Stephanie Soileau
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Stephanie Soileau’s short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Ecotone, Tin House, Gulf Coast, StoryQuarterly, Nimrod International Journal, three volumes of New Stories from the South, and Best of the South, Volume II. She is working on a collection of stories and a novel, Terre Bonne, about fishermen, oil, and erosion in her home state of Louisiana. She formerly lectured at Stanford University and now teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Twitter |
On Ambiguity |
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If Little Red Riding Hood is our companion and analog when we are children, so are Anna Karenina, Billy Pilgrim, Clarissa Dalloway when we read as adults, and so are our own invented characters when we write fiction. As readers, we journey with Anna through the impossible morass of her affair, with Billy Pilgrim as he grapples with the tragedies of war. As writers, we loose our characters in the wilderness, set wolves on their heels, confound their paths, and watch, mesmerized, to see how they will go, whether they will come out on the other side. Often, we see them behave in ways that raise questions but offer no answers. In fiction, we suspend judgment. We relish ambiguities. I believe in storytelling as a way to map and explore the ambiguities of human experience, and it is this belief that motivates me as a fiction writer. Stories have given me a language to express the contradictions in my own experience, and because writing them has been an often challenging exercise in sympathy and compassion, I have come to see the practice of storytelling as a moral imperative. But the morality is in the practice, not in the story itself. Fiction is no place for sermons, for conclusive answers. Whether we’re reading or writing it, the best fiction gives us a woods to get lost in, and if at the end we have come to no conclusions, if we are only left with more questions, the questions themselves are something like a map, and we emerge from this woods a little better able to find our way. | |