A Short Interview w/ Caelyn Cobb

If you haven’t already, read the story now… then read our short interview about the story:

“Time Management” by Caelyn Cobb

Feb 17

Once there was a girl who wanted to be a part of something bigger than herself, and so she moved to a big city and tried to get a job at a company everyone else had heard of before. That didn’t work, but she did land a job, and that job, she was sure, would lead to a better job, one at one of those aforementioned heard-of-before companies. As far as decisions go, it wasn’t the worst one. Some people searching for community end up living in weird New Age compounds or following musicians around to every concert they play for the rest of their lives. Our girl just wanted to work, and for the work to give her meaning.

Aaron Burch: I’m kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?

Caelyn Cobb: This story came from a couple of places: Hilary Leichter’s novel Temporary; the story “Who Will Greet You at Home?” by Leslie Nneka Arimah, and a unionization drive at the publishing house where I'd had my first real job about a decade prior to writing this story. Temporary had me thinking about the world of work in whimsical, but ultimately a bit darkly comic ways, and the story by Arimah, which takes a speculative look at the pressure put upon women to become mothers, had me thinking about the mysticism of spaces created and run by women. And then, in the unionization drive, someone shared a junior staff member’s complaint that mentioning a too-high volume of work to higher-ups was met with seminars about time management. And my reaction was: do you mean, like, how to create more hours in a day? Labor in publishing is always an issue; the thin and unpredictable profit margins of the business pressure us to have as lean of an operation as possible while publishing more and more books. You could work 24/7 and still not get everything done to your satisfaction. On top of this, the amount of extra work you do becomes a badge of honor. I remember, in that first job, we had developed such a culture of competitive overwork amongst ourselves. It was like the first season of Industry with comically lower stakes. So the story comes from that place: how a push to do more for your own ends becomes a way to take back the work for yourselves, and assert your power as a worker.

I love this answer! Love that it came from kinda triangulating three different inspirations. I think that is often true for the strongest stories. With so many stories, you can almost feel like a one-directional inspiration/“idea,” and that often leads to it reading flat and not as complicated or messy as I want a story to be.

I love, too, your note of “do you mean, like, how to create more hours in a day?” and how that then becomes literalized in this story! One of my fave uses of the speculative of a story is exactly this.

Maybe your answer kind of already touches on this, but my own responses here remind me of the comments already on the story. “An engaging corporate fable,” and “Yes, this reads like a fable, minus the lesson that often comes at the end,” and “about time too, that the corporate world started to inspire fairytales.”

I think I often don’t love contemporary “fables” or “fairy tales” because they end up feeling a little more one dimensional than I prefer in my stories. They can too easily fall into the trap of ending with a “lesson” or “moral.” I wonder how much you thought about any or all of this... while writing, in general, but maybe with this story, specifically?