Jennifer Howard’s three short fictions–”Twenty Questions,” It’s Me,” and “It’s You”–appear in the December 2009 issue of The Collagist. She has published fiction in VQR, the Blue Moon Review, and in the anthology D.C. Noir (Akashic Books). A former contributing editor of the Washington Post Book World, she writes about publishing, libraries, archives, and humanities for the Chronicle of Higher Education. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, the writer Mark Trainer, and their two children and two cats. She can be found online at www.jenniferhoward.com.

Can you talk about the inspiration for “Twenty Questions”, “It’s Me”, and “It’s You”? What was on your mind while you were writing these stories?

I was walking down the stairs one Saturday night and the first lines of “Twenty Questions” started running through my head. I can’t say exactly what set those lines loose—it was a quiet night, I was happily at home with my family—but I wanted to sit down right away and write the rest. So I did. Whenever a relationship ends, especially if it ends badly, questions are sometimes all that’s left, and they’re often questions that have no real answer. The other sections came later, once I decided I needed to draw the other sides of the triangle.

Like writing a short story, flash fiction really forces you to be aware of the language, the meaning and efficiency of every word you write. Though each of these works is less than 150 words, together they form a story which is as loaded with meaning as a much longer piece. When you were writing this piece, how much did you have to pare down? What is the process like for creating a story where so much of it is told by the negative space, the words left unwritten?

I didn’t have to pare much at all. Writing these pieces reminded me of writing poetry, which I used to do a lot. Poetry teaches you a lot about what can be spared and what can’t. The need to compress can be a sort of liberation. Every word carries a charge. As a writer I find that very satisfying, although there are ample joys in writing long too.

Why did you order the pieces as you did? Did you play around with the order before settling on one, or did you write them in order and keep them that way?

My first impulse was to sandwich “Twenty Questions” between the others, but I changed my mind about that after asking a reader or two how they felt about that order. In the final order, the other woman (“It’s Me”) comes between the former lovers literally as well as emotionally, which makes sense to me.

Beyond your work as a fiction writer and as a staff writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, I noticed on your website that you’ve written a “comic ditty for kiddies called ‘Henry and the Hungry Hamper’ that could use a publisher.” What was the process of writing a manuscript aimed at children? Was it similar to writing literary fiction, or did you have to find new ways of working?

Kids are probably the easiest and the hardest audience to write for: easiest because they go into a book expecting and wanting to like it without reserve (how many adult readers can do that?) and hardest because when you’re writing for them you have to hit the right note for the ages you have in mind. You can’t patronize them (not that I’d want to!), you don’t want to bore them, you don’t want the story to be too hard or too easy. The great kids’ writers make it look so easy. It’s not. It is fun, though. I wrote “Henry” as a bed-and-bathtime story for my kids—Lela, who’s 7 now, and Finn, who’s 5. Unlike a lot of grownups, they don’t seem to mind that it rhymes. We’d been reading Ogden Nash’s “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” and a lot of Roald Dahl poems for kids, which are wonderfully subversive. If Nash and Dahl think it’s okay to write in rhyme, I think so too.

What other writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m making some notes for a novel that’s too new to talk about yet. I’ve been doing some research for a nonfiction project about libraries and the digital future of books, too, although I worry about having time and energy to work on all that and keep a job and see my family. I’ve also learned to be skeptical when it comes to talk about books not yet written. (As Yoda says, “Do or do not. There is no try.”) Not long ago I finished the manuscript for another kids’ book, this one a modern-day story that draws on Ben Franklin and newspapers. That idea came out of a conversation I had with a publisher who wanted to do something to help newspapers, which is a cause near and dear to my heart. I haven’t heard yet if it will be published, but I hope so. It would be nice if “Henry” finds a home, too. And I want to write more short fiction. Like a cat, I need nine lives.

What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

I had a yen to read something atmospheric (I’m a sucker for almost anything set in Victorian London), so I picked up Philip Pullman’s The Ruby and the Smoke, part of his Sally Lockhart mystery series. It’s a rollicking read as well as a great example of how to pace a story. Everything comes together and makes sense, plus it has a plucky heroine who’s a crack shot. What more could you want? I just finished Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which is a retelling of Kipling’s The Jungle Book, with an orphan boy being raised by ghosts and a vampire instead of wolves and a panther. I’m slowly working my way through Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. I’m about to crack open a new anthology–Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandr Hemon (Dalkey Archive Press)–that looks like a great introduction to some writers I might never get to read otherwise. After that, it’ll probably be some battered Signet paperback I pick up in the second-hand bookstore down the street. Books have a way of finding you when you need them.

[Interview by Marie Schutt]