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An Interview with Marika Lindholm, Third Place Winner of the Mary C. Mohr Short Fiction Award
Marika Lindholm recently resigned from Northwestern University, where she
taught sociology for thirteen years and published several articles on gender,
race, and political organizing. Her energy is now devoted to fiction writing,
organic farming, and raising four children. She and her husband are
impatiently waiting to bring home a second child from Ethiopia. Her first
story was published last spring in Silent Voices.
Excerpt from "Fall
Seven Times, Stand Up Eight":
Picking up a brown, wilted
carrot that should have been compost, Toshio decided to sculpt a delicate
flower, an orange blossom that always made girls smile. His fingers failed
him. He tried to hide the hacked-up vegetable, but it was too late.
“For me?” She picked up the brown and orange, turd-like object. Toshio gave a noncommittal shrug. “How nice,” she murmured tonelessly, as if hearing that an old boyfriend had met his true love.
Was it his destiny to disappoint? Why had he opened up to this woman? Why had he slipped, let down his armor, foolish enough to believe that the tide of misfortune could be so easily reversed? Embarrassed, he grabbed the botched gift out of her hands and flung it into the trash.
***
Katie Guthrie: You have been twice-honored in the Who’s Who of America’s Teachers. What are some of the innovative teaching techniques you have used in the classroom?
Marika Lindholm: I was an effective teacher because I’m very hyper and immature. OK, it was a little more than that, but at the heart of my success was a willingness to show emotion, share my mistakes, and speak candidly about issues of identity―conversations always fraught with emotional intensity. I taught large lecture classes on Social Inequality, Workforce Diversity, Race & Sport, and was obsessed with finding short film clips and experiential exercises to augment my lectures. In my course on inequality, the whole quarter was one long exercise in stratification. Not everyone had fun, but the experience was always memorable.
When teaching complex sociological theory, I always tried to find readings that made the theory more accessible. For example, I had the class read Death of a Salesman in conjunction with lectures on Durkheim’s theory of suicide. I’ve also assigned Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston and John Updike to elucidate issues of identity. I loved the excitement of teaching, but it was all-consuming, making it difficult to accommodate a variety of changes that were happening in my life. Namely, becoming part of a blended family that kept adding more kids, and purchasing a farm in Columbia County, New York. My husband, Ray, came with teen triplets; I had a son and daughter; then we added a boy and a girl; and now we are anxiously waiting to pick up our eighth child from Ethiopia. Yes, the family will be complete at that point. I look forward to moving to the farm, raising our children, and writing sentences until I’m dead.
KG: Describe your writing process. When you sit down to write a story, do you already have a basic outline in your head of what you want to happen, or do you find that your characters sometimes take on a life of their own and lead you to places that surprise you?
ML: At thirty-eight, I finally screwed up the courage to take a fiction writing class even though my only writing experience was academic articles. On the first day, the instructor explained that not knowing the ending is essential to the creative process of story writing. I was liberated!
I never begin with an outline. I work from a scene or conversation that has
grabbed me and then allow the mysterious imaginative trance to show me the
way. Once I’m involved in a story, I often feel as if I’m watching a play.
I’ll tell my kids, “You’re not going to believe what so and so did today.”
“Fall Seven Times” was inspired by an exchange that I observed while eating Japanese food with my kids. A young woman sauntered over to the sushi bar, ordered red wine and began chatting up two stoic sushi chefs who barely responded to her effusive chitchat. She never ordered sushi and just kept talking. I tried hushing my kids, but I never could catch the drift of the conversation. I walked out prepared to write a story about an incredibly needy woman. However, when I sat down to write the scene, Toshio’s character came to me in a magical gust. He hijacked the story, taking me on a ride I never expected.
KG: A lot of your writing seems to deal with themes of disabilities and/or women’s issues. “Fall Seven Times, Stand Up Eight” has both. What draws you to these themes?
ML: It’s a bit early in my transition from academic to fiction writer to feel comfortable characterizing overarching themes in my work, but I will say that an interest in social inequality and marginalization inevitably shapes the way I think about story writing. I’m always very aware of the ways in which identities divide us. Therefore, when creating my characters and the worlds they inhabit, I am particularly interested in seeing what happens when characters from diverse backgrounds want something from each other.
KG: What advice do you have for writers who are trying to get published?
ML: Since at this point I only have two publications, it’s a bit premature for me to be offering advice on how to get published. Yet, I’m two for two and looking to extend my streak, so for whatever its worth, my advice is get your stuff out there and when it gets rejected, get it out there again.
Last spring when I decided to quit my job, I was freaked out that I would
become a housewife whose hobby was writing (not that there is anything wrong
with that!) so I decided to start a publication support group. Six women
formed Life after Fred (LAF). “Fred” is Fred Shafer, a generous and gifted
teacher who takes all our writing seriously in his short story workshop, yet
when it came to publishing, most of us were too intimidated or overwhelmed to
submit our stories. LAF meets once every two months to encourage each other to
submit; discuss the nuts and bolts of the submission process; provide a place
to whine when the rejection slip comes in the mail; and most importantly,
offer constructive criticism on the final revisions of a manuscript. Here’s a
shout out to LAF who gave me the resolve to enter this contest!
KG: Could you tell me a little more about the Fred Shafer workshop? Was it similar or different than "traditional" workshops?
ML: I have limited knowledge as to what constitutes a “traditional workshop,” yet I know that Fred Shafer’s workshop is unique. Fred is knowledgeable, extraordinarily generous with feedback, and prepares assiduously for each meeting. Over the academic year, we meet almost every week for three hours to take each short story through three drafts of collective feedback. Additionally, we study the work of two authors who we interview at the end of the year. This year we’ve had the pleasure of reading the work of Antonya Nelson and Jeffrey Eugenides. Notables from past years are Charles Baxter, T.C. Boyle, and Tobias Wolf.
KG: Who are your literary influences?
ML: As a kid I devoured every book I managed to get my hands on. Although trained as a sociologist, I’ve maintained this habit even if it meant lugging Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy in a backpack already laden with weighty books by Karl Marx and Max Weber. Favorites among the many transformative writers who’ve impacted me are Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, and Russell Banks. Lately, I’ve been reading short stories by Antonya Nelson, Lorrie Moore, and Amy Hempel. I so admire these writers for their ability to weave witty, yet emotionally complex, stories that break your heart. As the daughter of a Swedish actress turned translator, I’ve read and seen more than my share of plays by Strindberg and Ibsen. This may account for the fact that my stories and characters tend to express variously morphed versions of Scandinavian angst. I’ve yet to write a happy ending!
KG: Your mother sounds interesting. Could you tell me more about her?
ML: In the early sixties, Eileen Ford of Ford Modeling Agency convinced my mother to leave Stockholm, Sweden, and bring her family to live and work in New York City. She proceeded to have a long, successful modeling career despite her ambivalence about leaving behind a blossoming acting career in Europe. An early NYC memory was that as the “Kodak Girl,” we saw her cut-out image in a red bathing suit every time we walked by a store that sold Kodak film. Her work in theatre started with off-off Broadway and then over the years she dedicated tireless hours to various theatre projects, ultimately finding her niche in translating the work of a brilliant Swedish playwright, Lars Noren. In Europe, he is quite well known, but it’s been tough to get American audiences to appreciate his edgy political subject matter and often twisted take on modern relationships.
KG: What was it like to grow up in a bilingual household?
ML: Our household wasn’t bilingual in the traditional sense of the word. I had started speaking Swedish when we moved, but unfortunately, my parents were more focused on teaching my younger sister and I English rather than maintaining our Swedish. However, my parent’s private conversations were always in Swedish, so because of my shameless eavesdropping, I became proficient enough to get by during our summers in Sweden. In graduate school, I dedicated myself to gaining greater command of the language in order to conduct primary data collection on the history of Swedish welfare state formation.
KG: How do you think this exposure to different cultures affected you?
ML: This is a tough question, because although I experienced discomfort due to our family’s cultural inappropriateness, such as regularly eating smoked eel, wearing clogs that people assumed were corrective shoes, and being sent to the local pool without a swim top (utter humiliation!), I didn’t contend with the kind of marginalization that most immigrants face. My mom drove a white Mustang convertible, my dad sailed, and my sister and I blended with ease. I do, however, remember feeling that our family was incredibly timid and overwhelmed during those first years in the US, making me empathetic to outsider status.
At twelve years old, my cultural backdrop shifted again when my mother
remarried a Jewish Broadway and TV actor from New York City with three
children. We were thrust into a social world where humor and Stephen Sondheim
ruled. Our blended family was unwieldy but always allowed backstage. During my
teens, my Swedish father lived on a sailboat in the Caribbean subsisting on a
pittance; therefore, I became even more adept at traversing cultural
boundaries. I’m certain my voice is linked to such boundary spanning, but how,
exactly, remains to be seen.
KG: You have spoken about your daughter Safia, adopted from Africa, in a Chicago Tribune Online article. What advice would you give to prospective parents who are thinking of adopting a child from a different cultural background?
ML: WARNING! This question is prone to set off a lecture. Adopting a child of another culture, especially trans-racially, is a life-long commitment to honoring where they come from, giving them the knowledge and confidence to confront discrimination, and building networks that include friends and role models from their specific cultural background. An “all you need is love” approach just isn’t going to cut it. The adoptive parent must stretch outside their comfort zone and build bridges to communities that will inevitably be essential to the psychological well-being of their child.
KG: I enjoyed your unpublished story, "Lilac in Bloom," very much and hope that it will eventually get published. If you care to talk about it, could you tell me a little more about what inspired this story?
ML: "Lilac in Bloom" is a story about a teenager who runs away to LA to become famous but gets pregnant. Opting to give her baby up for adoption, she is thrilled to pick a former soap star and his wife as the adoptive parents. The couple invites her into their home for the last trimester and madness ensues.
This story emerged from a snippet I heard in a required adoption course. One of the couples shared that when they attended the birth of their adopted daughter, the birth mom pretended that the adoptive dad was the baby’s biological father. This got me thinking about a situation in which a young girl fell in love with the man to whom she was going to relinquish her baby. The setting was influenced by hanging out with my brother, an LA actor who isn’t a household name but has managed to survive the business thus far. When he kindly organized the opportunity to watch the filming of the TV drama ER, neither of us expected that a year later, a runaway from Sheboygan would end up going into labor and having her baby on the set.
KG: Marika, all of us here at the Southern Indiana Review would like to congratulate you on winning third prize in the Mary C. Mohr Short Fiction Award. We thank you for your time, and we wish you the best of luck in all of your future endeavors.
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