Gina Nutt: The two nameless neighbors in “Leather” know each other at varying proximities throughout the story. Early on, one recognizes the other as “the voice.” During their first longer encounter, the tense shifts. Can you share a bit about how you balanced the gravitational ballet these two characters share?
Lindsay Lerman: I wrote this story not long after I finished writing a novel. I felt pretty hollowed out—in a mostly good way—but I wondered if I would write anything at all for the next weeks, months, years. I never sit down to write unless I really need to. I had also spent a year and a half studying a new language and doing my best to live in it, here in Berlin. Everything in me was different. I was making tea one morning and the characters appeared to me. It’s always like this for me—the characters arrive first. So I decided to follow them around for a while, put them in contact, see how they interact. The ballet, as you call it (thank you!) is just the result of wanting to understand who they are and how they behave. Every story is a dollhouse. I’m playing with dolls.

As for tense and narration shifts, I often do this in my writing. Sometimes I’m surprised when I see it on the page, because I don’t necessarily remember choosing it. There’s always the option to eliminate it, but my gut keeps telling me to hold off, to let it be. I think I use those shifts intuitively to alter momentum and energy in a scene, and sometimes it feels like it coincides with a subtle shift in perspective within a character. I guess it feels right when it feels right. All is flux anyway.

GN: As you wrote and revised, did third-person narration reveal anything surprising to you about these characters and the tension between them?
LL: Initially, I was surprised by how the cold, sharp ending felt right. But when I thought about how the tension between the two characters was so present and forceful, I realized that theirs is a fire that burns fast. And once it’s out, it’s out. If books are prolonged, years-long obsessive affairs for me, short stories are a fling. Very meaningful, sometimes significant, but over in a heartbeat, by design.

GN: I find it intriguing that their first longer encounter takes place in a department store, a space of consumption, exchange, longing, perhaps also regret. Did this environment present any unique limitations or openings you hadn’t expected?
LL: I was inspired by Berlin’s old-fashioned department stores. I love them. There’s a kind of formality, ceremonial quality to them. You look, you sometimes touch, you have a kaffee und kuchen at the cafe on the top floor, you see everyone performing personhood. It’s incredible. I imagined the woman being excited to let this older man take the lead, show her how things used to be done. There’s an erotic dimension to that gesture of let me show you something, come with me. She’s game. Maybe he realizes he wants to extend the enjoyment he brings her by showing her something—maybe that’s why he insists on treating her to the boots. Spaces of consumption and exchange can really bring this out of us. Capitalism learned how to weaponize it. It’s not sexy anymore—not even close. Maybe this is why the old-fashioned version is tempting, seductive. It’s still a lie. But a lie in its infancy still carries the possibility of a thrill.

GN: Something else I admire here, as well as in your other writing, is how your characters often wrestle a gap between their longing and reality. This tension flavors how they move through the world and how they relate to other people. In this story, the woman trying on a pair of boots and the characters being intimate together inspires a pause: “Was she real?”; “Was he real?” What draws you to exploring this specific tension in your writing? How do you reach this gauzy psychic place? When do you find yourself grounding the work?
LL: Thank you, Gina. Tension animates everything. There is nothing that is not held in place by tension. I search for ways to understand this, to dramatize it, to de-personalize it. As a result, I think I often live in that gauzy place you describe. I ground the writing the way I ground myself. I ask what is really, really essential here? About the characters, about the way they are with each other, about their relation to the world. From there, it’s not long before I’m in the territory of wrestling with the nature of reality. 

I don’t understand this relentlessness in me, but it’s there and it’s vicious, and it always comes back around to interrogating the nature of reality itself. It’s funny to be in this position of wanting to offer something real while never really being sure what reality is, or if it’s as fixed as our minds would like us to believe.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
LL: Mary Shelley’s posthumously published Mathilda; Joseph-Roth-Diele, a perfect gaststube near Potsdamer Platz; the notes and rocks from my daughter that I keep on my desk; Talk Talk’s album from 1988 called Spirit of Eden (listen in the dark with the volume way up); very long walks; the level of listening required while learning a new language; D’Angelo, who just departed this plane—his entire being and the beauty that poured from him.