An Interview with Whitney Collins

In Whitney Collins’ new collection, Ricky and Other Love Stories, readers will find love in peculiar places: the sperm bank, a windy city hotel, behind the counter at Glazy’s Ham Depot. Through fiction that is dark and tender, intimate and fantastic, Collins shows us love in its many forms. A few weeks after publication, Collins sat down with associate editor, Kira Compton, to talk about submissions, love stories, and writer’s dread.



IR: So, I read both of your collections, and you do such a good job with first lines. They’re all so raw and visceral—there’s not a bad one in the bunch. Do you start from these intense images, or is there a revision process where you find a good place to come into this broader world?


WC: I'm so glad you asked this because I just recently did an interactive workshop called Big Beginnings. It’s one of my favorite little tricks of the trade. As a writer, you want your audience to be riveted from the beginning so you don't lose them. But it's also a trick for me as a writer. If I start out with a big bang, then there's so much more momentum to keep going. You know, let's get right to the meat of the plot. Let's get right into the nitty gritty of the action. Let's start where it's scary or exciting or weird. We second guess ourselves so much during writing. We'll stop, read, edit, overthink… I think by starting with something wild, we can get rid of some of the overthinking.

So that's kind of a long way to answer your question.


IR: No, no. That's awesome. I think about beginnings a lot, especially as a reader and editor for the Idaho Review. I’ve learned a lot about my own writing working for the magazine, and my biggest takeaway has been that if I don’t get them on the first page, I’m not going to get them.


WC: Exactly.


IR: But I didn't even think about it as a way to keep my own interest.


WC: Yeah, I initially started because I did work for three literary magazines in some way, shape, or form. Sometimes you'd have the most beautiful writing in front of you, but you were like, wow, this is a twelve-page story, but I don't really get excited until page six. I’m reading these and then getting my own rejections and realizing it’s a lesson to me as a writer: get to the point.


IR: Speaking of magazines, you are deeply prolific with publications. With most short story collections, maybe three or four stories have been previously published. But with both Big Bad and Ricky & Other Love Stories, it’s well over ten . What’s that process like for you?


WC: I love submitting my work. I think any writer will attest, when you're first starting out it's really daunting because it's basically a numbers game. You have to prepare yourself for an unbelievable amount of rejection.

I was like, you know what? What if I just make this a game? I have three finished stories in front of me—what if each one goes out to twenty places? What if I flood the market with these finished stories?

You shouldn’t send out just to the three places—if you can, you should be sending it to twenty. It might seem like a lot, but in the world of literary magazines, it’s really not. The more you have out there in circulation, the less you feel like you’re just sitting at home waiting for an answer.

Reading, writing, submitting. It's like the Holy Trinity for me.


IR: I’d love to hear your thoughts on the novel vs the short story, since it seems like novels constantly get pushed on us writers. Do you feel there’s a benefit to the short story form that the novel doesn’t have?


WC: This is probably a little unfair—I love novels and am trying to write one right now—but I do think that the novel is the preferred form because it sells. The short story just isn’t as financially lucrative to publishing companies, making it an underdog. But I think it’s just the most fantastic form for fiction. It most accurately mimics the real world.

The novel does this beautiful thing for readers because it gives you a beginning, middle, and an end. The conflict is resolved and everything is tied up because there’s the space to do that.

In real life, though, things are constantly in flux. There's a lot of loose ends and unknowns. The short story is actually more representative of how life works—it's a little more mysterious and slippery, and we don't get these perfect endings. You rely on your reader to participate, and they have some space there to interpret. There’s more of a relationship between writer and reader.


IR: I didn't realize you were working on a novel. Has that been a different process from short story writing for you or similar?


WC: It has been extremely different. I am not going to lie, I think I've had twenty false starts. I got so used to stalling out with my enthusiasm that I have all these unfinished documents on my computer, and I was like, okay, can I even call this a novel anymore? I had to really psych myself into this place where I'm writing it in snippets, setting it up in a way where it feels like storytelling instead of novel writing.

And full disclosure, I have had the most success of writing this novel on my phone. I am literally typing it in with my thumbs in my notes app, and then I will send it to my email so it's in a safe spot.

It’s a little messy, but it's also just liberating because I no longer have to say, well, I didn't get to my novel today. I can be in the dental waiting room and write two paragraphs of dialogue right there.

I mean, it’s a trick. It takes the daunting nature of two or three hundred pages away because I can’t do a word count in my notes app—please don’t tell me if there’s a way I can—but I’m just not worrying about how many words or pages I’m writing.


IR: In another interview, you said you don’t use the phrase writer’s block, but writer’s dread. How has that shift helped?


WC: I don't remember if this was a teacher or if it’s a famous quote, but you know, a plumber doesn't go work on someone's pipes and say, oh, I have plumber’s block today.

It's a job. You might not feel like doing it, but it’s a job, and you need to treat it like one.

Whenever I have a complete out-of-flow day, I sit for a little while and just read my favorite people. And sure enough, I may not have the most productive day, but I usually end up writing something that I really like, which is why I just believe so wholeheartedly that to be a great writer, you have to be reading the greats.

It doesn't mean that everyone's going to be reading the same authors. It's just the stories that speak to you that you should be reading regularly.


IR: What are some of the ones that speak to you?


WC: Joy Williams, definitely. Lydia Davis, Ramona Ausubel, Kelly Link, George Saunders.

Anybody that has dark humor and the brokenness of human spirit and a few elements of magical realism. At the heart of my work, I want to be writing about characters who are processing complex emotions, but I want to do it in both a comedic and tender way.

When I'm struggling, sometimes just reading one paragraph gets me back in the swing of it.


IR: Your new collection is called Ricky and Other Love Stories, which sets the reader up for them. Not that they’re not love stories, but I went into them thinking, okay, every one of these is a love story, even the ones that aren’t necessarily lovey dovey, you know?
When in the writing or publication process did you know you were going to do that?


WC: So, I did not know I was writing love stories when I started. The umbrella for that happened after I had written maybe three or four stories. Back during the pandemic, all these stories were coming out of me. I kept putting them to the side because I was trying to work on a novel, but they just kept coming. I asked myself what they had in common, and they’re all some exploration of love. Parent, child, friend, neighbor, husband and wife, wife and wife, husband and husband.

So I said, well, let's just call them love stories. They're not going to be your traditional love stories or romances. No touchy feely, lovey dovey tropes. I mean, some of them are sweet, but I would say these characters are pursuing love in a desperate way, or are sabotaging it and running away from it.

Between the love stories and Danika’s beautiful book cover, I think I lured people in. You know, a little bit of false advertising. Hook them and trick them a little bit.


IR: You've talked about your MFA program being non-competitive, and I just wanted to hear a little bit about that. When I was applying—and a lot of our readers are in that process of applying for MFAs—when I was applying, I thought I wanted that competitive, meat grinder experience. And then I got into BSU, which is very much not like that. Very supportive and non-competitive. After my first workshop, I was like, oh, this is the way. Why did I ever think the other way was better?

So I wanted to hear more about your program, or maybe the benefits of a more relaxed MFA community.


WC: When I applied to Spalding, I did so because I knew people that had gone through the program. It was close to home. I was excited about the faculty there, and how it was going to work for me geographically.

I’ll admit that I didn’t know their philosophy going into it, so it was new to me that first semester, but I quickly realized it was fantastic.

I’m not sure how useful competition is in the long run. The bottom line is we want great writers who have great stories, great poems, great essays. The best way to do that is to be in a community with other people who are passionate about writing and who actually have useful feedback for you, rather than causing you to run off and lick your wounds.

Competition is great to a certain degree, but there’s no reason why we can’t be both motivated and helped. And that’s what workshop should be—helpful. We should send people home with solutions instead of, you know, pain. Going home from workshop with something constructive instead of destructive.


IR: And the question I ask everyone: what sort of advice do you have for writers early in their careers?


WC: We all have a voice inside us as writers. One voice is saying write, I can’t live without writing, I need to write write write. And the other one is an inner critic who is just so, so dangerous. If there’s a way you can put that critic to the side every day—even if it’s just for thirty minutes or an hour—then that’s great. That critic is the biggest road block to writers getting their stuff out there. It's the biggest roadblock to submitting. It's the biggest roadblock to writing.
If you have to trick yourself to avoid that critic, go for it. Right now for me, it’s writing in my notes app. But it can be anything.
No matter what success you have, that critic is still there. Writing regardless is the only cure, every day if you can. Just going to work like the plumber, every day.

And reading, reading, reading. I really can’t underscore that enough.

Whitney Collins is the author of RICKY & OTHER LOVE STORIES (Sarabande, 2024) and BIG BAD (Sarabande, 2021), which won the 2019 Mary McCarthy Prize, a 2021 Bronze INDIES, and a 2022 Gold IPPY. She is the recipient of a Best American Short Stories 2022 Distinguished Story, a 2020 Pushcart Prize, a 2020 Pushcart Prize Special Mention and won the 2020 American Short(er) Fiction Prize and the 2021 ProForma Contest. Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, AGNI, The Idaho Review, Gulf Coast, Book of the Month Club’s literary magazine Volume 0, and The Best Small Fictions 2022, among others. 

Purchase RICKY & OTHER LOVE STORIES and BIG BAD here, or anywhere books are sold.