A Little Bit of Magic: A Conversation with Cameron Walker
Cameron Walker has published three books, including the award-winning children’s book National Monuments of the U.S.A. (Wide Eyed Editions 2023) and the essay collection Points of Light: Curious Essays on Science, Nature, and Other Wonders Along the Pacific Coast (Hidden River 2024). Now, with her debut short story collection, How to Capture Carbon: Stories (What Books Press 2024), her love of the natural world and her experience of motherhood merge with a lifelong delight in the fantastical, creating a collection that is surprising and profound.
Walker’s essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Orion, and High Country News, and her short fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, PANK, New South, and Carve. Her work has received awards from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the American Institute of Physics, and Terrain.org. She lives on California’s central coast with her husband, three kids, one dog, and an embarrassing number of surfboards.
Novelist and writing coach Heidi Reimer chatted with Walker over email about the genesis of How to Capture Carbon, the ways motherhood has informed Cameron’s work, and how she can’t seem to prevent magic from emerging in her fiction (and finally stopped trying). This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
HEIDI REIMER: One thing I’m fascinated by in How to Capture Carbon—partly because this is so different from my own fiction—is the way your stories are thoroughly grounded in reality until they stray suddenly but organically into the bizarre. Can you talk about how this happens for you? Are the magical elements part of your idea from the start, or do they take you by surprise in the midst of an otherwise “normal” world? How does magic allow you to explore truths of mothering or climate change or grief in ways that pure realism wouldn’t?
CAMERON WALKER: I tend not to interrogate what’s happening when I write, but it took years (many, many years!) to learn not to resist this tendency. I grew up reading a lot of fantasy and fairy tales, often adult fantasy because we didn’t have all of the wonderful young-adult fantasy books that are being written today. But then when I started to write fiction—first on my own, then as part of an MFA program—I started to read more traditional literary fiction and short stories by writers like Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, and Raymond Carver. I wanted to write the way they did, which was usually fairly straightforward realism, both because I loved these writers and their stories so much, and because this seemed like the way “serious” writers wrote. If I had a story that started getting a little out of line, I quickly reined it back into reality. There were a lot of stories about people on the subway and in cafés having deep thoughts.
My kids got me back into more of that fantastical mode. They liked stories I made up that had these whimsical elements, like a pumpkin farm where the pumpkins got as big as skyscrapers or a brother and sister with a flying house. I also started paying attention to some of the stories that I REALLY loved. I mean, I will drop everything if I see a new story by Karen Russell or Helen Oyeyemi or George Saunders, who all use a lot of magic in their writing.
And looking at some of these complicated issues—mothering, climate change, or grief—with a little bit of magic helps me get at them sideways, and in a language that seems more accessible for me (and, I hope, for a reader). The stories open up for me in a way that my “realistic” stories didn’t. Although there is still a part of me that wishes I could just write a straightforward story without any tricks.
That’s why I always love talking with you about these things. I know you have spent a lot of time thinking about the psychological/emotional side of writing, and how we might be setting up these barriers for ourselves. I mean, why should I feel like it’s cheating to write in a way that seems to be more natural to me and that readers seem to respond to?
But back to your original question about how magic emerges in the writing: I also think that some of those bigger ideas about mothering, or about the natural world, emerge organically.
HR: I love this answer, because I think it speaks to the vitality that can live on the page when we don’t try to control the narrative too much. It’s also a strong argument for allowing ourselves to love what we love! And I’m delighted that having kids is part of what helped you embrace your true voice in your writing because the more common perception can be that having kids is a complication and obstacle to creative work. It certainly can be, but several of the stories in How to Capture Carbon feature either a parent or a child protagonist, and I wonder if you can say more about how being a mother informs and nourishes your work—perhaps in ways you never expected?
CW: I think being a mother made me feel more connected to the world and more curious about how the world works. In those first early weeks and months of parenthood, it was totally destabilizing. I remember being in bed at one point and I could see two pairs of feet and I wasn’t sure which set was mine and which was the baby’s. Everything felt so porous! (Also, maybe I hadn’t slept very much.) But even now, I feel like my kids show me so much about the world—through the things they notice, the questions they have that I’ve forgotten to ask, through their interests, just through who they are. And I think all of this goes into my writing in one way or another.
Also, the amount of slowing down I needed to do, particularly with young kids, was really helpful to my writing, even though I resisted it at first (and have resisted at various points along the way). I was on bedrest for about a month with my first baby, which was NOT what I had imagined, but it ended up forcing me to move more slowly. Even now, in the moments when I can release whatever idea I have about how fast I can get things done and just be present (which is not always!), I can feel my mind open up into that weird, timeless space that also appears sometimes when I write.
HR: Your mention of feet—yours and your baby’s—makes me think of the closing story, “Shoeless,” in which a mother wakes one morning to find that all the family’s shoes have disappeared. Every effort to find or replace them is thwarted in one perplexing, semi-magical way after another. It’s a deeply moving story as the mother experiences real grief and ultimately a form of acceptance of their barefoot state. Other, deeper losses of her past emerge: a grandmother, a beloved pet, a longed-for pregnancy, ultimately even her own once-known self. (Tellingly, she doesn’t have a name but is called simply “the mother” . . . I think that can’t have been an accident?) Where did the idea for this story originate, and how did it develop?
CW: I’d written a draft of “Shoeless” as part of an online class in 2020 with Sabrina Orah Mark, who is a wonderful teacher and writer and author of the book Happily: A Personal History with Fairy Tales (Penguin Random House 2023). The prompt was to write about something mundane or essential that disappears from the world, and she gave us the example of Aimee Bender’s short story “Appleless,” which inspired the title. (I am also fascinated with Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox scandal.)
I remember the first draft gushing out of me. Shoes were a big issue in our family at the time—several of my kids really did not like to wear shoes or were very particular about their shoes, so we’d show up at places with very old shoes, or only one shoe, or no shoes at all. And older women would stop to tell me that my children were going to catch a cold or hurt their feet. One of the freeing things about that early pandemic time was that there was no more arguing about shoes!
But then I set that draft aside—I was working on other things, and I felt like maybe I’d gotten what I needed out of writing it. Three years later, when the editors came back to me about finding another story, I pulled it out again to see if it had any juice left. I cut a lot of the shoe ranting (I’d gotten it out of my system by then) and started thinking about ways to develop a series of escalating challenges for a shoeless family. In the process, I figured out more about the losses that the mother was grieving along with the lost shoes.
And then I had a power session with my writing group. We met in another of Sabrina’s classes and have stayed in touch ever since. I asked them to take a look at “Shoeless,” we met over Zoom last fall, and I scribbled down notes as they talked about the story. When I incorporated their feedback and slid the story into place, I realized it had a nice resonance as the final story. It comes back to some of the questions that the other stories are asking, and—I think—it ends on a more hopeful note.
HR: Can you expand a little more on how you and your editors approached shaping these stories into a collection? Since many of the stories were previously published in literary journals and were presumably written as discrete pieces over time, was there some work to do to create a cohesive journey?
CW: Early on, I did some work in thinking about the length and feel of the stories as a group—I wanted to give readers a little break after a longer or heavier story by following it with a shorter or lighter story.
While I was putting together the collection in earnest, I was taking classes with poet Tess Taylor. First, I was in one of her poetry workshops, with another terrific group of writers, and then she said that she was offering a course on how to put together a poetry collection through Hugo House, a literary arts center in Seattle. In the class, we read a number of collections and talked about how they were organized.
What stuck with me is the idea of constellations—grouping poems that might share qualities like tone, or subject, or even word choice. I loved this idea, in part because I’m particularly fascinated by the night sky and the stories we tell about it, and because this seemed manageable for a person who has trouble with more straightforward structure. So I moved stories around until I could see how they might be connected to each other.
What’s been really interesting is hearing other people’s responses to the connections among the stories. They often notice patterns and links that I didn’t imagine. It feels like another way to be surprised by my writing. That’s what I love about reading, too—having my own experience in a world that the writer has created—and it’s so cool to see this happening for someone else when they read my book.