We were honored to publish Maggie Cooper’s “The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies” back in 2022, and we’re just as excited to share this interview with Cooper conducted by Dana Diehl upon the publication of her collection. You can purchase The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies from Bull City Press.
The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies (Bull City Press, 2024) by Maggie Cooper consists of nine short stories that are just as playful and far-reaching as the title suggests. In one story, a city is powered by women’s rage. In another, women travel deep into an ever-changing cave system. In the title story, park-goers are given a tour of the Miracle of Life ride and the Tower of Flaming Corsets. However, beneath the fun is a profound exploration of gender and community, in which the characters fight both within and against categorization.
Dana Diehl: Part of the fun of these stories is the breadth of worlds and genres they inhabit. These stories seem to fight a narrow definition of femininity simply by showing women in so many different modes and settings. Can you speak to this? Are you drawn to a variety of genres as a reader, as well?
Maggie Cooper: I have pretty much always been obsessed with genre, and many of my favorite books are ones that feel like they engage with multiple genres simultaneously. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five were two early obsessions that I loved because they featured one kind of story inside of another. I don’t want to sound like one of those people claiming they were into whatever indie band before they were cool, but I do feel like I was blessed to be learning to write just as this most recent wave of the literary + speculative was cresting, and that will always be one of my favorite mash-ups. I’m also a big fan of what Lincoln Michel once called the speculative epic—those sweeping Cloud Atlas-esque novels that have several stories in different timelines and modes that come together (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the book) to form a larger narrative. In the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, Erin Swan’s Walk the Vanished Earth, and Daniel Mason’s North Woods, which I would argue is also in this category. Of course, sometimes the whole thing works better than others, but I almost always feel like the writer is having fun writing those kinds of books, and that carries over to the reading experience. That is part of it for me too, especially with these very short stories—it sounded fun to write a pirate story, but I didn’t want to write a whole book of pirate stories, so I gave myself permission to play around with different settings and registers.
There’s another part of this question that I think has to do with gender, and in my mind, there’s an interesting parallel here—in the same way that I am interested in stories that resist strict categorization, I’m interested in ways of thinking about gender that transcend traditional roles and binaries. So, of course, it wasn’t entirely unintentional that these stories all show women, and a few characters who I think would probably describe themselves as trans or nonbinary, in very different spaces and roles. Going back to genre for a moment: I love romance, but one of the things I love about it as a genre is the way that it is so often aware of and in conversation with itself and its own tropes—and that is actually another way of playing with genre, not unlike how being a woman who embraces a really intentionally or playfully high femme aesthetic is a way of being in conversation with gender too.
I don’t want to take this comparison too far because, obviously, the stakes around gender policing and gender-based violence, against both women and trans folks, are much higher than the stakes associated with how the literary establishment views a certain kind of fiction—but I do believe that we would all benefit from being more creative, flexible, and maybe even just open in the ways we understand both our stories and ourselves, and reading more widely might offer us an opportunity to practice that. So many of us were brought up with an insistence on rigid categorizations as a kind of habit of mind, and I would love for us to be free of that in both the literary world and life in general.
As an agent, have you found ways to push against strict categorization? What advice would you give to your clients who are struggling with this?
I feel like in a lot of ways, it’s the classic tension between what is creatively interesting to us as readers and writers and what holds up in the market. Because publishers’ decisions about what to acquire as so often based on what has sold well in the past, it can be really hard to convince people that it’s worth trying something different.
I also hear the “where does it fit in the bookstore?” argument—and while yes, I have worked in a bookstore and know that booksellers do need to be able to slot each book into a physical space on the shelf, it is actually pretty rare for any book to straightforwardly fit in just one section. (There’s also the sad reality that many many books are being bought online—and while that should maybe make it easier for a book to be “shelved” as more than one genre, one still has to consider cover design and copy and how that might cue potential readers to what’s inside.)
At the end of the day, I think the only thing you can really do is decide what’s important to you and the work. Is being between genres a core part of the identity of what you are writing or can you still do the thing you want to do while leaning into a way of talking about your book that is going to be recognizable to publishers? Either way, the most important thing is to write a really really really good book—because at the end of the day, if the book is good enough and you are lucky enough, you just might be the example that convinces publishers that your particular form of weirdness is marketable.
For better or worse, I love books that fall between genres, and while sometimes it can make for a tricky submission process, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the writers who wrote those really really good books that, sooner or later, found their publishing homes. I feel like you will appreciate Margie Sarsfield’s Beta Vulgaris, which W. W. Norton is publishing in February, and which has some shades of horror to it—in a totally different vein, Union Square is publishing a not-yet-announced book from one of my authors that is what she calls a “not-quite” romance, that turns a lot of those tropes on its head in a way I find really delightful.
The worlds you create made me think of this Hilary Leichter quote from an interview in The Rumpus: “[T]he process of discovery is a process of defamiliarization, of making the world strange.”
Is this something you feel in your writing process?
I hadn’t seen this quotation before, but the word strange in particular stands out to me because I very often think of something similar that the lovely Clare Beams said to me about wanting her writing to engage with “the living strangeness of the world.” That phrase—living strangeness—has always stuck with me because I think it captures the quality of wonder that I feel like I’m often seeking to capture in my writing. When I taught high school English, I remember writing DEFAMILIARIZATION on the board and talking about the way certain kinds of description help open our eyes to “the thing itself and not the myth” (shoutout forever to Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck”). I love reading a sentence that feels like it wakes me up or cracks open a door, but even more than writing that makes the ordinary strange, I actually think I might be interested in writing that makes the strange strange—or maybe just lets the strange be strange rather than trying to corral it. I don’t know if that’s something that I’ve figured out how to do in these stories, but one thing I have loved about writing flash is that I do feel like it gives me the opportunity to write into some slipperier moments and resist the expectation that a story necessarily needs to make sense. I wouldn’t want to subject someone to 300 pages of that—I know I wouldn’t want to read 300 pages of that—but in these very short pieces, I think there can be pleasure and aliveness in embracing the weird.
Do you have any interest in writing longer form stories? If so, how do you think you’d maintain that aliveness—or how do you see other authors achieve it?
I have written longer stories, and I will absolutely keep writing longer stories! I may even write a novel one day, though it probably will not be at all related to the grad school manuscript that sits in the Office Depot box in my closet. That said, all of this does feel like a different enterprise than writing flash, maybe not unlike the way that writing a poem is different from writing prose or writing a postcard is different from having a long phone catch-up.
Some of my all-time favorite short story writers, like Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, I think, do this really beautifully, and I always love Lindsey Drager’s novels, which often use short chapters that read a lot like flash to create something like a more lyrical version of the speculative epic.
I just read Kelly Link’s The Book of Love, which might be the most perfect possible example of how one might maintain a sense of “living strangeness” across 600+ pages. I’ve read pretty much all of Kelly Link’s work, and it’s fascinating to me to see how she brings so much of what makes her short stories great to the context of a novel—the very particular quality of the prose, the sense of darkness and humor, the close attention to character and desire. When I studied with her at the Clarion Writers Workshop, she encouraged us to be really thoughtful about what kinds of demand we put on the reader. As she put it, you might have a really complex plot, or in-depth world building, or intricate language, but probably not all three, and I think in The Book of Love, she does a truly spectacular job of balancing elements that both challenge and reward the reader in a way that allows the book to be strange and vivid but still an absolute delight to read.
How has your work as an agent in trade publishing affected your approach to your own writing and publishing?
It’s funny because I actually wrote quite a few of the pieces in this chapbook before I was an agent—but it was only after working in trade publishing that I started to toy with the idea of putting them together like this. One of the main reasons a chapbook in particular was exciting to me is that it is so distant from the kinds of books that I work on; there are no major trade publishers paying big advances for chapbooks (unless maybe you’ve written enough mega bestselling non-chapbooks, in which case, they will package your collected grocery lists as a stocking stuffer and put it on bookstore front tables next to the reading lights!). Because of that, I felt like I could really be playful and write what I wanted to write. Flash fiction was great because it fit into the little spaces that I had for writing—it has always felt much more feasible to sit down and crank out a 500 word story in one sitting than chip away at a novel while also going full-tilt at trying to build my list as an agent of other people’s books. (That said, I have colleagues who do it, for whom I have infinite respect and a healthy dose of envy!)
I think we would all be much better off if more artists made more money off of their art, but I also think it’s great for me personally to get to make art and not be thinking about whether or not I am going to make money off of it. That’s a privilege, of course—to be able to devote time to something that is not income-generating—but it’s one that I’m glad to have, and as far as leisure activities go, writing weird short stories has got to be better for my brain than scrolling social media. Of course, if I was just writing these stories to get off my phone, I wouldn’t necessarily have to publish them, so that’s a separate piece of the puzzle that has to do with ego, of course, but also the prospect of being part of this community of writers who I so respect and admire. There is so much incredible writing coming out of indie presses, and I really feel pleased and delighted to get to be a part of that ecosystem. I’m so grateful for Ross White and everyone at Bull City Press for making this beautiful little book and doing everything they have done for a very long time to literally run this small publisher in what is essentially their free time. One of my very first short stories was published by Bull City’s micro-journal, Inch, back in 2016 or 2017, so getting to work with them again has been such a lovely full-circle moment.
The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies is broken into three sections, each one named for a different archetype of womanhood: Furies, Maidens, and Crones. Which of these archetypes do you feel the greatest connection to these days?
First, I feel like I have to tell you that when I originally put the book together, those sections actually had different names—Bitch/Lover, Child/Mother, and Sinner/Saint, inspired by the great Meredith Brooks’ song “Bitch.” And honestly, I still love those as section titles, but for various reasons, it felt like they weren’t totally working with the collection, so I ended up swapping in the three that you mention.
On a personal level, I feel like I probably fluctuate between Fury and Crone—I really don’t feel much like a maiden these days, and I am grateful not to! If we’re going to connect this to writing, I’ll say that my maidenly writer self was very concerned about what people thought about her writing, and I’m trying to get past that as much as possible, with the benefit of all the crone-ly wisdom I can possibly summon up at my advanced age of almost thirty-five.
I don’t think of myself as a very angry person, though there are certainly many excellent reasons to be angry these days. But what I like about Furies is not necessarily the idea of anger as much as the idea of an avenging spirit that crusades on behalf, not of herself, but some higher cause. The fact that it’s a plural, too, seems important—one of the things that interests me about all these categories is the way they have more power when we can occupy them together. Although we typically write alone (although you don’t always, something that fascinates and thrills me!!), one of the things I love about writing is the feeling of being part of a larger conversation among writers—and I can certainly think of worse names for a writing group than Furies & Crones.
Maggie Cooper is a graduate of Yale College, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, Inch, and elsewhere. She lives with her spouse in the Boston area and also works as a literary agent. Her collection, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies, was published by Bull City Press in September 2024.
Dana Diehl is the author of Our Dreams Might Align (Splice UK, 2018) and the collaborative collection, The Classroom (Gold Wake Press, 2019). Her chapbook, TV Girls, won the 2017-2018 New Delta Review Chapbook Contest judged by Chen Chen. Diehl earned her MFA in Fiction at Arizona State University. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Passages North, Necessary Fiction, Waxwing, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.