And I didn't think about what that would be like having the book come out in 2020, which seems silly, I guess that I didn't think about that. But I don't know time is like an illusion now after three years of this endemic in a. Yeah. So I'd love to jump into the book now so Martha Moody is a love story, as I said between a woman named Amanda and the Tichillier character Martha. Oh, and then we'd love to come in our fat and their fatness is really integral to the story, which is one of the things that made it so meaningful to me when I read it for the first time last year. So could you tell us why each you chose to write this story about fat women

falling in love? had come through a period of joyous exploration of fatness that sparked burst of creativity in me that were, you know, it was a whole bunch of different things coming together. They was aesthetic and political and sensual intellectual and spiritual and, you know, literary because I'm a writer. And I was trying to find language for my own body that felt more expansive and expressive and true, more true than the incredibly limited and often destructive language for my physical self at the mainstream culture had for me. You know, I felt like the cultural story around fatness were just my fat body and my fat lesbian body were stories that I couldn't live within. So I had to write new stories just to give me a little breathing space, me and others. And, you know, I was going to fat swims and meetings and dances with other fat lesbians. So I suddenly had a context. We did a fat radio broadcast as part of International Women's Day in Boston. And so I knew that people and specific people would be eagerly waiting to read a fat lesbian love story. And there's also a process in the book in which Amanda imagines Martha as a kind of a goddess, as a magical being. And part of the book is about the process by which they both come down to earth and get to be known and loved as full flawed human beings. They don't have to be goddesses to be worthy of that.

I love that. Yeah,

I think, you know, I remember first connecting with you after I'd read this for my dissertation, my qualifying exams last year. And as a fat queer myself, I, you know, I've certainly read a lot of books with fat characters and, you know, seen fat characters and things. And yeah, as you say, you know, what the book does with fatness is so different from what we normally get. And I remember reading it and I was sort of crying. I was like, where was this when I was growing up? You know, this would have been so, so important to read then. But of course, it's still very important for me to read now and to be able to share with students. So I just really appreciate you bringing this book into the world. So if we

could talk a little bit about me,

yeah, thank you. If you could tell us, you know, what is Amanda like, how does she sort of live her life and what motivates her to pursue

Martha? Well, Amanda is unhappily married to a man. This is sort of 19th century on the the border of the 20th century. She's a storyteller. She's not she's not content with the constraints of her life. And Martha, who runs a general store, is a a figure of enormous power to her. And she also has an intense physical attraction to her.

Can you talk a bit about Miss Alice? I loved I loved Miss Alice, whose Amanda's, you know, beloved cow. Yeah, what is her significance in the story? Yeah,

I love Miss Alice too. I really do. Well, Amanda talks to the cow while she's milking. And she talks to her about things that she can talk about no no place else with no one else, not even her best friend. So Miss Alice is the sweetest part of Amanda's daily life with her husband, John, and both Amanda and John love Alice. And when Amanda begins writing stories, you know, kind of tall tales, Miss Alice becomes Israel in the stories, a winged cow golden and powerful and sacred and inscrutable and wise. So she's both of those things, an ordinary beast and also a being of great power. You know, is maybe all of this

are? Yes, I love that. And of course, Alice allows Amanda to make butter, which is very important, I think, to the plot of the story and her relationship with Martha. So could you tell us how does butter play sort of a role in

the story? Sure, right, right. Alice, Miss Alice is a source of all milk and so the source of all butter. And butter has kind of multiple roles in the book for me. I mean, it's literally fat. So it becomes an element of sensuality and sex in this relationship between two fat women. Since, of course, their relationship is bodily based and they're fat. So so so butter and butter is slippery. I mean, it's a beautiful like literally a beautiful material presence. It's also associated for me with making art, with creating Amanda has to churn the cream to make butter. It's meditative, it's sensual, it's solitary and it feels but not completely solitary. I mean, as you said, it couldn't happen without Miss Alice. So it feels like a source of life and of art.

So you sort of touched on this earlier, but the book certainly examines friendship between women, not only friendship that is like necessarily super nourishing, but also friendship that maybe sometimes can't always do for the characters what they would like it to do. And I'm just wondering if this is a topic of friendship between women, a topic that you find particularly interesting or significant and if so,

why? I do find friendship between women really interesting. And in addition to a relationship with Martha, Amanda has a very close friend in Clara and she loves a wild young girl named Ruth and she's interacting with the women of the town in all sorts of ways, including taking part in or almost taking part in smashing up a bar with Carrie Nation who was a historical figure who who traveled the West organizing groups of women to to smash up bottles of alcohol, the names of temperance. So I guess I've drawn to it because of the relationships between women and friendships between women because it's so important in my own life and also because friendship between women can be volcanic. I mean, right, it's not always it's not simple and and it still feels a little bit unexamined, under-examined to me. And I'm thinking of Adrienne Rich calling Emily Dickinson Vassivius at home. You know, there's so much forth to it and it gets trivialized. So I'm drawn to it. And travel

is also something that seems to be, excuse me, an important part of this novel and I know from reading some of your other work, travel seems to be quite important in those in your narratives. So I'm wondering if you can tell us about, you know, what does travel allow your characters in Martha Moody to do? That's important. Well,

so they they they form a traveling snake oil show near the end of the book. So I guess that's a spoiler. But they get to be together. Martha performs Amanda's stories so they make art together and they can move through a culture that would deny them their existence in the small wagon world of their own. Like, so they're still connected to the rest of the world, but they have much greater freedom than they would have if they had stayed in Moody.

There's something so interesting, I think, about Martha being more in the sort of public eye because of, you know, the store that she owns versus Amanda, who's at home. And there's just something really satisfying, I think, about them taking up more public space, you know, at the end of the novel. So I just, yeah, I really loved that. I also really love the way that you use nature in the novel. For example, you have Amanda sort of remarking or thinking about these like bright shining silverfish that are in this creek in the beginning. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the about animals and landscapes and like if they're important for your work, if so why?

Well, yeah, they are. I mean, and here, like you said, the fish, Miss Alice, you know, why? I mean, part of that is probably because I was born in Texas and grew up in Colorado and then moved east and never moved back because I will always miss Western landscapes and creatures as much as I love my New England home in North Hampton, Massachusetts. And also, they're just such, I find it such both a relief and also really fertile and really rich to sort of try to try to acknowledge that there are beings other than humans, Miss Planet, and that even, you know, I'm trying to tell a different story about fatness, but even the ways I tell stories, I mean, the concerns and perceptions of animals are so are different from humans in ways that I can only imagine, but that even that act of riding them into worlds that I'm describing and of giving them some power and significance. It's both just, I just do it naturally, but I think it also helps me know the world better and and helps me see more, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, the animals all feel very sort of tenderly rendered in a way that, I don't know, they don't always appear that way in literature. And so it's really striking. So I wanted to call attention to your contribution to the fat studies reader. So you have a fabulous essay in there called Fat Girls Need Fiction. And I was wondering if you could tell our listeners, you know, why, why is this? Why do fat girls need fiction? And

what do books like Martha Moody do for fat girl readers? Oh, it makes me so happy that you're asking me about that. Nobody's ever asked me about that essay. And I mean, fat girls need stories of all kinds. As I said earlier, you know, I'm trying to write stories that different stories that make it more possible for me to live my life. But we, I think that it helps. It certainly helps me cultivate the ability to make skilled and daring imaginative leaps fiction does. It builds empathy, it builds emotional risk, it draws on the evidence of the senses and helps, you know, draw our attention to it. So if you're fat, and you, and you can rely on the evidence of the senses rather than, you know, just all the great cascades of language about what fat means and is and how you should feel about it, if you get down to, if you're absolutely actually able to experience directly, you know, you can find that it's soft and, and really delightful to the touch. And it took me, you know, the work of gate poets, like Walt Whitman comes to mind and to participating and in grassroots, feminist organizing and fiction, like years of reading fiction, to even be able to find my own belly and realize that it was soft and lovely to touch. So, and that's just, I mean, that's one simple thing, very close to home. The ability to, to make, to, to imagine other points of view were deeply, or at least to try, to, to practice it taking emotional risk and, and playing with what, how that might play out. I mean, among many other things, I think I quote Martha Nussbaum in that essay and she talks about fancy and, and one of the things she says is, it's preference for wonder over pat solutions. And yeah, all of those are just some of the gifts of fiction. That goes needed for sure.

Yeah, I'm actually, I'm assigning fact girls need fiction as well to my undergrads, as well as Martha Moody. And one of the things I asked them to do, which I didn't realize I was obviously taking this from that, that's one quote, but, you know, to wonder, to just allow yourself to wonder instead of having to be right or sure, you know, that's something that I asked them to do in the class. That's amazing. They're really going to love this essay. And I think, I, I

don't

know if I'm on the book. But I was wondering, I always want to ask authors that are, you know, whose work I assign this and I never really got the opportunity. So, you know, I'm going to be teaching Martha Moody to my undergrads in the fall. Is there anything that you would like, you know, people who are, who are teaching your work? Is there anything that you would like them to focus on or to discuss with students to make sure that we sort of hit on when we assign your writing?

I love so much that you're teaching Martha Moody and, you know, what you just said about wonder. I mean, that could, I mean, you're already doing something that I hadn't thought to ask, but which is just so powerful and so delightful. I guess, so what, what I thought in relationship to this question is that, like, would be to try to notice the story is around human bodies, including fat bodies, and to realize those stories can change. But there are other ways to tell them that the motion of fatness in some ways and explicit link to the motion of water or trees in the world, fat people move, like much of the world moves, we belong here. And that abundance of body and abundance of mind, you know, maybe highly inconvenient in places that are standardized to maximize profit, but there are so many gifts to bursting out of constraints, bodily and otherwise. That was beautiful. Thank you. I love

that. So for my final question, are you working on anything now that you'd like to talk about? And maybe you could tell our listeners where they could find you and find your work.

Yeah, so I've been working really for quite a while on a novel set in 17th century New England. And it's inspired by my novel, Spider in a Tree, about Northampton in the time of preacher Jonathan Edwards. And this book is inspired by his grandmother, Elizabeth Tuttle. So mothers and daughters love and betray each other as they take on strange qualities of sea lamp rays in 17th century Connecticut. So the animal, the draw of writing about and trying to learn from other animals is just is really front and center in this book. And lamp rays live for five or six years in the river banks, and they get much bigger and spend a year in the ocean. And then we turn to the river. I don't know if you can hear the truck noise outside, but I apologize if it's making it hard to hear me. The lamp rays return to the river and swim upstream to spawn and die like salmon. But unlike salmon, they don't go to the same place every year. They can smell their young in the banks of the river and go to the place where they were the most young lamp rays. And in that way, the past is guided by the future. So that's what I'm writing about. And that could be something else to tell your students. It's very interesting to think about, at least I think so. And where you can find my work, well, my publishers at Smobier Press also own a book store

called Book Moon Books. And

they'll do mail order to any place in this country. So that's a great place to find it. And you can even get my first book, Belly Songs, which is a little chat book there that you can't find anyplace else, but you can get it from Book Moon. And it's also all the other usual places you would get your books, most of my work. And I have a website, Susanstinson.net, and I'm also active on social media, Facebook and Twitter. And I'm thinking about starting a substack. I haven't done it

yet, but I might.