An interview with Zsuzsi Gartner

Back in November 2014, Zsuzsi Gartner appeared at KPU as a part of the “Women Writers: How Do They Work” panel. Pulp Managing Editor Stephanie Peters got to ask her a few great questions like this one:

I’m struck by the use of reoccurring motifs in your stories. I was delighted every time I came across terry cloth shorts in Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. Do you deliberately make these distinctive images reappear to give cohesion to a collection of stories, or is there a different motive?

You’ve identified one of the idiot-savant-ish aspects of my writing.  Certain things are deliberate, such as the Biblical motifs, while other things, like the terry cloth shorts are a result of just too much stuff jostling about in my brain that it ends up as flotsam rather than jetsam. I guess in the case of the too-short terry cloth shorts they’re a kind of shorthand for a certain kind of gal—sassy, ballsy, and somewhat tacky. When I combed through the page proof of both my books, I was shocked and pleased by the recurring motifs that seemed to hang together. And in both books there’s the sudden violence and explosions—I was more aware of this while writing Better Living than Anxious Girls.

 

Read the full interview here.