A Conversation With PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018 Author Megan Tucker

“The idea here is the casual way children can accept and parrot this kind of simple, black-and-white math about worth. So much so that in a pinch they are willing write off their own mother!”

On August 21, Catapult published PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018, the second edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll feature Q&As with the contributors, whose stories were selected for PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and for the anthology by judges Jodi Angel, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Alexandra Kleeman. “Candidates” is written from the perspective of two sisters as they watch their mother sell a crib.

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Megan Tucker is the associate fiction editor of The Common, and a graduate of Wellesley College and the University of Michigan.

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The television is on but no one is watching. The end of the day at the end of October and our mother closes the door to the den and tells us what she has done: “I’ve switched it on so the man who is coming will think your father is home.”

We try to imagine our father as someone who watches television behind a closed door at six o’clock in the evening. Light shines around the door in thin lines. The noise comes through in full. Together we watch the door to the room where our father might be.

The voice coming from the television that no one is watching is Dukakis. We know it is sad to be for Dukakis, as we must. We know who will win: Bush will win. Even here in California. It will be a landslide.

When the doorbell rings, we scatter to the brown-tiled kitchen where our mother has abandoned a skinned pineapple, angular and wet, cupped pores left behind in the yellow meat. The pineapple sits up on a chopping board on the counter with an old serrated paring knife, the pale plastic handle pocked from turns in the disposal. Later, we will try to eat all of the pineapple, even the core.

Our mother answers the door and on the porch is more than a man. Three people walk down the hall toward our bedroom, where our bunk beds are stacked. One person is our mother. One is the man. One is a very pregnant lady. She asks to use our toilet.

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Catapult: Where did you find the idea for this story?

Megan Tucker: In the lead up to the most recent presidential election, I thought about the Bush/Dukakis election and how important and loud it felt to me as a child. My elementary school conducted a mock vote and there were very few ballots cast for Dukakis, though I was one of them. As I worked on “Candidates,” my parents were preparing to repatriate from California to England, and so I was hearing a lot about selling the contents of my childhood home on Craigslist. “Candidates” flips around some of those ideas.

Most of this story is told from the perspective of two sisters in first person plural, but the last couple lines are told from the perspective of just one of the girls. Had you always planned on writing the story in this voice, and how did you make that decision?

This story did begin as my first and only attempt at a first person plural voice. I hoped that shifting into just one of the girls at the end of the story served to represent the inevitable aging and division of the sisters.

Math plays out in an interesting way here. You write, “We two add up this way: one sister is six and one sister is twelve. Together, that is an eighteen-year-old.” Or, “Our mother is not a US citizen, so she is not eligible to vote. If we were one person, we would equal our father’s vote.” Can you talk a little bit about this, and what this meant to you in the context of the story?

The idea here is the casual way children can accept and parrot this kind of simple, black-and-white math about worth. So much so that in a pinch they are willing write off their own mother! It is such a received, immature way to determine value.

How long did it take you to write this story?

I first started working on it in 2015—you do the math!

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

The prize is of course very reassuring. But I’ve also really tuned into PEN America and the work they are doing. It motivates me to want to use my writing for a deeper, more substantive purpose.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a collection of stories and a novel about repatriation.

Finally, where do you discover new writing?

I am the associate fiction editor of The Common literary journal, so I get to read a lot of very new, very lovely writing.