This story is featured in CityBeat's March 20 print edition.
Award-winning author Robin McLean describes her latest work, 2022’s Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing — a collection of 10 short stories — as a “North American road trip.”
“There’s a lot of scammers and tricksters — and those who were tricked,” McLean tells CityBeat via phone. “There’s a lot of exploration of the good and the bad in American mythology and thinking.”
McLean will read from Get ‘Em Young on Thursday, March 28 at 5:30 p.m. at the University of Cincinnati’s Visiting Writers Series. She’ll also join her agent Stephanie Steiker in conversation on Friday, March 29 at 3:30 p.m. Both events take place in the Elliston Poetry Room (646 Langsam Library).
Preceding Get ‘Em Young is her debut 2021 novel, Pity the Beast, and her first short story collection, 2015’s Reptile House. The former started as a work meant for her second short story collection, but as she wrote, she began to realize that her story could be something much more. Before Pity the Beast, McLean thought of herself solely as a short fiction writer.
“People would always say, ‘Are you going to write a novel?’ And I would say, ‘I don’t write novels.’ But every so often, you get one,” says McLean. “It sat as a short story for a long time and then I workshopped it. It was suggested that it could keep going. And so, it became a novel by mistake.”
Now, she’s working on her second full-length novel.
At the time of the interview, McLean spoke from Missoula, where she is currently a Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. But McLean has worked and lived across the country, from Alaska to New Hampshire to Massachusetts. The UC visit will bring her back to her old Midwest stomping grounds – she grew up in Illinois.
The natural world is an oft-explored subject in McLean’s writings. When asked if the places she lives at any given time inspire her work, she responds that she’s interested in how the natural world can be central to a story, or even a character.
“I’m also interested in how many, many books – Westerns, for example – leave the background in the background,” explains McLean. “I’m interested in bringing the background and the beings that live in the background forward into the main story. When I lived on a little lake in New Hampshire, I wrote a story about a frozen lake. The work that I’m doing now was mostly started [while in] the desert, so it all takes place in the desert.”
McLean’s work history, like the places she has lived, also carves a unique background. Before receiving her MFA at UMass Amherst, she worked as a lawyer and a potter.
She was also a figure skater, which she says prepared her for fiction writing. Figure skating, McLean explains, takes you to extreme ends of experience; one learns to skate, slide, jump and spin without friction.
“It’s an incredibly wonderful feeling once you’ve achieved mastery but, in order to do that, you have to fall and fall and fall and crash and smash and deal with a tremendous amount of failure,” says McLean. “I feel like learning to cope with failure as a necessary part of the process is a really, really good thing for fiction writers.”
Later in the interview, McLean says she puts pottery in the same category; like in figure skating, there’s a lot of screwing up to be had: pots collapse or blow up in the kiln, among other issues.
“But at the end, you can have this dysfunctional thing where you can eat your cereal out of in the morning, or drink your coffee. Of course, potters tend to secretly believe in the ritual of food and being a part of that with strangers,” says McLean. “There’s something about association with writing a book or story that some stranger reads at some point in time.”
When asked what attendees can expect during the March 28 reading/talk, McLean says that, since it's tied to UC’s graduate creative writing program, there will likely be discussion about technique, methods and ticks or patterns in her writing. The following day’s conversation on March 29 will focus on the agent-author partnership.
McLean originally connected with Steiker, her agent, through Chris Bachelder, now the director of creative writing at UC. At the time, Bachelder served as McLean’s thesis chair when she studied at UMass Amherst. He connected her with his editor, who was at a writing conference and happened to be on the same panel as Steiker. Steiker and McLean then met at a bar. The rest is history.
“My agent, Stephanie Steiker, is a fascinating person,” says McLean. “She works mostly with non-fiction and groundbreaking political stuff. She’s a firecracker and brilliant and she’ll be quite interesting for everybody.”
The UC Visiting Writers Series will conclude in April with this season’s final writer: Douglas Kearney, the 2024 Elliston Poet-in-Residence. The multi-hyphenate has published seven collections, most recently Optic Subwoof. Catch Kearney’s talk at 5:30 p.m. on April 2 and a poetry reading at 6 p.m. on April 4.
Robin McLean will join UC’s Visiting Writers Series on Thursday, March 28 at 5:30 for a fiction reading; and on Friday, March 29 at 3:30 p.m., McLean will be in conversation with her agent Stephanie Steiker. More info: artsci.uc.edu.
