Q&A with J. McCormack

This week we had the opportunity to publish “Yesterdayland” by J. McCormack, a piece that brilliantly displays how fragments can come together to create such a complete, memorable, human story. Mina El Attar, one of our editors, interviewed McCormack about the experience of writing this piece and its inspiration.

1. I'd love to know more about what inspired this story. Does it stem from personal experience or a connection to your life? Was it an observation that became something deeper? Or was it simply something that sprouted on the page?

I’ve lived in Malmö for 16 years. It’s a really multicultural city and I think that influenced my character choices.

As to the setting, I was at a flat-warming party, with a huge tv screen in the living room. The Tomorrowland festival was on that screen and a guy was telling me about it. I was entranced by how much it felt like a construct - the set, obviously, but even the happy crowd. I think that drove me back there, to fill the space with problems. 

2. What form did 'Yesterdayland' initially take? Is it or has it ever been part of a longer story?

It came out as a bunch of connected moments that I assembled a story around. When it was done, I reorganised them, then wondered if I had written a micro-novel, if there’s such a thing? That’s funny, because the one thing I am not writing is novels. I used to be really into stories that are long in the telling, like Halldor Laxness’ ‘Independent People’. These days, people read less. I don’t want people to stop reading bricks, but I’m curious about compression.

3. I like that the events of the story jump around, almost as though we are following the fragmented thoughts of the narrator. Is this something you do frequently? What inspired this style in this particular story?

I think the only big decision I made from the outset was to write about how care brings meaning to lives, irrespective of gender, and to represent that care in the various lives, I had to hop. 

I used this hopping once before for an anthology that Gothenburg University released called ‘Staden’ (The City). Then it was autofiction and a way of compressing my experience of my local community, but there wasn’t the same narrative thread in that text.

4. What emotions do you hope to evoke in your readers? Is there a particular message you're aiming to convey? 

I have a dialogue with myself about how my broken bits inform the unbroken. I can be ashamed of them or think they’ve held me back, but they can be insightful, or the first parts to extend curiosity or kindness, so I’m trying to stop disowning them. If ‘Yesterdayland’ could convey anything, it would be that. 

5. How did the process of writing this story affect you? When you read it again, do you still see it the same way you did initially? Or does something else stand out--a different feeling or perspective?

I made a u-turn. My first instinct was to have Patrick’s goodbye to his father be a formality. When I decided instead to have him dig around for a fond memory to recount, I cried. Even if it’s all made up, I felt like I had made the right choice by him.

Then it got a bit spooky after I wrote the story. I opened the news on my phone this summer to see the set of Tomorrowland ablaze. It’s lucky that didn’t happen when people were there.

Likewise, I wrote the dialogue about Jimmy Carter shortly before his death. I wanted to hint at a time with a different range of values and Carter’s obituaries mirrored that sentiment.