ESQUIRE BALL, STORIES FROM THE GREAT BLACK SWAMP: Q&A with Lisa Slage Robinson

Bloom spoke with Lisa Slage Robinson about her debut short story collection, which is out now from Black Lawrence Press.

Leah De Forest: First, congratulations on Esquire Ball. Can you tell me a bit about how this book came about?

Lisa Slage Robinson: Thank you so much. Esquire Ball is an extension of my MFA thesis, “Salad Days”, which won the Best Thesis in Fiction Award at Chatham University. During my time at Chatham I was thinking about this quote from Antony and Cleopatra: “My salad days / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood.” I wanted to explore the tyranny of youthful ambition, what happens when all that exuberant drive goes unchecked by discernment or care for the consequences. I wondered who and what will be the collateral damage left it its wake?

I was interested in not the big questions of good vs evil but the gray side of ethics, the small moral choices being made every day. Esquire Ball became a collection of thirteen stories linked by a fictional law firm and a young female attorney. The collection delves into the invisible landscape of ambition, how the drive to succeed leads to subtle tyrannies, and how women navigate their professional terrain within a traditionally white male sphere. The stories are set predominantly in 1980s Northwest Ohio, a region known as The Great Black Swamp—farmland, a college town, and the city of Toledo built on the ghost of a vast impenetrable swamp where strange things happened, where people disappeared in the muck. The stories contemplate the altered landscape, the violent severing of people and trees from the land, the draining of the swamp.

Leah: Many of these stories deal with the practice of the law. Can you talk about why that subject matter interested you?

Lisa: While I was a student at Chatham, my much younger peers (twenty and thirty somethings) were writing about their contemporary exploits, the dramas of young adulthood, their romances, addictions, work experiences, and travels. There was so much energy, raw emotion, grit and beauty and horror in their narratives which I deeply admired. I had recently switched from a concentration in writing for children to literary fiction. I was casting about, trying to find my voice and to find stories that I could write. I wanted to emulate and to entertain my peers, to write a coming-of-age story about characters in their 20s learning how to be an adult.

Because I spent my twenties in law school, studying for the bar exam, practicing law in a big law firm in Ohio and then started all over again after I moved to Canada where I articled with a very large law firm on Bay Street in Toronto, and then passed the bar again in a foreign country before I returned to the States and took yet another bar exam in Pennsylvania and started over again, my coming of age experience was firmly planted in the law. As a young lawyer, I was in love with the law, but did not have the experience of time or mature discernment to fully understand the small moral choices that I was being asked to make on a daily basis by the partners who directed my work on behalf of our clients. I often had this itchy, uncertain feeling that maybe I wasn’t on the right side of an issue. But I knew that my side would almost always win in court because of the deep pockets of my clients and the resources available to a large firm. I wanted to interrogate those young associates, to understand what they would be willing to do to succeed in pursuit of becoming a partner someday. What emotions and grit and horror could I uncover?

Leah: Landscape is so important in this book. Reflecting on the stories, my mind’s eye is full of grain silos, trees, bodies of water, fields. How do you see the relationship between your characters and these places?

Lisa: I was so lucky to study at Chatham, the alma mater of Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), where landscape and the environment take center stage.

It took me a long time to realize that landscape is more than just window dressing, the drapes and the wallpaper of a story, that landscape could be a character, a force to reckon with, the catalyst for change and self-discovery for the human characters who interact with it. It exposes hubris, can lead to enlightenment (as with the tree in “Legend”) and lead to death as in the case of the silo in “Swimming Lessons.”

Leah: The characters in some of these stories recur. How did that evolve?

Lisa: As I began to pull the stories together, using the law firm of Strathy McMahon as part of the connective tissue, I wanted to explore how the lawyers’ pursuit of success affected others outside of the firm. How did they interact with siblings, and spouses and random people they meet? So I took them out of the law firm and into their homes and the Toledo Zoo and poker games and revisited their pasts and foresaw their futures. As the universe of Esquire Ball grew, it was fun to go back through the various narratives and make the connections tighter, combining characters and changing names to make the collection cohesive.

Leah: Frogs. Why frogs?

Lisa: Frogs! Yes! Frogs arrived via a little research detour to answer a mundane question—how to get Cissy Armstrong (the main character who ribbons in and out of most of the stories) from her waterfront office building to the Lucas County Courthouse. Most of the stories in the collection take place in Toledo, Ohio, where I first practiced law. And at this point the stories were firmly rooted in realism. Through my research of the Lucas County Courthouse, I discovered that there is a tile mosaic of a rather charming frog in the rotunda. The courthouse designed by the architect David L. Stein was built in the late 1890s in the Beaux Arts style that was popular at the time and incorporated, in keeping with the style, whimsical details that would reflect the region. In addition to the mosaic, frogs can be found on the exterior of the building in the ornately carved triumphal arches. Sandstone frogs are also hidden in the rusticated stone at the base of the building.

Because Toledo was marshy and built upon the ghost of a swamp (the swamp, known as The Great Black Swamp, was drained in the 1850s) the area was inundated with frogs and Toledo earned the nickname Frogtown. Thinking about the frogs and the swamp ignited my imagination and suddenly there were frogs everywhere not only in my imagination but out in the world and in the stories I serendipitously encountered. I was inspired by Steven Millhauser’s New Yorker story, “A Visit,” in which a writer travels upstate to meet up with an old friend and his new bride. When he arrives, he finds that his friend’s wife is a frog. He ponders what kind of romantic life the friend will have with his frog wife. I also was inspired by Italo Calvino’s retelling of the Italian fairytale “The Prince Who Married a Frog” in which a young prince inherits the kingdom because of his frog bride’s superior performance of tasks at the request of the King. It suddenly made sense to me that the young associate, Trevor, in the story “Esquire Ball,” who desperately wanted a wife to help him become a partner, would need a frog bride.

Leah: A number of your stories have male narrators; often, they are characters wrestling with their masculinity. What interests you most about this, as a writer?

Lisa: Because the stories take place mostly in the 80s (with a detour in the 70s and the present day) I wanted to address the sexism that was ever present in the workplace and at home. While the doors were open to women or at least slightly ajar, and there was an attempt to make things “equal” or at least to look equal, it was a confusing time. Sometimes the sexism was blatant but most of the time, it was subtle, simmering under the surface. I wanted to interrogate and understand these men who were confronted for the first time with these women who had agency in their lives. And who may have been threatened with changing roles and mores. They didn’t know yet that a competent woman did not take away from their own agency, their own competency. I tried to present a counter narrative in the story “Drive” where the Captain delights in and encourages Cissy to find herself, to revel in her drive, her hunger for success.

Leah: How long did it take you to write this book?

Lisa: It took ten years from start to publication. So eight years in writing. But I would say that I muddled around for about two years finding the cohesive spark for the collection, the connective tissue of the law firm and the swamp, the locus from which all of the stories sprang before I hit my stride. I did a lot of research to make sure that I accurately described the law and legal theories that were available and in the correct jurisdiction at the time the stories took place. (I fear that some astute lawyer will notice an error in how I presented the law—but I did my best!)

Leah: What’s been the best thing about publishing this book?

Lisa: Just one best thing? There are so many opportunities that have arisen from publishing this book and I’ve met some wonderful people along the way and have reconnected with friends and colleagues who I haven’t seen in years. I will say that after toiling in obscurity for ten years, the mountain of rejections and all of the self-talk necessary to keep going, having a published book is a physical manifestation of all the “invisible” work I’ve been doing.

I often tell people that it’s easier to become a lawyer (than a published author) because there is a prescribed path, a milestone you have to meet in a very ordered manner along the way. The road to publication is crooked and bumpy and less certain.

Leah: What’s been the most surprising thing?

Lisa: I was surprised by how much work happens after the manuscript is accepted for publication. Eighteen months seemed like a long time for the production schedule but every minute was necessary for editing, acquiring blurbs, picking a cover, cover design, interior design. And all of the marketing. Which is working completely different muscles. Learning how to advocate for my work, to advocate for these stories without feeling icky about it. I complained to a wonderful neighbor who is a marketing exec about how I felt uncomfortable with self-promotion. Her advice to me was “Get over it!” And think I have.

Leah: What advice do you have for other writers who may be “blooming in their own time”?

Lisa: Enjoy the process. Allow yourself to take detours, follow what inspires you. There’s so much joy in the doing.

I enjoy research and spent a lot of happy hours in newspaper archives, and history books and personal narratives. For the story “Heat Wave,” which is about the very hot summer in 1988 when the Giant Panda bears arrived at the Toledo Zoo (much to the chagrin of more prominent zoos), I read many books about Panda conservation, panda estrus, the very small window of ovulation—36 hours once a year—bamboo forests and the WWF lawsuit filed against the Toledo Zoo, alleging commercial exploitation of the pandas and seeking to send the pandas back to China. But my favorite books were about Ruth Harkness, a fashion designer and socialite who brought to the US in 1936, a baby panda (the first live panda to arrive in the States) who adorably rode in taxis and attended cocktail parties with Ruth in NYC. I wasn’t able to shoehorn Ruth into the story, but I infused Sarah, the lonely housewife who has an affair with a Chinese panda keeper, with Ruth’s desire for adventure, to live beyond the cage of social constraints imposed on women.

Don’t despair of time. It takes as long as it takes. And know that rejection is part of the process. Rejection is not a sign to quit, it means that you are doing the work.

Leah: What’s next for you?

Lisa: I’m working on a novel. A Wizard of Oz meets Frankenstein exploration of Constitutional law.

Lisa Slage Robinson writes to explore invisible landscapes and magical feminism. She is the author of Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Black Swamp (Black Lawrence Press, February 2026). Her work has appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, PRISM International, Necessary Fiction, Pittsburgh Review of Books, Writers Digest and elsewhere. A former corporate attorney and litigator, Lisa practiced law in the States and Canada where she was called to bar by the Law Society of Upper Canada. She holds a JD from Case Western Reserve, and an MFA from Chatham University. Currently, she serves as a Director at Autumn House Press and Contributing Editor for TONGUE. Lisa lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and keeps the lights on for their daughters who still like to come home.

Leah De Forest was born in Geelong, Australia, and lives in Boston. Her debut novel, Any Kind of Known Tomorrow, is out from Betty on 9/15/26. Her fiction, essays and criticism have appeared in Griffith Review, CRAFT Literary, Fiction Writers Review, and Kill Your Darlings, among other venues. Leah is a senior editor at Bloom.