It’s early March and Elizabeth McCracken has just finished teaching her Monday afternoon class, a Novel Workshop, at the University of Texas at Austin — the same class that had been cancelled two weeks before, due to snow.

Why, you might ask, would snow affect a class that meets remotely on Zoom?

Because the power was out, a glaze of ice making roads impassable, the city at a standstill. It was the start of an historic and crippling February freeze that would dominate national news for a week. Austin, a global technology hub, had been brought to its metaphorical knees: Much of the city, and indeed the state, had no water, no heat, no food. And all this, as the nation slogged toward the one-year anniversary of the pandemic.

This was the backdrop for the following conversation with McCracken, whose new short story collection The Souvenir Museum (Ecco) is the author’s seventh book and it’s getting rave reviews. The Boston native and one-time librarian continues to impress with her edgy and smart, stirring, and reliably witty tales of couples and families navigating their lives. 

While McCracken chats with obvious pleasure about her new collection, there can be no mistaking the signs of this last year. The renowned author and teacher is speaking from the Austin studio where she and her husband, playwright and illustrator Edward Carey, have worked off-campus during the pandemic. McCracken spoke about her new story collection, family, writing and life during Covid with Joan Silverman for The National.

Q:  Did you have as much fun writing “The Souvenir Museum” as it would appear to a reader? 

A:  I think I did. It was largely fun to write. I tend to draft things pretty quickly and then revise a lot. Five of the (twelve) stories are about the same two characters, Sadie and Jack — those I wrote quite recently. I wrote three of the first drafts in three consecutive days while my family and I were traveling. I would get up early every morning and work on those three stories. I hadn’t ever written anything in that way.   

Q:  I loved your last story collection, “Thunderstruck,” and was trying to compare it with the new book. How would you compare the two? 

A:  I think this book is lighter in a lot of ways. I wrote almost all of the stories in “Thunderstruck” when my kids were little. And there’s that particular stage of childhood when you look at your children and you think, “Terrible things can happen to them at any moment.” I still worry about my children, but they’re 13 and 12 now, and for their sake as well as mine, I don’t exist in the same state of hyper-vigilance. 

Q:  “Terrible things can happen” is a nice umbrella for the sense of weirdness and of something being haunted in that book. And the new book doesn’t have that at all. The new book seems more family-oriented, and it felt warmer to me.

A:  Yes, I think it probably is.

Q:  Were you trying to do different things this time, and did you achieve what you’d hoped for? 

A:  Oh, I don’t know — I’m the wrong person to ask! The thing that drives me as a writer is that I feel like I never achieve what I want to achieve. And then I tell myself cheerfully, “I’ll get it in the next book.”

Q:  And do you get closer each time?

A:  I hope so. I’m never quite sure. I also suffer from amnesia when I have finished writing something. So, since I wrote those stories, I’ve written a bunch of other stuff because I was on leave in the fall.

Q:  That’s a good thing, isn’t it — to have some distance?

A:  It is, actually. I don’t have the usual feelings of dread. I also think, like many writers, I’ve had my perspective shifted on what’s important. It makes me feel much more blasé or devil-may-care about publishing a story collection. I’m like, I hope people like it, but whatever it does, it’s fine. 

Q:  Right — you hope people like it, but you hope people live!

A:  Exactly. People are more important. 

Q:  From a publishing standpoint, authors have been through a lot in the last year, with books being thrown off-schedule by six months or more, and bookstores closed. 

A:  I’m very sympathetic to people whose publishing careers were thrown off by this. But frankly, we’re the lucky ones because we are not performers.    

Q:  One of the odd, unexpected aspects of pandemic life has been virtual readings, which are more often conversations between authors these days.

A: It was already shifting before the pandemic. Most of the people wanted to have conversations. But I miss going to see famous people, and having famous people read their work to me. I miss readings. I love being read to. 

Q:  I don’t know that any writer gets a monopoly on great lines. But as I was going through your book with my highlighter pen, I realized there was no point because most pages are highlighted. You have so many good lines — I’ve become a fangirl!  

A:  Oh, thanks! If there’s something I am vain about in my writing, it’s at the level of the sentence. Like that’s my favorite compliment!

Q:  And that’s my favorite thing as a reader. I pulled out a few lines from the story, It’s Not You: “A lobby filled with departing hangovers and their owners.” “….his mustache tended by money and a specialist.” “He had a beef bourguignon voice.”

Do you know when you’ve hit upon the right line?

A:  I think so, usually. I was talking with my friend Ann Patchett. We were doing an event. She was talking about going over her language again and again, and her language is beautiful. But I don’t labor over language. I fiddle a little bit with punctuation as I write, but if I can’t get it right the first time, then I throw the sentence out.

When I write, what gives me pleasure is writing a good sentence; writing a good sentence is deeply pleasurable. I have to work much harder to think about who these characters are, and moving them through a story in a way that deepens them. 

Q:  As a reader, I often feel that you’re naming something for the first time, which may be the most essential thing that a writer can do. You give me new ways of seeing things. 

A:  That’s one of the nicest things anybody has ever said to me! 

Q:  Going back to Ann Patchett: I stumbled upon an (online) conversation that the two of you had in 2005. You referred to yourself as “a garbage disposal writer.” You said, “I will try to put anything that occurs to me into whatever book I’m working on at the moment.”

A:  That’s true. 

Q:  You also described yourself as “a remarkably aimless person.” What did you mean by that, and is that still true?

A:  I don’t think it’s still true. I’ve had children since then. Children force you to think about the future, so I do more of that than I used to. That conversation actually took place when Ann and I were working at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Ann is one of the most aim-full people in the entire world. She’d come in and sit down, and write her book, whereas I would procrastinate all day long, then I would finally manage to sit down and get some work done.  

Q:  What is it about strangeness that you keep going back to in your stories?

A:  Part of it is, I really feel like I have no interest in ordinary people because I’ve never met any! I feel like most people I know are actually deeply strange.

You know, I often joke about why I ever wrote anything. I should just put up a slide of my parents: My father was about 6’3”, 350 pounds, a giant WASP, German and English. And my mother was 4’11”, 100 pounds, walked with canes, and was a Jewish girl from a small town in Iowa. Together they were a sight gag. Photographs of them are inherently funny and strange because of the difference between the two of them. So, I’m not fully interested in unusual people, but in what makes people unusual when they’re next to each other.  

Q:  I gather, in real life, you might have an interest in vintage things and quirky, weird museums.

A:  Yes indeed. I have always liked vintage things and strange museums, and in fact, both aspects were a big part of my childhood. I have a fond recollection of going around with my parents and my brother to the weird little house museums of New England. And also my parents loved objects tremendously — family objects, antiques. 

Q:  I realize this is like asking if you have a favorite child, but do you have a favorite story in the new collection?

A:  I’m fond of “The Irish Wedding,” which I think is the funniest and probably the happiest story in the collection. Though the characters are not autobiographical, 80% of the anecdotes in that story were actually between me and my husband.

And I really love the book’s cover. I love that sense of here is something temporary that’s being displayed with great seriousness.   

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 Joan Silverman writes op-eds, essays, and book reviews. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, and Dallas Morning News. She is the author of Someday This Will Fit, a collection of linked essays.