Top 10 new titles this fall and a Q&A with Chicago author Laura Adamczyk about “Hardly Children.”
Several stories in Laura Adamczyk’s forthcoming collection, “Hardly Children,” are, in fact, peopled with kids — or, as one character calls them, “smaller, more naive adults.” Others feature juvenile-acting grown-ups, and some, a disturbing lack of children — as in “Too Much a Child,” where kids deemed “bad” are ripped from their beds at night.
“There were far fewer children in the original iteration,” the Chicago-based writer said in a recent phone interview, “which is funny, because it seems like a such a big part of the book now. Turns out I have some preoccupations.”
A striking blend of graceful sentences and eerie premises — a man suspended from the ceiling of an art gallery, a woman scrawling messages with clumps of her own hair — make “Hardly Children” a no-brainer for the experimental imprint FSG Originals, which will publish the book Nov. 20. Adamczyk, who’s also a copy editor at The A.V. Club, spoke with the Tribune about her singular style and the (notso-long) road to publication. Following is an edited Q&A.
Q: Has fiction always been your primary focus?
A: Pretty much. I got my MFA in fiction from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. But as an undergrad (at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.), I definitely got some (expletive) poetry under my belt!
Q: I was going to guess that you studied poetry, because your writing is lyrical and really beautiful.
A: Well, thank you. That’s good to hear. I definitely try to pay attention to the lineby-line language. But I don’t know how well I’d do in poetry if I tried to take it up these days. (Laughs.) I’d probably just end up with prose poems.
Q: How did this collection come together?
A: I’d say about half I wrote in grad school and half after. One of the stories, “Girls,” won the Disquiet Prize, and they send you to Portugal for a couple weeks and publish the story in Guernica. An editor reached out to me — it’s kind of a long story — and set me up with my current agent. We sent out (the manuscript) last summer, and FSG was one of the first publishers to respond. It was really surprising how it happened so quickly. I was anticipating a long wait and couldn’t believe it.
Q: In “Girls,” the narrator doesn’t totally trust her childhood memories. Is that something you’ve experienced too?
A: I think with strong memories from a young age, especially memories that feel really emotionally weighted, there’s often a warped or dreamlike (quality). You might not remember exactly how everything happened, but you can recall the feeling. I think it has to do with language. When you’re a kid, you don’t always have the words to describe something, let alone what it might have meant. Later on, you end up sculpting language around something that’s already very fluid and murky.
Q: These stories have guns, kidnappings, missing parents. Have you always been fearless in addressing more intense topics?
A: I don’t think it has always been true, but I feel like in the past few years I’ve been able to look at things more directly and speak about them more directly. It’s funny, because some characters in these stories are always angling from things and making a joke out of things when, I guess, living becomes too much for them to deal with.