Gina Nutt: Wondrously strange elements populate both these stories. What draws you to the otherworldly and whimsical in fiction?
SL Carroll: I think my love of children’s books and my dissatisfaction with reality. Children’s books often have a really fun balance of lightness and dark, loss and pain alongside magic and resilience. As an adult, you need that balance more than ever but it becomes harder to find, both in media and in life. Fiction, for me, exists as a space to play, to challenge, and to escape. 

GN: The narrator of “Tomato Girl” has an unbeating tomato for a heart, yet she’s clear-eyed in cataloguing the sensory details of her daily life. From her perspective, objects, language, film, and dreams can be sites of fascination or rupture. Can you share a bit about your experience writing this narrator? Were there aspects of her voice that surprised you or pulled you in a different direction?
SLC: This story was written in the spring and that change of the seasons is thematically present - the edge of the fullness of summer, marked by the scarcity of winter. The protagonist feels full inside, but is worried she’s lacking. There is a difference between how she is portrayed on the outside and the inside.

Her tomato heart is lush, full, and colorful. A yellow heirloom tomato is a wonderful image. There is nothing in her body that indicates decay, illness, or pain. Yet this mere difference - the tomato heart in place of a regular one - plants a seed of doubt. Once this seed is planted, the narrator cannot see beyond it. Her focus on her perceived flaw colors her experience of the world.

This story appeared fairly fully formed to me, which is rare. I wrote it in an uninterrupted flow one afternoon in April and when I later edited, hardly anything changed. The story was unique to that moment.

GN: “Life Size” carefully unspools suspense as the story moves. For me, the reading experience evokes sitting beside a campfire, listening to someone telling a story. How did you approach pace here?
SLC: In comedic sketch writing, each beat needs to raise the stakes, as in the scene may start fairly normal but must become increasingly absurd. I think suspense in a story moves similarly. Each beat needs to add another layer of suspense and if it doesn’t, the piece will lose its rhythm.

I was lucky in that I knew where I wanted the piece to go when I started it, which doesn’t always happen. To raise the stakes, I wove in my own experiences of quiet horror - being home alone, being unsettled in a space without protection, being around someone who may do you harm, being unsure of your own apprehension and intuition. The aim was to make the unease hard to pinpoint, but increasingly present throughout the piece.

GN: These stories complement each other in their shared strangeness, while each creates a distinct atmosphere. What do you think fiction reveals about duality, especially of the self? 
SLC: Life contains a lot of dualities and fiction mimics life’s experience. I don’t know that it provides any answers about duality, but instead lays out more questions. I like fiction as a tool to mirror and magnify, poke and prod.

GN: The sentences and language in both these stories are distilled, and you’re the author of a forthcoming novella. What appeals to you most about working in shorter forms? Are there any challenges you find especially unique to writing at these lengths?
SLC: I’ve always been drawn to shorter works, many of the most formative pieces I read growing up were poems. I love the directness and power that comes from a shorter form, and I also love it as a challenge, to strip down excess and focus on the heart of a work, to say more while simultaneously saying less.

Amina Cain has a great book (A Horse At Night) where she explains that the writing process begins for her with an image in her mind that she then translates onto the page. I feel similarly. The story exists in my mind through an image, or multiple images, and I attempt to translate this onto paper. It begins very sparsely but the more I work on it, the more I flesh it out. Then, when I feel I have everything I need, I whittle it down again. It is a process of making and unmaking.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
SLC: Anything that impacts my atmosphere and by atmosphere, I mean my vision and experience of the world. I feel greatly influenced by the weather, the shade of the sky, what’s currently blooming or decaying or both. I like to pull words from conversations I have with friends or examine turns of phrase. I’m influenced by places I visit once and never see again, places I’m forced to reconstruct from memory. I’m also influenced by places I visit again and again (like James Turrell’s Meeting at MoMA PS1, which is an unparalleled reading spot). I am obsessed with the work of the Norwegian writer and poet Gunnhild Øyehaug. I like live theater, watching a world within a world, and I also like live music, the craft of performance and its inherent flaws. I find inspiration in art galleries and museums, I see them as stages for play, refusal, and defiance. I often tell myself that everything good happens outside of my front door because I know once I leave the house, anything could unfold. I find inspiration in the unexpected.