May Program:
Short Story Writer Elizabeth Crane
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Elizabeth Crane certainly isn’t a freshly minted creative writing student who had the great fortune of wowing some editors at a big-name publisher. Nor is she a stay-at-home mom who penned her first novel between her kids’ screaming matches. Her writing career has been more of a gradual progression than a shot out of a rocket. During CWIP’s annual author reading at the Chicago Athletic Association she admitted, “I had a very circuitous route to becoming a published author... I’m not the 25-year-old wunderkind. I spent a lot of years doing what I thought I was supposed to do. You know, having conventional jobs and then struggling at conventional jobs—trying to pursue something in the arts but struggling to pay the rent.” Since her career started unconventionally in some ways, it makes sense that Crane’s third story collection, You Must Be This Happy to Enter, is being put out through independent publisher Punk Planet Books. This means no big fat advance check and no publicist assigned to push the book, but ultimately more control over the finished product and more editorial attention Traditional publishers just weren’t sold on the idea of another short story collection. The publisher who did her first two books, When the Messenger Is Hot and All This Heavenly Glory, wasn’t willing to take a chance on short stories the third time around. Crane at one time attempted a novel, which is now tucked away in a drawer somewhere, which she is “pretty grateful is not out there in the world.” Her current modus operandi is the short story, and it is in this form that her writing has found its niche. This comfort with form is conveyed in the two stories she read to the audience of CWIPers. Adventures in the dating world drawn from her own experience in When the Messenger Is Hot are something just about any single woman can relate to. “Football” is something of an antithesis to her own experience, outlining the seemingly familiar, idyllic yet bittersweet life of a hometown girl. Both stories reference the television show Friends. Given this last fact it’s no surprise to learn that Crane once wanted to pursue sitcom writing. Hollywood life, however, turned out not to be the thing for her, like a lot of other careers she tried out. She said, “If I included my entire work history on my resume it would be about ten pages long and I’m pretty sure the universities that employ me to teach might have thought better of it.” Now that she lives in Chicago she teaches creative writing at Northwestern, the School of the Art Institute, and the University of Chicago. In that busy schedule she squeezes in writing her stories wherever she can. “I’ve always felt that even writing in short spurts, if you can do it on a daily basis, can be surprisingly productive... When I do write, I tend to kind of bust out and get on a crazy jag, and then I have a book suddenly. I don’t know how that happens.” Tamara Matthews is a freelance writer who lives in Chicago. If you have time to kill, check out her blog at http://tamatam.vox.com/. |