Can you tell me more about the process behind it? This seems like a very intentional theme of the collection (it is even echoed in the title). In “Eight Bites,” a woman who undergoes bariatric surgery is haunted by the ghost of the parts of herself she has given up ( if you would agree with this description). In “Real Women Have Bodies,” women begin to literally fade to nothing, and no one can explain it or help them. The wife in “The Husband Stitch” asks for only one private thing: that her husband not touch the green ribbon that is always tied around her neck. There are a lot of darker elements to your stories, but one of them is that many of the female protagonists are denied control over their own bodies. Shirley Jackson’s “The Tooth,” Adam Nevill’s “Where Angels Come In,” Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” Victor LaValle’s “The Ballad of Black Tom.” I will follow that up with: what are some of your favorite scary stories? Some are set a little deeper in my past: Ray Bradbury, Lois Duncan, John Bellairs, Louis Sachar, Roald Dahl, Gabriel García Márquez. Some are obvious: Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi. Thank you so much! My influences are pretty wide-ranging. So I have to ask: Who are your influences? What do you love to read? The stories are wholly unique, and they are tinged with all sorts of different genres: fairy tales, ghost stories, horror, dystopian fiction. “I honestly just wondered if it would be possible to write a short story in the form of episode capsule summaries, where the episodes could function autonomously or as part of a larger narrative.”įirst of all, I have to say that I really enjoyed your debut collection. Here, we talk to her about her influences and what we can look forward to seeing from her next.

In another, a writer meets an otherworldly cast of characters at a residency. In one of her stories, a woman always wears a green ribbon around her neck, with the understanding that others aren’t meant to touch it. Her debut short story collection, Her Body And Other Parties, has been met with much-deserved acclaim and was recently shortlisted for The National Book Award.

We were thrilled to have the chance to interview the talented Carmen Maria Machado.

Carmen maria machado green ribbon