In both of Patricia McNair’s short story collections, Temple of Air, published in 2011, and her recently released Responsible Adults (Cornerstone Press) readers will encounter stories often imbued with a mood of uneasiness and menace—an atmospheric style that could be classified as small-town noir.  McNair is equally adept at writing about violence and tenderness, love and fear, danger and the retreat from danger toward safety and home. Home is not always a place of comfort, however, and it is in the care of parents and parental figures that McNair’s younger characters are often the most at risk in the stories that populate Responsible Adults.

At times one has the sense many of the characters featured in McNair’s stories will forever be trapped in a cycle of self-destruction.  In some cases, recovery is possible, and an escape from the poor options arrayed before a character, along with a release from boredom and loneliness, are skillfully dramatized with a sense of inevitability.  McNair is also particularly talented at guiding her characters to a moment of self-knowledge that is as likely to redeem them as it is to frustrate or crush them.

For The National Book Review, Christine Sneed corresponded with McNair recently about her new collection and in her thoughtful and illuminating replies, McNair she shares details about her new stories, writing process, and what moves and inspires her.

Q: Some of the stories in this collection are set in the same fictional town, New Hope, which I imagine as somewhere in western Illinois, not far from the Mississippi River. Do you often have the setting in mind before the characters and/or the plot arrive?

A: Good call on the location of New Hope. That is exactly where I imagine this made-up town to be. When I begin to conceive a story, it usually comes as a combination of people and place together. I see the characters, and I see where they are in the moment that I begin to picture them. Sometimes that is a small place—a cluttered dining room, say, where one of my characters is trying to find her purse among the stuff she doesn’t want to get rid of and among the memories that come with that stuff; the front seat of a car by the dumpster behind a grocery store where neighbors give in to their drunken urges.

Other times it’s more of a landscape I see: the fields alongside a highway as the sun comes up over the corn, the icy road that leads up a hill to a Motel Six, Christmas lights in the yards along the way. Small settings or grander ones, I usually feel a Midwestern grounding is lurking in the foundation of the story, and New Hope is a composite of the various places I imagine. I never think in terms of plot (I hope that isn’t painfully obvious) but rather the gathering of scenes and what they begin to tell me the story is really about. That usually comes pretty late in the process, after I’ve hung out with my characters in these places for a while.

Q:  Several stories in Responsible Adults focus on a difficult mother-daughter relationship; the fathers are either absent or are only marginally involved in their daughters’ lives. I see them as coming-of-age stories--would you say this is the story archetype you’re most attached to?

A: Sometimes I think that all stories are coming-of-age stories. Coming of adolescence, coming of adulthood, coming of middle age, coming of the final life chapters. All stories—can I say that? Stories that are heavily reliant on character push those characters to a new or different moment, understanding, discovery, growth. They start here at fifteen, or forty-five, or eighty, but by the end of things, these characters are somewhere else chronologically (because time passes in stories) and often psychologically.

But that isn’t what you asked, really, is it? Yes, I am very attracted to stories about young people, young characters, and the way they are both so sure of things and so not. It is an interesting time of life, one that insists on change of some sort, on the gaining of new knowledge. But while I am eager for the characters I make to be presented with a new way of looking at things, I especially think it’s interesting when they don’t buy in to that new knowledge entirely. I like them to question, to doubt, to get it wrong, too. So maybe what I am attached to is a sort of “coming-up-to-an-age” more so than a full-on coming-of-age archetype.

Q:  One of my favorite stories is “Regarding Alix,” which occurs mostly in the late fall of 2001.  Is this a story you wrote a while ago, before you published your first book, Temple of Air, or did you write it recently? I’m curious about how it evolved, and if you drew, for example, any of its events from your own experiences as a writer in residence at Interlochen (even though it isn’t set there).

A: This is one of the older stories in the book; I first drafted it in 2002 or 2003, before my first collection was published. When I was writer in residence at Interlochen up in Michigan, our first day of classes was September 11, 2001. And as you might imagine, we were all quite shook up. Interlochen is an arts boarding school with a few day students.

Many of the boarders had family in New York and in other parts of the world; we all felt far from home. The day students were a little different from that; they went home to their families at the end of each day. It made for a sort of town and gown dynamic as I saw it; they, the day schoolers, were somewhat on the outside of the way we residents existed on this tiny campus, away from big cities, away from our loved ones. In “Regarding Alix,” the timing for the story is just a few weeks after the attacks in New York, D.C., Pennsylvania. But in the story, as in the way it really went at the time, everyone felt the uncertainty and despair that came with these horrific acts.

We were sad, we were scared, we were helpless. My students were; I was. It took me some months to begin to write the story itself, but much of the emotional content, the culture of a boarding school, and my sick cat (like the main character’s cat in this story) were things I had written about in my journal. When I was finally ready to write the fictional story, I had already explored a lot of it in the pages of my notebook.

Q: I noticed one or two recurring characters in this collection--Dorothy, for example, who appears in three stories, two set in the U.S. and one in England. Her mother, Edna, is suffering from dementia, but Edna only figures into two of the stories. I can see you writing a novel about these characters--do you aspire to write a novel or is the short story now and possibly forever your preferred mode?

Actually, Dorothy is in four of the stories. In the fourth one she is hitchhiking in the Midwest and is picked up by a creepy guy with a large framed painting of Jesus in the backseat. But isn’t that interesting that you thought there is novel possibility here. I wouldn’t say I had thought of Dorothy and Edna as novel material, but I have toyed with the idea of using Dorothy’s memory of visiting Paris as a potential stepping stone for something longer. A few of the stories, “Good Men and Bad,” “Serve and Protect,” and “The Truth is Not Much Good” were mined from a novel I keep trying to write.

I have two apprentice novels in a drawer, and maybe this third one I just alluded to is another apprentice novel, but I hope not. I hope to be able to succeed at writing a novel. I love reading good novels. I am also crazy about the short story form, its compression, what you tell, what you leave out, all of that. Endings. I love a good ending on a short story. When I do successfully and satisfyingly finish a novel, I imagine it will be influenced by the way I make short stories. I am not entirely sure what I mean by that, but I know it is true. Edna and Dorothy, huh? Interesting.

Q:  Many of your stories remind me of Elizabeth Strout’s novel Anything Is Possible, which also features recurring characters and a small-town Illinois setting--was Strout’s book an influence on you? If not Anything Is Possible, were there other books you had in mind as you wrote Responsible Adults? 

A: I have long admired Elizabeth Strout’s linked story collections as well as her novels. I haven’t yet read Anything is Possible, but I am certain that Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again, as well as the mother daughter relationship in Amy and Isabelle have whispered in my ear as I write. I really enjoy linked collections, novels in stories. Jaimee Wriston Colbert has a few of these. Climbing the God Tree, Shark Girls, are two of my favorites of hers.

And as I was putting Responsible Adults together, I was also thinking of the Chicago writer Giano Cromley’s What We Built Upon the Ruins. He has a family that appears in three (I think) of those stories, placed strategically throughout the collection. And while each story is completely satisfying on its own, you come to understand that you will revisit these characters, and you begin to feel invested, curious, and that pulls you along, gives you more to know about the fictional lives that he has created.

In my collection, these returns to Dorothy and Edna, and in a more limited way to Guillermo, aren’t set up in a manner so you would anticipate them. However, I am hopeful that when you come to understand that we are seeing a sort of evolution of these characters, and you reflect back over what you have read, this understanding will illuminate the book in a new way for you.

Q:  Often your characters are trying to overcome impoverished circumstances, whether financial, emotional, or both--would you say your default mode as a writer is the tragic?

A: I am drawn to the beauty found in what makes us ache. I don’t think I could write a particularly happy story even if I wanted to (I don’t much want to). Bittersweet is good, slightly hopeful, cool. When I gave one of these stories to Philip, my husband and first reader, to read, I asked him what he thought of the happy ending. “You have no idea what a happy ending is, do you?” Perhaps I don’t. An intentional ignorance, no doubt. Good thing I’m not writing for Hallmark.

Q: You also write essays, and your second book, And These Are the Good Times, is an acclaimed essay collection. In fact, an essay ends Responsible Adults--what made you decide to include it? Do you consider it a coda, as it addresses the pandemic, in part?

A: A coda is a good word for it. While it might not speak specifically to the book itself, to the stories, it does speak to the essential loneliness of the making of work, and the enforced loneliness of this time in particular. We are in such an odd place right now; so much is beyond our control and we really don’t know what is going to happen next.

Maybe the work will get us through; maybe the roaring silence in the lockdowns can; maybe, as I quote Arundhati Roy, it is this: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.” My characters have not lived through this pandemic yet, not in the time I have written them. But I have, we have. And it was important to me to tell a little of that story, too.

Q:  Cats are important characters in a few of these stories, most notably “Kitty,” “Regarding Alix,” and “My Mother’s Daughter.” Would you say cats (or animals as characters) help you get to the heart of the story faster than human characters do--or, put another way, do you find them more immediately sympathetic?

A: I am a cat person. I adore cats. I would have seventeen if I could, but I am without feline companionship right now. We had two cats for about fifteen years; they died within a couple years of one another and we are not ready to replace them. All of this is to say that I was not intentional with my choice of having cats in so many of the stories; they showed up like strays in need of food and a warm place to sleep, and I let them stay.

I read a quote attributed to Ernest Hemingway once, “…human beings, for one reason or another may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.” What I might understand about the presence of cats in these stories now is that my characters find it easier to love a cat than another person, or at least easier to admit to this animal love. Easier, too, to mourn for pets in their absence. Much less emotionally risky than grieving the loss of one’s memory, or the loss of a brother, a lover, a parent.

Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts,and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, and New York Times.  She’s been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and has received the Grace Paley Prize, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Society of Midland Authors Award, and others.  She lives in Pasadena, CA, and is the faculty director of Northwestern University School of Professional Studies’ graduate creative writing program and also teaches for Regis University's low-residency MFA program.