Contents
Contact Info
Meghan Rose Allen
meghanrose[at]gmail[dot]com
@reluctantm
www.reluctantm.com
Product Info
ISBN: 978-1-7773772-0-5 (epub), 978-1-7773772-1-2 (trade paperback)
Price: $2.99 (epub) or $10.04 (paperback)
Publication Date: October 12, 2022
Sales Copy
A father drives his children all night to witness an execution.
A reporter spirals trying to find answers in a migrant farmworker community.
A girl offers up her brother to the monster living under her bed.
With sometimes fantastical but always exacting prose, Meghan Rose Allen, author of “Enid Strange” (DCB/Cormorant, 2018), returns with fifteen short stories. Whether rooted in a contemporary setting or exploring a speculative landscape, each story dazzles with its emotional depth and beautifully-worked characters.
Biography
Meghan Rose Allen has a PhD in Mathematics from Dalhousie University. In a previous life, she was a cog in the military-industrial complex. Now she lives in New Brunswick, Canada and writes. Her short work has appeared in FoundPress, The Puritan, and The Rusty Toque, amongst others, and her story “Good Fences” was an honourable mention in the 2022 Dreamers Sense of Place and Home Contest. Her first novel “Enid Strange” is published by DCB/Cormorant and was a finalist for the 2018 New Brunswick Book Awards. “The Summer The School Burned Down” is her first published collection of short stories. One can find her online at www.reluctantm.com.
Author Photos
Interview Resources
Bio Talking Points
- Meghan has a B.Math from the University of Waterloo, an M.Sc in mathematics from Dalhousie University, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Dalhousie University.
She started studying mathematics because she couldn’t not. “Every time I looked at university calendar way back in high school,” she says, “and the program didn’t have any math courses, I would decide that program wasn’t for me. Finally, I decided that if I was rejecting programs because they didn’t have any math courses in them, that might be a sign that I should take all the math courses instead.”
- For Meghan, math and fiction overlap.
“I always say I’m not a fan of reality,” Meghan says. She studied pure mathematics, the area of mathematics that doesn’t have immediate real-world applications. “Of course,” she explains, “what has no real world application today could be vitally useful tomorrow.” Still, not being constrained by the real world when working in mathematics has helped her with her fiction. “Even when I’m working mathematically, I’m using my imagination to figure out where to go next, what to look at next. It’s exactly like writing fiction, except using math as a language rather than words.”
- Since 2012, Meghan has made her home in Sackville, New Brunswick.
“I lived in Halifax for five years going to graduate school,” she says. “We moved away for work, but always said we’d move back to the Maritimes if we could. Luckily, four years after we left Halifax, my husband was offered a job at Mount Allison. We didn’t even consider saying no. I left a stable government job to move to a small town in New Brunswick,” she laughs. “People thought we were crazy. But the Maritimes is where I’m supposed to be.” Since moving to New Brunswick, Meghan has been able to focus almost all her time on writing. “Not that I’ve left all mathematics behind,” she says. Meghan has worked as a sessional mathematics instructor at Mount Allison university, as well as volunteered her mathematics and computer science skills with local schools and Girl Guides.
Sample Interview Questions
Your background is in mathematics. How did you transition from mathematics into fiction writing?
It isn’t a transition actually. The area of mathematics I study, pure mathematics, is very creative, dealing with objects and ideas that don’t have immediate real-world applications. This means that my imagination gets exercised when I’m still in math-land. As well, mathematics at higher levels requires explaining your ideas in an engaging and narrative way, and I’ve been structuring a lot of my mathematics papers and classes as stories: you want to make the ideas interesting and encourage the reader to keep following along. So even when I work with mathematics, I’m taking made-up ideas and writing them down creatively, which is the same as writing fiction.
Your collection has fifteen short stories. Do you have a favourite?
That’s a bit like asking if I have a favourite flavour of ice cream (I like all ice cream) or a favourite penguin (I also love all penguins). There are some stories that were easier to write, where the writing was like one fluid movement, and there were stories where each word was a five, ten minute long struggle to get onto the paper. Wolf Children, the longest story in the collection, took years, contrasted with La Casita, the second longest, was written in only a few sittings. But even then, I can’t say that because a story was easy to write that I favour it more, or that because I struggled with another that the reward is somehow greater. Each story is my favourite in some way; that’s why they are all put together in this collection.
Okay, how about a least favourite?
Well, when I’m done the writing part and I’m at the editing stage, whatever story I am currently editing is my least favourite. Rationally, I can give a thousand reasons why editing is so important to writing, but when I actually have to do it, I almost have to chain myself to my computer to get it done. Reading and rereading and rereading until the words are almost meaningless in order to make the tweaks that perfect the story: so important, yet such drudging work.
How personal are your stories? Do you take situations from your own life to put them in your stories?
I love it when people think that my stories are taken from real-life; it means that I’ve successfully wormed my way into a reader’s emotions. But these are stories. They are made-up. My life is too dull to be interesting to anyone other than myself. If I ever write a story about walking to the mailbox and back before cleaning out the cat litter, then you’ll know that I’m writing a story that’s one hundred percent true-to-my-life.
On the other hand, some of the stories in this collection have a speculative or fantasy feel to them, the opposite of a real-life experience. Can you speak to that?
Is it peculiar that I often find the stories I write that do have these speculative or fantasy elements as more real than the purely reality-based ones? If extraordinary elements creep into a story, like monsters under the bed (Phalanges) or shape-shifting magic (Wolf Children) or curses buried in a film canister (Good Fences), I often double-down on the realistic parts. Anything that I write that is fantastical is less about exploring the fantasy than about exploring the humanity of the characters within the fantasy. I mean, my first book, Enid Strange, was about faeries, but really it was about growing up and recognizing parents as more than just parents, but as adults. In the same way, for example, Wolf Children is less about being transformed into a wolf and more about wishing for a world different than the one the characters each occupy. That’s one of the great things about fiction, as opposed to some of the more reality-based genres, the ability to place the otherworldly at the same level as the world.
Who are some of your short-story writing influences?
My two strongest short story influences are:
- Guests of the Nation by Frank O’Connor; and
- A Piece of Cake by Roald Dahl.
both of which are short-stories set in a war, Guests of the Nation in the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and A Piece of Cake in World War Two (1939-1945). These might seem like odd choices, as none of my stories are about war, but there’s a sentence in Guests of the Nation, the last sentence actually, that perfectly encapsulates the emotional impact of either of those two stories. Don’t worry, no spoilers, but here it is: And anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again. That is the exact feeling I want to explore in the short stories I write, how certain actions cause everything to shift. Sometimes the skew is massive, sometimes only tiny, but capturing that feeling of disorientation is what I hope to accomplish in my own writing.
Guests of the Nation can be read online here. An audio recording of A Piece of Cake can be found here.
Your last book, Enid Strange (DCB/Cormorant, 2018), was a middle-grade novel. Why the switch in format and audience for this book?
Stories exist as stories exist. Very tautological, I know. I might as well say red is red. Sometimes a story needs the space of a whole novel, or a whole series, to exist. Sometimes it doesn’t. For a long while, I felt compelled to make everything I wrote into a novel because publishers would tell me that only novels sell, but you can’t always push an idea into a novel when if, at its core, the story can be developed and resolved in less time.
For instance, For Your Pleasure, which is included in this collection, is only three paragraphs long because to push it more than that would be unnecessary padding. Everything a reader needs to know, needs to have in order to construct the entire scenario in their own mind, is in those three paragraphs.
As for audience, while Enid could be enjoyed by a younger audience, it also appealed to a certain type of adult. There were themes in Enid, such as relationships between parents and children or the feelings of transitioning from child to adult, that are universal, regardless of age. Adults who enjoyed my previous book will likely find themselves drawn into this collection as well. Much like I transitioned from attempting to write everything as a novel, the same can be said for an audience. I’ve stopped trying to write with a specific audience in mind, but rather write so that the story exists as it has to exist, and then hope that it finds its own audience naturally.
Your website has a link to artisanal mathematics. Could you explain what that’s about?
There’s something about the phrase artisanal mathematics I really like. It just seems like something that should exist. So now it does. Get hand-made pictures of mathematics to hang on your walls. Like art, but with math.
It makes me smile. I made some business cards with the phrase on it too.
What is next for you, writing-wise?
I’ve been working on a longer piece, likely a stream-of-consciousness style novella — yet another style and medium publishers assure me will not sell. And I always have more story ideas; the one benefit of being a poor sleeper is that I have hours each night to spend building worlds and telling myself stories in the hopes I can trick myself into falling asleep.