Add the Community, Hold the Commodity: From Writing as Therapy to a Published Collection, a conversation
by Rochelle Robinson
It’s a busy Tuesday at Caffe Adagio in downtown Bellingham. For the last few months, Brittany and I have been meeting to dream, discuss, and divine an ideal book launch party for her new short fiction collection, It’s No Fun Anymore.
When I say “ideal book launch party” I mean that together we’ve focused on the best ways to make her personally historic evening as helpful to other local writers as possible — the only real reason Brittany sees value in a launch party at all. Thus her asking HamLit, her origin journal, to co-host.
For author Brittany Micka-Foos, community is the prize. And, so, here we are communing with coffee in joy, delight, and wonder over eight idelible short stories, the woman who wrote them versus the woman she is now, and how successful publishing can come in many, varied forms.
Rochelle Robinson (RR): So, your new book, a collection of short fiction, is set to be published on June 17th. And many of the stories in It’s No Fun Anymore have been featured in literary journals before, is that correct?
Brittany Micka-Foos (BMF): Yes.
RR: Okay, so, from when the first of those pieces was published till now, how much time has elapsed, if you remember?
BMF: Many, many years. So I wrote the first story in early 2020. During the pandemic, I had a lot more free time on my hands. I was like, what am I gonna do? I have nowhere to go. So, I enrolled in a Hugo House writing class called Writing Monsters and Myths, taught by Elizabeth Christman and the first assignment for that class was to take a thing about you and anthropomorphize it. And I really wanted to get it right, so I was brainstorming ideas with Karl, my husband, and I was like, maybe I’ll, you know, write about my anxiety disorder and make it, like, a two-headed monster or something. He was like, “No, you should write about your thumb.”
I have what’s called a murderer’s thumb. {Holds up thumb} If you see it’s a little weird. And I was like, I’m not gonna write about my weird thumb! And then I got curious and I started writing, and that became Thumb Stump, which is the first story [from the collection] that I wrote, and really one of my first short stories ever besides a few little things. And it got published in Variant Literature, which is a really cool organization.
I had never really thought seriously about short stories until then, and I think having a home for [Thumb Stump] just kind of increased my, like, “Oh, this is actually really validating.” And it’s quick, you know. It’s instant gratification compared to a novel. And then I wrote another one, and another one, and another one, and eventually years later, I was like, “I have enough for a book.”
And they all happen to be about similar themes ’cause that’s just naturally what I’m interested in. It wasn’t, like, a plan that I had. It was very late in the game when I thought, “People do this! Why not me?” And all of the literary journals and small presses, like HamLit, were hugely instrumental in terms of motivation to continue on and feeling like a part of the [writing] community and, you know, I have so many wonderful things to say about the whole thing, because that’s absolutely what’s made it possible for me. I didn’t even realize at the time how important that was or how much it meant to me until looking back, I can kind of see how it all led to this and is special to me.
RR: Wow, well, this was my dream [for HamLit], and to get to sit with you now watching your own dreams being realized as my dream is realized through you–that’s so beautiful to me.
And I recently, of course, got to read It’s No Fun Anymore. And I have so many thoughts and I just want you to know that I am truly struck by you, Brittany.
BMF: Oh, thank you.
RR: After I finished, I had to go back and read Lune de Miel, which was the short piece that you published with HamLit in our first ever release Winter Issue: No Man’s Land. And I went back to re-read because I was really struck by the evolution of themes in your short story collection. And then I wanted to see, because, like you were saying, you wrote Thumb Stump in 2020, and so you would have written Lune de Miel one year before.
BMF: Yeah.
RR: And so it’s all kind of around a similar time. And so I wanted to be reminded of the themes you were working with in that story, and what struck me this time going back through Lune de Miel was that, at a couple paragraphs in, what starts as like… recounting by the main character, almost moves into epistolary mode, like a letter to a leaving person, her absent husband. And I appreciated so much of the memoryscape that [the main character] is shifting back and forth between. She’s tugging between her reality and the dream of the honeymoon. And what I found compelling and interesting and divergent about the short stories in It’s No Fun Anymore is that they are – though there’s a lot of overall “horror” elements – there are also specific violence elements, especially internal or body based concepts of violence. These stories are so present. They are so actively in the present. And I just had a really fun time teasing that out. I’d really like to hold a book club [to discuss], because each story has its own universe. And the themes of female desire and the metamorphosis of women’s bodies and the strangeness and uniqueness of individual relationships with men that are also somehow all the same… these are just a couple things that feel compelled to keep teasing out in this collection.
And so I’m wondering–you said that as you were writing these stories and doing the exhaustive work of submitting them for publication and finding the right homes for these pieces, their first initial homes–was there ever a moment where you were just like, “I am chewing a similar nut.” Like, “this is something that I recognize and want to unpack for myself” or were the interwoven themes truly unconscious until a certain point?
BMF: Yeah, that’s a really good question, and I love that you went back to [Lune de Miel], ’cause I actually haven’t read that HamLit story in forever, but I remember it, and that was legitimately like one of the first ones. And it is, in a lot of ways, thematically like a baby version of this book in that end.
[Lune de Miel] explores this sort of, you know, dread of relationships and how can you really ever know anyone? But, I think at that point, I was so early on in my conception of stories that I wasn’t really thinking about narrative or how things like what “needed” to happen. And it’s funny that in sort of two ways, thematically and also in the evolution of a story, it’s sort of the genesis of these later stories where I am trying to unpack similar themes, and I feel like as a writer I’m always interested in certain things. Like identity construction, and how, especially for women in different stages of life–many of the women in the stories are mothers–like what that does to both your outward public facing identity and how the characters have a sense of constantly constructing that [identity]. That’s just something I think about personally in my life, like, how am I coming across? How do these groups that I identify with reflect on me? To your question, I think certain things like that are kind of conscious, but really, for the most part, it’s just what I’m interested in and what comes out.
Normally, it’s something like a thumb, and it’s like, I’m gonna write a story about a thumb. And then I write, and it always kind of comes back to these key themes every time, even, I think when I want it to be something else, it almost gets very obvious. Like, [no matter] what I’m working through at a particular point in time, it always comes back to identity or the relationship between the self and the other and sometimes that other being and the unique parts of your own self. Or violence, violence against women. Violence against one’s own body and the sort of implicit way of everyday violence.
RR: Oh, my gosh, yes, yes, absolutely. It always comes back to that. I just love it. I love it because I’m listening to you bliss off these themes and I’m like, oh, there it is. Pressures of outside perception. Everyday violences in the lives of women are literally written right here. It’s so good.
[These stories] also feature women taking their power back. And some of that is in a reassessment of what that power means. Some of it’s misguided, but it’s still a grasping of power. There are lots of layers. In fact, in the collection there are eight pieces, right?
BMF: There are eight.
RR: Yeah, okay, so in the first four pieces, I was going through and I was trying to understand my response to the first four versus the last four. And what I think I came up with is in the first four, there is an energy of going at the end of each story. And when you get to The New Jenny, which is about a woman going through a divorce, she’s trying to grapple with her perception of herself and the perception that her ex husband holds of her. And in some ways she’s helping but she’s still very unhealthy [in her thinking] and I loved that dichotomy, and especially how she handles the new woman in his life. Like, there’s something really poignant in the care and love of other women in this short story as well. But what I realize is when we get to the end of The New Jenny there’s a cradling of an item like a newborn. And when I’m thinking about cradling this item, I’m thinking about a rocking sensation. Then we get to the end of the next short, which is A Safe Haven for Writers, they’re shivering. At the end of Thumb Stump, she says “You are beautiful” as she rocks Thimble, right?
BMF: Yes.
RR: And then with Border Crossings, the main character completely stops. So, in the first four stories, I’m feeling a sense of mobility. I’m feeling a sense of going or needing to go; at the end of each story there’s a next step happening. The three that come after that, there is a sitting, and feeling or moving or shifting, but within self. And then in the last story, it says clearly, “Miriam stops.” Miriam just… stops. And so there was this very specific arc that I found in the ordering of these stories.
BMF: I love that. And actually the decision on how to order the stories was very fraught for me. Like, I had no idea what I was doing, and I sort of experimented with a million different ways because I do feel like it kind of changes the lens. I ended up just kind of going on gut feeling. I knew that I wanted to start with The Experiment. One, because it was the longest. [Two], I think it’s just very transparent in its themes and what it’s going for and what it’s sort of telegraphing. So it felt it was a good litmus for the reader; like, will you enjoy this book? It also umbrellas a lot of the themes.
And yeah, because I think a lot of the stories [explore] women who are mostly misguided in their attempts to break free from this kind of power struggle in their own lives or this role that they’ve been assigned or this constant messaging that they get from external people that, you know, at a certain point, you can’t even tell that it’s external anymore. You sort of internalized a lot of it. And so they’re kind of trying, in whatever desperate ways they can, to unpack that. And then the border crossing story–-I put that one at the end for the reasons that you picked up on. It’s the least bleak story of the collection, which isn’t saying much, but the stopping was really important to me because it was, I think, the first attempt at just a non action, self awareness, and, you know, that moment in meditation or something. It’s a brief, tiny window of possibility. I also see it as a cultural commentary on how everyone is always producing.
A lot of the women in my stories don’t have traditional jobs. They’re a stay at home mom or they’re selling shampoo. They’re not making very much money probably, and they’re not going through traditional paths and that’s a point of conflict. Like, how do you value yourself when you’re not actively bringing monetary value into the world and how do you deal with these messages that define you by what you produce and what you give off and what your job is? So any attempt toward busting out of that narrative by doing the opposite, which I guess is stopping, was really important to me because I do think that that’s the window of hope for the characters. To just shut out the noise and everything that you’re always trying to fight against and just take a step back and, yeah, that is the reason for the ending in Border Crossings. It was really important to me to be authentic and to not put happy endings on these characters that I didn’t necessarily feel were earned. And I think that it’s really open to interpretation. Like, a lot of the endings are like that. I think it’s also more authentic to me [to keep] the openendedness and the possibility that can really be whatever anyone else brings into it.
So, I love that that was your reading and it’s so cool that the order of the collection has some sort of organic flow, because at the end, I was just going with this order because it was so, so hard to decide. And I ended up just wanting to have it be spaced out, like, you know, not have two stories close together that were about childbirth and to keep the themes more expansive.
RR: I think you achieved that, Brittany. I do love that you started with The Experiment because it is the longest; it’s almost 30 pages.
BMF: Yeah.
RR: Which is great, because that way readers are primed to dive into what’s still very much a short story, right? Yeah. And you do separate content well, and it does make it feel more expansive. And also, I think it leaves space for the understanding that it’s even more expansive than we know. Because so much of what is explored here is our strange and brutal reality. Of the everyday, of the body, of the mind, of expectation. And so that becomes very, in my opinion, very universal, or at least it really resonated with me. Even though I am not a mother and I don’t have children, you know? I have a sister, I once sold makeup products, like there are these little pieces that felt very open and resonant. But overall, it was just the quality of reality of womanhood that came through so powerfully.
The way the stories are laid out, it becomes a cascade, tumbling further into these relatable women’s lives. Where’s the line between fiction and reality for you?
BMF: Yeah. That’s a good question because I think a lot of the things that come up in this book are weird mirrors of my life. Like, I think a lot about trauma and the effects. Especially after you have a kid, you’re sort of forced to think about how these [traumas] reverberate through your life and how you continue to be impacted by older versions of yourself and I think a lot about dynamics in relationships. I don’t know what that says about me, but I always feel like, as a woman, that’s always in the back of my mind. I’m a stay at home mom. That definitely factors in when I go through the world, like, what do people think of me or how do I justify my existence?
So all of those things are true, and then I think I just sort of dial them up to 100, because then it’s almost like a thought experiment. Like, how far can I take this and still have it be within the realm of possibility? Even if it’s weird or whatever, how far can we take these elements? For example, Instagram and the weird messaging that we get from social media and how that’s sort of a subtle effect that I see in my own life. And then, how can I sort of put that into a character and dial it up so it has this, like, kind of wild consequence? So I would say everything has the basis of real issues that I think about and then I just– I think it’s fun to push it to its furthest conclusion.
I watched a lot of horror films and I love horror’s capacity to take you to, like, the edge of disbelief and see what that illuminates. And that is sort of what I’m doing, but trying to keep it for the most part in the realm of the literal, the possible. Of course, there’s always a supernatural possibility out there, but also, I think, you don’t even really need that. Like the current situation still today for women is scary enough that, like, you don’t really need to add any real monster. You just can have people in compromised positions and you put the characters there, you give them the social media post or phone call or the mental health crisis or the new age mantra that will change life forever and see what comes of it.
RR: What a great answer.
BMF: Oh, thank you. Thank you. These are great questions. Your thoughtful read of the book is just really nice.
RR: Well, I mean, you’ve just been on such a journey–and in my own tangential way, it’s been a journey for me, too–and so getting to see you take work that you’ve invested in over years and then decide that, yes, it’s time to move forward with the collection, and all of what that entails; it’s just so much work.
BMF: Yeah.
RR: Did you feel intimidated when you finally made the decision to pursue publishing?
BMF: I don’t think I really had the knowledge to feel intimidated. All of this has been very lucky and unorganized and unplanned and sort of like my approach to writing: let’s just see what happens. I didn’t know where it was going to lead. That’s why, again, having entities like HamLit are so helpful because they are really wonderful mile posts that allow you to really feel like you’ve accomplished something, and it helps you chart the way as you go. [Lit journal publishing] gives you momentum to move forward.
So, I was just kind of going with it. I had that HamLit publication, and then I wrote another short story, got that one published, said, “oh, maybe I’ll do another one.” And then kind of kept moving forward in that way, and I don’t even remember when I thought, “I’ll put it into a book.” I eventually started noticing that that was the thing people were doing, and I didn’t really put that much thought into it. I was just kind of like, well, I’ll see what happens. The only thing that I knew was that I wanted to go with a small press.
I think partially that was because I was told from the very beginning, no one cares about short stories. Like, you won’t find a home. People were very bleak about the prospects at all of having it published, but that had not been my experience with the individual stories in journals. So I did my own research and I made a whole big spreadsheet of different small presses that did literary story collections; it was a six months process or something. It wasn’t a huge endeavor. It was work, but it was, if you’re submitting short stories everywhere, it was honestly a lot simpler because it’s one big thing.
I think I got really lucky to find Apprentice House Press because it just ended up being kind of a perfect fit. And they’re really unique in that they’re a teaching press, affiliated with Loyola University in Maryland, and they set you up with undergrads who are also learning the book publication process. They walk you through the process on the academic calendar and it takes a lot longer, but it’s very collaborative and interactive and I think it’s unique in that the author really does get to have a huge say in all facets of the publication. And they’ve been so great.
I don’t have much in the way of advice for people except to put yourself out there. I know a few people who have collections that they just don’t want to ever publish because they’ve been told there’s no market for it, but they are thinking about the mainstream, big five publishing market, and maybe that’s true, I don’t even know, but if you are willing to look past the obvious, I feel like there’s just tons and tons of small presses, all sorts of niche things. I mean, it’s kind of incredible. You just need to take a step back and maybe look under the surface of what most people talk about or think about or want, probably. But for me, it was kind of a no brainer, just because that’s the kind of stuff that I read and it’s just so important to have these places that do provide an alternative to, I think, what tends to be a kind of mass produced cliche, not totally, but in general.
This was a perfect fit for what I’m trying to do, which doesn’t fit for everyone, but it has its audience.
RR: Well, yeah, and recently you and I were talking about: what is the motivating factor [for getting published]? And after we had that conversation, I also wondered if some of the hesitancy to approach publication the way you did and working with an undergraduate program through a college or working with an independent publisher, like a local publisher, is the author’s desire not to have to sell themselves.
BMF: Yeah. I think that is definitely true, for sure. It’s daunting, and for me it’s really uncomfortable. I get exhausted by commodity culture. Everyone is trained to sell you something and everything feels like it has a price tag attached and it’s really exhausting and demoralizing, and I was really hesitant to even enter into that sphere for a variety of reasons, and it’s also just a lot of work.
I think one of the biggest takeaways for me personally, and a benefit to this approach, is I feel like I’ve learned so much about myself and what is comfortable for me when I’m willing to do it. And it still takes me a long time to figure out this stuff. I always do something and then it’ll take me like three or four months later to be, like, did I even like that thing that I did? I’m really grateful to have this sort of low stakes platform to be able to have the room to figure that out.
And I think it’s still, it’s constantly kind of evolving. I’ve had so many practical takeaways I wish that I had known at the beginning. I think it has made the path a lot easier for me, but I like to think of it more like having a book out is a part of entering into a cultural conversation and a community conversation and a community in general with other creatives and people who support them and it’s just another part of making life meaningful. So now I think I’m approaching my whole writing career with that as a more important lens, and I think that I was before, just like, how can I participate in these community conversations and support other people who are trying to do the same thing, and build this sense of, you know, build a platform for everyone to feel like they have a seat at the table and to participate, and was not really in the forefront of my mind before I started on this journey.
I mean, I think seeing how many people are involved in the creation of a book really puts into perspective how this way more than just me. And I’ve just been so grateful for so many of the people who have supported me along the way that weren’t getting anything out of it other than just being generally nice, supportive people. I’ve been so, so touched in a way that, like, I can’t even really put into words how much of an impact that has had on me and has really changed how I see myself as a part of this, like, larger group that has this really important purpose of just making space for people to access creativity and expression in whatever form that means.
RR: And you fed that into how you wanted to set up your book lunch party. Thank you again for asking HamLit to host and be a part of this landmark moment.
And you also wanted it to be about bringing information in some way to the community, creating a way that the community could benefit and journals can benefit and information could be made accessible. And so I think that’s one of the pieces I’m most excited for the upcoming launch is to hopefully realize that desire for you. Make sure that everyone who comes walks away with a little bit more information about the different options for publishing and that it really is an individual story. I mean, you mentioned wishing that, in a way, maybe you had more of a plan at the beginning or an idea of what that might have looked like, but really, what I hear you saying is that may have been overthinking it? Instead, you just did it. And I think, as writers, as creators, especially in the machine that is publishing–or that is getting your work read, recognized, realized–it’s all a game. And so, I do think you hit on something there. A healthy way to do it is to just do it.
BMF: Yeah.
RR: Just keep learning as you’re acting.
BMF: Yeah.
RR: Which is inspiring. And I think it’s a way that other writers can heed your advice or heed your action.
BMF: I love that. And it’s worked well for me. I mean, I guess the other side is that you sometimes do things and then think, “oh, I wish I had thought that through more.” That happens to me all the time. But I think in general I have this innate resistance to, “well, that’s the way we’ve always done stuff around here.” And so I think that is at the core of pushing back. So, for the book event, like, everyone does a book launch. And book launches are great, and I love them, but it’s sort of like, what is expected? And I just feel like, for me, I’d rather not. I’d rather just feel, I guess, a little bit more expansive about how we’re defining it and have it be a bit more of a broad thing.
RR: Yeah, you need it to be a little more collaborative.
BMF: Yeah, community centric. Because I just feel like it’s better for me and it’s sort of in keeping with the full circle nature of the book, the fact that HamLit was the first journal to publish me and bringing that back full circle, I think, was really meaningful to me. And then also, I think HamLit does a really good job of being in the community. Like, I see you guys at the Chuckanut Writers Conference. I think I found out about the first issue maybe in the Village Books newsletter. You guys are out there and you’re making a name for yourself, and you guys do a really good job with that. I think that for reasons I don’t know, probably manpower and time and energy, mostly, it can be hard to. I know it was hard for me; I really had to go looking for places that were publishing full-length story collections. There are many out there, but you really have to be actively seeking them out. So I think that any way to have those groups be out there more is beneficial to everyone. It’s good for readers. It’s good for the journals. It’s good for writers.
I think maybe it’s, you know, just the kind of world that we live in, where everyone’s saturated with everything and a lot of it is marketing material and it’s hard to find the stuff that’s really more real and authentic. So yeah, having opportunities to highlight that, I feel are really important in this day and age.
RR: Absolutely. And, like, writing and stories are probably the most powerful thing? In our entire world, maybe?
BMF: I think so, yeah.
RR: And so that means that they lend themselves to change the world, they lend themselves to change our communities. And we’ve talked about this before, and we can finish on this point, that we can write to learn more about ourselves and ebb and flow and change and grow. I did not mean to make that rhyme.
If you were–and this is putting you on a spot a little bit–but if you were to think back to writing these eight stories over the last four years, can you recall one of them having a more impactful echo in your recognition of self, in your insightfulness, in your own evolution as a human?
BMF: I think the story that stands out to me– I feel like they all have kind of done that for me in various ways, and I don’t know if this is a bad thing to say, but I am all for writing as therapy. I think it’s therapeutic. I feel like sometimes it’s diminished or it’s like, oh, don’t. But for me, it’s just been incredibly powerful, on multiple levels. And so there’s a story called From the Waist Down, and that was… I had a really traumatic birth experience, which I was not expecting, and I talk about it a lot. I kind of love talking about it, even though it’s like!!! Because it was one of those moments where a sort of rift opens up and there’s a very clear before and after.
And I mean, after the birth of my daughter was really when I started to write more because I was working through this thing that happened to me, and I wrote so many different stories and poems about it. I think I started with poetry, then nonfiction, and then my daughter was probably four or five at this point, and I started fictionalizing it, and I think that was really the necessary final step of the process because it allowed me to take the event and, in a sense, control the narrative. Change it. Make it about what I wanted it to be about. And I remember having a very conscious sense of, like, I’m taking this event that happened to me and I’m rewriting it. And I mean, I didn’t give it a happy ending, so it wasn’t like that neat, but it was like, I can. It took what otherwise would have been a totally bad time and [gave myself] the ability to make something from it that I was really proud of and I felt said something that was important to me about what that experience had meant. It was a critique, I think, of the medical establishment and how it treats women and women’s bodies and that felt a little bit like doing something like, “now here’s a piece of my mind”, and that was really healing.
So many aspects of [writing] were just really powerful, personally, like, I felt I don’t know, it’s cliche, but, like, I felt empowered and then I had it published in Witness Magazine, and I heard back from other women. I mean, there are so many who have had less than ideal birth experiences or just poor encounters with the medical field. They weren’t all mothers. And it kind of felt like it was speaking to this larger problem, which, of course, yeah, like, of course it is. But just to have that, again, like another community and a common language, it felt really powerful to me in that moment.
And then that was when I was like, yeah, like, this is what it’s all about. It did so much for me in terms of feeling like I could move forward from my experiences and really make meaning from them in a way that I think helped me deal.
RR: I wonder if once this book is published there will be a bit of a before and after feeling? I wonder what that will look like?
BMF: I’ll be excited to come back in six months after it’s out and do a little hindsight work.
RR: How it will feel different in your physical body, spiritual body, creative body.
BMF: Yeah. And talk about the formation of identity. Like, when I started writing this, I wouldn’t have even called myself a writer, like, in public, in front of anyone. It was a thing I did quietly, and people, a few people knew that about me, but, you know, and now, like, yeah, I mean, having a book out, you really do feel like you can carry yourself through the world as a writer, which is kind of a shame because you absolutely do not need that, and nothing really changed about me from from the beginning other than having this, you know, this thing that I can point to. But I think that is one of the lessons that I would go back, you know, and tell old me. Like, you’ve already done it.
RR: Well, I am very excited to invite our whole community to your release event on July 3rd. Thursday evening. 6 p.m. And we’ll have some visitors on a Q&A panel. One from Village Books and one from Dark Forest Press. Just to talk about different ways of approaching perceptions around publishing. We also get to talk more about It’s No Fun Anymore, and learn about the experience of this work, how it feels to have a book out, and the continued practice of holding up a different lens. I’m really looking forward to it. Thank you so much for this interview, Brittany.
BMF: Yeah, thank you. Looking forward to it!
Book Release + Publishing Panel tickets available HERE
PLUS – HamLit Community Hang @ Corner Taphouse, 7-9PM
Directly following our Village Books event on Thursday, July 3, we hope you’ll come raise a glass with us, meet fellow writers, and toast Brittany + all of the other incredible HamLit authors we are lucky to know and read! 21+ friends welcome!
RSVP HERE
Brittany Micka-Foos is the author of the poetry chapbook a litany of words as fragile as window glass (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her work has been published in Ninth Letter, Witness Magazine, NonBinary Review, Hobart, HamLit, and elsewhere.
Her debut It’s No Fun Anymore (Apprentice House Press, 2025) is a collection of eight stories that explore the politics of victimization, the sites of trauma on women’s bodies, and their attempts to divine meaning from suffering. The centralizing thread is the question: How can trauma be transformed?
Copies available now at Village Books and everywhere else books are sold.
Leave a Reply