The Brooklyn Rail

Ayşegül Savaş’s distinctive ability to craft striking narratives from the quotidian lives of ordinary people is on full display in the baker’s dozen of stories in Long Distance, her first fiction publication since the deservedly-lauded novel The Anthropologists. In Savaş’s sure, delicate hand, these mostly-female protagonists are still in the midst of recognizing—and shaping—their identities, often in Paris, a place which offers its own mythology and magic.

A sumptuous short story collection—much like its poetic counterpart—creates a kind of omakase menu. Individual, perfectly composed dishes have both a visible and ephemeral connection with each other. With each reading of Long Distance, one might follow a different theme even as the collective offers a rumination on the many ways there are distances in our lives: literally across countries and languages, and emotionally between ourselves and others, between our past, current, and future selves, and between who we are, and who we might yet be.

Mandana Chaffa (Rail): I have my own guesses, but what was the first story you wrote in the collection, and the last? Or perhaps: which one made you think, “I have a collection here,” and then, “This is complete”? Similarly, with respect to structure, what was your approach in creating the arc of the collection, bookended by the title story and the fabulous “Twirl”? 

Ayşegül Savaş: The first: “We Are Here.” The last: “Marseille.” I wrote the former when I was working on my first novel; I wrote the latter once the book was going into copyedits. I must have realized around the time of writing “Long Distance” that I had a collection. At that point, I began to notice the repeating themes and preoccupations in my work and I wanted to see how they might look altogether. Still, there was no deliberate effort to write stories for the sake of making a collection. They trickled in, one by one. 

It was my editor, Callie Garnett, who placed “Long Distance” at the beginning and “Twirl” at the end. I would not have thought of this—for some reason, I was sure the title story had to be in the middle! And I might have picked something more sober for the ending, like a full stop, but I like that the collection ends on this gesture of twirling.  

Rail: In many of these stories, there’s a lovely nuanced exploration of early adulthood, a time when there may not be a complete picture of what the future self might be, but rather a performative desire to act as we want to be more so than who we are. I’m thinking especially about Lea, from the title story, who “wanted to portray another version of herself: a young woman in Rome, enchanted by life.” 

Savaş: The performance of identity is something I return to often in my writing. You are right that this performance happens more frequently in early adulthood, or perhaps it is more openly expressed at that age, even though we continue to act out imaginary versions of ourselves throughout our lives. In some ways, the work of the fiction writer is to explore the distances between these real and imaginary selves.   

Rail: There’s a subtle multi-temporality at play in many of these stories, such as in “We Are Here”—which was so emotionally authentic that I painfully recalled those I had let down in my youthful days. Masha is in the “present” of the past, as we are in the “present” of the future. I also appreciate how you explore the subjectivity of our memories, or rather, how we are all unreliable narrators.

Savaş: That story could only have been told from a distance, because Masha needs to gain some wisdom, and compassion, in order to understand the weight of her actions. But of course the past has to be told in “present” detail to be engaging. This is a fictional sleight of hand that I adore, as I do retrospective narrators—not just for the insights they offer but also for the way they allow a writer to be playful with narrative. 

Rail: Your insights into the experiences of expats figures deeply in these pieces as well as your other work. In my own immigrant story, we “came to” rather than “escaped from,” and I’m always aware it is a luxury not afforded to many. How do your own physical moves mark what you choose to write about now? What does being foreign—being from the external, the margins—mean for you as an artist?

Savaş: My family started moving—cities, countries—when I was very young. We changed locations every few years, which is why the sense of temporality is a more natural state for me than that of a native or a “rooted” immigrant. I don’t think I ever set out to write about expats or feelings of foreignness, but it is no surprise that they make up the foundation of these stories. At the same time, I write often about unnamed cities or characters of unspecified origin—this is not necessarily to accentuate their marginality but rather to allow them freedom, without being constrained to a single nationality or geography.  

Rail: Place and space are main thoroughfares in this collection; the former often as a specific location, and the latter the more figurative sense of how much “area” women take in the world. And of course, Paris is an exquisite character in this collection, in all her mystery, demands, and endless facets. Would you talk about location in your life and work?

Savaş: My husband and I moved to Paris around the time I committed to writing with discipline. For this reason, Paris has often served as my “atelier,” providing the raw material for many of my stories. Because I moved to the city in my adulthood, not being fluent in the language and not knowing very much about it, I could see it from a naive perspective. Naiveté is very important for writing. The moment we become jaded, we have nothing to say!  

At the same time, Paris is a difficult setting for an English-language author. There is so much that has been written about it and about the expat experience. It is hard not to fall into clichés. 

Still, place remains the essential trigger for my work—novels as well as stories. I am frequently moved to write with a sense of space, though it is not always a geographically specific one. 

Rail: I’d be happy to have an aperitif with any of your protagonists, but dare I say that Leyla from “The Room” was a particular favorite for how she fashioned an intimate space to make room for potentiality, without the expectation of actually immediately creating. “She thinks that in time, she will write here. But there is no rush, unlike for her friends, who always talk of another life, brighter and more established than their own.” This feels like the essential freedom we could have in our lives, as writers, as humans. What does freedom mean to you at this point in your career, rather than when you were Leyla’s age?

Savaş: I yearn for that time in my life when I was free to daydream without feeling the pressure to create. This would be the greatest freedom for me right now. To put it another way, I would love to have the freedom to read as I liked, to read classics, to read strange, forgotten books I come across at second hand bookshops. This is a part of my writing life that has greatly diminished when I started to publish my work, though it was this type of reading that made me want to be a writer and taught me essential lessons in craft and imagination.

Rail: I was so taken with this excerpt from “Marseille”: “She was still young enough that she could sum up her life in a continuous narrative.” I’m close to twice the age of many of your narrators, and I realized I can no longer sum up my life in one continuous narrative—or even three. Freedom—from others, from the self—is a refrain in this collection, and I wonder, do you feel a kind of freedom in embracing more narratives rather than one always forward-looking one?

Savaş: I am interested in the fact that you think of singularity of narrative as a form of oppression or constraint. Amina in “Marseille” considers it simply as being a little boring. 

You are right, of course, that it is a very rigid costume to wear. On the other hand, it can be comforting, just as it is a comfort to know where you belong, what your culture is… plurality, with its freedoms and possibilities, can also be a source of anxiety. 

Rail: The story “Ghosts” has a number of statements about spectrality: “What’re you doing here again, with all the ghosts?” and later, “What did we know, two girls irrelevant as ghosts?” I think there are ghosts throughout the collection, of those who have passed, or the dreams we have that haven’t materialized, of all that we thought we might be, but aren’t. Are there ghosts that run through your fiction and nonfiction work, themes that are always present, sometimes silently, other times flickering and visible?  

Savaş: This is a tonally different story from the others in the collection, and my editor and I went back and forth on whether we should leave it out. It was my agent Sarah Bowlin who suggested that the story serves to frame the other “ghosts” in the collection in a more literal way. Those ghosts are often memories—or people and places—and the way that they have distorted with time and yearning. 

The ghosts that flicker most menacingly through my writing are those that pertain to empathy, and our capacity for compassion. Like ghosts that linger on earth because of unhealed wounds, these characters, limited in their ability to reach out to another person, are always resurfacing in my stories and novels, perhaps because I have not figured out what it is that makes us unable to hold one another’s gaze; why it is that daily life is filled with so many minute acts of cruelty or blindness.    

Rail: The narrator of “Twirl” noted that “my life [is] a façade of beautiful objects and luxurious rituals, without any sturdy foundation.” I’m certain about the sturdiness of your foundation, but might you offer some of your rituals that connect the disparate parts of yourself, or that form the base of your writing practice?

Savaş: I would have provided a long and detailed answer to this question about two years ago, before my daughter was born. I was very disciplined in my work, which was filled with rituals of reading a certain number of hours and writing a certain number of words, going for runs or long walks when I was stuck. This sort of luxury is no longer possible—while my life is filled with rituals (bath time! Story time! Croissant time!), none of them pertain to writing. 

Interestingly, “Twirl” was the first thing I wrote after giving birth, a month or two postpartum. I was deliriously tired, I had not left the house in days, and I thought that I might lose my mind if I did not do something creative. This is probably why I chose the topic of online dating, as removed from my reality as possible. Perhaps the ritualistic belief I retain from my earlier years of writing is that entering one’s imagination can offer a unique refuge.