Q&A with Sarah Starr Murphy
We are very excited to be adding an incredible piece of flash fiction from Sarah Starr Murphy to The Wild Umbrella! One of our editors, Sophia Blush, interviewed Murphy and gained some insight on the inspiration and writing of “Dark Roast.”
What sparked this piece? How did you decide to center the moments inside the coffee shop?
The first line simply popped into my head, which almost never happens. While my protagonist could have been anywhere, I decided to set the story in a coffee shop as a challenge to myself. I think most stories set in cafes don’t work, possibly because so many writers attempt them while sitting inside cafes. This can lead to the work feeling very narrow and observational. I did my best to transcend that here. (I made a point not to write this one in a coffee shop.) My own preferences aside, cafes are important social gathering places worthy of artistic consideration. I suppose every writer has a coffee shop story in them somewhere.
There is a real sense of dread throughout the whole piece – about the interview, about being late, but also about global warming, the world ending. Yet, it’s a pretty short piece. How did you decide what to focus on?
Absolutely – space is of the essence. With flash, I usually write much more than I need in a first draft and then cut mercilessly. Here, the protagonist’s anxiety allowed me to flit from crisis to crisis. The overarching concern is climate change, but that’s entangled with her other worries. I wrote this last summer, which was brutal. Sweating under a ghastly brownish-orange sky, inhaling burning Canadian forests, it’s hard to avoid a feeling of doom. It’s a crisis, clearly, one that requires collective action. But for many people, like my protagonist, it’s hard to figure out how to help. It’s easy to feel like nothing you do is enough. At the same time, no matter how worried you are, you’re not exempt from things like paying bills or calling your mom or making dinner. Big crises of all sorts exist right alongside our petty concerns, and that’s what I wanted to capture. Once I knew that was my focus, I just had to whittle the story down.
Tell me a bit about your style. Who inspires you? Did you have any specific influences when writing this piece?
My biggest inspiration always comes from the staff and writers I’ve been lucky enough to work with at The Forge, where I’m managing editor. Getting a glimpse into the writing processes of such wildly diverse artists is thrilling. When I first started writing seriously, I read a lot of Carmen Maria Machado, Amber Sparks, Patricia Highsmith, and Shirley Jackson. In the past year, I’ve fallen in love with story collections by Bora Chung, Jan Carson, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Megan Kamalei KaKimoto. Influences spread like jellyfish tendrils, and I find it impossible to untangle them for any one piece. I can say I learn equally from writers whose styles are like mine and those whose styles are very different.
I absolutely loved the ending – the shift of perspective to the barista, that striking image. How did you decide to end the piece in that way?
Thank you! I wrote probably a dozen different endings, trying out very grounded, very speculative, and everything in-between. I was lucky enough to get some great critique that pushed me in the right direction. I settled on this version because I’m always interested in women who get shoved to the background, as the barista does here. I wanted to end on a note of semi-hope and she seemed the best choice. I wanted to raise the possibility of escaping stasis and remind myself that we can insist on collective change – our futures aren’t set.
