The Economy of Language: An Interview with Sarah Freligh

Sarah Freligh’s new collection, A Brief Natural History of Women, will be released in June by Harbor Editions. These flash and micro stories explore the rust-shot reality of women and girls perpetually trapped in a harsh place and time. Each story—each sentence—is exquisitely crafted, with an eye to the poetic and one foot firmly planted on fractured ground. I’m an avid admirer of Sarah’s work, and I appreciate this opportunity to talk with her.

—Myna Chang

Myna Chang: Reading this collection, the first thing that struck me was the sense of time and place. From a craft standpoint, how do you achieve this so consistently?

Sarah Freligh: Thank you for this, Myna, because setting—not only physical location, but time and place—is really, really hard for me. I generally start with characters and a provocative first line and spin something out from there. I tend to write a lot of words, like throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I’ve come to understand, though, that the real writing is revision, and if I’m persistent enough, I’ll start to understand the “aboutness” of a story at some point.

The stories in this collection have undergone multiple revisions, many of them major revisions that included reimagining structure or recasting point of view. “A Brief Natural History of the Automobile,” for example, started out in first person with a traditional narrative, but it was spinning its little literary tires and going nowhere. But once I shifted to second person and expanded the scope to contain an entire life, it started getting traction. It still took twenty-some years from the time I started the story to the time it was published, but I’m happy where it ended up.

MC: Tell us about your inspiration for these stories.

Sarah Freligh: Twentieth- and twenty-first-century women at various ages and stages of their lives and their struggles to achieve personhood and a sense of self, especially bodily autonomy. I’m old enough to remember a pre-Roe world and the fact that certain interest groups have been chipping away at it since 1972 as part of a larger plan to diminish women and their rights. I was disheartened by the Dobbs decision, but I wasn’t surprised. The characters in my stories aren’t surprised, either.

MC: Do you feel there is one specific story that embodies the heart of the collection?

Sarah Freligh: Probably “A Brief Natural History of the Girls in the Office,” the last story I wrote and the last to find a place in the collection. I’d started fooling around with first-person plural point of view in my previous book, We, which (I’ve found) is a great vantage point for condensing a lot of time into a very short compass. Here’s it’s a lifetime – lifetimes, really – spent in an office, from the early days of their marriages to retirement. These are women who likely have nothing in common except for the workplace they share, and yet they’re there for each other over the years in the way that families and friends aren’t, a democracy of women, really. In writing the story, I understood the about-ness of the book, the glue of the theme. The title arrived shortly thereafter.

MC: You’re an acclaimed poet, as well as an award-winning flash writer. In one of your previous interviews, you said: “Flash combines the lyric precision of poetry with the narrative urgency of fiction.” I love that (I have it printed and taped to my computer monitor). Each story in this collection is a stellar example of this philosophy. I was particularly struck by the lyrical language and form of “That Girl.” Can you talk about the construction of that piece? How does the form reinforce the subject matter?

Sarah Freligh: I would really like to claim that the structure and spacing are deliberate, but it was a happy accident, not unlike the discovery of the Post-It note. When revising poetry, I sometimes triple-space the lines to test where the language or rhythms might be flabby or inert. I may have been doing that with “That Girl,” and phrases that had been parenthetical in an earlier version got yanked out, dropped into their own lines and italicized, offering up the narrative counterpoint to the collective “we” of first personal plural: a Greek chorus of teenage girls gossiping about a classmate god, you know? I kept it and built the structure around that.

MC: I love your economy and use of white space. Your micros, “Skinny Dip” and “Saginaw,” feel so raw and visceral, filled with beauty and the casual violence that haunt these characters. How do you determine how much to put on the page, and how much to withhold?

Sarah Freligh: It occurred to me during one, long sleepless night that all of micro is really synecdoche, the rhetorical trope where the part stands in for the whole (This is insomniac, rather than literary theory, but I’d love to give it a test run someday in a critical analysis of a few good micros.) There’s not enough space to wield every aspect of craft for, say, building a character, so you rely on one aspect of character presentation—action, maybe—as well as some archetypal qualities for that character, which allows the reader to fill in what might be perceived as gaps. Metaphor, too, is a way to get to something in a very few words, and I’ll frequently revise toward an expanded or controlling metaphor in a piece. Those two things—the economy of language and the expansion of metaphor—are the tensions at work when I’m revising. I’m glad it shows.

MC: Shifting gears, I’d like to ask about your workshops. They’re always sold out. You cover poetry, flash, and micro, with new topics and approaches every year. How do you keep the content fresh? And what are your future teaching plans?

Sarah Freligh: Thank you, and can I say what a pleasure it’s been to have you as a participant in those workshops over the years? I especially remember the one in February 2021, I think it was: just an extraordinary group of writers, and so much good work from that one. I’m still reading published pieces that started in that group.

I’m an avid reader and keep an electronic file of work that’s both lights-out terrific from a literary standpoint but also inspiring for how it sends me to the page, makes me want to write. I’ll often build a prompt around these pieces, figuring that if I’m inspired, someone else will be as well. Luckily there’s no end to the good stuff that’s out there.

As for what’s new, I’m working on a new class for fall that’s two weeks of prompts—three per week, including a speculative and a historical prompt—and a third week that’s a deep dive into revision through structure, point of view, and the poetry of prose. And speaking of poetry, I may add a poetry class for prose writers in Winter 2024.

MC: I wonder if you’re seeing any trends in flash and micro. What do you hope to see on the horizon for flash writers?

Sarah Freligh: I’m seeing so many more markets than when I started submitting my shorties nine years ago. That’s a good thing, but it’s also a bad thing as it maybe encourages writers to send out work before it’s finished. Revision, above all, requires time—most especially time to forget what you both loved and hated about something so that you can return to a piece and read it objectively and revise accordingly.

MC: What’s next for you?

Sarah Freligh: I tend to scribble in a notebook when I’m teaching, so I have pages of stuff that may or may not become stories during my annual summer write-a-thon—micros, flash and standard-length short stories. I’ve been fooling around with a suite of stories featuring this kind of clueless guy named Chuck and a cat. Chuck is fictional, the cat is not. A friend was given the wrong cat from the boarding kennel, and she didn’t realize it until she got home and opened the box. It’s too good NOT to write about.

I also have to scrub my bathroom floor and clean out the refrigerator. Always and eternally.

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SARAH FRELIGH is the author of five books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and A Brief Natural History of Women, forthcoming in 2023 from Harbor Editions. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Wigleaf 50, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), Best Microfiction (2019-22), and Best Small Fiction 2022. Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.

MYNA CHANG (she/her) is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain. Her writing has been selected for Flash Fiction America (Norton 2023), Best Small Fictions, and CRAFT. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction. She hosts the Electric Sheep speculative fiction reading series. See more at MynaChang.com or @MynaChang.