St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Karen Russell’s debut collection of short stories, is certainly the most arresting title of the year so far, but luckily the content more than fulfils the promise of the name. St. Lucy’s is crazy but thoughtful, absurd yet disarmingly real.

One theme that seems to run through these stories is a happy celebration of non-conformity. When I asked Karen whether this was how she viewed life, she exclaimed ‘Oh no! May-day alert! I'm afraid I have no idea how I view life just yet. Let me get back to you in fifty years.’ She does agree, however, that there are a lot of characters living on the extreme margins of human society in St. Lucy's. ‘I definitely empathize with outsiders, and I am really interested by the tension inherent in characters who are social animals with a herd impulse and also uniquely flawed and beautiful individuals.’

Karen also writes touchingly about the loneliness and confusion of adolescence. ‘I think most adolescents have moments (or whole years) when they feel trapped, lost, traitorous, craven, wonderstruck, betrayed by their world and their bodies,’ she said.

‘Mercifully, I was never tormented by my peers like Big Red, or forcibly reeducated by nuns like Claudette (although I did attend Catholic elementary school as a child). No bully ever inveigled me into their summertime crime ring.’

Above all, Karen seems to be having great fun with her writing. ‘Thank you! I did truly love inventing and living in the world of these stories.’ In her stories she describes a forest at night as “full of friendly menace”; characters “flinch beneath the leaf-flung shadows”; “jolly mosquitoes drone on and on”; conch shells “echo with the radular skitterclatter of their extinct inhabitants.”

In this rich and wonderful mix of words, several unusual ones appear more than once. ‘I think it's funny that you noticed certain words that keep cropping up. I knew I had certain vocabulary tics, but I had no idea I liked the word “calliope” so much! "Limn" I love for its sound alone, that lemony strangeness and the idea of a light, shadowy touch around the edge of a thing.’ Lemony strangeness – classic Karen Russell.

Although the stories in St. Lucy’s are distinct from one another, characters from one story do occasionally cross over into another. Continuity is also provided by the setting of many of the stories on an unnamed island, home to the Bowl-a-Bed Hotel. Did Karen re-edit the stories as they originally appeared (in magazines) to give greater continuity to the collection?

‘You know, I think I actually toned down some of the more obvious cameos. Lady Yeti used to be a “this is your life” style round-up of characters from the other stories, which in retrospect was pretty ridiculous.’

‘I wanted the stories to feel like they occupied the same slightly skewed universe, but by the end I found it was mostly geographical markers that recurred. That sort of just happened naturally during the original composition of these stories.’

Karen has –  justly – been included in Granta’s new Best of Young American Novelists collection, but the list has generated some criticism about the so-called production-line output of creative writing programmes. 'You know,' she says, ‘I feel a certain ambivalence about writing programs myself – I think it comes from that old notion that there's some division between going to school and living life.'

'When I was applying for MFA programs, many people told me I should go out and "live life" and I think this can be good advice for many people. The problem is that, realistically, I wasn't going to go on a lion country safari. I wasn't going to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon or travel the seas as an oceanographer. With my English/Spanish degree, I was set to become a sour paralegal and "live life" with all these stillborn stories inside me.’

The simple fact is, she says, ‘all I had ever wanted to do since age six was write stories, and I was extremely happy to have the time and freedom to experiment and grow as a writer that the MFA afforded me.’

Karen thinks that MFA programs are unjustly maligned, ‘in part because there are a lot of misconceptions out there about the nature of workshop. It's not a "story factory" – at Columbia, at least, we were all encouraged to develop our own styles and voices, to take risks, and to experiment.’

The readers and instructors on the program – to whom Karen is ‘bone-grateful’ – gave her courage while she was writing her ‘wackjob stories that I thought nobody would ever want to read. It's nice for an Edenic stint to be with other people who share your borderline lunatic love of language and fiction.’

I explained to Karen that the Story campaign was launched in the UK to give the short story a new lease of life after years of neglect, unlike in the US, where such a dip in interest never seems to have occurred. I was surprised by her response:

‘Oh, I wish we had a similar campaign here in the US! I myself love stories and wish that more people would read them. There's something incredible to me about the economy and power of the form. I was a little surprised by your question because I am always hearing these dire pronouncements about how nobody in America reads stories anymore. I thought that the situation was much better in the UK, to be honest!’

Americans ‘have a real appetite for memoir and novels that are really thinly-disguised memoirs,’ she explains. ‘To sell a short story collection, you often have to sell a novel, too. And fewer and fewer nationally-circulated magazines are publishing fiction these days – the Atlantic has stopped running stories in every issue, and the Paris Review seems to be focusing more on long-form journalism.’

Why isn’t the story more popular? ‘I'm not sure. Perhaps today's readers don't want to put in the time and effort that fiction demands for a payoff that's not immediate and quantifiable? Fiction requires much more effort that nonfiction on the reader's part, because you have to stretch and imagine the world of each story. I know several people who've told me they read for information and "don't have time for stories," as if there's something morally lax in reading for truth and surprise and pleasure.’

If this is depressing news for those of us who assume that the short story is alive and robustly well in the US, Karen has some good news. When I ask if she has any favourite short story writers, she exclaims ‘Oh boy, do I! Thanks for asking, I love answering this question. Scott Snyder’s amazing collection, Voodoo Heart, is coming out in paperback this spring. And everybody should read Kelly Link, too. Then there's Joy Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Denis Johnson, Isaac Babel, Marc Richard, Alexsander Hemon, Mary Gaitskill, Ron Carlson.’

When I suggest tentatively that the more zany aspects of Karen’s stories remind me of George Saunders’ work, she replies ‘Oh, I think it’s a huge compliment to be compared to George Saunders – he’s one of my favourite authors working today and he’s definitely been a huge influence. I feel a real affinity with his sense of humor and the absurd. I would only be annoyed if you had compared me to Deepak Chopra.’

Karen is currently working on expanding the story Ava Wrestles the Alligator into a novel (Swamplandia!), ‘but the plot keeps changing every day, it’s sort of like trying to navigate a funhouse with mirrored halls and doors that lead nowhere … I’ve had the frustrating experience of following certain plot lines to dead ends.’

‘There's so much more room in a novel,’ she says, ‘which means there's also more room to get lost in.’ Writing short stories ‘felt like having a single room (or conch, I guess) to play in. I'm learning, though, and I love the Bigtree alligator wrestlers and their island and am happy to be lost there.’

(Interview by James Smith, May 2007)

Photo of Karen Russell by Joann Chann

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is published by Chatto & Windus

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