The Gas Station Croissant Theory of Fiction

On the body in short stories + what I've been consuming

In 2018, I wrote a short story called “Fat Swim” about a little girl in West Philadelphia who falls in love with a group of fat women at her local pool. I can see now that this story was an inflection point: yup, it was the first story of mine that The New Yorker seriously considered publishing (though it ultimately landed, happily, at VQR), yup it won a Pushcart Prize so it got to live a nice little life printed between two covers in their anthology, but the real thing was that writing it helped me find the inquiry that has arguably animated all my work since: how to render in words what it feels like to be a chaotic, longing, complex human living inside a fleshy animal body.

Lately I’ve been returning to “Fat Swim” because my next book will be a collection of old and new short fictions called Fat Swim, sold together with Housemates in 2020. The short story is my first form—the first form of writing I loved, the first form of writing I fell out of love with, the first form I tried to write myself. Fairy tales are short stories, children’s books are short stories, jokes and anecdotes are short stories, and these were the forms that sustained me as a little kid and then into college and adulthood. Short stories were the only form of writing I ever did until I finished my MFA program in 2015. I’ve since taught myself to write a novel and a reported memoir, but stories are still the only form that I studied closely and that I routinely teach.

They’re also—bummer—a form that supposedly no one in America reads. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been sitting at a signing table with all of my books when someone touches my story collection and says ‘Oh, what’s this one?’” wrote Rebecca Makkai over on her Substack, “and I say ‘That’s a short story collection’ and they recoil as if they just touched a dead squirrel.”

So of course, as I dive deeply into writing this collection, I’m asking every dumb and deep question about writing stories all over again, questions such as: what is a story really? What should it feel like to read a book of stories — a continuous restarting from scratch or an accumulation? How many sex scenes is too many sex scenes?

I’m noticing my own repetitions and obsessions (the words “bonkers” and “snacks” make a lot of appearances, as do soft-serve ice cream, the skin above the ear and below the hair line, and tuna fish sandwiches) as well as the things I do when I don’t know what to do — put in an image, describe a beautiful piece of furniture, have the character talk about the way a character on a TV show they are watching looks. And I’m noticing that I’m feeling turned on by the short story form all over again, that something about writing them is scratching some weird primordial itch that was less available to me in the wide wide world that is writing a novel.

Last week I moderated the paperback launch for one of my favorite novels of last year, Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas, a book I respect in part for how well it writes the experience of being a person living in a skin suit — the discomfort, fear, longing for transformation, desire, and more. When I asked Thomas how he’d learned to do this, he credited his teachers at the Iowa Writers Workshop who had stressed that good fiction pays attention to every sensory detail and physical object that comes into contact with the body. James told me and the audience about going to a reading by Iowa alum and novelist Lindsay Stern where she told a story about teacher Charles D’Ambrosio workshopping a section of her novel The Study of Animal Languages in which a character is holding a gas station croissant in a plastic sheath between his knees. “The reader might not believe in this situation right away,” Ambrosio supposedly said to Stern, “but you can sure as hell make them believe in that gas station croissant.” 

I just love this so much, the idea that the choice of a specific snack does something to the fiction it’s in that matters. A gas station croissant is not a bakery croissant is not a diner piece of toast. The contours and the sensations and the material it’s packaged in matter to the scene, the character, the experience of living. “The sleeve pops open,” Stern’s writes, “releasing a stale, buttery odor. I breathe through my mouth, feeling the swill of irritation and fatigue he so often compels in me.”

I am so charmed by Thomas’ anecdote—his short story if you will—of the gas station croissant also because my experience in my MFA program was that we were not encouraged to dwell on the body or physical sensation in our fiction. My teachers had made names for themselves mostly as practitioners of either minimalism or lyrical psychological fiction. We were encouraged to look out through our characters’ eyes, to observe the world around our characters, and to interrogate our characters’ reasons, omissions, failings, and traumas in order to find the shape of our work. We were asked to think about structure and action, cause and effect, and emotional coherence — “would” a character do that, was that “consistent” with a character’s emotional logic.

A few of the other students in my workshop were writing stories that were somewhat about the body (eating disorders, sexual violence, Catholicism, self harm) and some of these even contained pleasing sensory information. These sometimes did well in workshop and even got laughs and appreciations, but no one in my memory used that language—sensory, physical, embodied—as a central lens through which to see a story. The shape of the story could be its size — I remember a professor asking us to identify the farthest away thing a character sees in a story and the closest up. But the shape of a story was never to be found in its body. I remember that same professor harping on how often I described characters’ clothes. Why do we need to know what they’re wearing? she would ask, again and again. I didn’t know why, but I knew that we did. (In retrospect, I think this has to do in part with queerness and how queer people have used clothes as quiet signals to each other for centuries).

My MFA program’s orientation towards the body in fiction might best be summed up by this excerpt from Ron Carlson Writes A Story, a craft guide we were encouraged to buy when Carlson himself visited the program.

The Body. The body is a charmed and potent field that has been well traveled by the jillion writers before us, and it is their footsteps that have created so many wicked clichés into which the novice often stumbles. This thing first: you are not obligated to give the body. Genre writers (thriller/romance/adventure) are obligated to give the body, and you can look it up. On page 24 of every bodice-ripper there is the ”tall dark and something” paragraph…The attributes you give the body should play a part in the story and not feel like furniture we need to lug along.
Scars, tattoos, jewelry, body jewelry, hair, dental aberrations, deformities, missing digits, etc.…On the body—part is better than whole. Don’t be encyclopedic from head to toe. Use the cowlick or the brown tooth or one single thing that we can believe and hold onto.

Ahahaha! I’m trying to imagine my own work, my novel Housemates in particular, if I had followed this advice. Bernie would have blunt bangs and that’s it. Leah would have a big belly. Yet to me, their physical forms were essential to finding the story of the novel as a whole. The story is, in part, their erotic, embodied, and physical combustion, of Bernie’s hands on Leah’s belly and Leah’s eyes on Bernie’s camera.

Yet, there’s other parts of Carlson’s book that I love and assign often to my own students, namely his sections on what he calls “inventory,” the physical items you give a character that you the writer use to teach yourself who a character is and how they experience the world as you’re writing.

Are you doing character work when you give someone a car? Yes. What’s the goal? Credibility.  All I want to do is believe it without being generic. What does it mean that [this character drives a Saab]? I don’t know; if they’re believable vehicles (data/inventory) then they will be their own meaning…This notion of inventory is an important consideration in creating character.  Everything you give a character is another element in his or her definition and will help determine the weight she/he gives or receives in the story.  If we start right at the body and radiate outward, we see hundreds of believable opportunities to give our characters unique inventories. 

For me, the gas station croissant is the bridge between inventory (a character’s accessories) and the “own meaning” that a character’s bodily reality can provide and I can tell the stories I wrote before I knew how to make that leap because they’re worse. The gas station croissant is not just a Saab that shows a character’s taste for Swedish, sleek vehicles, it’s a thing that the character is touching, smelling, consuming into their body. It will leave grease on the bag and release its “stale, buttery odor” and that odor will do something, act upon the scene and change the character’s mood, association, and where they put their hands. The gas station croissant is the way we experience life.

While I love the gas station croissants of novels, I think that short stories are where the gas station croissant moments really shine. The golden feather that the narrator of Justin Torres’ “Reverting to a Wild State” finds. The squeegee of the boy in Miranda July’s “The Man on the Stairs.” The geode in George Saunders’ “Victory Lap.” The green ribbon in Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch.” The bird statue in “A Sheltered Woman” by Yiyun Li. The two beers in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”

What happens when we don’t just look and watch and judge, but touch, eat, hit, wrap, pull, melt? That bird statue turns out to be an actual bird that flies away.

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Toppings

• Do you love short story writer, essayist, poet and activist Grace Paley and want to be just like her? (If you don’t know Grace Paley but you love George Saunders then you love Grace Paley too; she was his teacher and biggest influence). Do you want to learn how to write actually great dialogue? Are you an anti-Zionist Jewish writer looking to plug into your legacy? On October 21, I’m teaching a class called What Would Grace Paley Do? and you can register here.

• Apparently I’m feeling very Jewy in my class naming these days.

  

  This one on November 2 is designed to help you jumpstart the fiction writing practice you truly want. Perhaps you have an idea for a novel or collection of short stories but don’t know where to start, perhaps you are able to write the “bones” of characters but don’t seem able to add “flesh”, perhaps you’ve been writing journalism or cultural criticism and want to make the leap to fiction, or perhaps you are contending with deeply held blocks about whether you are “worthy” or “talented” enough to truly commit to a project. In my life as a writer I have stood at all these junctures myself and I have also worked with nearly fifty editorial clients, many of whom are seeking answers to such questions as “how do I trust my ideas or know which ones are worth pursuing? How much do I need to know before I begin? Do I need an outline? Why do people keep telling me that they don’t feel invested in my characters?” Through a series of short lectures, voice memos from some of the coolest and wisest fiction writers working today, and reflection exercises, students will leave ready to dive in. Register here.

• The Perfect Couple on Netflix. Nicole Kidman’s face has no lines and Dakota Fanning’s dresses have every ruffle and Liev Schreiber is a DILF who is high 100% of the time. Does Amelia, the main character, have a personality to speak of? Absolutely not. No notes.

• Weight for It, a '“narrative podcast that explores the way we think about our bodies” hosted by Slate’s Ronald Young Jr. This episode about the host’s college secret fat girlfriend who had early bariatric surgery and then fell into drug addiction broke my spirit and this episode interviewing Da’shaun L. Harrison (Belly of The Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness) about how the term “fat” has more in common with the term “Black” than you’d think broke my mind, all in the best ways.

• The Netanyahus, a novel by Joshua Cohen. Scary! But good. This is a novel that takes up, with a fictionalized frame, the true story of the time the father of genocidal prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent in the United States as a wayward, second-rate academic. It is a strange and profoundly anti-Zionist book that offers a concise history of settler colonialism while still being compelling—and even funny—literary fiction.

• Blue Stoop’s full slate of fall writing classes are now live!!! Many are virtual, some are in-person, and all are affordably priced and taught by excellent folks. Satire, Audio Storytelling, Sci-Fi and Fantasy for Liberation, Tackling NaNoRiMo Together, and more.

Book Scoop

• I had the best time in Baltimore and DC this past week talking with generous and smart new friends and novelists Kate Reed Petty (True Story) and Tania James (Loot) and chatting with readers and eating ice cream. I bopped all over my cousin cities eating and signing copies of Housemates which are now chilling in Greedy Reads (Remington), Charm City Books, Capitol Hill Books, Lost City Books, East City Bookshop, and Little District Books, as well as at Hiro & Huxley in Wilmington, DE.

• In the next few weeks I’ll be in Moorestown, NJ on 9/24 with Philly pal & literary mystery queen Liz Moore (The God of the Woods), Rutgers Camden’s series Writers in Camden on 9/26 with beloved Annie Liontas (Sex With a Brain Injury), in Philly at the nonfiction series Personal Velocity on 9/28, Temple University’s Poets & Writers Series on 10/10, hosting Electric Literature’s annual masquerade dance party alongside Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Vanessa Chan, Deesha Philyaw, and Clare Sestanovich on 10/18, as well as speaking at Philly’s 2nd Annual Fat Con (!!) on 10/19.

<3 <3 <3

Emma

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