Emily Greenberg’s writing has appeared in the Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Santa Monica Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, the anthology New Stories from the Midwest, and elsewhere. Her writing honors include the Witness Literary Award in Fiction and two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions. An editor at Split/Lip Press, she holds an MFA from the Ohio State University and lives in San Diego.
Mark (M): All of the stories in Alternative Facts focus on moments where the line between representations of “real life” and fiction blurs. As you wrote the collection, did you have a sense of this as an organizational principle, or did that only emerge as the common thread later on in the writing process?
Emily (E): I started writing these stories individually with no real thought towards a collection. In the final year of my MFA program at Ohio State, I wanted to try putting together a complete book manuscript and so I started reading back through my stories to see if any might go together. Only then did I start noticing the major threads, for example, that many of the stories were about public figures. And even beyond my writing, as a visual artist, I’ve long been interested in questions of reality and simulation. So, even though I never set out to write a collection along those lines, these thematic interests naturally crept into my stories, and once I noticed that, I began writing new stories in conversation with the others.
M: Once you recognized that common theme in your fiction, did you start to recognize it in certain events or public figures? “Lost in the Desert of the Real,” which is about the Hawaii false missile alert, stands out especially as almost a tropism for the collection as a whole.
E: I wrote that story before I realized I was writing a book. After the false missile alert happened, I remember thinking how clearly it related to my concerns as a fiction writer, as an artist. It posed questions about what constitutes a true or false event. I had been thinking about those questions for a long time, but they started becoming more prevalent in public discourse at the start of the first Trump administration. Around the same time, I also began experiencing a crisis in my visual arts practice. I had made several para-fictional works, including a manipulated video of Edward Snowden, where he appeared to say things he hadn’t actually said, and a false display called Artifacts from the Bowling Green Massacre, which referred to the fake massacre invented by Kellyanne Conway. But then Trump came along, people started using this term “post-truth,” and a lot of the artists I admire started asking whether it was responsible to make para-fictional work anymore. Is it okay to make satire right now when Trump is satire? When facts are under attack, shouldn’t we instead focus on separating fact from fiction? I worried that I was just creating fake news and undermining a shared sense of reality. .
In the end, of course, I kept making this work, but I became more intentional about identifying it as fiction. I still think it’s important to poke at mainstream narratives, to complicate what we take as truth or fact, but in a way that doesn’t itself deceive.
M: Did this crisis you’re locating in your visual art translate into your fiction at all? In fiction, of course, there is the assumption that what you’re reading is not true, or at least that is what the form supposes.
E: Well, with fiction it was a little clearer how to resolve the crisis: label it as fiction, even when it contains certain non-fiction elements. For example, in one of the stories in the collection, “Tonight Show,” I go into the character George W. Bush’s head, and what I’m narrating obviously isn’t true to the real person, George W. Bush. I obviously have no access to his real thoughts and feelings. Even though some of his dialogue in the story matches what he said on a real episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the story very clearly contains entirely made-up elements, which you can further signal to the reader by labeling it “fiction.”
M: What about something like “In the Desert of the Real,” where you have a fiction representing events that themselves are blurring into fiction, where you have a “false event,” the missile alert, that creates very real consequences? Do you see this story trying to untangle the web, to state clearly what is fiction and what isn’t, or do you see this story as a means through which you can hold the real and the fictional on the same ambiguous plane?
E: I love the way you just described the false missile alert, that it was a false event with very real consequences. Someonereally had a heart attack—it doesn’t get more real than that. There was already so much room to toy around with fictive elements because the event itself called into question the very idea of a so-called “true event.”. The alert was not responding to an actual missile threat, but then everything else that resulted did actually happen. Fiction became the perfect tool for reflecting on that. There was already so much coverage of the event—contemporaneous eye witness accounts and articles—and those help document the event. However, as a fiction writer who can use the tools fiction provides—metaphor and speculation— I’m not entirely beholden to facts. My goal for this story was to immerse the reader, to recreate the sensory experience and the feeling of the event through language and image. Fiction allows me to create something that feels true even though it’s not technically, factually, literally true, and that’s just so different from a journalistic approach. The journalist’s job is descriptive, whereas I wanted to go into the event.
M: Toward the end of that story, you have a moment very emblematic of the ethos of the collection. Donald Trump sits down to eat a McDonald’s cheeseburger. The story goes into an extremely atomized list of that cheeseburger’s components, yet it’s being attached to this moment of branded authenticity, this moment of extreme sensorial luxury. It made me wonder: What kind of language can we use to best represent the real? On the one hand, we have this hyper-granulation, the description of the cheeseburger, and on the other, we have the kind of grand, sweeping narratives that I see the collection pushing against in other stories.
E: I looked up the cheeseburger’s ingredients online because I wanted to be as literal and specific as possible. It’s interesting because so many of the ingredients are chemicals and preservatives, things I didn’t recognize. As food, the McDonald’s cheeseburger is so unnatural, so artificial. So even in this granular, hyper-detailed way of writing—this attempt to be extremely literal and concrete and thus “real”—that artifice reveals itself even more.
M: The McDonald’s cheeseburger as false missile alert.
E: Exactly.
M: I see something somewhat similar happening in “Houston, We’ve Had a Problem,” where one of the main characters can only speak in cliche movie lines, and with Paris Hilton’s language in “The Author and the Heiress,” the novella about the chance meeting of Hilton and literary author/famed recluse Thomas Pynchon. What artistic possibilities do you see in cliche and sweeping axioms as the bases for literary prose? What interested you in Paris Hilton’s manner of speaking?
E: With “Houston, We’ve Had a Problem,” I was wondering what it would be like to only communicate in cliche. That cliche happens both at the level of character—one of the main characters can only speak in famous movie lines following a brain injury—and also at the level of form because the plot is very cliche. It’s the typical rom-com story: Will they or won’t they get back together? In that story, the characters realize that their relationship has always been a cliche, a form of simulation, rather than something authentic. With the Paris Hilton character in “The Author and the Heiress,” I didn’t really see her as speaking in cliche. Of course, she uses certain banal catch phrases, but those are part of her unique voice, which I was really trying to capture in all its absurdity and idiosyncrasy. Often, we are taught to look down on people, usually young women, who speak in Valley Girl cadences or use filler words such as “like.” I wanted to show that this way of speaking can also be beautiful and that it does not preclude the speaker from being intelligent, introspective, and insightful.
M: What drew you to using Thomas Pynchon as a character opposite Paris Hilton? Was it his total absence of public persona? His books?
E: I just came across this quote by San Diego Union-Tribune critic Arthur Salm: “If Pynchon and Paris Hilton were ever to meet—the circumstances, I admit, are beyond imagining—the resulting matter/antimatter explosion would vaporize everything from here to Tau Ceti IV.” When I read that quote, it felt almost like a dare. Could I write a story about Thomas Pynchon and Paris Hilton meeting? It was irresistible. The quote sets up Pynchon and Hilton as opposites, but my story shows they actually have a lot in common, at least the way I’ve written their characters.
M: Maybe this critic has been waiting all this time. He knew his statement was a dare, and he’s been waiting for a fiction writer to take up the challenge.
E: I hope so!
M: As a writer in our time, a time I often see as one in which cultural forces are constantly aiming to evacuate internal life into external life, how do you approach the form of fiction?
E: That’s partly why I enjoy writing about these public figures. They claim to offer us such transparency. Supposedly, we know everything there is to know about Paris Hilton—so much of her life has been meticulously documented on reality television and social media—but we don’t really. It’s all a performance, it’s all a persona. In these stories, I’m trying to go into the minds of these characters in ways that grant a little more access to the “real selves”—even though they are entirely fictional—behind the personas. Fiction is a great tool for this, a way to fill in certain gaps. For example, with the title story, “Alternative Facts,” I use fiction to fill a gap in the historical record. . The story’s inspiration came from an article in the New York Daily News about Kellyanne Conway punching someone at the Inaugural Ball, and the article quoted a credible eyewitness who was a known journalist. It seemed like a shocking bit of news, yet I couldn’t find photo or video documentation. What had led her to do this? As a fiction writer, those gaps are really enticing. Fiction can fill in these absences, or it can also work as connective glue. In “Lost in the Desert of the Real,” for example, there are so many accounts of what happened—it was extremely well-documented—but I use fiction to make those accounts speak to one another more, to create linkages and associations.
M: Some of these stories you began writing when the events these stories describe were contemporary; they had just occurred. Did your relationship to these stories change over time, as those events took on new historical contexts?
E: Absolutely. This collection reads very differently given Trump’s re-election. I also cut some stories that, with the passage of time, no longer felt unique. For example, I wrote a story about Elizabeth Holmes that didn’t have much to add after Hulu’s The Dropout.. Then, of course, there’s the inverse. Some of the stories and their themes became even more relevant as time went on and as more people began contemplating the nature of truth in the Trump era.
M: Other, notably visual, mediums often contextualize or even inform some of these stories. I’m thinking of painting and television in “Tonight Show,” photography in “From the Eyes of Travelers,” and film in “Houston, We’ve Had a Problem” and “Lost in the Desert of the Real.” Often, the stories seem to actively be thinking about mimesis. . How do you see these other mediums functioning in the stories?
E: Given my visual arts background, I’m drawn to thinking about these more visual mediums, and they just naturally crept into the stories. I’m interested in how these art forms can help us think about simulation and mediation. I also find myself relating to characters who are artists. I only became interested in George W. Bush because he was painting. People were saying he was painting to process the events of his presidency. Someone who lied repeatedly during his presidency was now using painting as a form of truth telling? I found that fascinating. Same with learning that the psychologist B.F. Skinner was a failed fiction writer. What was it about fiction that didn’t work for him? What drove him to become a scientist rather than a writer?
M: The first time you shared one of these stories with me—I believe it was an early draft of “Tonight Show”—was back in 2016. That’s a long time ago! Can you talk a little about the process of writing this book over so many years?
E: The book took me so long to write because I was learning how to write along the way. Back then, I really had no idea what I was doing. It’s not that it took me this long to write the literal sentences of these stories, but it took me this long to develop the skills necessary to write them. Moving forward, I would love to be able to work more quickly, but we’ll see if that’s possible for me. I’d rather take my time and put something out that’s hopefully worth reading than publish all the time.
M: In a very old email you sent me, you talked about difficulties in your drafting process. Specifically, the dilemma in self-editing and the corresponding challenge of writing over-stylized things in order to keep yourself engaged. Has this process changed much over the years?
E: Not really! I write in layers. I’ll sketch out the structure, then go back and add in dialogue, description, interiority. In the meantime, I’ll just put in fillers, something like “describe the room here,” or “characters discuss where to eat.” Some writers I know progress in such a linear, seamless way, and I’ve just never written like that. When I have so much generic filler language in these early drafts, it’s hard for me to feel excited about the story. It doesn’t have a voice or style yet. So sometimes, I’ll allow myself to really finetune one paragraph just to prove to myself that the voice, imagery, and rhythm—the musicality of the language—will come. I need that light at the end of the tunnel so I can be patient with the drafting process and not get too far into the weeds before I figure out the larger structure. I also use formal experimentation and constraints to motivate myself in a similar way. It feels like an anchor, and once it’s in place, I can take my time working through the rest of the story. I also like giving myself challenges that feel impossible. If it’s impossible, then I will never finish the story, and no one will ever read it! Strangely, that actually helps my writing process. Thinking no one will ever read what you write is very freeing.
