In addition to three previous books of fiction, Wendy J. Fox is the author of the just-released story collection What if We Were Somewhere Else. A two-time finalist for the Colorado Book Awards, Wendy has been published in The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, Self, Business Insider, and Ms, as well as in several literary magazines. We had the great pleasure of sitting down with her here at Occhi to discuss her new collection, on-the-job “messaging,” what it means to be a literary citizen, and much more.
The characters in the various stories in What if We Were Somewhere Else are all connected, directly or indirectly, through the same Denver-area office. This office, which expands when business is good and shrinks when business is bad—and even has a peculiar draft to mark the transitions—is a character in itself. Why/how did you choose it?
I chose the setting because I was employed in a space like this. To be specific, the office setting in the book is modeled after Denver’s Petroleum Building, 110 16th Street, which was built in 1957. At 14 floors, it was Denver’s first high-rise with a swanky club for oilmen on floor 13, but when I worked there between 2012-2019, it was a dump. The building had a lot of history, but also dirty bathrooms and unreliable elevators.
There were various remodels, including turning the oilmen’s club and the former suites on the top floor into co-working spaces, but the rest of the building was roachy—and really, we don’t get many cockroaches in Denver; you kind of have to work at it to attract roaches—and just in ill repair.
It was a weird space, and also a changing space. I was really sad when the nail salon on the ground floor converted to a Cricket Wireless shop. Once when the elevators were busted, I came down in the evening through the stairwell from Floor 12 to 1, and the door to 1 was locked. I was with some other people, and we eventually found our way out via the basement, but I kept thinking, what if there was a fire? I emailed the building manager the next day, and he said, oh you know, we are just trying to make sure people don’t use the bathrooms on Floor 1.
This is a building that, despite being a wreck, had a full-time security guard—and management will lock a fire door against the chance someone who doesn’t work in the building needs to pee? What?
What if We Were Somewhere Else is a work of literary accretion. The protagonist of each chapter tells his/her own story, but as he/she knows most of the other characters from work, he/she winds up divulging information about them too: We learn who climbs the stairs instead of taking the elevator; who has what kind of food in the fridge; who monopolizes the microwave; whose marriage is falling apart. Can you talk about the process of introducing characters in this way? Did you know ahead exactly who each character would turn out to be? Or did each develop organically?
I didn’t know how it would play out at first. However, I was setting out to write a linked collection of stories, so there was certainly the understanding, or at least hope, that characters would show up again. Writing an intentionally linked collection felt very different than my first book of stories, which were, in the way of disparate stories over time “collected.”
There were two novels in-between What If We Were Somewhere Else. I actually don’t think a ton about form, but stories felt like the correct medium for where I was at in my writing life as this was coming together.
When the business gets a new COO, who is vegan, he replaces the office candy dish with a bowl of fruit. The administrative assistant, not wanting the new COO to know no one is eating the fruit, throws out a few pieces at a time in the lady’s room trash can. What does this say about the office environment generally?
Oh, that’s a small detail and I love that you noticed it. What I was trying to express is how much women often hold things together. In this instance, the COO wants to encourage healthy eating, and he’s being dogmatic about it. The admin gets it, but even though she may present as playing along, she’s not going to enforce his ideas. She exercises her power in her own way.
In the office environment generally, this is about performance. I’m pretty certain that no one after six hours of meetings wants an orange or a banana. You want a chocolate or a cocktail. You get judged if you take some candy, though, no one actually cares about the fruit, and a cocktail isn’t one of the choices, so the default often becomes coffee.
I think as we continue to talk about work-from-home for office staff in the wake of the pandemic, one of the compelling things is just having access to your own food and beverage. I worked in a company where someone senior to me got really annoyed when I bought (with my own money, not company budget) a water filter for the office. Her perspective was that if people were so uptight about not drinking from the tap, they should bring their own water from home. Turns out these years later that Denver like other cities does have a lead problem. I couldn’t understand how the water filter was hurting her, but in some way, it offended her sensibility of what the everyday staff should and shouldn’t have access to.
What does it mean that Kate, in her narration, tells the reader she’s been served with divorce papers in the very same sentence that she tells us that the company has grown too fast and will now have to downsize? It’s almost as if these two affronts are of equal weight. Are they?
No, and yes. As Kate says, we hide from our marriages in work, and we hide from our work in partnerships.
We aren’t always good at knowing which of these relationships need more energy. I think there’s a default to be like, no, don’t give into late-stage capitalism, don’t put wage-work first, but there’s also a way in which work people can be the humans who are the most important in our life. I worked at a company that was textbook emotionally abusive (in the aforementioned building with the oilmen’s club), but I also worked at a company where I got along so well with the people that I married one of them. Over a decade later, I’m still married to that person and still good friends with many people from that time.
It depends, I suppose. Sometimes the randomness of hiring decisions is really beautiful. Sometimes it’s truly terrifying.
One character, Sabine, lies her way into her job with the others by picking up as much knowledge as she can from the office workers who visit her at her old job, waiting tables in a coffee shop. She comes to this conclusion: There was as much interpretation in data as in trouble and love. Can you expand on this idea and its place in your work?
Sabine doesn’t so much as lie, I think, as what in corporate marketing we would call “message.” That’s a hair-splitter to be sure, but the distinction is important. The consultant who she meets in the coffee shop who helps her style her resume basically assists her in looking good on paper and instructs her on how to physically appear in an interview. Sabine has also seen because a lot of writers hang out in the coffee shop as well as perform at the open mics, how often the lines are blurred between fact and fiction.
How this idea—the idea of interpretation—impacts my own work is through the concept of “message” and also performance from above. What I mean is that I think a lot about how our own presentation impacts the access we have to opportunity. An example here might be, for me, as someone who grew up in the country, I never (and still don’t, even though I have lived in cities for a long time) understood sport coats or blazers. It always seems like a jacket is something you wear to not be cold, not something you do to express your professionalism. Indeed, shouldn’t the work itself speak to the professionalism? Probably so, but the fact remains that women who wear makeup to work get raises more consistently. I have no data on blazers specifically, but women who are perceived as more conventionally attractive get rewarded, period. In that context, honestly, with what people are up against, why not just “lie” or “message” your resume. I’ve done it. No one found out.
The third to last story in the book leaves the pattern that you’ve used for the other stories and zooms out into the future. It’s quite surprising. What motivated you to write that chapter? And why the third to last and not the last?
Several people have asked this same question! It’s true that this story, The Human, takes a different turn than the others. It’s speculative fiction, which is a different mode than the
other stories. However, all of the stories in the last half of the book follow the characters in their “after” moments of being downsized from a corporation, and this one does too, it just spins farther into the future. The reason it is the third to last is because it’s in the same order, character-wise, as the first half of the collection—not a satisfying reason, I get that, but structurally it did feel important to me to keep the ordering, and I still think it is the right choice.
What motivated me to write it was the same thing that motivated me to write all of the stories in the second half. This question of, okay, a thing happened, like you got fired, but what happens next?
I have also been thinking more about what the next twenty years of my own life will look like. I grew up in the 90s when ideas about climate change, or, global warming as we called it then, felt like a much more abstract idea. It seemed then, like some terrifying future prospect. We thought we were doing a good job by switching to pump hairspray instead of aerosol and recycling. Now as the seas are rising along with the temperature, it seems much more clear that as humans we may have set in motion something that we can never take back. I hope I’m wrong about that. The character Michael doesn’t want to live on the moon, and I don’t either.
Tell us something about your 2019 release, the novel If The Ice Had Held.
ICE was a big breakthrough for me. It sold well, was reviewed well, and got a lot of support from the publisher. I think that there are some ways in which WHAT IF is a better book. That’s also like trying to play favorites with one’s children, which is a fairly un-useful perspective.
It’s odd what becomes important about each book, but what I think about now is that ICE was listed by the publication High Country News as the best book in the season, and I remembered the old High Country News newsletters my folks used to get in the mail, basically broadsides, but it’s a big deal publication now. It felt super special.
In addition to novels and story collections, you have written for numerous national publications, including writing reviews of other authors’ books. Does reviewing impact your own fiction?
Reviewing does impact my own work. The largest impact is that when one gets a little traction as a reviewer, books start to show up in the inbox or the mail. Some of these books are work I would have sought out on my own, but much of it is authors I’m not familiar with, but a publicist has put me on their radar
What this means is that I have the opportunity to read very widely. I cover small press almost exclusively, and there are so many small and independent presses who are issuing amazing work. Because these presses don’t always have great marketing muscle, I’m really grateful that via my reviewing work I’ve been exposed to so many great writers. Reviewing is also an act of literary citizenship, and I think all writers should take a stab at it at least once.
Can you imagine your collection as a feature film? Or one of the stories as a film? Who would be the right director for the job?
I do think there’s some visual impact in these stories. In terms of a director, I think I would like someone who is a total unknown. Maybe even someone who fakes her resume and lands the job anyway.
Please tell readers where they can learn more about your work.
Website: https://www.wendyjfox.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WendyJeanFox
IG: https://www.instagram.com/foxwendyj/
Images, courtesy of Wendy J. Fox
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