So Is Yours: Cathy Ulrich
MICHAEL CHIN: If I’m not mistaken I first made your acquaintance when you had a guest stint editing for Spry Literary Journal, and we collaborated on edits for a piece of flash fiction. Since then, you started your own flash fiction journal, Milk Candy Review, and I know you serve as an editor for Parentheses Journal as well. Aside from all that, I’m continually impressed with you being one of the most generous and prolific readers in the Twitterverse—constantly sharing thoughtful blurbs and excerpts about work by others. I was curious if you could speak to your processes in editing, curating, and reading so widely and insightfully. And how have these practices impacted your own creative work?
CATHY ULRICH: I am a person who likes to stay busy — if I don’t, my mind wanders. Sometimes this is a good thing, and I end up coming up with story ideas. Sometimes, I start thinking about terrible things and spiral my way into a panic attack. So I like to keep busy, and since I enjoy reading and editing, it’s a perfect outlet for me!
I started sharing excerpts and links to stories on Twitter after being inspired by Georgia Bellas, aka Mr. Bear Stumpy. She is such a lovely and giving reader (and a talented writer in her own right), it is an honor to have your work shared by her.
Besides that, I just want to be able to share beautiful writing as much as possible — there are so many amazing talents creating wonderful writing nowadays, it is such a joy to read.
And definitely the things I read impact my own creative work. Sometimes a line from a story will spark inspiration in me. Sometimes I will read something that is similar to a story I have thought up and realize: “Oh, they did it so much better than I could!”
CATHY ULRICH: Well, the first story in the series (which is also the first story in the book), “Being the Murdered Girl” was inspired by a story I’ve read that — apologies! — I’ve forgotten the title and author of. All I can remember is a girl’s body is found and the town is changed by it. And reading this story, I thought, “well, I guess that’s the thing about being the murdered girl. You set the plot in motion.” And I had the first sentence there.
After that, the second story was “Being the Murdered Wife,” which was inspired by learning about the poet Joan Vollmer’s death at the hands of her husband William S. Burroughs. And I thought how sad and unfair it was that I had never heard of her or her story. And how sad and unfair it was that her death became just part of the myth that was William S. Burroughs. So that was on my mind when I sat down and wrote “Murdered Wife.”
Then I wrote “Being the Murdered Lover” (which wasn’t inspired by any particular thing!), and with that, I realized that I was writing a series of stories.
The truth is, I never really thought about collecting them all in one book — with the repetition of the title and the opening sentence, I was worried it would be a wearing project for readers, but people kept saying they wanted to see them in a collection. So when I was approached by Eric and Genevieve of Okay Donkey about working with them to publish the Murdered Ladies series in a book, I went back and counted them all and realized, “oh, yes, I guess there are enough for that!”
Each story in the collection was written as a separate thing from the others. I tried not to let myself be influenced by stories I had already told as I wrote them out, tried to keep the focus on each individual character. So there may be some unconscious influence between the pieces, but despite the similarity of topic (and, again, title and opening sentence), I definitely wanted each story to be able to stand alone.
MICHAEL CHIN:You’ve authored other linked work, such as your “Astronaut Love Stories” and “Girl Detective” work. This might overlap with my previous question, but I’m curious as to your general process in creating these bodies of work that connect to one another. Do you start with one piece and naturally wind up writing more, or plan them as a series? Are there broader patterns or themes you’re interested in, not just within, but between these linked projects?
CATHY ULRICH: All of my series started with one piece that was meant to be a standalone and then things snowballed! I have a couple of series that got off to false starts — I wrote something and thought “hmmm, this could be the start of a series,” but then it turns out it isn’t even the start of something publishable. So! Apparently I have to be surprised by a series for it to work.
I think you will notice a lot of the focus in my stories is on women: Murdered Ladies, Girl Detectives, the astronaut and her wife. I definitely want to be telling women’s stories, sharing women’s worlds.
I also enjoy playing with tropes in my writing. The Girl Detective series has been the most fun for that — once I discovered (in the second story) the girl detective exists in a multiverse, that she isn’t the only girl detective, it opened up a lot of storytelling opportunities.
Also, if there are any discrepancies in the stories, I can just tell folks “well, that one’s set in a different universe, I didn’t make a mistake!”
MICHAEL CHIN: Between your creative and editorial efforts, most of what I know about your work circles back to flash fiction. I was curious what draws you to this form both as a writer and reader? Was it always your preferred mode of storytelling, or, if not, when did you find the transition happened for you?
CATHY ULRICH: In college, I was writing poetry. Not really because I wanted to — I always liked short stories and wanted to study fiction, but the teachers at my college were all poets and so my focus ended up being on poetry.
However, when I go back and look at the things I was writing then, it’s pretty clearly all flash fiction with awkward line breaks. So I guess I was writing flash all along, even if I was reading a lot of poetry and short stories and novels and comic books and….
But I love flash as a form! It’s so immediate and powerful. People unfamiliar with the form might think it is simple because it is short, but there is so much work put into a good piece of flash. I love when I read something in less than a minute and then end up thinking about it all day.
MICHAEL CHIN: My new book is called My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So is Yours and as a tie in to that project, I’m asking other authors about their relationships with family. I’d like to start with grandparents—what kind of relationship you had with yours and how that may have influenced you as a person, or even as a writer? I’d also be interested to hear about ways in which other family (be it biological, adoptive, chosen, etc.) may have impacted your identity and your work.
CATHY ULRICH: It's nice that you mention adoptive family because I don’t know my birth family at all. I was adopted at two weeks old and raised by my family here. My brother was also adopted (from a different family), but we kind of resemble each other because we are both part Native.
I wasn’t close with my father’s parents — his biological father died before I was born, and his mother died when I was around 5 or so. I remember we would go visit her and her husband on their farm and there would always be interesting things in her house that we had never seen anywhere else, like antique Barbie dolls and oil lamps. But we weren’t close.
Definitely my Grandma Willene (my mother’s mother) was one of my favorite people in the whole world. She could be a bit curmudgeonly (I remember her making me change clothes one summer when she came to watch me — I came out of my room wearing a little tube top or something like that and she took one look at me and said “that is not a shirt” and sent me right back in), but most of the time we were, my mother liked to say, “soul mates.”
We didn’t really have much in common — my grandmother had been an outgoing flapper type when she was young and I was much more shy and awkward — but she was someone I could just spend time with and not feel like I had to do anything more than that. She and my Grandpa Ben loved mystery books and I was always reading them when I went over to their house. My favorites were definitely the Agatha Christie Miss Marple stories.
After my grandpa died, my grandmother lived alone in the family home for a while. The summer I took driver’s ed, my mother would drop me off at the school for lessons and then I would walk over to my grandmother’s house and spend the rest of the day with her until my mom could drive me home. We’d watch TV and play games, go for walks in the neighborhood. There was still a little local grocer in the neighborhood back then, and I remember we would go there and it was so strange to me — it was so small, it was practically just a house like the rest of the neighborhood!
So I really enjoyed my time with my grandmother that summer.
After that, she moved into an assisted living facility. She had started losing her eyesight, which made her severely depressed — she had been an artist (though she always told me she was no good, it made me so sad! Her art was really beautiful) and not being able to see to create her art nearly destroyed her. I remember we got her this horribly tacky Christmas tree to decorate her room (though she came and spent the actual holiday at our house). It was silver tin-foil and you aimed this rotating multi-color light at it. And she loved it because she could see the color, but not the detail, so it was perfect.
I would go visit her there and I’d go visit her when she ended up moving into a nursing home. She was having memory issues by then, and every time she saw me she would ask me when I got that “awful tattoo on your arm!” and introduce me to her dinner mate, whom I “met for the first time” at least once a week for several months.
Despite all that, she was still her outgoing, cantankerous self. She thought at one point that she was living in a girl’s dorm, so when her roommate’s husband came to visit, she chased him away with her cane, shouting “No boys allowed!”
So, yeah. My grandmother was a really precious person to me, and I miss her a lot. Despite the fact we weren’t related by blood, that didn’t matter at all. She was my family.
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