Kelly Link chose “The Sisters” by Angie Ellis as the grand prize winner of the 2023-2024 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers! Ellis’s story was published earlier this week, so be sure to read the magnificent, prize-winning “The Sisters,” and then check out our interview with the winner of all winners below!
Congratulations on winning our 2023-2024 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers! This is a wonderfully magical story, with the air of a fairy tale. Place is of utmost importance, and I love how you’ve brought the story to life through the use of specific color—Agnes’s fitted velvet jacket is “moss green,” and the sky when their father arrives is “bone-white,” and so on. Tell us about that process. Was color always integral for telling this story?
Thank you—this still doesn’t feel real!
I wish I could say that everything I write is part of a solid plan but intention comes very late in the process for me. Once I know what I’m working with, I can say, “This velvet jacket obviously HAS to be moss green!” Some old Victorian thing, once elegant, now strange, something passed down, something bright in this bleak landscape but still a color derived from nature, which is so key in this story. But I only have this confidence in the descriptive details once I know my characters and what I’m trying to say. It’s quite a messy process and throughout it all I probably cut a hundred other details (and colors) that served more as place holders than anything else.
The titular sisters get their own names and their own personalities, but for the most part throughout the story, they’re referred to as a collective. Even the folks in town think of them as a group: “The sisters are coming,” they say to each other. Knowing the importance of three in fairy tales, this may be an obvious question, but were there any versions of this story with a different number of sisters? How do you see them functioning as a group in the story?
There was a point where I tried for two sisters, actually, just because I didn’t want to bog the story down but it didn’t work. Something about that classic, odd number—visually seeing these three women in swishing skirts, briskly walking into town, is a much stronger image than two. They’re a force. These are the sorts of decisions that are more feelings-based for me—three feels right, two doesn’t. Though I was definitely going for a fairy tale feel in this story, I would be lying to claim that I was thinking about numbers from actual fairy tales in any conscious way. The unconscious, though—that’s a whole fascinating element to writing. I’ve both read and listened to the Brothers Grimm, as a child and as an adult, so it’s likely old fairy tales knocking about my head could very well have helped drive my decision to choose three sisters.
Their father is an outsider, (re)intruding on their life, and I love the way the sisters and the other townsfolk deal with him in their own ways. He sees the land his daughters are living on as mismanaged and wants it for himself to extract value from. And then he meets his gruesome fate. Was this the ending you always envisioned for the story? How did you get here?
I watched a documentary about eagles a few years ago. When the parents struggled to feed both of their eaglets, they chose to feed only one and let the other die. It was brutal to watch as the baby starved and eventually withered into the walls of the nest but at the same time, the stone-cold writer in me was thinking, That will absolutely turn up in a story one day. This detail was included early on in writing this story, with the squirrels and the birds (whose nests are made up partially of the bones of their dead), and later it hit me that the perfect third instance would be the father. I knew immediately that this was right, as it also ties into the sisters’ moral code of letting nature choose death (with a little nudge from the sisters, of course).
Would you say that fairy tale, or fairy tale-adjacent stories are your typical style?
The fairy tale style is completely new for me but I enjoyed the detour and will likely stay in this lane for a while. That said, there are other similarities to my usual writing. For example, I tend to write about women, and I love to dig into mood (usually a bit gloomy) and place (also gloomy). I enjoy writing historical pieces, which leaves me plenty of room to weave in a bit of the unusual—something witchy, eccentric, or surreal. And nature is often on display, sometimes woven heavily into the plot. I suppose the biggest difference between my usual stories and The Sisters is tone—a storybook cadence, while holding back somewhat on the more explanatory features like dialogue, interiority, and backstory.
What does your writing process look like? When and were do you find inspiration? Do you stick to a routine, or do you write as the impulse comes to you?
It seems the general advice is to write every day but I sometimes go weeks, maybe longer, until something strikes me (and that something is always very, very small). I’m a sucker for nature documentaries and find all kinds of fodder there. The same with music (I tend to have a playlist for each story) and art. One particular artist I found myself enjoying while writing “The Sisters” was Andrea Kowch, who paints these unsettling midwestern gothic pieces. There’s always something subtly creepy about her subjects, a tinge of horror or strangeness. Looking back, I can see the influence this had on “The Sisters,” as much the music I listened to, the eagle doc, the beadwork of a moldy lemon I saw online, the rabbits that rule some of our local parks like kings, the time someone told me I wasn’t curious and I thought, No, I’m just quiet, the way my grandma collected animal skulls and feathers, hung them on her wall. In a way, it’s a patchwork of inspiration, and it all slowly and clumsily shapes the story. Until it no longer feels clumsy but complete.
What are you working on now?
I wasn’t ready to leave the sisters’ world just yet so I’ve been spending some time working on linked stories. The second one I wrote was about Irving, the pig farmer with his garland of rabbit feet. I’m also working on my second novel that’s still in the early stages. My first, A Snake and a Feathered Bird, will be published next fall, so we’re in the editing stage with that!
Interviewed by Cole Meyer