Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is an author and educator based in northeast Iowa’s Driftless Area. He is the author of numerous essays and short stories, and the editor of An Anthology of Rural Stories by Writers of Color, published by Eastover Press.
I spoke with Keith about the third edition of the anthology, which was released on December 2nd. (Just in time for the holidays, should you be looking for rural books to gift!)
Enjoy our conversation about the supremacy of short stories in sharing insights, inspiring writers, and fostering connection.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anya Petrone Slepyan, The Daily Yonder: In a fiction scene that feels dominated by novels, you’re a self-described “short story guy.” What do you find remarkable about short stories?
Keith Pilapil Lesmeister: If you ever talk to a writer, they always have those one or two stories where they read those stories, and they felt moved to try it themselves. And that’s what happened to me. I think it was Saul Bellow, who said a writer is a reader moved to emulation. And that’s how I felt when I started reading short stories. For me it was “White Angel” by Michael Cunningham. I was blown away and I thought to myself, I want to try something like this.
So the short story was really my first literary love. And thinking back on it, I think it probably has to do with the way a short story adheres to your classic story elements like character development, conflict, setting, dialog, action, etc.. But it also has this hyper-focus on language as well, in the same way that poetry might. It’s that combination, the intersection of those two forms, that create, in my mind, the short story.
DY: What inspired you to create the Anthology of Rural Stories by Writers of Color?
KPL: Initially, the reason for my interest in this is because these are the kinds of stories that I’m personally writing. I’m writing stories about my experiences living in rural spaces as a person of color. I have had a series of experiences, just as a person living here, that have led me to wonder about other people of color living in rural spaces. I’ve experienced this sense of ‘othering’ for pretty much my entire existence, living in rural areas. And for the most part it comes in non-threatening ways, like people mistaking my ethnic identity, asking me questions about where I’m from, asking me if I speak a certain language because they assume something based on the color of my skin. So all of these examples started adding up to questions in my own mind. I started wondering, well, if I’m experiencing these things as a rural citizen, certainly other people of color are experiencing something similar. And I wanted to explore that, to see if anybody’s writing about it in their short fiction. And that was the impetus, ultimately, for the anthology.
DY: There are a lot of stereotypes associated with rural America. How does this anthology, and the stories within, disrupt these assumptions?
KPL: I do think the anthology as an entity – the title alone, really – addresses some of these assumptions we as a society hold about what “rural” means or suggests. My hope is that the stories themselves explore the full extent of our human-ness, in all of its emotional nuance and complexity, and in so doing, provides us readers with a fuller and truer idea of what it means to live in a rural space, and what these rural spaces might look like. That is, the stories are not simply a bunch of old farmers running around in bibs and John Deere caps. But they’re inhabited with complex humans who may in fact share more in common than we might realize, if only our human desires and concerns around our families and relationships.
DY: What do you hope the anthology achieves, for both readers and the writers who contribute?
KPL: I think the thing that we’re striving for the most with this anthology is to help writers of color find a community of other writers who they can exist with, not just on the page, but also, that we might meet. Ultimately, writing is an act of communication, it’s an act of connection. And at Eastover Press, we’re trying to help foster and sustain that community as much as possible.
For readers, these stories are beautiful and surprising in their own way. Like all good fiction, the stories are more expansive than their allotted space on the page. The stories in this collection explore wooded areas, the desert, a basketball court, a shotgun house, trailer parks, the Osage Indian Reservation, and other locations critical to the development of the stories and characters.
I reread the stories over the last couple of days, and I just think they’re such rich, wonderful portraits of the lives of these characters of color living in rural places, and I love them all so much. And I hope people find the same amount of connection with the stories and the characters as I have.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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