Rosie Schaap is the guest. She is a contributor to This American Life and npr.org, and she writes the monthly “Drink” column for The New York Times Magazine. Her memoir, Drinking With Men, will be published on January 24, 2013 by Riverhead Books.

Kate Christensen raves

This book will be a classic. There is so much joy in this book! It’s a great, comforting, wonderful, funny, inspiring, moving memoir about community and belief and the immense redemptive powers of alcohol drunk properly.

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There is something equally freeing and unsettling about the wide-open desert—the horizon stretching out forever is both unattainable and inspiring. In Battleborn, a collection of stories by Claire Vaye Watkins, we get to explore all aspects of Nevada, from the sad allure of a brothel to nights out in Vegas that can only lead to trouble, told in an honest and yet lyrical voice. We bear witness to those moments in time beyond which there is no return. And what comes after this tipping point—that is our salvation.

Consider this from the character Sophie in the short story Fly-Over State, “our house was the only rental on the block. Maybe something unseemly happened there: adultery, Judaism, modern dance” from Emma Straub’s brilliant debut story collection OTHER PEOPLE WE MARRIED (Five Chapter Books, 2011). This sharp, evocative sentence encapsulates the way Emma Straub sees the world through her characters: a little bit normal, with shades of absurdity, and a kind of irony that causes you to smirk.

OTHER PEOPLE WE MARRIED is simply one of the best collections I have read in years. The twelve stories in this concise compilation recall the early work of Ann Beattie, Lorrie Moore (who offers a blurb) and Raymond Carver. The characters that inhabit these worlds are deliciously sad and wickedly funny, and their tales draw you in with an immediacy that is startling in a few short pages. Emma Straub knows where to start a story and when to get out, all the while leaving you wanting more.

After tearing through this collection a couple of times and marking up my copy with post-its and scribbles in the margins, I’ll admit to a bit of a writer’s crush. A few e-mail exchanges later I was relieved to find that I managed not to scare Emma away with my enthusiasm, and was more than thrilled that Emma agreed to an interview for TNB.

RA: Emma, writing a successful short story ultimately means you have to distill the very essence of plot and character in a few pages. I had a professor once tell me that I was a novelist trying to write short stories. You do not have this problem; each story in the collection is a study in finding that one moment of truth. Have you always found the short story form comfortable?

ES: Thank you! In a funny way, I’ve always felt like I was a novelist trying to write short stories too, so I’m glad that I’ve fooled you into thinking that I know what I’m doing. It is true that, when writing stories, I do write towards that one moment, which is a lovely, very manageable feeling. I’m working on a novel right now, and it’s an entirely different beast. Now I think I must be a story writer trying to write a novel!

I find a lot of the readers at TNB are interested in process, can you share yours?

I am an outliner, to be sure, but not a terribly thorough one. I outline the big events—or, what I think will be the big events—and leave the scenes up in the air. So my outline changes with every draft. That process is true for both stories and novels. The novel I’m working on novel covers a very large expanse of time, so I’m trying to be especially good about that.

Was it always your intention that the characters in these stories would live for only a few (stunning) pages?   Is there any character you had a hard time leaving? (I vote for Jackie). Were there any surprises?  Did you leave anything out of this collection?

Well, Jackie and Franny used to belong to a novel, one that I have cannibalized and left for dead. I do sometimes feel sad that other people don’t get to find out about the rest of their lives, which I know very well. Maybe someday I will try to resurrect that book. I also miss Teddy and Richard, from “Hot Springs Eternal,” but I’m sure they’re very happy, wherever they are. I don’t think I know the characters very well before I start, but certainly before I’m done with a story. With the abandoned Franny novel, I got to know everyone in that universe very intimately, but yes, certainly there are surprises. I think if none of your characters surprise you, you’re holding the reigns too tight. Yes, there were stories that I took out, either because they felt redundant or because they felt too far afield. There will be another collection someday, I hope.

When I write, if I have to track back to the genesis of the idea, it is usually an image that comes to me first, perhaps a snippet of dialogue. Talk a little about your process.

I don’t know if I can’t properly identify what makes me write. I get inspired by all sorts of things, often taken from my own life, or the lives of people I know, or an article in the newspaper, or a painting, or a song, or a conversation I overhear. Then I take squirrelly little notes and sometimes an idea emerges. I have a very long list of stories and novels to write. I think if someone gave me five years with a live-in chef and a yoga instructor, I could very happily write five or six books.

On the subject of your “squirrelly little notes” there was a recent post here at TNB discussing the volumes of paper and notebooks that make up a writer’s archive.  I have never been one to journal – everything gets poured into the work – and my notes consist of post-its and cryptic scribbles in notebooks that only I understand. My “paper” legacy consists of proof pages from the publisher and stacks of stained and wrinkled notes.  What does your archive consist of?

I’ve always been a pack rat, so my archive will be PACKED. Slips of paper, maps, notes, first drafts, notes from early readers, letters, receipts, detritus. If anyone is ever interested in going through all my passed notes from high school, just let me know.

You have a refreshing knack for dialogue and the ability to infuse even the most melancholic situation with humor.  Often, the best humor on the page arises from the emotional content of the material and I suppose, it is the most personal way of conveying your author’s voice. What writers inspire you?

There are a lot of writers I admire: Lorrie Moore, Jennifer Egan, Kate Christensen, Tom Perrotta, to name but a few. As for writers that make me want to be a better ME, though, I don’t know about that. Let’s just say they make me want to be a good writer and leave it at that. Otherwise, it might get a little creepy.

Congratulations on the recent sale of your novel, I’m very excited to read it.

Thank you! It is phenomenally exciting. As I mentioned earlier, I was writing novels before I started writing stories, and so it feels extremely validating to have finally sold one, and to a publisher I admire as much as Riverhead. As much as I love and support small presses, I am very much looking forward to having a bigger support team. An editor! A publicist! A marketing department! It boggles the mind.

Do you remember the first time you really felt like a writer?

I’ve always felt like a writer, always. I wrote books as a child, and poems as a teenager, and was very lucky to be surrounded by encouraging voices.

Can you talk a little about publishing this collection with the brand new Five Chapters imprint and the wonderful Dave Daley?

Sure! I published a story on Five Chapters a couple of years ago, and about a year ago, Dave Daley approached me about doing the collection. It was amazingly flattering that Dave wanted my book to be his first. Publishing with small presses has its advantages and drawbacks, but Five Chapters has been amazing. I get more attention than I would at a bigger house, that’s for sure.

How difficult do you find marketing your work?

While being on social media does take a lot of time, I don’t find it difficult at all. If anything, I enjoy it too much! Being at a small press, I certainly do rely on social media for much of my publicity. There is absolutely nothing I wouldn’t do! There are some writers who feel like it’s not their job to promote their work, but I’m not one of them. It’s all part of it, these days, and no one will ever care as much about my work as I do.

I agree, self-marketing is the unspoken agreement we all make, whether published by a large or indie publisher.  And with the advent of the Internet there isn’t much that is kept sacred.  A current conversation raging on the boards has been about the critic on the Internet. Some authors have engaged these critics, while others turn the other cheek.  Where do you stand on this?

One should never respond to a critic. Never. It’s very simple.

What would people be surprised to find out about Emma Straub?

Oh, god. I tell people so many details about my personal life on the Internet that I doubt I could surprise anyone. Maybe how little I actually want to leave the house? Being a total hermit is my dream job.

What’s on your nightstand right now?  Are you a one book at a time girl? Or do you have a staggering TBR pile?

Right now I’m reading Alan Heathcock’s VOLT, which is very dark and rich and good. Next up I’ve got some biographies of movie stars (Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn, Judy Garland) that I’m reading for research. I also can’t wait to get my hands on Tina Fey’s BOSSYPANTS! I am going to gobble that up.

To follow up my conversation with Emma, I asked Dave Daley of FiveChapters.com, and now a publisher, what inspired him to start an imprint.

DD: FiveChapters Books started because the state of publishing provided an opportunity. FiveChapters.com was one of the early online literary magazines, and for five years now the site has serialized a new story every week. Some 275 stories are in the archives, and every week the site generates between 15,000 and 25,000 page views. That represents a lot of people who love short stories — and it seemed to me that if they trusted FC the same way I trusted indie-record labels or the Vintage contemporary label as a teenager, that the Internet provided a way to upend the big publishing model in a way that benefits writers. The costs for a small press are decidedly lower — and by trying to sell directly to readers, we can break even by selling far fewer books. Suddenly the barriers to entry disappeared, and I could really see a way to do something I’ve always wanted to try.

The original plan was to begin with an anthology of FC stories, but the more people I talked to about the idea, the more submissions I started to receive. Lots of amazing writers had story collections available. As I realized I could work with people like Emma and Jess, (Jess Row, author of Nobody Ever Gets Lost, also by Five Chapters) the anthology moved to the back-burner for the moment. I’d had Emma on FC in 2009 with her story Puttanesca, and it was one of my favorites. She’s got talent to burn, on top of being the most ridiculously cool and generous person. When she sent me the manuscript, it was an immediate no-brainer. The voice, the humor, the spirit, the genuine humanity of her work — she’s going to have a long and amazing career. I’ve known Jess through FC and other projects for several years now, and it’s an honor to publish someone who I think is one of the most important writers of this time, someone with deep insight into the way the biggest questions of this moment affect individuals, relationships, neighbors. My hope is that this is the Paul Harding or Jaimy Gordon of 2011 — the small press book that gets noticed in a big way. Both Emma and Jess have sold their first novels to Riverhead and I couldn’t be more delighted — that’s the whole plan.

You can order Emma’s book: Other People We Married along with Jess Row’s Nobody Ever Gets Lost from the Five Chapters website as well as purchase it from some very fine indie’s such as BookCourt and McNally Jackson among others. If you haven’t already, a visit to FiveChapters.com will inspire you with a daily short story fix like no other on the web. Bookmark it, you won’t be sorry.

Imagine what it must be like to be surrounded by strangers, never recognizing the face of your spouse, the face of your children, your co-workers and students, or even your own features when revealed in a photo or in film? At first, it sounds amusing. Most of us have trouble remembering names and faces so this couldn’t be that big of a deal. Right? But amusement quickly turns into a nightmare, losing your son in a grocery store, ignoring people you’ve worked with for years, walking past your students as if they are strangers. Add to that an unreliable, alcoholic father with a nasty temper, and a paranoid, schizophrenic mother, and you have the life and times of Heather Sellers. Her memoir is titled You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know (Riverhead Books), and it is her true story of face blindness, and the way her world has been shaped since childhood.

Take this excerpt from the beginning of the book as an example of what her life has been like:

“I ran up to him and threw my arms around him and stretched up to kiss him; he drew back, pressing me away.

It wasn’t Dave. I had the wrong guy.

Dave—my real Dave—came up a moment later; we laughed about my mistake. I was embarrassed he had seen me hugging another man. ‘So many people here look like you!’ I said. ‘We need to move. To a place with fewer Dutch people.’ This had happened numerous times before, my mistaking someone else for Dave.”

Heather Sellers teaches at Hope College, and is a talented author, her books on craft funny and light, never dry, her short stories rooted in humor, but always carrying with them a hint of danger and dysfunction. So to hear this story, well, it just sounds like something Heather might do, always thinking about something else, her mind wandering, maybe just a tad bit ditsy. It’s anything but that.

Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, can be caused by a blow to the head, a stroke, trauma:

“Sufferers recognized people, just never by the internal features of the face. They used voice, gait, jewelry, and context. Common sense. They compensated. Many could function well. Others became withdrawn, housebound, even suicidal.”

But for the longest time, in fact, all of her childhood, and most of her adult life, Heather Sellers had no idea that she had face blindness. She thought she was unique, special, that she simply looked at the world a little bit differently, and she embraced this perspective.

Although, there were times she looked back at her youth, and her mother especially, and hesitated, questioned things, wondered about the sanity and behavior that was, for them, the norm:

“I tried to remember. Had she always nailed the windows shut? Yes. It was just how we lived. Bare light bulbs. Sponge baths in the garage. Walking around on our knees. Windows nailed shut.

Paranoid schizophrenic.

That could not be. Schizophrenics were like Dave’s first wife. They were locked away, they were on meds, they were crazy, crazy people. My mom was peculiar. It was not possible for me to be thirty-eight years old and not to have known my mother was a paranoid schizophrenic.”

Face blindness. A mother with a mental illness. An alcoholic father. Nothing was normal. Heather ate paper, an affliction called pica, the craving for unnatural substances. She was eating pencils, metal, sucking on rocks, under a great deal of stress. No, things were not going well.

But life went on. And as any daughter (or son) is naturally inclined to do, she loved her mother, and supported the decisions that her mother made:

“Most of the time, her reasons made sense—as much sense as adult reasons ever make to a child. I had to wear strange used clothes because we were not rich. Trends were for sheep, fools. We had to move because she was dead set against the divorce, the bank was foreclosing. The wrong food contained toxins that killed people; people had died from eating food they thought was perfectly safe. I couldn’t argue. Her bizarre habits were swirled into the days with no obvious pattern; she happened like life, in hours, in years.”

This way of living, it had to shape her. Coupled with her own issues with face blindness, is it any wonder she though she was going insane?

It would take years for Heather Sellers to find the courage to get therapy, to address the mental issues of her father and mother, their weaknesses, their problems. It would take that same courage, and more, to admit to her fellow teachers and students that she had problems, that her face blindness was real, not all in her head. What response could she possibly expect? When she finally revealed her problem to the campus, to her students and peers, she only expected compassion:

“Someone else wrote me. I don’t even remember who it was. But it’s the question that matters the most.

‘Do you want me to reintroduce myself to you once or always?’

I want you to always.”

When you live with uncertainty, when the love you know is flawed, deeply flawed, it can be a life-changing experience. Heather Sellers found the strength to share this experience with others, to let them know that they’re okay as well, whether they suffer from face blindness, or other issues. She asks us to stay open to the possibilities, and to try and understand the intangibles, the unseen, those elusive worries and mental roadblocks, and to keep on going, keep trying, keep evolving. You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know is a touching, heartbreaking story, one that is unique, and yet, filled with the same love, and hope that we all carry with us, or strive to embrace. The next time I run into Heather, I’ll be sure to introduce myself, as I always have, but this time, the moment will carry with itself more weight, a glimmer in my eye as I search her gaze for recognition, the years of suffering unfurling, the laughter and adventure radiating from her smiling face as we shake hands, and I reconnect with a powerful voice in contemporary literature, an inspiration to all of us out here who are writing, teaching, and trying to love each other, flaws and all.