Really, it’s impossible to do justice to a living person in writing, even in a scrupulously accurate memoir or biography. And once a real world person enters the realm of a fictional story, and thus becomes subject to what the story needs, it’s especially no longer fair to read back from the story onto the person in a meaningful way.

Andy Mozina – 1 May 2014

The Back Flap

In a wide range of forms and tones, the fifteen stories in Andy Mozina’s new collection, Quality Snacks, center on high-stakes performances by characters trying to gratify both deep and superficial needs, often with unexpected consequences. Driven by strange ambitions, bungled love, and a taste for—or abject fear of—physical danger, the collection’s characters enact the paradox in the concept of a quality snack: the dream of transmuting the mundane into something extraordinary.

Two teenage boys play chicken on a Milwaukee freeway. A man experiencing a career crisis watches a seventy-four-year-old great grandmother perform an aerial acrobatics routine at the top of a swaying 110-foot pole. Desperate to find a full-time job, a pizza delivery man is fooled into a humiliating sexual demonstration by a couple at a Midway Motor Lodge. A troubled young man tries to end his father’s verbal harassment by successfully hunting a polar bear. After an elf civil war destroys his Christmas operation, Santa Claus reinvents himself as a one-man baseball team and ends up desperate to win a single game. And in the title story, a flavor engineer at Frito-Lay tries to win his boss’s heart with a new strategy for Doritos that aims to reposition the brand from snack food to main course.

While some stories embrace pathos and some are humorous and some are realistic and some contain surreal elements, all of the stories in Quality Snacks share striking insight and a cast of compelling, well-conceived characters. This collection, in an earlier form, has been a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award, the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, the Elixir Press Fiction Award, and the Autumn House Fiction Contest, and a semi-finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize. Readers of fiction will be satisfied by the variety of fare offered by Quality Snacks.

About the book

What is the book about?

I think the stories in the book generally concern more or less average people (teenagers, accountants, metallurgists, mothers, pizza delivery men, etc.) who are having trouble dealing with relationships, their purpose in the world, and losses of various kinds (failures and deaths). A lot of the characters are well-intentioned but deluded in some way. They’re often alienated from contemporary culture even as they’re immersed in it and even fascinated by it. Absurdity is ready to spring from behind any bush or tree. The stories are often about clarifying what’s wrong or finding some small victory or a way forward.

When did you start writing the book?

Gosh, to be honest, I started the oldest story in the collection twenty-five years ago.

How long did it take you to write it?

I was working on one of the stories right up until the end of the copy-editing process at the end of 2013. So it was twenty-five years of off-and-on work on the stories that became the collection, with most of that work done in the last seven years.

Where did you get the idea from?

The ideas for the various stories came from all over the place. Pelvis started with an anecdote that Dennis Hopper told about Elvis Presley on David Letterman. Overpass started with a memory of some guys getting run over doing push-ups on the main drag of my college campus. I witnessed an aerialist act very like the one described in A Talented Individual. But most of the stories started just when their first sentence occurred to me, kind of out of the blue.

Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?

I struggle with pretty much every story, usually when I’ve put out everything I first knew about the story and now realize I have to invent more and try different things and finesse stuff to get it to work as a whole. Endings are always hard.

What came easily?

Often first lines and sometimes the first four or five pages came easily, almost by accident.

Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?

I’d say both: they’re entirely fictitious and I’ve borrowed from real world people, to some degree, in most of the stories. Once the characters in the stories are doing things they never did in real life, they’ve crossed over and must be considered entirely fictitious and not just real people in disguise. Really, it’s impossible to do justice to a living person in writing, even in a scrupulously accurate memoir or biography. And once a real world person enters the realm of a fictional story, and thus becomes subject to what the story needs, it’s especially no longer fair to read back from the story onto the person in a meaningful way.

We all know how important it is for writers to read. Are there any particular authors that have influenced how you write and, if so, how have they influenced you?

Stanley Elkin, Mary Gaitskill, Donald Barthelme, Aimee Bender, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Richard Ford, and I’ll throw in Conrad, Dostoyevsky and Beckett for good measure—all through tone, type of detail, and my sense for the shape of a story.

Do you have a target reader?

I write for the reader who will feel something like what I felt when I read those writers I just mentioned.

About Writing

Do you have a writing process? If so can you please describe it?

When I’m not caught up in my job as a college professor, which is not often enough, I like to write for at least three hours a day, just plugging away at whatever is unfinished or could use revising. I try to write first thing in the morning on those days.

Do you outline? If so, do you do so extensively or just chapter headings and a couple of sentences?

Only when I’m working on novels and have already gotten through a first draft.

Do you edit as you go or wait until you’ve finished?

As I go.

Did you hire a professional editor?

I get feedback mostly from fellow writers, one of whom is also a professional editor.

Do you listen to music while you write? If yes, what gets the fingers tapping?

Not usually.

About Publishing

Did you submit your work to Agents?

I did not submit Quality Snacks to agents.

What made you decide to go Indie, whether self-publishing or with an indie publisher? Was it a particular event or a gradual process?

I’ve seen some reasonably well-known writers have trouble placing story collections with commercial presses. Wayne State University Press did my first collection and was interested in my second, so I thought, why not?

Did you get your book cover professionally done or did you do it yourself?

Wayne State did the cover.

Do you have a marketing plan for the book or are you just winging it?

Wayne State is marketing the book, of course. I also decided to bite the bullet and hire a publicist for this book.

Any advice that you would like to give to other newbies considering becoming Indie authors?

If you can get an independent press or small press to publish your book, I’d say go for it.

About You

Where did you grow up?

Brookfield, Wisconsin, a Milwaukee suburb.

Where do you live now?

Kalamazoo, Michigan.

What would you like readers to know about you?

I am a stable, friendly, law-abiding citizen.

What are you working on now?

A novel about a harpist taking a symphony audition.

End of Interview:

Get your copy of Quality Snacks from Amazon US, Amazon UK, or Barnes & Noble.