive storyline. I’ve read everything by Tana French, and I’m also a huge Sarah Waters fan. They’re brilliant literary writers who use the thriller form to fantastic effect.
My fascination with true crime evolved in a roundabout way, first out of my mother’s ghost stories, then out of a local tragedy. My mom grew up in a haunted house and told us stories about the things that happened there from the time we were little kids. She was a captivating storyteller and knew all the right places to pause and lower her voice to a husky whisper so that my skin prickled with anticipation. Because of her, I gobbled up all the ghost stories I could find. I remember scouring the card catalogue in my grammar school library for every ghost-related book in the place.
As a tween, I discovered from my musical theater friends (yes, I was a musical theater geek who grew up longing to be Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand rolled into one) that, during the seventies, in the town next to the one where I grew up, an accountant named John List murdered his entire family then fled. Decades later, he would be captured after “America’s Most Wanted” aired an episode about the crime that included an age progressed clay bust of him.
When I was a kid, though, all I knew was that a friend of a friend lived on the property where one by one, John List had shot his mother, wife, daughter and two sons, then lined up their bodies in the empty ballroom and disappeared the next morning. I remember wondering whether the house was haunted by their ghosts and whether John List wondered the same thing. Rumor was that he returned every year on the anniversary of their deaths to sit outside the house before driving to the cemetery to put flowers on their graves and whisper his remorse.
The story so terrified me that I read everything I could about List, which in turn led me to discover there were other killers equally or more depraved. This was before the true crime explosion as we know it in this age of the 24-hour news cycle. There were some true crime TV shows and books, but no blogs (since there was no internet), no podcasts (since there were no mobile devices), no constant onslaught of all the bad things that could happen in life.
Still, I dug up whatever I could. Immersing myself in true crime calmed me and made me feel more in control. If I knew about such horrors, maybe I could avoid them. As I got older, I realized that knowledge was no protection from happenstance. Knowledge wouldn’t cocoon me in safety. Neither would writing, but once I started writing fiction, I circled back to the fear that had driven me to true crime and used bits and pieces of those stories in my work.
Christine: The title story was a runner up for the Nelson Algren Short Story Award from the Chicago Tribune, and in a different year, your story “Beach Haven” was a finalist for the award. Did this encouragement change how you saw your work or your hopes for your career? (I remember hearing that when you won the Flannery O’Connor Award, you thought it was a prank when the judge, Lee K. Abbott, called with the news).
I had never been a finalist in such a big contest, so I was thrilled when I got the call from Liz Taylor, the longtime literary editor of the Chicago Tribune. She couldn’t have been more gracious. Both those experiences with the Chicago Tribune were encouraging, but they didn’t feel like game changers.
Then again, I try to temper my expectations when it comes to anything remotely related to traditional (mis)conceptions of authorial “success” (awards! fame! big book deals! buckets of money!). If I think about my writing in those terms, I stall myself completely. Instead, I try to focus on becoming a better writer with each story I write.
And it’s true—I didn’t believe it when Lee K. Abbott called to tell me I’d won the Flannery O’Connor Award. By then, I’d pretty much given up on publishing the collection. I had been playing around with it for a few years with no success, but several months before I heard from Lee, I’d finally sat down and worked hard to rewrite the collection into a cohesive, linked whole.
Even in that form, it had received rejections from a few agents who, though they praised the book, thought the stories weren’t linked enough to be saleable. I dimly remember sending the manuscript to the Flannery O’Connor Award in a last ditch effort to get it published, and then I promptly forgot about I’d submitted it.
I was shocked when I checked my voicemail one day after dropping my kid off at summer camp and heard Lee saying he’d been trying to contact me to tell me I’d won. I had to pull over, I was so shocked. The first thing I said to him when I called him back was “Are you sure you have the right phone number?” He laughed and assured me that, yes, he did, and yes, I’d won.
It’s validating to win a prize and publish a book, but it’s also daunting and overwhelming. Suddenly, those traditional (mis)conceptions about writing success loom large as a measure of my writing’s worth or lack thereof, and it feels more important to produce work people want to read instead of work that I enjoy and that helps me become a better writer.
I’ve found myself frozen by the fear that whatever I’m writing isn’t going to interest anyone. The pandemic helped to cement that fear, I think because being so isolated and frozen by other fears gave rise to a general anxiety that has yet to leave me. It’s been difficult since Once Removed was published to get my writing back on track.
Only recently have I slowly re-embraced the idea that my writing has to capture me first before it’s going to capture anyone else. I’ve been trying hard to rediscover my joy in the process and let my characters lead me to the stories they need to tell. On days when I can do that, my fear recedes and I’m able to write.
Christine: We’ve spoken a little about how novels--their daunting length, and their need for a structure that can carry the weight of hundreds of pages--require a different craft approach than short stories do.
Colette: This has been a topic that’s been at the forefront of my mind lately. Over the years, I’ve gotten partway through several novels, only to abandon them to return to my first love, short stories. Now, though, I’m working on a novel called Piecework that I’m determined to finish, in part because it’s based on a family story and in part because it’s about characters from my collection who have a longer, more complex story to tell than can be explored in short story form.
Having said that, I’ve been grappling with how to tackle this particular novel, which has a rather complicated structure: Piecework jumps back and forth in time between the early aughts and the mid ‘80s, and there are three narrators: a first-person narrator of the early aughts storyline and two third-person narrators of the 1980s storyline. Figuring out how to work with this structure is made more difficult by the fact that I’ve always been more of a pantser than a planner. When I start a short story, I usually know the main character and the central conflict, and I have some idea of the ending I’m writing toward.
Often, I also have a craft element I want to play with (e.g., let’s try a flash forward near the end; let’s try a front/middle/back story structure; let’s try an epistolary story). But that’s it.
The few times I tried outlining a short story, my interest died when the planning was done. Once I knew what was going to happen, there didn’t seem to be much point in writing the story. So with short story writing, I’ve stuck to pantsing. I love the spontaneity of discovering what happens next and having the characters guide me to what they need to happen, which never ceases to surprise and delight me.
But pantsing a novel has never worked for me. Hence my several failed novels. Ironically, I see novels as much more forgiving medium than short stories.
Novels can withstand tangents and digressions. They’re sprawling, more forgiving beasts. Short stories, on the other hand, demand a more exacting approach. When writing a short story, you have to find a way to expand a reader’s understanding of the characters’ world within the confines of a small, contained storyline. Every element—every character, every detail, every plot point, every paragraph, sentence, word—must move the story forward.
But just because novels can be a more forgiving medium doesn’t mean they suffer fools lightly. It’s been foolish of me to assume that I don’t have to become something of a planner to write a novel. It’s one thing to come up with a story that’s big and complex enough to sustain hundreds of pages. It’s quite another to propel that story into motion and keep it going. For me to do that, I have to plan and brainstorm ideas about what might happen in the novel based on who my main characters are and what they want versus what they actually need. I have to figure out who my key minor characters are and who needs to be winnowed away.
I have to actually know what my big set pieces are, the major events on which the plot turns. There are writers who can proceed with a novel without that kind of planning. I’ve discovered I’m not one of them. I’ve also discovered that, unlike when I outline a short story only to kill it in the process, there is comfort in having an idea of what happens next when writing a novel. Because here’s the thing: no plan is set in stone. My characters still manage to surprise and delight me and change what I thought was the course of the book.
Christine: The last and longest story in the collection, “La Cuesta Encantada” (“the enchanted hill,” Willam Randolph Hearst’s name for his San Simeon estate), spans more than 60 years and includes many details about Hearst, his famous castle, and the elephant seals that sometimes spend time on the nearby beaches - where did this terrific story come from?
“La Cuesta Encantada” took me about fifteen years to complete. The germ of the idea arose when I was still a lawyer, struggling to write in my spare time and searching for inspiration. I found it on a trip to Cambria with my identical twin sister and a dear friend. Every morning we’d stand on the cliffs and watch the elephant seals, who were beached for birthing season. Even from a distance, they were impressive, their massive bodies that moved with such odd, swift grace across the sand into the water, the trunk-like snouts of the males. They were unlike any animal I had ever seen.
We also took a tour of Hearst Castle in nearby San Simeon, and its opulence, compared to the wild, wondrous sight of the elephant seals, stuck with me. Back home, I did some research and discovered that Randolph Hearst once kept a zoo on the property. The wild zebra descended from those zoo inhabitants still roam the area. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it might have been like to be a local when the castle was in its heyday, and more specifically, what it might have been like to be a child living nearby and longing to go to that zoo on the hill where only the rich and famous ventured.
I also researched elephant seals: what drew them to that particular beach, their mating habits, the way they cared for their young. As I researched, I tried to figure out the connection in my brain between the castle and the seals. I still didn’t know what it was when I finally started the story by writing a scene in which teenaged Althea, the main character, allowed herself to be persuaded by her friend Irene to take a drive to the castle. Althea longed to escape her small town and was fascinated by the castle, which represented everything she yearned for.
After writing that scene, I worked on the story in fits and starts, exploring the relationship between Althea and her friends, and the Hearst Castle zoo’s place in their world. But those scenes never felt like they were meant to be part of a story that focused on the girls.
Instead, they felt like part of a larger story that involved the three women as adults as well. I’d never written what I call a “front/back” story, one that switches between present and past, and this one seemed to demand that structure. Years passed as I tried to figure out a storyline about the women as adults that fit with their trip to Hearst Castle as teenagers.
Finally, my front storyline emerged in a story I was writing about an older couple with a dying souvenir shop in Sedona, another favorite place of mine. The wife, I realized, was the adult Althea. I moved the store to Cambria, which Althea never left despite her yearnings.
Her two best friends also still lived there, and they all volunteered at the turnout beach for elephant seals. There it was, my connection between Hearst Castle and elephant seals, but the story still wasn’t working. As hard as I tried to thread together these two storylines of the adult Althea and the teenage Althea, something was missing. I kept writing scenes, though, putting the story away for more years, waiting for myself to develop into the writer I needed to be to finish it.
Whenever I find myself stuck, I reread my favorite stories and novels for inspiration. I did that with “La Cuesta” by periodically rereading “The Year of Getting to Know Us” by Ethan Canin, one of my all-time favorite short stories. “The Year of Getting to Know Us” uses three different time periods in an emotionally repressed man’s life to tell the story of how he tries to reconnect with his dying father. Canin expertly weaves together the front, middle, and back stories until they culminate in a quiet yet explosive way that always brings me to tears.
In rereading the story, I realized that I needed a middle storyline to bridge the gap between the old women Althea and her friends become and the ambitious teenagers they’d been. I needed to tell at least some of the story of their younger adult years, what kept them in Cambria and kept them together. As I developed that storyline, I discovered Althea had a decades old secret, one that filled her with guilt and shame. After that realization, the pieces of the middle story fell into place and, along with them, the pieces of the other two storylines.
Another lesson I learned with this story besides how to weave together several different storylines was that I need to let a story be whatever length it needs to be. As a younger writer, I often edited my stories into oblivion, worried that if they exceeded most journals’ word count limits (e.g. 3,000 - 5,000 words), they wouldn’t be publishable.
This was a particular struggle for me since I tend to write long. I had to accept that publishability couldn’t be my main goal. Instead, I focused on exploring all the possibilities offered by the short story form. It’s such an elegant, demanding art form, where all the pieces must be placed precisely without anything extraneous lying about. I’d much rather keep discovering new, well-fitted pieces and have the puzzle grow and grow rather than cull away so much that I’m left with a misshapen mess with minimal emotional impact. I allowed “La Cuesta Encantada” to morph into the size it needed to be.
The final draft is around13,000 words, and I was lucky enough to have it published by the wonderful Carve Magazine, which had published another story of mine, “F-Man,” a few years prior. That’s not to say that I didn’t edit the hell out of “La Cuesta.” I spent hours whittling away, trying to ensure that every scene, every line, every word moved the story forward. But I recognized that if I cut it down too much, I’d lose the heart of each storyline and destroy what my characters needed to say.
Christine: You used to work as an entertainment lawyer in Hollywood. I’m curious how this prior career influenced your fiction and your discipline as a writer.
Colette: I hated being a lawyer, so I’d like to think my legal career hasn’t influenced me or my writing at all. If I’m honest, though, my time as a lawyer has helped me to think in a more linear, organized fashion, which has never been my strong suit. This has been an extremely helpful skill when trying to figure out how to move forward with whatever story I’m working on.
My legal career also made me more resilient. As a lawyer, you learn to take criticism and rejection less personally. I’ll never be immune to those things, but practicing law helped me put them in perspective and use them to spur me on. It’s also made me grateful for any success I receive as a writer. I wouldn’t have started writing if I hadn’t been so miserable as a lawyer. In fact, I signed up for my first writing class at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program when I desperately needed an escape from the legal career I despised. So I always remind myself that I can’t regret practicing law since it led me to this place.
Christine: A number of characters in these stories appear in more than one (Aiden, Savvy, Judith, Rose…)—did you ever consider writing this collection as a novel or a novel in stories?
Colette: I didn’t consider writing this collection as a novel or novel in stories, in part because I’d come to think of myself so firmly as a short story writer. Which is strange since I went to graduate school thinking I must be a novelist since my stories were so long and complicated. After graduation and a failed novel attempt, I returned to short stories to help me hone my craft and become a better storyteller. That’s when I fell in love with the form. After that, I spent years writing whatever short stories came to mind without thinking about how they might be linked. This made putting together a collection difficult. I had no understanding of the themes that coursed through my stories, the similarities in their truths and revelations.
At some point, I realized certain characters clamored in my head with more to say. I followed one or two of them into new stories, mostly as supporting characters in new protagonists’ stories. Doing this helped me see there were ways I could link my stories and create a collection. Problem was, I had no idea of how to put a collection together. There was—and still is—very little written on the topic. So I put my best (aka “most successful”) stories first and last, buried my least favorite story in the middle and littered the rest in between. Needless to say, that collection went nowhere.
It wasn’t until about a year after my mother died that I finally pushed myself to figure out what kind of collection I wanted to put together. Two of my favorite collections [both, incidentally, marketed a novels] are Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.
Each uses recurring characters, themes, and plot pieces to link the stories. I didn’t have a central character like Olive Kitteridge or Goon Squad’s Bennie and Sarah. The only recurring characters I really had were members of the DiCorscia family, in particular the family matriarch, Rose DiCorscia, who’s based on my paternal grandmother. But I sensed there were other recurring characters and themes waiting to be mined.
I took myself on a DIY writing retreat and spent a long weekend figuring out the links. At one point, I drew a timeline and plotted each story on it to figure out how the stories related temporally to each other and how that relationship influenced the recurring characters’ development. I discovered as I worked with that timeline that certain characters demanded additional stories, not just to explore their own development and emotional arc, but also to develop the thematic connections between stories—of loss, secret keeping, lie telling, the burden of being the person others need you to be.
As I’ve mentioned in other interviews, maybe the best organizing principle for the collection came from Matthew Limpide, a wonderful editor I consulted near the end of assembling the collection. I’d been using Once Removed as the working title for a while, but Matthew was the one who suggested using the phrase’s definition to help organize the collection.
His idea was to start with a story in which the characters were more distantly related by blood and then to work toward the middle of the collection with stories where kinship and intimacy were more intertwined, then, from midpoint to the end, work toward to the final story where kinship wasn’t at all blood-related but instead based solely on the intimate ties the characters have chosen to build over time.
The only story that doesn’t follow that organization principle is “Malocchio.” That one I purposefully placed near the end, after its main character, Rose, was cemented in previous stories as a strong, willful personality. Rose can be such a destructive character that I wanted to humanize her by allowing her to show some vulnerability. I knew she wouldn’t do that as an adult, especially in the first person point of view, which is the narrative voice I used for the story, so “Malocchio” became a story she tells about herself as a child.
I had only written the final scene of “Malocchio” when Matthew and I discussed the kinship organizing principle. We decided the collection needed one more Rose story, which was when I remembered the existing scene, which is based on an event from my father’s childhood. I was so fascinated by the idea of telling a childhood story about a character based on my grandmother and ending the story with an event from my dad’s own childhood, that I wrote “Malocchio” faster than I’ve ever written anything. It wound up being the second longest story in the book, and I’m so glad I finished it. It helped me get to know Rose in a way I hadn’t known her before, which in turn has helped me write about her and from her perspective in Piecework.
Christine: What are you working on now?
Colette: I’ve got two main projects going. One is another short story collection, currently titled Tell the Bees. The stories are inspired by various oddities, including the cloning of Trakr, a search-and-rescue German shepherd who discovered the last 911 World Trade Center survivor; a phone booth in Japan where people make pilgrimages to call dead loved ones.
The “Tell the Bees” exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which depicts folk remedies from world cultures like eating dead mouse toast to cure bed wetting; and, of course, a story that has true crime/ghost story elements, about a ghost-obsessed little girl who lives down the street from the John List house. Most of these stories are in their early phases, and at least one of them involves some of Once Removed’s recurring characters.
I’m not quite sure yet why the stories belong in the same collection, but I suspect there will be recurring themes and characters. I’m hoping in this collection to flex my craft muscles by stepping out of my comfort zone with some of the stories, for instance writing from a male POV, which I rarely do. Plus, we live in such disturbing times that I can’t help but think that the fear and strife surrounding us will seep into this collection in a way that didn’t happen in Once Removed.
My other big project is Piecework, which is based on a murder my grudge-holding, sweatshop-owning paternal grandmother helped cover up in the ’70s. It’s fun to switch off between novel writing and short story writing because, as I discussed above, the process feels so different, especially the pacing. I’ve had to learn to let the novel unfurl at a more leisurely rate, to linger in events that in a short story I’d be forced to omit or summarize in a few lines.
Novel writing also allows me to write from different points of view, which I tend to avoid in short stories, where switching POVs doesn’t feel organic to my writing style. In Piecework, though, I’m able to alternate chapters using different points of view. The present day storyline is driven by the first person narrative of Rose DiCorscia’s eldest daughter Connie, who’s mentioned but never appears in Once Removed. The past story is driven by two third person narrators: Rose herself and Savina, her younger daughter who narrates “Lamb” from Once Removed.
I decided to tell their stories in close third-person POV in part because, from a craft perspective, I thought it would be too confusing to have three female first person narrators. The primary reason, though, is that first-person narration allows readers a great deal of access to characters’ interior lives. Rose and Savina keep what’s private private, and their chapters delve into events about which they would never be willing to tell the whole truth.
I’d like to focus on Piecework since the DiCorscias have been demanding for decades to tell this particular story. The problem is that characters outside of Piecework keep vying for their stories to be told as well, and sometimes, when the novel stalls, I can’t resist those other characters. I don’t know which book I’ll finish first, but I love the different challenges they each pose.
Wonderful post, Christine! Loved hearing the details of Colette's journey and her writing process.