I have been a fan of Michelle Ross’s and Kim Magowan’s work for years, so when I saw that they had started writing collaboratively, I couldn’t have been more excited. Together, their writing takes on a special magic, their individual styles blending naturally to create something new and sparkling. In their collaborative short story collection, Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, the pair tackle the murky complications of parenthood, the frustrations of office life, and the joys and pains of adult friendship. Magowan and Ross make even the mundane feel strange and novel with their honesty, empathy, and humor.
In this interview, Magowan and Ross discuss how collaboration requires a lot of trust and flexibility. They share what they’ve learned from collaborative writing and how their solo work has changed after working together. You can pick up a copy of their collection at EastOver Press.
Dana Diehl: What first made you interested in collaboration?
Michelle Ross: Your collaborative writing with Melissa Goodrich, Dana. Partly because I loved the stories the two of you were writing together. Partly because the idea of writing a story with another writer just seemed curious and mysterious. I couldn’t quite imagine how it would go. There was no question to me who I would want to try collaborating with since Kim had become, in short time, my first and most trusted reader. And because I very much admired her writing and trusted her instincts.
Kim Magowan: You you you Dana! Well, you and Melissa; plural “you.”
DD: How has your collaborative process evolved over time you’ve worked together?
MR: The first several stories we wrote together were flash fictions or almost flash fictions. Writing longer stories together seemed more intimidating for some reason—perhaps because the mechanics of plot feel more complicated in longer stories. So, I guess that the fact that we have since written several long stories is one kind of evolution. The other evolution that comes to mind is that of learning our tendencies as collaborators, the roles we each play, the distinct kinds of moves we each make. Sometimes writing together feels a bit like a game of tug-of-war. Kim is pulling the story in one direction, and I’m pulling it in another. But that tension makes the collaboration and the story interesting, in my opinion. And the more we have learned each other’s tendencies, that tug-of-war is a kind of theater. I know that when I pull this way she’s going to pull that way. I make my choices knowing full well that she will pull in another direction, that I can rely on her to pull it in another direction.
KM: I just pulled up my ridiculously long spreadsheet, because I can’t remember this stuff—our first couple of collaborations were flash stories, but the third one was a pretty long story called “How Things Work in Your Home,” almost 5,000 words. So pretty early on, we were working on these more ambitious pieces that involved big casts of characters and having to bone up and adapt to each other’s interests. I think, looking at Michelle’s answer (“when I pull this way, she’s going to pull that way”) I might be more predictable than Michelle? Or Michelle is better at anticipating me than I am her? Because often, when Michelle tosses me back a story, I feel completely surprised by what she’s added. I thought I knew what the story was about, and now it’s taken some strange left turn. I love that! George Saunders writes about how short story authors need to avoid the easy or predictable route by deliberately throwing obstacles in their way, thereby defeating both the reader’s expectations and their own. It’s hard to surprise yourself (at least, it’s hard for me to surprise myself), so that’s one thing I really appreciate about the process of collaboration.
DD: I love that this process has made you both more adaptable, but has also given you the freedom to lean into your own styles or writerly obsessions more fully, because you know your collaborator will be there to balance things out. Have you had any disagreements about the direction a story should take, and how have you resolved those disagreements?
KM: I can’t remember ever having a dispute about where a story should go. We never really discuss stories in process, other than to flag lines we like or make us laugh. I have sometimes agitated for a story being finished, and Michelle has pushed back and said it needs another scene or beat, or something is askew with the ending. That happens often. I’m a lot more impatient than Michelle, more prone to It’s done it’s done it’s done! I’m the hare, she’s the tortoise. Though Michelle always wins those battles—we add some line or paragraph or scene, or we cut some overly on-the-nose sentence, and the story is better. I need to cool my jets.
MR: Not disagreements, no. But there have certainly been moments where I felt a little frustrated by the tug Kim gives a story, only insofar as her tug dismantled my preconceived notions about where I thought the story was going and so forced me to rethink my next contribution. That is, sometimes as I’m writing this paragraph, I’m already thinking ahead about where I might take the story a few paragraphs from now, but then Kim throws a wrench in those plans with her next paragraph. The frustration is short-lived. It’s good for me to have to give up control, to have to pivot, to become more flexible. And I think that tension, that wrench is good for the story.
DD: What makes the two of you work as writing partners?
KM: I see us as a good doubles team or Top Chef partners: We can lean on each other’s skills. We each have things that come naturally to us. Michelle is much better at titles. I can write a pretty sentence. Michelle is the queen of plot. There are things we both like to do and do well, like write dialogue, or compose similes. We both like warts-and-all characters who are messy human beings with a lot of flaws. We both incorporate a lot of random social philosophy in our stories. We like snark. In the end, we genuinely love each other’s work, and we’re honest with each other. We don’t worry about delicately tiptoeing around the other person’s feelings. We trust each other, which is obviously essential if you’re going to create together. We make each other laugh.
MR: 100%—except I have to point out that Kim came up with the title of our book, which I think is perfect.
And I don’t think I can stress enough how important Kim’s point here about us not delicately tiptoeing around each other’s feelings is. We’re working right now on an essay in which we roast each other’s writing. It’s a blast. But I don’t think there’s anyone else I could do something like this with without wondering if it might be the death knell of our friendship.
KM: Michelle is forgetting that prior to coming up with the current, good title of our book (which I agree is perfect), I came up with two terrible titles (which I am too embarrassed to include here, but trust me, they sucked).
DD: You’ve both published (excellent!) short story collections of your own. How did the process of assembling your collaborative book differ from the experience of doing it solo?
KM: One of Michelle’s superpowers is that she is very good at sequence, at rearranging the parts. She was so, so helpful to me when I was assembling my own story collections. We have the same general ideas about how collections should be organized—strong story at the beginning that sets up what the collection is “about,” “makes-you-think” story at the end, a good, long story somewhere in the middle working as a tentpole, mixing up the tones so it’s not too many funny stories or sad stories in a row—the common sense stuff, basically. But beyond that, Michelle is very adept at assembling story chains—this one belongs near that one. In another life, I think she’d be a great curator. All this is to say, Michelle definitely played a bigger role than I did at organizing the stories. We had some missteps—initially the book started with a story that we decided (Michelle decided, I agreed) was not the right set-up for what our book was about (it was too anomalous). We pretty much agreed on which stories to keep in the book and which ones to cut. Well, I had to campaign to get one of my special pets back in the line-up! But eventually I wore her down.
MR: I don’t think the assembly process was different at all really outside of it ultimately being a joint decision. I can get kind of obsessive about ordering stories. There are some writers who don’t give story order much thought at all. That’s not me. I order and reorder. I pull stories, then put them back in again. I see the process of ordering stories in a collection as being awfully similar to revising an individual story. Some of that work is very conscious and deliberate. For example, right now I’m working on ordering the stories in my new flash fiction collection, and there’s a story called “Bristles” that ends with the line, “The bristles beneath my feet seemed a small price to pay.” So, I’ve followed that story with one titled “Costs.” Other decisions are harder to articulate; they’re more instinctual. This pairing feels right; this pairing feels wrong.
One thing I’ve noticed is that I will often initially cut an oddball story because I think it’s too weird somehow. But then I’ll find that I miss that oddball story. I find it charming. So I put it back in and when I do, I no longer question its inclusion because I’ve felt the pain of its absence. In Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, that story was “It Was Stapled to the Chicken.”
DD: What have you learned from each other by working together?
KM: Collaborating with Michelle teaches me content, but also teaches me about writing. In terms of content, I mentioned our early story, “How Things Work in Your Home.” That story had all this material on DIY home projects and their parallels to ways the human body functions. Now, it’s safe to say I know jack about how to install toilets or how cardiovascular systems work. So one thing I love about collaborating with Michelle is I get to step into and stomp around her writer-brain, full of things I would never, on my own, choose to write about. It’s like sneaking around someone else’s attic, full of their weird headless mannequins and tea kettle collections. It widens my world.
In terms of style, Michelle is very funny, and I’ve embraced that. I think our collection is funny, and my own solo stories have lightened up. When I compare my first book, Undoing, to my most recent work-in-progress, I see that my writing has become sillier, more fanciful, wryer. It’s also gotten looser and less precious, which I attribute to Michelle’s influence. There’s a skill of Michelle’s that I really admire and envy but still haven’t been able to pull off very well myself: Michelle is a great rearranger. She sees stories in a modular way, moving around the parts (not just the scenes but the sentences). I lean on Michelle to do that kind of editing of our collaboration. But I have noticed that I write more “modular” stories on my own now, ones composed of a lot of disparate segments.
MR: Well, as Kim already pointed out, she writes pretty sentences. This is true. Her sentences are indeed prettier than mine. I don’t know that I write prettier sentences now after all this collaboration, but certain quirks of her sentence structures have rubbed off on me. For example, I’m not sure I had ever used a colon in a short story before I met Kim. And now I love them, especially as I’ve been writing shorter and shorter micros. I used six colons in a 100-word story I wrote this past week.
Topics have rubbed off on me too. All good writers pay close attention to words, but maybe not so much their characters? Probably at least partly due to Kim’s influence, I’ve written a number of stories in the last several years in which the protagonist considers and reconsiders particular words and phrases.
Writing with Kim has made me more relaxed about plot. I have a tendency to get worked up about plot—overthinking the shapes of stories. I think that one of the reasons we write so quickly together is that I am restraining my OCD-ish impulse to overly design. This is all for the good. Many of my favorite solo stories are those that I wrote quickly—that seemed to spontaneously generate. Writing with Kim has helped me to develop that muscle so that more and more of my stories are drafted quickly, instead of me laboring over a first draft for, no kidding, a year.
Dana Diehl is the author of Our Dreams Might Align (Splice UK, 2018), the collaborative collection, The Classroom (Gold Wake Press, 2019), and The Earth Room (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2026). 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.
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the English Department of Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, the short story collection she coauthored with Michelle Ross, is out now from EastOver Press. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. You can find her at www.kimmagowan.com
Michelle Ross is the author of three story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award; Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (2021); and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (2022). Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, a story collection she cowrote with Kim Magowan, is out now from EastOver Press. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50, and the Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. It’s received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is an Editor at 100 Word Story. You can find her at www.michellenross.com