We Hide Secrets Even From Ourselves: An Interview with Ivy Grimes

Mirror glass shows us a world flattened, reversed, uncanny; a portal trompe l’oeil. The sense of unease from staring into it too long—where the known world becomes suddenly unfamiliar and alien—is a feeling also evoked in the strange prose offerings of Ivy Grimes. At the top of 2024, Grimes released her debut novella Star Shapes with Spooky House Press and Glass Stories was released with Grimscribe Books in August 2024.

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Tiffany Morris: Congratulations on the publication of Glass Stories! I was honoured to be asked to blurb the collection, and I had a lot of questions following reading it, so I’m so happy to be able to ask you some of them with Seize The Press. Some of the stories in it have appeared in Cosmic Horror Monthly, ergot., Interzone, and STP, while others are original to the project. Was there an initial story that inspired the rest to come into being? What was the process of creating this collection?

Ivy Grimes: Thank you so much for interviewing me! I love your work, and it’s an honor to talk writing with you. The first glass story I wrote was “Glass Mountain” in Interzone Digital, where I played around with the elements of the original fairy tale by the same name. I had so much fun writing about the tactile aspect of living on a mountain of glass, and I also became interested in exploring all that glass can represent. 

Multiple fairy tales feature glass coffins as temporary resting places for someone who only appears to be dead. The famous glass slipper appears in Charles Perrault’s 1697 French retelling of the Cinderella story. Of course, the basic story of a girl oppressed by her family who receives supernatural aid to overcome her troubles is found in various forms in cultures all over the world. In the Grimm Brothers’ version of the story, it’s a golden slipper rather than glass. Little differences in detail like that are so interesting. I’d like to ramble on about glass slippers, but there aren’t any in Glass Stories, so I’ll spare you my thoughts for now. Suffice it to say, I think when glass appears in a fairy tale, it often involves searching for truth where there’s been some deception. 

Anyway, I fell in love with glass and fairy tales, and I thought about how much I’d enjoy reading a collection of stories with glass elements. What I love about short story collections is that sometimes the sum is greater than the parts; ideas can be developed over many stories with unrelated plots. It was fun to conceive of these stories as a collection from the beginning so I could place clues throughout. Little glass crumbs. 

After “Glass Mountain,” I wrote stories like “Glass Pet” in Seize The Press, which took elements of the “Little Red Riding Hood” story to explore how people try to make God (an unwieldy word by which I mean at least a transcendent being or cosmic force) into a pet. 

So I kept enjoying myself, and I kept writing about glass.

The “spectral nature of glass” is mentioned specifically by Grimscribe when describing the collection. Could you elaborate on what inspired this exploration of glass and your relationship to its spectral nature?

I love to think about the life of the spirit, the incorporeal, and the glass was a vehicle for that in each story. It’s a barrier that doesn’t always look like a barrier. Sometimes it’s entirely see-through, while at other times it’s like a fun house mirror that distorts rather than clearly reflecting. It also holds light and color, and I enjoyed exploring the meaning of different colors of glass throughout the collection. Whatever our belief systems, many of us have fun with ideas about ghosts and spirits, even those who don’t believe in them. I fall more on the side of belief, and glass was a way to represent that belief. 

Sometimes the glass objects in these stories contain the spirit of someone who died but continues to make their presence known (for good or ill) through the object. Sometimes the glass represents some higher power, or at least a kind of talisman. Sometimes it represents an attempt to reveal what’s true. Just because an object is made of glass, though, doesn’t mean it’s always clear. Sometimes it only adds more confusion. Sometimes it breaks when you drop it, and sometimes it’s stubborn and strong.

There’s a domestic horror element to a lot of these stories, even those that might resist that kind of genre classification. You have such a keen sense of the existential strangeness of family, of self-awareness, and the uncanny interactions between the two. What interests you about weirding the domestic realm?

Domestic settings make for my very favorite stories. Homes are strange places where we eat, drink, and bathe like lumbering elephants at a watering hole, but they’re also places where we dream. They’re places where we hide secrets even from ourselves, which happens in stories in this collection like “Glass Turtle,” which is about a woman who avoids her childhood home to avoid bad memories, but they follow wherever she goes. 

Also, domestic spaces are the birthplaces of fairy tales and folklore, stories told around the fire. As many societies move more and more from being interdependent to independent, the connected family becomes its own kind of fairy tale. Something from the past. I grew up with a lot of extended family all living in the same small town in Alabama, and everyone relied on each other much more than they do now. Most of us have dispersed. There are many benefits to close family connections, but I think people disperse because of the drawbacks. We all want to shape our own identities and not be tied to other people’s expectations based on the past, but then again, can we understand our identities without knowing our history? Families are so funny and tragic when you have the opportunity to watch the same stories play out again and again over multiple generations. 

One of the things that I love most about your writing is the subversion and transgression of reader expectation – sometimes you do this with plot, sometimes with abstract use of language. How does playing with reader expectations influence your writing?

My favorite thing to experience in a story is to be lulled into comfort and then shocked by something bizarre. Some of my favorite writers do this, including Barbara Comyns, Haruki Murakami, and Shirley Jackson. I’m always chasing the high of the unexpected. Different people read for different reasons, of course, and some people don’t like that experience! Some want the story to hit the right beats to bring about catharsis, which is an age-old reason for reading. I enjoy those kinds of stories a great deal, too, just not in the same electric way. I’m always trying to entertain myself most of all when I write, which feels selfish sometimes, but I wouldn’t have the motivation to write anything otherwise. That’s why my main goal is always to surprise myself.

Another element of the collection is the sense of play with fables and fairy tales, especially in stories with female protagonists. It’s always interesting when these stories get retold by women because there’s a lot of room for feminist and gendered interpretation and re-interpretations of those stories. Is that part of your interest in those stories?

Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber, which is an inspiration and touchstone, contains fairy tale retellings that often focus on women’s empowerment. I’m aware that my stories don’t work that way, though. Many of my stories simply reflect on the absurdity of life, often from the perspective of a female character. 

On the other hand, maybe it’s a feminist act to simply speak honestly from a woman’s perspective. I like writing stories that deal with my own experiences, like being a woman who doesn’t have children (which I explore in stories like “Glass Mother” and “Glass Piano”). My favorite story in the collection is probably “Looking Glass,” where I use the “Beauty and the Beast” story to explore what it means to balance selfishness with selflessness. Of course, I think it’s better to be selfless, but I think our fear of our own selfishness is dangerous because it causes us to lie to ourselves.

Fairy tales were often composed by a chorus of anonymous women (among others!) trying to pass on the bits of insight they gained from being alive. Of course, I don’t believe gender is binary, which is one of the reasons I can relate so strongly to stories by men and masculine people. On the other hand, I also crave stories told by people who understand my situation more intimately (as we all do!). 

When the Grimm brothers sought out village storytellers so they could record various tales, the storytellers they found were often women. Wilhelm Grimm even married one of his storytelling sources, Henriette Dorothea. I feel a sense of understanding and kinship in fairy tales about surviving with limited information, often with guidance from supernatural mentors. I think of those original tale-tellers as our fairy godparents reminding us of what they collectively learned over the years. 

One of your stories, “Glass Cabbage”, was originally told by your Grandfather Grimes, and you’ve mentioned the storytelling tradition in your family in an interview with Matthew Stott in your collection Grime Time. I think oral storytelling traditions are so interesting, especially when it comes to family – often it will be family ghost lore, or a great joke, or the ability to tell a tall tale. It’s something that operates so differently from fiction writing, because there’s a lot of audience awareness, spatial awareness, and somatic awareness in the process of telling the story. How does the storytelling to fiction writing process translate for you?

That’s so interesting! I’ve been shy my whole life, so I was never someone who got in the center of the room to tell a story. I was simply a listener, part of the audience. I love watching people and then later trying to recreate their voices on the page. I wish I had a recording of my grandfather’s story about the cabbage and the big toe that I could play for everyone. It was funny and terrifying, told with dramatic energy. My version is quite different! I took elements of that story and then added my own tweaks (like the glass!). Mine is an on-the-page story, and it couldn’t be performed the way my grandfather’s story could, but I’d like to think he’d enjoy it, or at the very least, that he’d think it was funny that I stole it and messed with it.  

You also mentioned loving poetry in one of those interviews – how does poetry influence your writing process? Your imagery tends to have such a striking beauty and strangeness to it!

Thank you! I started writing poetry before writing prose, and what I love about it is that you don’t need a vehicle to get from Point A to Point B. It’s like you have access to the transporter in Star Trek. You might start out talking about a bird then suddenly you’re beamed into the center of an ancient war and then suddenly you’re lying in bed listening to the radio. The connections don’t have to be clear, and to me, the poem is best when it leaves you with a sizzling sense of meaning in the midst of inarticulate uncertainty. I have to explain myself a bit more in a story, but I still love the surprise of jumping around sometimes.

Both “Glass Art” and “Glass Piano” are told mostly through conversations – one a direct interview, one more of a thought and response. Does the form of each story come to you intuitively? What is the role of dialogue for your writing?

In “Glass Art,” I set out to write a story as an interview, but with “Glass Piano,” I just started with a concept I liked, and it led me into a dialogue between the speaker and the glass piano she swallowed. I love writing dialogue! It’s where I can cut loose and have the most fun. We probably each have our favorite elements to write, and I think that’s a sign we should focus on them when possible rather than trying to make sure all the elements are balanced.

Last question! Would you write another themed story collection? If so, what do you think the theme would be?

Yes, I enjoy myself most when I’m swimming around in a thematic soup. I like those kinds of restrictions, because they give me platforms to leap from. I’ve also considered trees, gold, birds. I enjoy making lists of those kinds of things. I love reading other people’s story collections, too, both themed and unthemed. I’d love to read someone else’s bird collection, for example. I’m not a member of the bird kingdom yet myself.

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