February’s Final Thursday Reading Series features short story writer and novelist Laura Farmer. Farmer is the author of Direct Connection: Stories and a Novella (Bridge Eight Press) and Catch and Release (North Dakota State University Press). A native of Cedar Falls, she currently directs the Dungy Writing Studio at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, where she helps students tell stories of their own.
The Final Thursday Reading Series takes place at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa. There will be an open mic at 7:00 p.m. (bring your best five minutes of original creative writing). Laura Farmer takes the stage at 7:30. The featured reading will also be simulcast on Zoom. Click HERE to register for a link.
Interview by Olivia Brunsting.
OLIVIA BRUNSTING: The theme of moving through a season of change is at the core of Direct Connection. Was there a season of change in your own life that inspired this collection?
LAURA FARMER: I was actually in the middle of a season of bad luck, writing-wise. I failed to find a home for my first novel, and I ended up selling my second novel three times in seven years – lots of bad luck with publishers folding, agents not working out, etc. When I wrote Direct Connection, I didn’t know if I would ever sell a novel. So I put together this collection as kind of a last-ditch effort to get something out there.
Short stories are also my first love. Putting this collection together was actually fun because I wasn’t putting any kind of pressure on myself. I was just trying to reconnect with writing, to find some of the joy I was afraid I was losing while pursuing the hunt of publishing.
OB: Many of the characters in this collection had left Iowa but then decided to come back. What do you think makes Iowa so magnetic?
LF: Home is home, right? I think there’s a common story in Iowa that when we’re young we can’t wait to get out and build a life somewhere else. And then, for many of us, there comes a time when we can’t wait to come back and build something here. For me, I lived out in New York state for a number of years, and after a while I wanted something different. To be closer to my family. A different pace of life. I love how strangers talk to each other out here, how the sky is enormous. Iowa’s just home.
OB: “Record of Grief” is the lengthiest short story in this collection although it's not the title story. Why did you pick “Direct Connection” as your title story?
LF: The themes in the story “Direct Connection” seemed to resonate throughout the whole collection: moving through a season of change, finding joy in small moments, searching for ways to be closer to something, be it another person, yourself, or the world around you.
Plus, I liked the title. I thought it sounded pretty good.
OB: Your novel Catch and Release was published this summer! Tell us a little about this book.
LF: Like Direct Connection, the novel is also set in Iowa, but on the other side of the state and at an earlier time. Here’s a brief description: Charles “Catch” Sherman has lived at the corner of Fourth and Lafayette, in the house his grandfather built, his entire life. While content with his small life in the river town of Beaumont, Iowa, he knows life will be much different for his eldest daughter Edie, a gifted physics student. Set in the late 1950s through the 1970s, and told in alternative voices between Catch and Edie, Catch and Release is the story about holding on, letting go, and the leaps we must take to become the people we are meant to be.
OB: What would you say to other writers who are working on projects of their own?
LF: Writing is a long game, so do what you need to do to keep going. Take time off. Try something different. But do keep going. We’ve all got stories to tell.
