Anecia Larsen: In your story “As Far As I Can Tell,” is there any correlation between the title and the very last sentence on the page? 

Stephanie Turner: You bet! I end up knowing only so much in this encounter, which I think is reflected in me “nodding politely, as if I understand” in the end.  But then, I don’t understand a lot, so this is almost my natural response to just about everything.

AL: For our narrator, they have a special voice that comes through the words. Was there any inspiration behind creating this narrator?

ST: The narrator is pretty much me, or my narratorial version of me, and I’d like to think that is a special voice. But because this piece is part of a larger memoir I’ve been working on, my voice in it is generated in response to the voices of the other people in the memoir, especially my mother. I miss the distinct way we talked to each other. I like to write dialogue.

AL: At the end of the second paragraph. You write “the human stain is upon us all.” What do you mean by that?

ST: The “human stain” in an untended mark that won’t come off. That line could be a darling I should kill, but I guess it’s too late now that the piece is published. What I meant by that line is a comment on the anthropomorphized animals in the Dodo videos. It’s like a vanity thing we humans do, pretend that animals are just like us, and try to get inspiration from that. A lot of representations of animals are not much about animals. Thus, “the human stain is upon us all,” including, sadly, non-humans.

AL: For this short story, was there any inspiration to write it? Did the narrator speak to you and urge you to write this story?

ST: The whole thing was Sue Morgan’s idea. She’s a character based on my real-life insurance agent, who one day conjured a hypothetical scenario of something you’d need a lot of insurance for, and it struck me as hilarious because I had lived through such a situation. There was nothing hypothetical about it to me. This piece is an interlude in my survival quest memoir where I try to figure out just who is telling the story.

AL: Did you read any books during quarantine? If so, what are they and would you recommend them to readers?

ST: Yes, I’ve read a few books I’ve liked a lot. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is the post-apocalypse tale I needed last August. Another terrific novel is Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest, The Ministry for the Future. KSR likes to imagine people collaboratively muddling through their conflicts in troubled near futures to somehow overcome their differences and improve the trouble. The trouble in this novel is that humanity dropped the ball on climate change intervention, so a global organization called the Ministry for the Future, not all that influential at first, manages to convince the Central Banks to adapt a carbon currency that dramatically changes the global economy. Just the right combination of grim and hopeful.

AL: Can you give writers some tips on how you face criticism when you get it? 

ST: First, curl up and die a little, like I do, then consider the least offensive of the critical comments, assuming you’ve got a pile of them. Try to work your way up to confronting increasingly objectionable comments; treat this process like that important if hated part of your gym routine. For me, that would be squats or burpees. 

If the criticism is mean-spirited, just remind yourself that it’s not about your writing; it’s about the critic.