Cathy Ulrich’s latest collection of short stories, Small, Burning Things, is a sharp, fiery flash. In these pages, flames are frequent, humans spontaneously combust, and a girl falls from the sky. The stories here, most of all, beautifully explore our complex and complicated humanity.
Cathy Ulrich is the founding editor of Milk Candy Review, a journal of flash fiction. Her work has been published in various journals, including Black Warrior Review, Jellyfish Review, Passages North, Split Lip Magazine, and Wigleaf, and can be found in Best Microfiction 2021 and 2022, Best of the Net 2022, Best Small Fictions 2019, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2019 and 2022. Her first collection of short stories, Ghosts of You, was released by Okay Donkey Press in 2019. She lives in Montana with her daughter and various small animals.
It was a pleasure to be able to talk to Cathy about, among other things, time, endings, and, of course, all things Small, Burning Things.
One thing I most appreciate about Small, Burning Things is how it engages with the fantastic. On these pages, there are burning girls, a girl with a robot arm, and a girl with snakes in her belly. What does the use of the fantastic allow your fiction to do?
I mean it can be a metaphor for so many things, right? But the truth is, I didn’t write any of these things with the intention of it being a metaphor (except, maybe, the girl carrying snakes — I’m pretty sure she and her friends are just confused about what’s actually happening). I wrote them to tell stories about things like girls spontaneously combusting or getting fitted with robot parts or falling in love with baseball bats.
So, really, what the fantastic allows my fiction to do is to play. It gets to be the strangeness that doesn’t happen in this world, or shouldn’t happen, or can’t happen. It gets to take me (and my readers) to places we might not have gone otherwise and shows us — hey, there are people here just like us!
Time is something I think about often in regard to the lives of writers. The time between this book and your debut, Ghosts of You, is four years. In what ways do you think your work has changed? And, similarly, how has it stayed the same?
I actually read this as “What ways do you think your world has changed” rather than “work.” But to tell the truth, the answer to both is the same thing: it’s gotten a bit smaller and quieter, a bit sadder and lonelier. Maybe that’s just what growing up (and old?) does? I’m still angry about the things that made me angry when Ghosts of You was first published, still saddened by the same things. But I’m beginning to lose hope for change and resolution (and maybe revolution?) and I think my work (and definitely my world) shows that.
Digging into Small, Burning Things, the first lines of these stories are excellent. For example, in “Through the Veil of Her Hair,” you begin this way: “You marry the dead girl.” “A Tree Falls” opens, “The girl with the dolphin tattoo is getting ready to meet your husband for dinner.” “The Hole in the Center of Everything” begins with these words: “This is one of those stories where someone drowns.” Engaging. Sharp. Just great writing. What do you see as the goal of the opening sentence?
I love a good opening sentence! When I read a book or a story or a poem, I want to see that first sentence and think “Yes, I have got to keep reading this!” And that is my intention with my own first sentences. I want them to invite the reader into the story, to shock them or intrigue them or make them laugh. I want them to hit hard, right from the start, so readers know what they can expect.
I mentioned “The Hole in the Center of Everything” in the previous question. I could just ask about this story for the rest of the interview, but I’ll try to refrain. It’s a gorgeous story — and my favorite in the entire collection. It’s full of heart. And sad. And has so many images that are fully brought to life. What inspired it?
Thank you so much! There are three stories that I think are some of the absolute best things I’ve ever written, and this story is one of them. So I’m really glad that it resonated with you!
The inspiration was seeing, and I’m sorry, I don’t remember where — whether it was a tweet or an article or someone else’s interview — someone said something about “literature always has a drowning.” It was kind of a statement on the grand old authors who felt like they had to kill someone (usually a beautiful young woman or girl) to really get the plot rolling. But me, being the competitive person I am, was like, “Yeah? I see your one drowning and I give you twelve.”
I was also playing with elements of haunting and loss here, how ghosts can be something more (and perhaps something less?) than the specters we think of. How they can be something like the sound of a chiming bell, or an unraveling red mitten.
Each paragraph begins with “This is one of those stories,” and expands from there. What led you to this structure?
I often say I “hear” a story in my head. Which is to say that little voice in my brain starts telling the story and I write it down as it speaks to me. I don’t sit there and think “How is the best way to tell this story? What form should I use?” That’s all something really subconscious for me, so when the “voice” starts speaking, it’s already something I’ve considered and didn’t even realize it.
In this case, because my original intent with this story was to push back against those kinds of stories with a drowning, I thought of it as “this is one of those stories,” from the beginning, and it naturally progressed from there.
And that ending… I won’t repeat it here because I don’t want to spoil it for anybody who hasn’t read it, but it is packed with emotion. We’ve talked about opening words, but what about closing ones? What do you want your endings to accomplish?
Oh, endings! On occasion, I still struggle with sticking my landings. I’ve gotten better as I’ve gone along, but I used to really struggle with knowing where to stop.
What I want from my endings is for the reader to think “Yes, there is more story here, but this is this story as a whole.” For them to feel like there is a larger world outside of the story, which the story inhabits, but that this snippet of that world is something whole and complete in and of itself.
The title of your book is, of course, Small, Burning Things. The collection begins and ends with burning girls. The first line of “A Place You Can See the Stars,” which is the third story in the collection, opens with this line: “Her baby will be born fire; her baby will burn.” In “A Different Kind of Smoke,” which is near the collection’s end, these words open it: “It is the spring of spontaneous human combustion, the spring of burning things.” Fire and the act of burning feature prominently throughout the book. Do you mind talking about the significance?
In all the stories you reference, the burning thing is a girl. Sometimes, I think a girl just needs to burn, you know? Ask any teenage girl you know! She’ll tell you.
But to be more specific, “A Place You Can See the Stars” is a story written about a woman I’ve never met — my birth mother. I am a fire sign (in two horoscopes even! … but don’t ask for more details; I’m not really up on astrology) who was born during the hottest time of year to a 15-year-old Chippewa Cree/Black girl. I can’t even begin to imagine how scared she must have been. I was scared when I was pregnant, and I was an adult! So I imagined her thinking of her child as this burning thing within her. I imagined that fear of hers taking form as a flame, something she could understand and maybe, in some small way, control.
And I guess that’s what all the burning is about — taking something that is frightening or enraging and making it into something understandable. Making it into a fire.
I want to close with my favorite question for writers of flash: What should good flash do?
I always think of flash as being musical, lyrical, something like a song or a bird melody. Something that implies a larger story and lets us hum along for ourselves.
I think good flash should give us that music, that soul, in the way only that specific writer could give it.
FICTION
Small, Burning Things
By Cathy Ulrich
Okay Donkey Press
Published July 11, 2023
Southern Review of Books 