Samantha Edmonds, a graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s MA program in English, is releasing a new story collection this summer through Northwestern University Press, A Preponderance of Starry Beings. An assistant professor of creative writing at Berry College in Georgia, she’s written two chapbooks, The Space Poet and Pretty to Think So, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ninth Letter, and The Rumpus, among other publications.
Edmonds says many of the stories in this new collection were initially drafted while she was at UC. She will be at the Mercantile Library on July 15 to discuss the book and her writing career.
It’s such a pleasure to read these stories, They’re so wild, magical, and unexpected and dive into the Midwest, evangelicalism, and feminine adolescence in a big way. Why were these topics close to your heart?
I grew up in southwest Ohio in an evangelical family, and I was always a dreamer and lover of magical tales, so though the stories in my collection are not autobiographical they were very much attempts at capturing my own lived experiences. I was in my early twenties when I first started writing these stories and was still trying to figure out my place in the world. This book is a record of that quest, though I think it finds the questions more compelling than any answers.
Space is also a big part of the collection. I loved how some of the stories even imagined what it would be like to take the perspective of the stars, whether baby starts in nursery school (“Futureborn”) or a white dwarf flirting with a red giant (“White Dwarf Star Seeks Red Giant for Binary Orbit”) or even what a human might look like to aliens if she landed on another planet (“Tastes Like Raspberries, Smells Like Rum”). You are not the only UC alum to be drawn to space; we talked with Lisa Ampleman about her poetry collection Mom in Space last year. What is it about space that draws writerly imagination, especially from UC grads in recent years?
I love that you’re making a connection between space and Cincinnati! Ohio has produced a significant number of astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, and often credits itself as the birthplace of aviation given the Wright Brothers’ historical work in Dayton. Had I grown up anywhere else, I think I would still be captivated by space—people from all over share this interest—but maybe because I was in Ohio my fascination felt like a cultural legacy. Drafting this book in Cincinnati made me feel part of a conversation and community bigger than myself. And isn’t it that feeling—the yearning for connection across galaxies, the hope that you’re not alone in the universe—which ultimately resides at the root of everyone’s imagination when they watch the sky?
Some of the stories totally surprised me, such as “Milk,” where a bereft mother finds an unexpected outlet to drink her milk in what she thinks of as a “symbiotic relationship.” Can you talk a bit about some of the stories that go in wild, unexpected places like “Milk” or “The Night Island?” How do the detours from the accepted or expected serve the story?
As a reader, my favorite stories are, in the words of Aristotle, “surprising yet inevitable.” That feels especially true in stories like “Milk” and “The Night Island,” where the characters are grieving deeply. There’s very little reason to grief. I wanted my stories to capture that feeling by creating scenarios that are so outside the realm of the expected or accepted (such as a woman nursing a calf) that it draws attention to the strangeness of living with loss. The reader might be surprised, but the characters, crucially, are not; for them, it’s the circumstances that led to these events that are senseless. Who then can say what’s normal after the unimaginable has already happened?
As someone who also graduated from the University of Cincinnati, I loved the references to Clifton, and especially Arlin’s, a bar on Ludlow Avenue that appears in several stories. What role does Cincinnati play as a backdrop to this collection, and how did your own experiences here inform the choices you made?
I chose to set many of the stories in Clifton because it’s such an alive place, a character in itself. I lived off Ludlow Avenue for years, memorizing the sounds and smells of those few blocks between Ambar and Arlin’s. It was my first time in a city, my first apartment out of college, the first place I lived alone. At its core, this is a book about searching for a place to belong—be it in a relationship, a religion, or somewhere to live in the cosmos—and since Clifton was my first adult home it felt only right that my characters should share that experience. Plus, I just love Arlin’s, so there’s that.
How did you think about piecing the stories together to form a cohesive collection? What challenges and pleasures did you encounter along the way?
One of the greatest pleasures in turning these stories into a cohesive collection was finding ways to link them. They weren’t originally written that way, but once I decided to set several of them in Clifton it felt natural to find small ways to create crossover. I wanted each story to stand alone, so a lot of the crossovers are subtle—some characters went to school together or share family members or run into each other around town—but for the eagle-eyed reader the connection is definitely there. This is a book about community, after all.
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