This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sharon Wahl, whose story collection Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances is out tomorrow from the University of Iowa Press. Everything Flirts explores some of life’s most challenging questions: Why is it so hard to make the first move on a date? How do we find the person we will love? If you ultimately do fall in love, how do you convince that person to love you back? With a tone that melds reverence and humor, Wahl uses classic works of philosophy by thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Zeno, and Bentham, and examines how love might be a subject too complicated for even the most esteemed philosophers to explain. Jamil Jan Kochai, the judge who selected the collection for the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, called the book “delightfully clever and philosophically complex,” noting that the stories unfold “like dreams, carrying you from one poignant love affair to the next.” He added that the “prose is exquisite and seductive,” and the "characters charm and disturb.” Sharon Wahl is a writer and documentary film producer. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in the Iowa Review, the Chicago Tribune, Harvard Review, Pleiades, and Action, Spectacle, among others. Wahl lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Sharon Wahl, author of Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances. (Credit: Jonathan VanBallenberghe)
1. How long did it take you to write Everything Flirts?
The earliest story in the collection, “A Lit Window Is Someone Awake,” was written in 1991. This now seems hard to believe! But I didn’t have the idea for the collection as a whole until 1996. At that point I’d had a lot of fun writing stories that used texts by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and I decided to work on a book of stories like these, love stories inspired in some way by philosophy texts. The two final pieces were finished early in the fall of 2023, and that’s when I submitted the manuscript to the Iowa Short Fiction Contest, which, to my shock, it won. But between 1991 and 2023 I wrote many other things, short stories and poems and essays and now-abandoned novels. The good news is, many of these stories and essays will be included in my second collection, “Bitter Tales,” which I hope to finish next year. No more of this thirty-years-per-book nonsense!
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There are two answers to this question. One is that my concept for the collection required me to include only a very particular kind of story. In addition to the general theme of philosophical romances, the book has an overall structure that the stories must fit into—Everything Flirts opens with stories of the beginnings of romances, then progresses to breakups and stories of starting over. So finishing this book wasn’t simply a matter of writing enough good stories, as would be true with a more general collection. I needed each story to contribute to the theme and structure of the book. Also, several of the pieces required quite a bit of research, so it all took some time to come together.
The other answer is that I had many health problems during the past twenty years. I won’t discuss most of these conditions here, but I will say that for me, chemotherapy was like being given brain damage. Fortunately, the prescribing and administering of chemotherapy has changed greatly over the past twenty years, but in 2002, the concept of “chemo-brain” was only just starting to be taken seriously, and while I was not affected as badly as some people—I could still add numbers, for example—it was quite a few years before I felt I was writing as well as I needed to be, to be able to complete this book.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at a desk in the corner of an oddly shaped room just off our kitchen. I think this was intended to be a dining room, but I use it for writing and for running our video production business. In addition to the desk and file cabinets and bookshelves, there is a small marble table at which we eat meals and watch hummingbirds battle over our three feeders. I am a born night owl, so by the time my brain feels prepared to write, it is usually mid-afternoon. I also often write at night. I think there are great benefits to writing every day, though this isn’t always within my control. But more and more, that is what I aim for.
4. What are you reading right now?
At the moment I’m reading two wonderful books that could hardly be more different in style and tone. One is a short novel by Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow (New Directions, 2022). The events of the novel are minimal—we follow a mother and daughter as they travel through Japan for several weeks. The book is carried by the writer’s voice, which is graceful, precise, and thoughtful throughout, describing internal and external landscapes equally well. The other book is a collection, Belly Up (A Strange Object, 2016), by Rita Bullwinkel. Her stories have tremendous verbal energy and are full of surprises. Some are set in our world, others in a world hovering alongside us in some weirder parallel universe, where ghosts are expected to visit their newly widowed once-wives, and occasionally a living child is born to be raised among the dead and deteriorating residents of Limbo, otherwise known as Florida. What will happen next? There are eleven more stories!
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
It’s hard for me to pick one writer to champion. Instead, I’ll recommend several books published in the last few years that I’ve loved reading and hope others will check out: Drifts (Riverhead Books, 2020) by Kate Zambreno; This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019) by Kate Briggs; The White Dress (Dorothy, 2020) by Nathalie Léger, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer; Margaret the First (Catapult, 2016) by Danielle Dutton; and The Employees by Olga Ravn (New Directions, 2022), translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.
The first three—Zambreno, Briggs, Léger—are, in widely varying and original ways, meditations on life and art, each written with a distinctive and engaging narrative voice that often felt to me like spending time in the company of an intelligent friend. “Companionable” was the word I used, describing these books to my husband while I read them. Margaret the First is an unconventional historical novel about an unconventional subject, Margaret Cavendish, the first woman in England to write for publication, whose publications include works of philosophy and science fiction. The Employees takes place on a starship and is a subtle, spooky tale of extraterrestrial contact. All these books are extremely beautiful.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have chronic health problems that most of the time can be managed comfortably, but occasionally take over weeks or months of my life.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
I don’t have an agent, and I didn’t work with an editor on this book in a collaborative way.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Everything Flirts, what would you say?
I would tell myself that although for years I strongly believed I ought to be writing a novel (and would go on to start and abandon several novels that seemed like good ideas at the time), I have always been happiest writing shorter pieces, and there is nothing at all wrong with that.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Everything Flirts?
As I mentioned before, some of the stories required a great deal of research, much more than makes it into the book. Writers always say this—most of their research doesn’t end up in their books—because it’s true! But I will also say that if I hadn’t greatly enjoyed reading philosophy and researching philosophers, I wouldn’t have written this book. Also—does this count as work?—it was essential to the conception of this book that I experienced a couple of frustrating, wonderful, difficult, and deeply interesting relationships with academically brilliant men.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I don’t really know the answer to this question, so I’ll tell you about a conversation I had with a writer friend a couple nights ago. She was in the middle of writing a novel, “and I’m cheating on it,” she said. She was writing a short story, and she thought she shouldn’t be. I told her I was the same way; I wouldn’t let myself write short stories while working on my (now-abandoned) novels. I also wouldn’t let myself start another story or anything else if I was in the middle of writing a substantial story, even if I was stuck on it for weeks. Do a lot of people feel this monogamous guilt in their writing lives? I don’t know. But in the past four years, I’ve completely changed my writing practice. Now I commonly work on several pieces at once, longer and shorter pieces, stories and essays both. And I’m more productive than in any of my monogamous years, and I’m having more fun.
