Today in Seven Questions, we’re excited to catch up with Clare Beams, award-winning author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, whose newest story, “Snowy-white, Rosy-red, Will You?” appears in Ecotone’s recent Moon Issue.
Clare Beams’s latest novel, The Garden (Doubleday, 2024), was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Vanity Fair Best Book of 2024, and a Kirkus Best Book of 2024, among other awards. Her novel The Illness Lesson (Doubleday, 2020) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was named a best book of 2020 by Esquire and Bustle and a best book of February by Time, O Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. Her story collection, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, 2016), won the Bard Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the Story Prize, and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her short fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, Conjunctions, The Common, Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and has earned special mention in The Pushcart Prize and twice in The Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize. Clare lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters and teaches in the Randolph MFA program.
Lookout Graduate Publishing Assistant Caroline Beuley interviewed Clare Beams.
Let’s start with your story “Snowy-white, Rosy-red, Will You?” which was just published in Ecotone’s moon issue. What inspired the story and what was your process for writing and editing it, both on your own, and with Ecotone?
I have a longstanding obsession with fairy tales. I had a Golden Treasury of Children’s Literature as a kid that formed some of the bedrock of my imagination, both the stories and the pictures, and I returned to “Snow-white and Rose-red” and its illustrations—those two matching-but-opposite girls—often. In parenthood I’ve become fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves about our children, and what purposes those stories serve for us and for them, and what their possible costs might be. That’s the swirl of thinking and feeling and images that started me writing.
My process with this story was similar to my process with most of my work, and it looks a lot like the process George Saunders describes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: a setting-down of bare bones and then endless, playful re-readings and adjustments and additions and subtractions until I begin to feel I can glimpse something that pleases me, something I couldn’t ever have planned. The editing process with Ecotone was a delight, as I knew it would be: the editors’ incredibly careful, generous, insightful readings helped me take this one the last bit of the way over the finish line.
The otherworldly and the fantastic have remained a consistent thread through We Show What We Have Learned, “Snowy-White, Rosy-red, Will You?,” and your latest novel, The Garden. What role do fantasy and strangeness play in your writing? What draws you to it?
I might go almost as far as to say that strangeness is my writing’s lifeblood—it seems key, for me, to making my work live on the page. I write some work that departs radically from realism and some that’s just a little pulled, a little stretched, but there’s always an element that’s (at least for me) not quite real. I think a lot about why this might be, and I think it’s that for me, strangeness of this kind is linked to creative risk and play—to the sense that I’m experimenting—and that feeling is one I really need when I’m writing.
You’ve now published two novels with Doubleday, a story collection with Lookout, and countless stories with established literary magazines, including Ecotone. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned through these different experiences?
I think the most important lesson I’ve learned is that while it’s a privilege and an honor to have one’s work out in the world—and it is!—my favorite part of the process comes before that, when I’m playing with what I’m making, seeing what I can discover and what it is I might have to say. I’m more and more convinced, the longer I do this, that the making-the-work part is the real reason to keep going. (Though connecting with readers will always give me a heart-overflowing feeling that I’m lucky to get to experience in this world.)
What would you say are some of the benefits of publishing with an independent press?
I still feel so fortunate to have published my first book with Lookout, where I had the whole team’s entire focus for my entire publication year. The creativity and ingenuity and energy at work on my book’s behalf were all astounding. The amount of personal attention my story collection and I received from the brilliant people at Lookout, especially Emily Smith and Beth Staples, still makes me teary with gratitude.
What would you say are some of the benefits of publishing with a Big Five house?
I’ve had a marvelous experience at Doubleday, where I adore my editor, Lee Boudreaux, beyond all measure. She’s a genius and I’m so lucky to have had her mind in the worlds of my novels with me. I’ll also say that a Big Five tends to have pretty massive sales and marketing reach, even if those resources have to serve a lot of books. (There’s also the fact that a Big Five can pay a writer enough to buy that writer meaningful amounts of writing time, depending on circumstances, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.)
What drew you to Ecotone for “Snowy-White, Rosy-red, Will you?”?
Because I’ve published in Ecotone before and know and love the team there, both through that previous publication and through working with Lookout for my story collection, I knew this story of my heart would receive the careful, thoughtful editing and attention I wanted it to receive. I’m beyond thrilled.
What advice would you offer a writer just beginning to seek publication, either searching for a first agent or sending work to magazines?
I think the best advice I have is to cultivate a blend of patience and persistence—the happiest writers I know have managed a balance of thick skin and receptivity/willingness to rethink when necessary. I would also add that the best part of all this is really and truly the part you’re doing already, the playing, the making. Keep loving that, and keep doing it, and the rest will happen, though none of us can control exactly how or when.