Q and A with Karen Bender about her story collection The New Order
1. Tell us a little about your new book
In The New Order, I wanted to see how fiction could respond to current realities in the country, and see the psychological or emotional toll of these issues. Specifically, I found I was looking at the ways that the constant threat of gun violence, the increased level of bigotry, and the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and violence affect us on an emotional level day after day. So many people I know describe a feeling of exhaustion, which I also feel, and I wanted to explore some of the sources of this exhaustion.
2. Like your first collection Refund, which is thematically linked by its characters’ anxieties about money, the stories in The New Order focus on the political turmoil our country is presently experiencing, i.e. the widening divide between liberal and conservative America. Did you start writing these stories with this theme specifically in mind?
I actually started this collection with the idea of exploring the unspoken between people--the first stories were “Three Interviews,” “The Pilot's Instructions,” and “The Lie.” Then the 2016 campaign kicked off, and that inspired other stories—“The Elevator” was inspired by the Access Hollywood tapes, “Where to Hide in a Synagogue” was inspired by the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. I tend to write stories by following my interests at the moment and I didn't see a theme until I sent it to my editor, Dan Smetanka, who did, and the collection was organized with this in mind.
3. You’ve published two novels and two story collections—I’m always interested in hearing other writers’ thoughts about this: do you prefer one form to the other?
I love and feel calmer with the flexibility of stories--that you can explore different strategies of story telling, different forms of content, characters, within a shorter span of space. Stories are like puddles I can splash around in, and maybe that perception of a story helps me write them. I tell students I think that writing a novel is one of the hardest psychological tasks in the world. While novels require the same sense of play, the patience a novel takes is enormous. A story and novel inhabits your mind in a different way. That said, I love both forms and part of the fun of being a writer is seeing how the content finds the form--some ideas are best suited toward a flash fiction piece, some a longer story, some a novel.
4. “The Good Mothers in the Parking Lot” which diplomatically but devastatingly addresses the 2016 presidential election—I love this story so much—how did you maintain such a calm POV here? Did you redraft it several times?
I wrote this story right after the election, and right after a very similar situation as described in the story--when a group of parents, some of whom were Democrats, some Republican, had to drop their children off for a school trip. The whole experience was immensely hard and the way I coped with it was to write about it in a very distant point of view. I could not get my mind around the situation--that people I knew to be good had decided to vote this horrid, immoral person into office, and perhaps just reporting on this helped the sorrow and anger right underneath that feeling of shock. I did rewrite it a few times, but the tone remained the same throughout.
5. “The Department of Happiness and Reimbursement” is a story that continues to haunt me, perhaps more than any of the others in the way it addresses #MeToo, workers’ rights and misogyny. How did this story begin?
This was my first dystopian story, and evolved when I heard about the settlements that prominent men like Bill O'Reilly made with women who had accused them of sexual harassment--and how these women were then not allowed to talk about their experiences. I found this situation surreal--it seemed wrong to pay women for their silence. So I started thinking about how this use of silence could be controlled by the government, and how it could be related to misogyny, workers' rights, an uncertain economic environment. It was the last story I wrote in the collection, and it was energizing to invent/develop this terrifying and familiar world; I hope that the story functions as a warning.
6. What are you working on now if you don't mind sharing a few words about it?
Writing some new stories (A short short, "The Shame Exchange," was recently published in The Yale Review online), and a novel beginning--trying to decide where to go!
Karen E. Bender is the author of Refund, a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction, short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and long-listed for the Story Prize. The New Order was also longlisted for the Story Prize. She is also the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Guernica, The Harvard Review, The Yale Review and others, has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories and won two Pushcart prizes. She is the Visiting Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University.
In The New Order, I wanted to see how fiction could respond to current realities in the country, and see the psychological or emotional toll of these issues. Specifically, I found I was looking at the ways that the constant threat of gun violence, the increased level of bigotry, and the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and violence affect us on an emotional level day after day. So many people I know describe a feeling of exhaustion, which I also feel, and I wanted to explore some of the sources of this exhaustion.
2. Like your first collection Refund, which is thematically linked by its characters’ anxieties about money, the stories in The New Order focus on the political turmoil our country is presently experiencing, i.e. the widening divide between liberal and conservative America. Did you start writing these stories with this theme specifically in mind?
I actually started this collection with the idea of exploring the unspoken between people--the first stories were “Three Interviews,” “The Pilot's Instructions,” and “The Lie.” Then the 2016 campaign kicked off, and that inspired other stories—“The Elevator” was inspired by the Access Hollywood tapes, “Where to Hide in a Synagogue” was inspired by the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. I tend to write stories by following my interests at the moment and I didn't see a theme until I sent it to my editor, Dan Smetanka, who did, and the collection was organized with this in mind.
3. You’ve published two novels and two story collections—I’m always interested in hearing other writers’ thoughts about this: do you prefer one form to the other?
I love and feel calmer with the flexibility of stories--that you can explore different strategies of story telling, different forms of content, characters, within a shorter span of space. Stories are like puddles I can splash around in, and maybe that perception of a story helps me write them. I tell students I think that writing a novel is one of the hardest psychological tasks in the world. While novels require the same sense of play, the patience a novel takes is enormous. A story and novel inhabits your mind in a different way. That said, I love both forms and part of the fun of being a writer is seeing how the content finds the form--some ideas are best suited toward a flash fiction piece, some a longer story, some a novel.
4. “The Good Mothers in the Parking Lot” which diplomatically but devastatingly addresses the 2016 presidential election—I love this story so much—how did you maintain such a calm POV here? Did you redraft it several times?
I wrote this story right after the election, and right after a very similar situation as described in the story--when a group of parents, some of whom were Democrats, some Republican, had to drop their children off for a school trip. The whole experience was immensely hard and the way I coped with it was to write about it in a very distant point of view. I could not get my mind around the situation--that people I knew to be good had decided to vote this horrid, immoral person into office, and perhaps just reporting on this helped the sorrow and anger right underneath that feeling of shock. I did rewrite it a few times, but the tone remained the same throughout.
5. “The Department of Happiness and Reimbursement” is a story that continues to haunt me, perhaps more than any of the others in the way it addresses #MeToo, workers’ rights and misogyny. How did this story begin?
This was my first dystopian story, and evolved when I heard about the settlements that prominent men like Bill O'Reilly made with women who had accused them of sexual harassment--and how these women were then not allowed to talk about their experiences. I found this situation surreal--it seemed wrong to pay women for their silence. So I started thinking about how this use of silence could be controlled by the government, and how it could be related to misogyny, workers' rights, an uncertain economic environment. It was the last story I wrote in the collection, and it was energizing to invent/develop this terrifying and familiar world; I hope that the story functions as a warning.
6. What are you working on now if you don't mind sharing a few words about it?
Writing some new stories (A short short, "The Shame Exchange," was recently published in The Yale Review online), and a novel beginning--trying to decide where to go!
Karen E. Bender is the author of Refund, a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction, short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and long-listed for the Story Prize. The New Order was also longlisted for the Story Prize. She is also the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Guernica, The Harvard Review, The Yale Review and others, has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories and won two Pushcart prizes. She is the Visiting Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University.
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