When you were writing this collection, what drew you to Clifton’s work as a guiding light into its subject matter? What do you think it means for a person’s bones to be “good”? And do you see your own work as defying that impulse to be good in the same way that “the poet” does?

Halle Hill: I started engaging with Lucille Clifton’s work when I was in college, but I really got into her because I was working with a therapist that I really loved, and I had to stop seeing her because I moved to a different state. She read me a Lucille Clifton poem as a parting gift. We worked together for a while, and that just really felt incredibly generous, and just so special. Those words were a kind of guide for me after our relationship had to change.

The Lucille Clifton collection that I referenced and somewhat named Good Women after is, I believe, part poetry collection, part memoir. Kind of a personal history. A lot of Clifton’s work has biblical illusions in it, but that collection is pretty steeped in that imagery, and it was exciting for me. It was a book that I would come back and reference a lot at still times of my life. I don’t know that it was this super intentional, exacting moment, but it was like, Oh, this is something that has stirred my mind. And I thought the collection was amazing sonically, which made me think a lot.

It felt like a natural progression to get into that as an opening poem. As for the title, I’m not really asking or trying to make a statement about women and goodness. I’m not really trying to explore those themes. I think that the title is in another place that goes beyond that. But I think that poem, when I read it, seemed very expansive. It seemed so beyond me and the project—so anchoring, like, This is exactly where I’m trying to move this book towards. And so I was grateful. It’s really rare that you can read the work of someone who has passed on and has no concept of you, or what you’re doing, and yet feel totally seen. My book felt legitimized through that poem, if that makes sense. So that was huge for me. It felt like such a gift.

CH: Absolutely, and very lovingly stated. Being able to see writing that exists on the same wavelength you want to be on spanning previous decades and generations is a terrific part of the craft. The timelessness of people expressing their being and finding it in yourself is amazing.

HH: Yeah, yeah.

CH: Speaking of the sonic qualities and the image richness of Clifton’s work, reading through Good Women I’ve seen that same kind of assonance and consonance, that kind of sharp focus on image. That feels on a craft level, too. Just a really fun connecting force between that as a forward and the work itself.

Okay, so our next couple of questions focus more acutely on the characters that bring such vibrant life to the vignettes of Good Women. I use the term “vignette” intentionally, because the stories you write have this wonderful quality of knowing when to start and stop without wrapping a character’s entire arc into a trivialized completeness. The reader gets a sense that life will move on from these key narrative moments—even as it is forever changed. So, as a writer that takes a lot of tender care in the rendering of her characters, do you find it important for character arcs to avoid the convenience and simplification of a “neat” or “clean” ending? What is gained by allowing your characters to face the uncertainties of tomorrow?

HH: Yeah, I think this book felt to me as anti-plot, very anti-resolution. I tried to refuse those things as much as I could. I definitely think that sometimes these tidy arcs move towards simplification. On the page, in some ways maybe it also feels a little bit political for me, too. Right? What does it look like if we’re making Black women and Black fems the center? If we’re making the margin the center. Then we can’t operate time in a way that is expected.

I was reading a lot of other great collections. I’m thinking of Alice Walker’s In Love and Trouble. Which was like a sister book for me to read. That book gives no cause, no concern to resolve. Yet every story feels so complete, every story feels so exacting and like its own entity, and that gave me a lot of confidence when I was doing this. So yeah, a lot of plot and world building, especially for the topics I was writing about, felt like simplification.

I think I was also mirroring this book around the real cadence and experience of conversation in my life, or oral history, and those are so circular in their logic, and their structure, because it’s literally family members and loved ones showing the way that our time is folding in on itself—in  this spiraling, endless cone of time, if you will. I was like, There’s no way I can plot that out in a straight line on the page. That’s not how I was taught to tell a story at all. That’s not how I want to hear a story. I’m so much more concerned about the integrity of a sentence than I am about worrying if this story is making sense from beginning to end.

CH: Yeah, I mean once again, an excellent answer. I think you expressing the motion of time around oral storytelling traditions is very felt on the page. One of my favorite aspects of the collection is the voice’s multifunctionality in every story. Not only is it fun to read line by line, but it individualizes and humanizes the characters.

Another question for you—a pretty ubiquitous trait across the characters of Good Women is their pursuit of having options. From boarding a bus to Florida to savoring the stop button on a carnival Tilt-a-Whirl, the microcosms of agency are often represented in the smallest, quietest choices they make on the page. Referring back to moments that change the trajectory of a person’s life, what is your approach to imbuing qualities like initiative and autonomy into narrators who are just doing their best to get by? How does choice become the steward of characters who exist in circumstances that deny them the luxury of options?

HH: This is probably where most of my lived experience is on the page. Because I truly believe that the next moment can change anything. I approached learning that way when I was a student in school. In college. Through grad school. I was always excited or terrified at understanding that the next thing I learned could change everything for me, you know? I’m always kind of filtering every single thing as crucial information, no matter how arbitrary.

I’m so grateful that, at least right now, I’m very much in a season where I’m just flooded with excitement of what I know and how time has changed. I’m always writing out of that sense of urgency because every moment is offering something that’s changing. I think a lot of the women in this book are confident in their ability to make a choice. Their sense of self revolves around this idea of navigation, and so I think choice is huge. This is where I think the book is not trying to ask this moral question again about goodness. It’s really about where do choices begin for you? And what’s possible with extensive resources, with limited resources? What’s the next step?

If there’s no viable options, how are you gonna make it? How you gonna make one—whether that’s choosing ignorance, whether that’s choosing destruction, whether that’s choosing pleasure—choice is so important to every woman in this book. And it’s not that deep, either. I think every woman is kind of living heartbeat by heartbeat. They just are coming up against thresholds and saying well, here we go again. I find that that’s how the majority of us live.

CH: I feel this. I was thinking a bit about how “Seeking Arrangements” leads off this entire collection. The last line of it reading “I could get off right here if I wanted to,” felt like the starting line of agency being presented in one of those normal, quiet moments. It set up the rest of the collection so much to engage with lived experience on that level and make worlds out of them. That answer sheds a lot of additional light, so thank you.

Alright, let’s move along from the character questions. I’d now like to ask you about some of the larger lenses that contribute to your craft. As I’m sure you’re aware by now, just about every reviewer in the universe loves your use of sharp and grim humor to develop tone/voice across your body of work. Good Women in particular wields its dark comedy to sharpen observations, elevate incidents, and amplify its nuanced emotionality. What role do you think humor serves within the shadow of misfortune? Why is it important to foreground laughter, even in the most uncertain of circumstances? 

HH: The archetype of delivering truth through humor is powerful. A powerful and important way to finesse truth into situations if you don’t have power in the capital P sense, right? I don’t want to read a book where someone is so self-serious. Like I just—I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I need. I need to laugh. I need something to humanize on the page. For me at least, the smartest people I know have the most wicked sense of humor. They’re also kind of mean, right? Like there’s something about being able to pinpoint something acutely, with great timing, that I’m just very drawn and attracted to. Those are things that I want on the page, too.

Misfortune can be funny too, the irony of it. And I think it’s actually really hard to be funny on the page. I still don’t totally know how I was able to navigate that. But I read a lot of Halle Butler. She wrote two, three books now. She wrote The New Me. She wrote another book called Jillian, and she just wrote a book called Banal Nightmare. She truly has this deadpan sense of humor. And I learned a lot about humor writing from her books. I have a couple of other humor writers I really like as well, and my family is really funny. I’m sure everybody thinks their family is. I think I just need to be around things that are quick and sharp and funny.

I guess so much of my collection deals with absurdity. And that’s how I think the women show their appreciation in a way. They do seem to have a lot of capacity for absurdity.

CH: Your note on not wanting to read things that are too self-serious is super on target. For a lot of readers, myself included, a refusal to look at the sharpness and levity of things like humor in the face of misfortune makes a caricature of a person experiencing it. It defies humanity in an uncanny way. Fiction especially has that bandwidth to explore absurdity and people’s capacity to witness and bear it and understand it, and even celebrate it. But yeah, that’s what makes it wonderful.

Moving onto our next one. Another of my favorite elements of your collection was the loving emphasis and detail given to place. Empathetic experience and individualized insight feel so key to engaging with the worlds you create, so I’d love to hear you speak more on this—what does it mean for these characters (especially as women of color) to navigate their small worlds in places like Appalachia or the Deep South? How does a writer navigate a place its characters both love and feel bound within?

HH: Place was the biggest container and the biggest place for me to experiment with these topics. Because the topics are so ranging and wide and sometimes spiraling. I needed something else to be the anchor. I think place in every story is its own speaker. So I tried to think about place set specifically, and it had a total function. It had a sense of utility for me, and it served as such a grounding, practical landing place for these stories, especially because plot is just not relevant to me. Something had to bolster the stories. That was place.

And you know I am Appalachian, but I guess I would be considered a more urban Appalachian in my family. My family would’ve made that transition from rural Appalachia to urban Appalachia. Place always felt incredibly important and fertile to our migration story and our kind of lived experience. And so place felt, has always felt, dramatic, and very specific for me. Even though I’m from a place that’s considered flyover country. Typically, I lead with place as a big part of my own personal identity, so that had to be central to the book. If my geography is correct, I’m from a valley. I’ve lived in many valleys, and the fields, too. There’s so much about place that’s always on my mind.

Sorry. This is a great question, and it’s making me think about my new work, too. I’m thinking a lot about Annie Woodford’s “Old Christmas” poem, where she says, “I think I was a field once,” and how when I heard that, it just split me open. Because I don’t have to explain that, you know? Like that’s exactly it. The word says enough. And the land in place is so important to me, too. I also think this is where the women in these collections have their existential freedom. They have their most God moments, their most beyond moments, because of place.

I’m thinking of “How To Cut and Quarter,” at the end, where she kind of is in this mirage, and she’s experiencing an exodus-type story herself. She has to wander the land. And she has this sense of self-satisfaction. At the end of the book, the only way that she could have that catalyst is because she’s in the elements, and kind of stripped down to that. So, boom. The land was always in place of those beyond functions in the book—for women to be able to go and live that other function of life that they couldn’t do in their worlds.

CH: That’s really beautiful. I actually have one brief follow up. It’s not a question I prepared. Just one off the cuff, because I write about home a lot myself. So, when you write about Appalachia specifically, do you feel like you want to present home exactly as it is in your memory? Or do you feel yourself taking specific elements of places of home and amplifying it? Or rather—do you aim to present place as it is, or amplify it into what you remember it as most fondly or succinctly?

HH: Yes. The crazy thing about that is I always know that my recall is going to be romanticized. You know the recall is not accurate. And the memory is not accurate. But it is emotionally accurate. Emotionally sincere. And that dissonance is interesting. If I’m writing about place, and I’ve had an experience there first from the mind, then go back and see it correctly, usually those recalls are completely different. That tension is exciting, because it’s like, What’s what? What did I have to make precious? What did I need to make sentimental? What’s just wrong? So I guess I’m trying to do both. I like that meeting place in the middle. A little bit of my memory, and then a little bit of another kind of lived trueness. Both are true, but both serve different functions, so I try to meet in the middle.

CH: I absolutely understand what you mean. I think I have just two questions left for you today, and I’d like to follow up with you one more time while we talk about people’s small worlds. So much of Good Women nurtures the deep interiority and physicality of its characters as forms of identity (and even as propulsive elements of the plot of a story, in the case of “Hungry”). When writing about the experience of women, especially in the modern day, what does it mean to give space on the page for them to highlight and explore physicality? And how does the characters’ focus on their bodies, and the bodies of others, become integral to how they navigate the world of a story?

HH: I had somebody the other day try to make a split and talk about either you do something cerebral on the page, or the body does something on the page, and I just didn’t think that was a good dichotomy. I knew that the book was going to be body-forward. I knew it was gonna move through the body. I don’t think I overthought it too much. I just believed this collection had bodies that wanted to talk and move on the page. I always say I want to fill every page with Black bodies. And I wanted that inner movement through their bodies to be everything. And it has been, and I wanted it to feel living in that way. So maybe it was more of an experiment. I couldn’t really write these stories from like a detached, aloof way. It had to be somatic. It had to be alive for me.

To the best of my ability, I wanted to write a book where I felt that a reader could just kind of be pulled through from the beginning to the end. I think that has to have some motion, and that’s a body function. Sometimes you say that you have a gut choice, like if it reads like it, if it’s body-forward. That’s because this is what my body told me to do, too.

CH: I do definitely get that sense. You said a reader is being pulled through the work from start to finish. Same as any body function. There’s a very naturalized feeling to that.

Okay! Final question. This one removes us a bit from the stories themselves, and enters the formal space—more specifically, the unique and challenging nature of story collections. Good Women’s vignettes involve odd jobs and characters doing whatever it is they have to do to get by, but in that vast strangeness there is an equal insight into the human experience. When writing about carnival workers and scam university admins and Sugar Babies and children at the cusp of self-discovery all in one project, how do you collect and sequence their stories into a cohesive body of work? How does Good Women strive to find profound emotional overlaps between its characters, who come from all walks of life?

HH: This collection is unlinked except for one crossover experience in the book. Or there is someone who’s mentioned another time, and another story. So it was even more crucial for me that these stories be in conversation with one another. They have a family line to them, and I think the only way that that was possible was through sincerity, you know? That comes with a cost. That comes with a certain type of vulnerability that comes with a certain type of self-questioning that comes with a certain type of laying down something on the page, or every single one of these characters really seems to give up something. Or give some sense of themselves back. I think they have a sense of offering. That’s the only way that that was possible.

There is a sincerity that I have wrestled with, that has felt hard for me as I’ve written this, or later on, as I thought about this book. That feels very open. But it had to happen for the book to have the tone it does. So I don’t know if I have a great grand answer for you.

But it’s only possible because of the sincerity.