In her novel in corporate memos, Please Be Advised (713 Books), and as editor of the short story anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up (Tortoise Books), fiction writer Christine Sneed takes aim at corporate culture. With wit and insight, Sneed skewers society’s reverence for CEOs who act as kings of the universe. As these new volumes appear in libraries and stores this month, poet and editor William Lessard spoke with Sneed about the inspiration for her stories and novels, how to use comedy in narrative, and the absurdity of the office. Lessard is a Sneed fan. He is an admirer of her ability to balance “the realistic and the absurd with such grace and a sense of pure entertainment,” and praises her for “situating the feminism of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan within contemporary pop-culture tropes—a subversion that is both cutting and delicious.”

Q: It was a pleasure meeting you and hearing you read at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference in Philadelphia this past March. But I don’t think you ever told me what inspired Please be Advised.

A. I had just finished a comic novel that was a straightforward narrative chronologically, everything traditional in a linear, storytelling sense, a comedic novel I was describing as a May-December (with the woman the older party) sex comedy. And I had such a good time writing it. I also wrote it quickly—it was one of those projects where you realize, "This is exactly what I want to be writing at this moment and it's working out and I love it." And then I was a little sad and deflated when it was over (as I think often happens to writers when they finish a lengthy manuscript), and utterly exhausted, and so I started writing memos and didn't know where I was going with them.

I thought there would only be a few and I would try to send them out as flash fiction, essentially. But I kept going and realized eventually that I had a novel, maybe. I sent some of these early memos out to a couple of journals and they kindly published them, and the responses I received from readers I wasn’t related to were heartening. I don’t get much fan mail and am a little envious of writers who do (I still write fan letters sometimes to authors whose books I love and often they reply, which I think of as part of the job, frankly). It was gratifying that these goofy corporate memos were attracting a little bit of attention. One reader posted a note on my Facebook author page about one of the memos ZYZZYVA published a few years ago and told me there was a debate in her office about the situation described in the memo, which ultimately turned out to be the first memo in the book and concerns two trees falling within an hour of each other on that memo’s main character’s property.

 Q: In my day job as a publicist, I'm more comfortable with press releases and white papers and thought leadership pieces. How would you place your work within the current context? Is Please Be Advised a memo for yourself? Or is it a response to current events in terms of the great resignation and the general precarity that Americans and other people around the world face economically and in their careers?
A: Not really, no—I don’t see this novel as a response to the pandemic or current employment and economic conditions, maybe because when I started writing Please Be Advised, the pandemic was still almost three years in the future. I was mainly thinking about the idiosyncratic and self-indulgent behavior of people in charge, and the accidental sadness and absurdity of office culture.

The idea that we must spend all this time working for a wage: it's joyful when you can do what you love for your paycheck, which I get to do for the most part with teaching and writing, but I used to work in different offices when I was younger, and I found it incredibly dull. I liked most of the people I worked with, but the work itself was boring. And most of the work assigned to me was something I could get done quickly. But instead of going and doing something else, I had to sit there looking busy, which is offensive to everyone involved, in my opinion, and a waste of time. I suspect you can relate.

Q:  I can.

A: My partner and I sometimes talk about how we’ve come to believe that the root of a lot of modern-day discontent, especially middle-age discontent, is related to how capitalism has essentially sold most of us the same bill of goods with no regard to our temperaments: first, go to college (if you can), next, get a good job, get married, have kids, support them, and eventually, send them off into their adult lives safely, retire, and lastly, die a good death—i.e. not in debt or otherwise in some kind of moral disgrace.

Well, that works for some of us, but certainly not for everyone. Some of the problems with substance abuse or other kinds of addiction that plague many of us might be rooted to no small degree in the way we design lives focused almost solely on earning as much money as possible and subsequently increasing our responsibilities over time without much reflection about whether we actually want these ostensible burdens, which require more money to properly maintain, something that isn’t always available when we need it most.

What if you lose your job—i.e., the company goes under, downsizes, sends jobs overseas, etc., but you still have a family to support, a mortgage to pay? Or you’re able to keep your job, but you must answer to a boss you deeply dislike, and you don’t particularly like your coworkers either, and sometimes you’re doing work you strongly detest or are uninspired by and/or feel is unethical, but you’re stuck—you’ve got the house, the two or three kids, the dog and cat, the aging parents, the expensive hobbies, etc. So, you eat copious shit at the office and toe the company line until either you self-destruct or find a new (and the hope is better) job somehow, or else you finally retire. 

Most of us don’t have other or new options as life rolls on, either—no trust fund, no sudden windfall when a rich relative dies, so we have to cling to our jobs, do the required work and deal with bosses who are sometimes utter buffoons as well as unpleasant bullies (which is how I drew the CEO in Please Be Advised, Bryan Stokerly, who runs the collapsible office product company of 180 people that is the novel’s setting, but he has a BFA in Fiber Arts and has no clue what he’s doing. He’s also an inveterate drunk and womanizer, but everyone puts up with him, day in, day out.)

And sometimes the rules in your workplace change arbitrarily and you feel even more unappreciated, abused, or otherwise confounded. I was thinking on some level about all of this—the misery of everyday breadwinning in corporate America—in most Western societies, frankly, from what I can tell, as I wrote Please Be Advised.

I tried to access all these ideas through humor—at least I hope I did—and drew on my own experiences working in about ten different offices from the time I was 15 until my early 30s when I had my last office job at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before I returned to teaching college writing courses, which I had first done in graduate school in the mid to late 1990s and am still doing today.

Q: I wonder about the specificity of the work. Tell me more about the jobs that inspired this book.

A: I started working in high school at a collection agency in the mid to late eighties, doing random office work for them, stuffing envelopes full of bills to all these people who had defaulted on their loans.

I remember the company I worked for was charged with the task of collecting on loans from the Philadelphia Higher Education Assistance Agency and other lending agencies that focused on student loans, and so we were sending out hundreds and hundreds of bills on little slips of paper to debtors. Some of these debtors were attempting to pay back their loans.

Some would send postdated checks, and I would enter these checks into the system from time to time if the woman who usually did it was busy with other work. We had skip tracers too, people who try to find people who'd essentially disappeared, which these days I think is less easy to do than it was in the eighties with the electronic footprint that we all inadvertently or not have now.

I also worked at Kaplan in graduate school, the test prep agency. I answered phones. And then I taught the MCAT essay class, which is not exactly office work, but I've had this hodgepodge of corporate and non-corporate support staff-type jobs. This was all before and while I was earning my MFA in poetry in Bloomington, Indiana.

Q: I gave up after my Master’s in English. People are welcome to make their choices. Mine would have forced me to move (and keep moving) from place to place. It’s not something I wanted to do. Bad as it is, the absurdity of Corporate America was preferable.

A: Irony is something I think is a joy. I live for funny books, shows, and humor. I love irony. I love British comedy—the dry wit and the understatement. It's so much fun. I do really want my work to be funny, and it is my default mode if I'm writing well.

Q: For me, humor is a texture. I use it sparingly, to set material off from the rest of the context. I never want people to sit there waiting for the next joke, not paying attention to the rest of the work. Humor can be a crutch, as well as a trap. I can see your work adapting well to the screen. Is that something you want to do? What’s next for you?  

A: Along with Please Be Advised, this month I’m publishing Love in the Time of Time’s Up; a collection of short fiction by women, which in many ways tackles the same issues as Please Be Advised, but from the point of view of mostly female characters in romantic relationships, although there is an imaginary epistolary exchange ranging over about 30 years between Brett Kavanaugh and his priest,

Collecting these stories has been inspiring and has helped to give me a little more perspective on what I have been ruminating on these last several years as a writer and a college professor and a person in America who is disturbed by the anti-democracy trends in politics since the rise of the truly odious, venal, and almost surreally greedy/inward-gazing Donald Trump and his helpmates.

Contributors to the anthology include Lynn Freed, Karen Bender, May-lee Chai, Elizabeth Crane, Gina Orangelo, Cris Mazza, and Amina Gautier.

I love this anthology and couldn’t believe how beautifully it came together as the contributors began sending me their stories for it. I didn’t know what we’d end up with, but I’m proud of how it turned out. There is humor in some of these stories, and surprises—it’s not about heterosexual man-bashing. It’s about trying to figure out what the hell is going on between people today, people with appetites, expectations, boundaries they sometimes aren’t aware they have until they’ve been crossed. 

William Lessard is Poetry & Hybrids editor at Heavy Feather Review. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Experimental Writing, Fence, and Southwest Review. His chapbook, instrument for distributed empathy monetization, was published by KERNPUNKT Press in April 2022. More info: www.williamlessardwrites.net.