Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  Q. Consciousness and identity emerge as two strong themes within the collection. What did you want to say in dealing with these?

  A. I don't know that I wanted to say anything. I think I don't understand consciousness or identity. There's a saying in fiction, 'Write what you know.' I think better fiction comes out of writing about the things that are important to me, but that I'm fundamentally uncertain about. That doesn't mean I sit down and say, 'I'm going to write a story about identity.' I always think I'm writing a story about a girl who thinks her best friend is a werewolf. It just happens that I circle back to those issues of identity.

  As a writer, I have a couple of itches that I scratch, things I return to again and again. I tend to be drawn to motherhood because I'm trying to find a way to convince myself that I wasn't a monster. I'll get an idea for a story and think, I know, I'll make the mother have Alzheimer's. Not thinking about the connection between a teenager finding her way and an old woman losing her way and a mother helpless in the middle to ease either passage. I find out about all those things years later. I put them there, because those things are by default interesting to me. But it's not conscious.

  Q. [)id you learn anything new about these stories in the process of choosing and ordering them for the book?

  A. I find it difficult to reread my own fiction. It was nice to see that a lot of it had held tip. And I was surprised at how much the same things kept corning up, again and again. The mother in "The Lincoln Train," for example, has some form of dementia.

  Q. How are these stories different from your novels, if at all? How does your writing process differ between the two?

  A. I often write short stories to a deadline. Often, anymore, a workshop. They are more likely to be ideas that I'm not at all sure will work out. I can take more risks because most of the time I know that in a couple of months I'll at least have a draft.

  Two of my novels have come out of short stories, so at some level, there is some overlap. But when I intentionally start a novel, I'm thinking it will have more ingredients than a short story. More loose ends. More questions and more stuff.

  Q. You've talked in the past about workshopping with other writers being an important part of your writing life. What do you take from those experiences?

  A. As I get older, I think I get better at reading and understanding stories, and some of that is from workshopping.

  Mostly it's been very rare for someone not to tell me something that didn't show me a way to read the story I'd written. A lot of times it wasn't the way I wanted the story read. And a lot of times it said stuff about the story and about my writing that I wasn't very good at hearing.

  But it's the only way I know to get better.

  Q. Who are some writers you admire or who have influenced your work?

  A. At any given time, anyone I'm reading who strikes me is going to have a pretty strong affect on me.

  When I was in my twenties I was really taken by the work of Samuel R. Delany and the novels of Joan Didion. I think I was drawn to the romanticism of Delany. I was also really taken with the way so much of Didion's stories happened off the page. I was also strongly drawn to a little hook by Marguerite lourcenar called Coup de Grace. I reread it a couple of years ago and saw all sorts of aspects of it that distress me now that I'm in my forties but it affected me powerftilk when I was younger.

  A few years ago I found myself utterly charmed by the sheer artificialness of Raymond Carver's stories. I had always thought of them as very psychologically realistic. Minimal. All that. But what I like about them now is how artificial they are. Perfect little setups that spring shut at conclusion. Lately I've been reading the short fiction of Joy Williams. It's really astonishing.

  I like the work of Kelly Link a lot.

  I like the Harry Potter novels. Great escapism.

  When I was younger, I expected what I thought of as a rigorous kind of lack of sentimentality in novels. Anything else struck me as cheating. Lately I have been drawn more and more to certain kinds of sentiment. Books like 1 Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

  Q. What can we expect to see from you next?

  I'm working on a novel. I've been working on it for six or seven years. But this time, I swear I'm going to finish it.

  Interview by Gwenda Bond.

  Talking Points

  Some things to talk about. There are no right answers.

  1. What is your take on the title of this collection-Mothers & Other Monsters? Is it that mothers are monstrous? How about the mothers in this collection? Who are the Other Monsters?

  2. Science-fiction stories may be set in places real or imaginary, in real or imaginary times. Even so, they are usually about the here and now. Do you feel McHugh is able to address contemporary issues in a more-or a less-effective way through the use of her imaginary settings? What contemporary issues seem to interest her most?

  3. Advances in technology allow parents to monitor their children in ways that were impossible a generation ago. What along these lines has already changed since you were a teenager? Would you prefer to be a teenager now? Would you prefer to have been a parent then?

  4. How much oversight is too much?

  5. Does McHugh's treatment of stepmothers seem accurate? What are some of the difficulties stepmothers face here? Why are stepmothers traditionally seen as wicked? With more families being headed by single parents, will the stereotype of the wicked stepmother lose popularity?

  6. McHugh works within a number of literary traditions including realism ("Eight-Legged Story"), ghost stories ("In the Air"), science fiction ("The Cost to Be Wise"), fantasy ("Ancestor Money"), fairy tales ("The Beast"), and narrative nonfiction ("Interview: On Any Given Day"). Science fiction has been characterized as a literature of exploration and therefore seen as especially appropriate for teenagers. Are these stories you would give to a teenager to read? What aspects of these stories would you have enjoyed as a teenager?

  7. One of the effects of Alzheimer's Disease is that life decisions for an individual have to be made by someone else. Do the reactions of the Alzheimer's sufferer's families in these stories seen realistic to you? How about the treatment of and the treatments for the disease?

  8. What would you do if your partner were cured of Alzheimer's but was not quite the person they had once been? (As in "Presence")

  9. In "Laika Comes Back Safe," is Tye a werewolf or a kid who thinks he's a werewolf? Which is scarier?

  10. In "Ancestor Money," a woman burns an offering for her grandmother. In China, these offerings include paper money called 'Hell Money' and elaborate paper models of houses, cars and even things like paper model fax machines and paper model cell phones. The idea is that when they are burned, the ancestors receive them as goods and money. What would you send your ancestors?

  II. McHugh's protagonists are frequently trapped in some way-by love, by law, by history, by illness. How do you feel about reading stories in which the narrator has little power and few choices? How well do you think McHugh's narrators do in the circumstances in which they find themselves?

  12. When it's possible to rejuvenate your body, will you?

  13. Would you describe these as love stories?

  14. 1)id this collection remind you of any other books? What did these stories gain by being collected together? What differences do you experience between reading stories separately in magazines as compared to reading them in a collection or anthology?

  About the Author

  Maureen F. McHugh has spent most of her life in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. She is the author of four novels. Her first novel, China Mountain 7_han~, won the Tiptree Award and her latest novel, Nekropolis, was a Book Sense 76 pick and a New I" rk Times Editor's Choice. McHugh has also written for the I Love Bees and Last Call Poker alternate reality games. McHugh has taught at John Carroll University and the Imagination and Clarion workshops. She lives with her husband and two dogs next to a dairy fare. Sometimes,
in the summer, black and white Holsteins look over the fence at them.

  Publication History

  These stories were previously published as follows:

  Ancestor Money, Schction, October zoo;

  In the Air, Killing Me Softly (HarperPrism)

  The Cost to Be Wise, Starlight i (Tor)

  The Lincoln Train, The Magazine of Fantasy tr Science Fiction, April 1995

  Interview: On Any Given Day, Starlight ; (Tor)

  Oversite, Asinrov's, September 2004

  Wicked appears here fur the first time.

  Laika Comes Back Safc, Polyphony (Wheatland Press)

  Presence, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2002

  light-Legged Story, Trampoline (Small Beer Press)

  The Beast, Asimov's, March 1992

  Nckropolis, Asnnovs, April 1994

  Frankensteins Daughter, SciFiction, April zoo;

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