Ladette Randolph is associate director of University of Nebraska Press where she acquires widely in humanities. She is the author of the short story collection This Is Not the Tropics and editor of the anthologies A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers and forthcoming The Big Empty: Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers. The recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation grant and Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award, her work has been reprinted in the Pushcart prize volume and Best New American Voices. Short fiction and essays have been published in numerous literary journals including Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, The Clackamas Literary Review, and Connecticut Review.

Farrah Field: Ms. Randolph, you create flavorful depictions of small town life, albeit not through vapid landscape descriptions, but rather through character action-a young girl who awaits the return of a missing neighbor, a handicapped accordion player, and a woman whose husband dies the very night she plans to leave him for another similarly lackluster man. Would you comment upon how you create this sense of place?

Ladette Randolph: That's an interesting question. I don't think I'm consciously going about creating a sense of place in my stories, but I've been told by people who live in Nebraska that I've somehow captured "how we talk." It may be that the dialogue portrays the values and assumptions that characterize not only a place but people of certain classes within a place. I'm interested in ordinary people and the choices they make, large and small, but I understand their choices much of the time through the details of their surroundings. And, yes, you're right. This has little to do with the landscape. That's something of an unusual choice given the western tradition of setting the characters against the landscape since the landscape (and the vicissitudes of the weather) dominates so much for us here. We live in a unique place geographically, neither the West nor the Midwest, but the Great Plains, a place that is often overlooked in most people's mental maps. If the Great Plains is thought about, it's often in terms of the part it played in the history of homesteading, ranching, and the Indian wars; therefore, a place frozen in time and no longer inhabited.

FF: As a follow-up... in "Our Infamous Failure," you describe your father's gardens, rich and fertile. How does the Nebraska land itself influence your work and what would you say quantifies writing from this American heartland?

LR: As I mentioned above, much of the literary tradition in Nebraska focuses on the landscape. Because of the extremes of weather, we experience the "land" much more intensely. We're more aware of it, and to some extent-- in winter especially--our lives depend on that awareness. In terms of Nebraska's landscape, western Nebraska is a very different landscape than eastern Nebraska. Western Nebraska is austere, lonely rangeland while eastern Nebraska is a bit more like Iowa, fields, farms, and scattered groves of trees. I grew up in west-central Nebraska (near the Sandhills), and when I write about that place, I find my writing shifts to focus on the land without my even really recognizing it. As you mentioned in your previous question, the landscape doesn't figure too much in This Is Not the Tropics, but other stories, not published in the collection, describe the land more.

FF: Your stories quickly become entities. Sometimes when I read a collection of short stories, I confuse one character with another or misremember a situation with the wrong character. Traveling though your stories, however, the reader is gracefully invited into a new world, almost like stepping into a different room. While putting the book together, how did you handle the organization of the stories? What techniques did you use to garner the reader's focus to a new yet well-molded character—from one story to the next?

LR: The question of organization is really important, and I'm glad you asked it. In terms of this collection, I thought a lot about the order and revised the order several times, in some cases in response to other people's suggestions. In addition to the collection, I've edited two anthologies (one forthcoming in spring 07), and I found the question of order even more important when gathering a group of writers. I like to have the pieces relate to one another in subtle ways. Oddly enough, I found this more difficult with my own collection than with the anthologies. I don't know what that says about me or my work. It may suggest that as a reader I like certain things and therefore chose pieces that reflect my tastes in a way that was more consistent than how I write stories. As a writer I like to make stories distinct from one another. In terms of techniques for ordering, I literally laid out the stories on the floor and walked around them and moved them around and then re-read the collection (or anthology). I did that again and again until I was satisfied (or too tired to care anymore). Like the stories themselves, though, I don't feel this process is ever finished. In the same way I'm still rewriting the stories (even as I read them to audiences), I'm often still questioning the arrangement.

FF: Pregnancy seems to develop as a sort of rebirthing and outing of kept secrets in your stories—Annie who quits her job and is secretly proud and afraid of her future son; Gemmy's rebellious pregnancy that seems to birth her sister's defiance of their town. Inspiring questions about life changes, secrets, and mobile legacies, pregnancy adds mystery, charisma, and unique charm. Would you explain how pregnancy developed into a significant theme?

LR: In all honesty, I hadn't seen pregnancy as a theme until you mentioned it. But there it is, lending credence to the notion that the author's intentions are pretty much meaningless. Smart readers inspire me to see my work in new ways, and that's the most pleasant surprise about publishing a collection. I suppose it's no surprise that pregnancy might be a theme since I have three grown children. I've been through it, though fortunately my pregnancies were nothing like those I describe. Pregnancy makes you vulnerable in ways you don't expect, and I perhaps on some level if I'm developing a character with a problem, pregnancy comes to mind as a refining experience, both for the character herself (as in the case of Annie) and for those adjusting to it (as with Gemmy).

FF: After reading your collection, "The Boy in the Band Uniform" seems to be a rare project for you. Its setting seems either futuristic or fantastic: an unidentifiable city surrounded by unknown extreme violence or war. What was the cause for this departure from your usual Midwestern setting? What ignited this delving into unfamiliar territory?

LR: I have other stories not included in the collection that veer into this territory, so it isn't outside of my repertoire as a writer, but when putting together the collection, after some consideration, I chose to include it. I was aware that it wasn't a fit with the others in tone or setting. I do, however, see Zoe as a woman from the Great Plains thrown into extreme circumstances (which is a theme my former husband has identified in my work, that of a woman making the best of a bad situation). The city setting is unnamed because it feels universal to me, one of the many places where civil wars have compelled children to fight and have brought aid workers together. I liked the clash of western values (not just "heartland" values, heartland being a word I despise) with those of other cultures. I'm interested in how those misunderstandings create unexpected and ultimately incomprehensible problems for other people. I like that subjectivity of what it means to do good in the world, and since another theme people have seen in the collection is goodness, the story seemed like a necessary ballast.

FF: In "The Girls," you create an aching suspense through the beguiling interaction between Becca and her oddly sexual and overprotective dog owner, Professor Blakely. The dogs as well Leslie Ann pull Becca in two different directions—being wild and being tame. What was the heart of the matter of this pushing and pulling of Becca? What or who was the inspiration for the wonderfully peculiar professor, who insists upon talking to his dogs on the telephone?

LR: I have to say, that story came to me full-born. I wrote it while I was managing editor at Prairie Schooner. Then, as now, I wrote for an hour over my lunch break, and that story came to me in one sitting. I've went on to revise it many times, but all of the elements were there from the beginning. I don't know Professor Blakely or anyone like him, nor do I know the dogs. I'm a great dog lover, but I've never owned or known well a boxer or a pug. I've never house set for someone, and I know nothing about being a theater major. In other words, this is an act of pure imagination. Which is not to say that I don't know how it feels to have to part ways with a friend you've outgrown or what it feels like to learn to respect, if not understand, the bizarre or mystifying (even offensive) thing that someone else loves. The story germ came from a student intern at the magazine who had told me about house sitting for a professor who loved his dogs like children. That phrase rattled around in my sub-conscious for a long time and then somehow it struck on one particular day with this particular character and setting.

FF: "Dill" is such a satisfying read. It is well-paced as far as the unfolding and folding of narratives with the character Dill and the background story of Norma that Dill returns to repeatedly. Your rendering of both characters-Dill the tough but vulnerable night clerk and heartbreaking, mixed-up Norma—is incredibly convincing. I must ask: what personal experience, if any, contributed to this story?

LR: Again, this is purely imaginative. I've never worked in a convenience store. I don't know these characters. The only "true" scene in that story was based on an anecdote my brother-in-law (a judge) told me about a case he had where a man laid on the check-out counter a jar (in his story it was peaches) along with a "piece of his anatomy." The store clerk responded as Dill does by slamming the jar on the vulnerable body part (how's that for being euphemistic). He fainted, of course. When the EMTs came to get him and heard the story, they started laughing so hard, they dropped the stretcher, the guy fell off and broke his arm (hence the lawsuit). Where Nora came from I can't say, but the story became interesting for me as a process of discovering what happens to the doomed friendships of our youth (another version of the friendship between Becca and Lesley Ann). I didn't have friends exactly like Nora (or Lesley Ann), but I had some version of that friendship in mind as I wrote. I'm interested in the way certain people haunt our lives long after they're gone from us.

FF: Finally, what futures projects are in store for you?

LR: I'm finishing a novel I've been working on for three years. It's set in the Nebraska Sandhills, and I'm afraid it's going to be a hard sell. The story of a ranch woman, a dark story that a reader probably doesn't quite anticipate. I've asked a local book club to read the manuscript in draft. They'd read my collection and were such good, observant readers, I thought they would give me the kind of reader response I find increasingly difficult to find from my writer friends. I seem destined to write things that don't fit into the Zeitgeist, but I take solace as a writer from something my friend and author Peggy Shumaker just sent me, a wonderful quote from Stanley Kunitz at age 100: "When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you have to think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. It is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life."

Thanks for your interest in my work, Farrah!