You’ve said previously in an interview about short stories that readers should pay attention to the structure that the authors have purposefully chosen. For Everything Inside is there a purpose behind how you curated the stories?

For Everything Inside I didn’t want to have a title story because sometimes when you have a title story people think that’s the most important story, so I wanted all the stories to have equal footing. I chose eight stories because I wanted them to be an equal number. The oldest story is from 2013 and the most recent is from 2019, which is the year of its publication, so I liked the idea of the collection being like a journey from the distant to the present.

These stories seem to be bonded together by overarching themes of love, whether that’s romantic or love of country. Did these themes inspire the conception of the stories, or did they spring up organically during and after they were written?

The stories inspired the themes. I think what you realize when you’re writing is that slowly there is a common thread and I quickly realized that for this collection it was love. It was some romantic love but also love of country, love of family, and so on. For me it was just a loose thread through and that’s why I have those epigraphs at the beginning of the book. I use epigraphs to guide readers through the themes.

I wrote this essay about how when Everything Inside was chosen for Reese’s Book Club they had never read a story collection before they had only read novels, so they told me to help guide people who were suddenly going to read a story collection and see that it’s not connected like my other ones. One of the things I thought and told them was that I think of a short story collection as like entering a big house. You walk into different rooms, and you linger there and, in some rooms, you will be in there longer than others. And then you move onto the next room, but you might still be thinking of something from the last room. So, I really do see it as a kind of physical journey through these different stories. Of course, you’re going to love some stories more than others.

I noticed that music is another common thread throughout Everything Inside. Did this theme come organically while writing as well or did listening to some of those specific songs inspire the stories?

When I was writing I was going through some of my jazz stage. Sometimes when you’re writing there’s so many words and lyrics and songs that you can incorporate so that song “Take Me to the Water” by Nina Simone was something I imagined. There’s a beautiful video of it where she was at Morehouse performing in like 1969 and she did this dance in Haiti that we call a Yanvalou, which is kind of an emulating dance. And I thought I’ll put that in the story. You know sometimes you’re writing and everything is up for grabs.

So, I thought the mood of that music and the Charles Mangis Haitian Fight Song, in that moment, because of that scene where this woman is being insulted for being Haitian and I thought that’s an opportunity for this gesture by this guy to kind of lift her up. And since it’s a dance and they are going to play music, might as well pick a song that kind of advances the story. So that’s always in the back of my mind like if I’m using something that advances the story and adds another layer to the scene.

In terms of writing short stories and what you said about collections being houses and short stories being rooms, how do you know when a short story is complete? This feels like a complex task when each story can differ in length and must feel like its own journey or experience. Do you have specific qualifications, or do you go off intuition?

I would say it’s intuition because I have written short stories that I’ll add more to years later. Another metaphor for you for short stories someone was saying is that they are like paintings where you’re looking at it, you’re completely immersed, but you know there’s something that happened before, and you know that there’s something that will happen after but that image should be enough. There are short stories that are flash fiction and some that are novella but one way if you have time is you put it away and you see how it ages. If you pick it up in a month there might be more to say but it has to be intuitive. Like one way I find is if I’m putting out the same things then I feel like I’m probably done because the revision is becoming repetitive.

It’s almost like you’re looking at the painting again as the painter and asking, is it complete? Is it missing a couple of brush strokes?

Yeah exactly. It has to be intuition but at some point, it has to end.