Emily Jon Tobias’s collection Monarch: Stories (Black Lawrence Press, 2024)is a visceral journey through the lives of people grappling with addiction, mental health, and past traumas that continue to influence their present lives. Her adept use of lyrical language and physical embodiment brings the reader into their seedy situations, offering profound insights into humanity’s resilience and struggles.
In February 2023, Tobias and I crossed paths in Oakland, California. Our meeting was intended to be a celebratory event. My short story collection, The New Low, was released in October by Nomadic Press, while Tobias’s collection was slated for June. Instead of gathering for a release party, we met at Nomadic’s closing party, where it felt more like a funeral.
Just over a year later, we reconnected over Zoom, delving into Tobias’s writing process, the significance of point of view, and her self-identification as a poet despite the fictional stories in Monarch.
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The Rumpus: The day we met, we were both pretty sad. Do you want to tell our story?
Emily Jon Tobias: Sure, I felt like there was a collective energy of heartbreak over the closure of Nomadic Press. And for me, I was mid-production of the book, so I was particularly struck by it. We immediately connected more in the spirit of community, I think, rather than our work, which was really lovely. And then the connection grew from there.
Rumpus: We also shared the same editor, Michaela Mullin, and we bonded over how much we liked working with her.
Tobias: Michaela became a big part of the book and my life, really. She’s become a dear friend.
Rumpus: After months of limbo, Black Lawrence Press came to the rescue, and we have Diane Goettel to thank as our champion. Now, she is trying to navigate distribution after SPD’s closure. Are you stressing about that?
Tobias: Diane handled the Nomadic migration with such integrity and honesty. Now with this huge roadblock, once again, she is getting in front of it. I feel like if anyone’s going to work it out, it will be her, so I’m not stressing. She’s been a big savior.
Rumpus: A lot of your characters are down on their luck. Some seem larger-than-life. What’s your entry point into character?
Tobias: The way I’m drawn to characters is through their wounds. I’m drawn to people who are obsessive and seemingly broken, and on the fringe, and naughty. And I’m most interested in how characters change and grow.
Rumpus: Your writing in Monarch—especially in the story “Nova”—reminds me of Denis Johnson’s because of its rawness, lyrical prose, intense images, and the confusion between dreams and reality. You stop caring if it’s really happening because you know these people are in altered states, and it is really happening to them. Was he a big influence on you?
Tobias: Huge influence on me, so thank you for bringing him up. He was in recovery, which informs a lot of his work, and I am also in recovery and proud to talk about that. I think there is a way [Johnson has] of weaving in and out of these very tight points of view. But that’s why craft has become so important in my life as a writer and also my greatest challenge and passion, because my work takes a whole lot of craft. Johnson and Lucia Berlin are both huge influence on me.
Rumpus: I really enjoyed your point of view shifts throughout the book, especially your close first-person, like this sentence in “Nova”: “My face was pointed toward that light bulb on a chain behind the open holes of his nostrils behind the fire mirrored in his red eyes, like a demon.” Is POV important to you or is it something you change in revision?
Tobias: Point of view is the most important choice that we can make as writers ahead of time. It must be intentional, and it has to be mastered. It is a vehicle. I’ll use “Nova” as an example. I think I rewrote it twenty-six times. It was the longest project of all of them. It was written in first person. Although newer writers tend to think first person is easier, it’s much more limited than third person. Third person narration is a camera with wings. It gives us every dimensional opportunity, and first person is very, very limited. So it’s actually quite a skilled endeavor to write a short story from first person. It limits the options.
Rumpus: What’s your writing process?
Tobias: I write endlessly, and endlessly, on and on and on and on. And then I have to take whatever I’ve got, and I start to kind of go inward to the center of the story. I work in these weird, concentric circles, and I rewrite and rewrite until I get to the heart of the story. But this takes endless amounts of writing.
Rumpus: For the stories in this collection, did you draw inspiration from real-life individuals? Or are they purely from imagination?
Tobias: I love that question because a lot of people who have read my work and get intrigued by it want to know if it’s fiction. My work, my process as a writer—and I had to learn this for myself with experience over time—is all about how my subconscious connects to the conscious mind. The two dimensions have to connect, right? So it’s about opening space for the subconscious mind to rise to the conscious mind. And then from the conscious mind comes craft. My work comes from shades of deep imagining, a whole lot of deep imagining, which is actually a skill, by the way.
My own sets of wounds and traumas also play a part. It’s a whole tapestry of energies or layers. And then my job is to allow the subconscious mind and the conscious mind to connect on these things. To answer the question bluntly: yes, of course . . . I mean, yes, of course. And also, no.
Rumpus: It’s like the saying, “the more specific you are, the more universal things become.” Maybe because I’m also from the Midwest and I’m haunted by being trapped in unfinished basements, but your writing in the story “Lucky Penny,” from this collection, gave me compassion for my younger self.
Tobias: That one is very connected to me.
Rumpus: That story hit a nerve. It shows how much girls have to navigate because of the way the world is behaving toward them, while they are innocently showing up in the world. How unfair it can be. You rendered that for me by writing in-scene.
Tobias: My access point is always image. It can be an image in my mind, or it can be triggered by some kind of memory or photograph.
All of these stories are explorations of craft through the character. That one was really risky because we’re dealing with a bipolar manic episode. I was playing with how image and language and rhythm and form can work to show that world, to help us feel that state, so there’s a lot of playing with rhythm and syntax and form. Actually, Michaela helped me a lot with that.
Rumpus: In “Lucky Penny,” I applaud you for creating complex characters because even with the incident that happens to the protagonist in the basement, she wants the boy to love her.
Tobias: She is also in love with the boy. And again, that is taboo because she’s not a victim. So that is like, “Yeah, let’s talk about complexity.” There are so many shades to these things. And you’re right, “Lucky Penny” is about an abusive relationship in which she also finds herself in love. And to me, it’s such an important thing to discuss. There’s a shame that goes along with that, which is like, I was hurt. It was wrong. And I love you. And so, what do we do? How do we reconcile that within our own beings? And I’m certain that most of us know what this feels like in some way or another.
Particularly as women, how do we reconcile within ourselves so that we can be the embodied, healed, empowered spirits that we are, but with all of these different shades of pain that we might not understand yet? Or the need to identify with victim or perpetrator, that either/or is something that I’ve really explored in the whole book. Like what happens when we blur the line? What happens when we’re both?How do we sit in ourselves when we are both?
Rumpus: Was exploring power dynamics an important theme for you?
Tobias: There are very strong energies of power and control in every story in the collection. [The story] “Jesus Wears Bermudas” is a big exploration of that, but also love. I liked what Kirkus Reviews said. Something like, the stories can feel mean, but they are about love. And that is really what’s underneath all of these wounds, all of the damage, and all of these things that we play out—this space of love.
Rumpus: There is a criticism that everyone is writing about their trauma, but the writing of it does heal other people. Not everyone has the communication or skill or resources to render their experience in a way that shows all of the nuance that you do.
Tobias: I think the way we heal is through the emotional body. It’s through the feelings, it’s through emoting, it’s through writing. For me, it’s very simple. It’s that I trust my character will tell me it has nothing to do with me. Crafting the characters is my job, but the relationship between me and the character is something I trust implicitly. I learned how to listen to these characters. And the rest is just craft. Craft is mathematical. There’s nothing artsy or flowery about it.
My dad left really early, and it was just me and my mom, and I had only imaginary friends. When I go into my memory, I see myself alone with my imaginary friends, and so I learned to communicate with these unseen beings. My job is to channel the character and it doesn’t matter if I like it or not, or if I agree with them or not.
Rumpus: What was the most challenging aspect of creating this collection? And what was the most rewarding?
Tobias: Writing this collection was one of the most challenging experiences that I’ve had, mostly because of the depth to which I had to dive into understanding these characters. I wrote this collection very early on in my sobriety, which began eight-and-a-half years ago. At that time, this collection was an experience of seeing myself through the lens of my own characters, which was an incredibly emotional experience. At that time, I wasn’t quite equipped to handle and honor my emotional processes as much as I am today, and so the process of writing would become as messy, obsessive, grueling, dramatic, and, ultimately, blissful as each of the stories was within their own narrative structure.
Oftentimes, I would have temper tantrums because the character wouldn’t reveal itself at the right time for me. Sometimes the breakthrough would come at the most inconvenient of times. Sometimes the frustration would overtake me, and I became completely immersed in these worlds and lives of the characters to my own detriment. So, oddly enough, what was the most challenging was also the most rewarding because through the transformation of the characters, through the discipline of the craft of writing, through the endless hours and obsessive days, and constant reworking of these lines, I became a better version of myself as a writer and as a sober woman learning to know herself as she really is. The most rewarding part of this collection was having those breakthrough moments with my characters, when I realized that, “Yes, I really do know you. Yes, I really do see you and hear you, even if I do not agree with your decisions. I will write you with the most truth I can.”
Rumpus: How did you decide on the order of the stories and how much time did you spend on it?
Tobias: I know this might not be the most expected answer, but the order of stories in Monarch has always remained the same from the beginning of the project until the end. I was very concerned about how to order the stories after talking with my mentor. He decided that any publisher or editor that got involved would reorder them anyway, so his suggestion was to use my intuition and put the collection together the way that I thought it should be, and we would revisit it later. We knew that “What My Mama Knows Is True” should be the middle story, as it is a streak of light in the midst of much darker stories. So I structured the collection around that piece being at the center. Other than that, I went with my gut. The collection has now been through two editors and five full rounds of editing, and none of these people, nor I, have chosen to reorder them at all. The beauty is the order has always remained the same.
Rumpus: In the introduction, you state, “As a kid, along with being a poet, the only other dream I had was being on the road.” Even though you published fiction, do you still identify as a poet?
Tobias: Yes, one hundred percent. I identified as a poet as a young kid. I used to sit in my mom’s backyard writing poetry to the roses, and she would ask me how these ideas would come to me at such an early age, and I would respond that I really didn’t know. I just knew, and I feel that that energy of intuition informs my writing, my poetry and my fiction, to this day.
All the poets in my life are people who I greatly admire and respect and who I have come to have deep, meaningful relationships with. I think poets see the world in fractured, multidimensional ways, holistic ways that I have found to resonate with me. Poems that I fall in love with can elevate an experience driven by such small structural vehicles. It’s extraordinary. My love of music informs the rhythm of my work. I love how I’ve been paired with poets for readings, and I think it’s because of that lyrical, rhythmic energy that you talk about in my fiction, which allows me to stand beside these poets who are my peers, who I so lovingly admire and respect. So, again, yes, a whole big-hearted yes to being a poet and being a writer of many forms.
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Author photograph courtesy of Emily Jon Tobias
