Your story in this week’s issue, “The Waitress,” uses the “three foolish wishes” motif from folk and fairy tale, though with a few new twists. The diner waitress fares somewhat better than the traditional characters, who end up with sausages attached to their noses or having everything, including themselves, turned to gold. What is it that spares her?
The magical creature who grants the wishes here is mischievous and unpredictable, but not without a certain redeeming affection for the waitress. The waitress in turn—demanding little—is not a heavy thinker, but she is cool enough to roll with the shifting circumstances and be wryly amused by them. A kind of urban version of a country tale.
Your introduction of fairy-tale elements into contemporary life seems itself somewhat mischievous and unpredictable. What keeps you doing it (namely your last story in the magazine, “The Frog Prince”)?
The entertaining and illuminating prism of metaphor. The art of storytelling is not limited to mere journalism. In fact, it revels in the improbable and the unexpected, even as its focus remains on the real.
You’ve just published a thousand-page novel, “The Brunist Day of Wrath.” Should we expect more very short stories while you recover?
Definitely. Though one page can be harder than a thousand.
