Stories in author and University of Michigan professor Greg Schutz’s new short story collection, Joyriders, demonstrate “how fragile things are.” The characters “share the terror and joy of having learned a life was a thing that could change.”

The short stories in Joyriders track characters who are coping with the course that their lives have taken. The stories take place in both the Midwest, including Wisconsin and Michigan, and rural Appalachia, including North Carolina. They also reveal how the natural world may be its own character in this collection.

For the characters, life sometimes moves very quickly. The story, “To Wound, to Tear, to Pull to Pieces,” brings a young woman who hears about her high school acquaintance’s affair from the distance of an observer. However, she has had her own liaison with an older man, and subsequent heartbreak. She reflects:

In truth, though, it’s not the initial meeting I typically find myself trying to remember as much as the moments that soon followed—sweeping apperceptions of opportunity and risk, and then choices made so suddenly and completely they seemed like they could never be unchosen.

Clarity on what happened requires retrospectively parsing out the events of one’s life.

In “The Sweet Nothings,” generations of a family bear similarities to and departures from the past. Valerie and Mack, once fumbling young adults and now well-established grandparents, give way to a new generation. As she observes her son:

…Valerie turned to her salad. She didn’t have the heart to tell him he was wrong. There were no big ideas, no grand romantic sweeps of time. What were years but stacks of days, hours, minutes, seconds? Life was lived small.

These lessons are hard-earned. Valerie and Mack face challenges in their youth and then must watch as their son Kevin, his partner Miranda, and their son Doyle go through their own stumbles.

Some of the stories in Joyriders supply characters and towns that reappear in multiple stories throughout the collection. “The Little Flashes” and “You Are the Greatest Lake” occur one right after the other and reveal the lives of Thom, his daughter Dot, and his lover. Such related sets of stories inject depth into the inner lives of the characters as the reader sees them in more contexts. The woman who begins an affair with Thom, who is first her carpenter, narrates the evolution of her relationship with him and his daughter. As she worries about Dot’s feelings towards her, she also considers the parallels to her own childhood:

A précis of my childhood would include my parents’ unhappy marriage, infidelities, and contested divorce, shortly followed by my mother’s early death—ovarian cancer, though by the time it was caught it hardly mattered where it had begun—and after that my father’s cool, watery bemusement at my surprise return to his life, an attitude vacillating between half-fond distance and half-distant fondness. But recounting these things to myself has started to feel like being forced to listen to someone else’s dull, garish, idiotically eventful dreams. Turn the page, I think.

Dot, at these moments, is who I’m thinking of. Mooning over.

This little girl, someone else’s child.

The characters face their lives head-on but sometimes want more.

Before his March 14 and March 17 events for Joyriders, Schutz and I talked by email about how long it took to write his new collection, the characters in his stories, sentence and word choice in this book, and what Schutz is reading and writing next.

Q: Joyriders took more than 15 years to write. How did you determine when these stories were ready for publication?
A: There’s an old maxim, attributed to a variety of different artists and thinkers, that says a work of art is never finished, only abandoned. I think there’s some truth here. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten to a place with a story where I’ve known it was “finished,” only that I’ve taken the story as far as I can take it on my own. I’m a slow writer, so this is often a long process: several of the stories in Joyriders took multiple years to write. Fortunately, this patience has typically paid off. Most of these stories quickly found homes in literary journals once I finally felt they were ready to be sent out into the world.

Eventually, I published enough individual stories to start thinking about a collection. That’s how it happened, for me: I didn’t start thinking about Joyriders as a book until relatively late in the process. For the most part, I just kept trying to devote myself to each story, one story at a time. I simply trusted that, because each story felt authentic to me, because each felt like it was coming from a true part of myself. The stories would speak to one another when placed side-by-side, creating a book that would feel patterned, unified, and greater than the sum of its parts.

Q: One unifying aspect is the locations in the book. The collection is set in the Midwest, including Ypsilanti, and in rural Appalachia. What is your connection to these places and landscapes where your stories take place?
A: I was born in Wisconsin and grew up there until I was 12 when my family moved to the mountains of western North Carolina. In 2005, I arrived in Ann Arbor for graduate school, and Michigan has been home for me ever since. So every story in Joyriders is set in or around somewhere I’ve lived. I think ideas for stories often arise, for me, out of the feelings and memories—maybe positive, negative, mixed, or complicated, but always powerful—that these places inspire in me. I always want the quality of intimate attention to the setting to shine through in each story.

Q: Farms, the outdoors, and animals often appear in these stories. A car flips over in a cornfield. A little girl pretends to be a lake: “ ‘I am the Greatest Lake!’ she announces. ‘I’m made entirely of water.’ ” A dog named John Quick connects with his human, Margaret, despite his squirrel-hunting habit. Could the natural world be its own character in these stories? How so? 
A: The natural world as a character in its own right: I like this way of putting it! As I’ve mentioned, all of these stories are set in places that mean something to me, places I’ve called home. Ideally, this means my felt experience in these places manifests itself as vivid and convincing fictional details—the sort of details that make each story’s setting into something characters don’t just move through, but truly live within and interact with.

Meanwhile, my father is a veterinarian, so I spent a lot of time as a child on farms, around animals, and enjoying the outdoors—camping, hiking, and fishing. Growing up outside like that, I think you come to recognize that the natural world really is a character, or rather that it’s full of characters, living beings just as vibrant and fascinating as humans. I’m so glad to hear it feels like I’ve honored that way of experiencing and loving the natural world in these stories.

Q: Regarding the human characters, the narration reflects the characters’ personalities. Doc, the veterinarian who appears in several stories, finds himself confused in contrast to the sharpness of Win, the shelter’s manager: “The world’s no mystery to her, as it so often is to Doc.” When the stories follow Doc, his bewilderment about the world surfaces. How did you get to know, develop, and convey these characteristics about these characters? 
A: I like to remind my creative writing students that the characters in our stories are just the same as the characters in our dreams: no matter what they do, no matter who they appear to be, each one is, ultimately, us. For a character to be truly vivid and alive on the page, I think the writer needs, on some subconscious level, to write from whatever part of himself that character represents. (This connection is subconscious, I want to emphasize. For me, at least, trying to understand it too directly just deadens the emotion. But maybe this reliance on the subconscious, on feeling rather than thought, is why these stories took me so long to write!)

So if Doc is bewildered, gentle, kind, lonely, and occasionally needy, or if Win is sharp, driven, meticulous, principled, and often judgmental, and if these qualities in them feel vivid and real to the reader, it’s only because I can be all of these things myself at times, and because I’ve been able to connect to those qualities—or vices—in myself as I’m writing. In this way, writing can sometimes be a bit like dreaming: a complex work-through of the more tangled parts of my psyche, during which I am partially in charge and partially being pulled along.

Q: Doc, his family, and his community appear in four stories, and there is another pair of stories that contain Thom, his lover, and his daughter, Dot. What kept bringing you back to revisit these characters in multiple stories? 
A: Love, I think, is the shortest answer. The more I work with certain characters, the more I find them connecting me to parts of myself that leave me feeling vulnerable, tender, and deeply fond. I come to love these characters, and to use thinking about them, storytelling about them, as a way of processing my own time in the world. If writing is a bit like dreaming, as I’ve said, then certain characters have a way of coming back again and again, like recurring dreams.

Q: In these related stories about Doc, his daughter Dani, and his wife Susan, the perspective shifts to focus on a different individual in different stories. The reader sees how Dani copes with her mother’s death and interacts with her father in one story, as well as how Doc manages the changes in his life in another. Was it challenging to turn your focus to another character in the same world? Why or why not? 
A: It feels strange to say because I think the effect it creates for the reader is pretty complex, but shifting perspectives like this didn’t feel all that challenging; in fact, it came naturally, even felt necessary, to me. From the very first story I wrote about these characters—the title story of the collection—I felt that each of these linked stories was in some sense about the ways in which people connect or fail to connect based on how they process shared experiences. It was such a joy to write from Dani’s perspective: her intelligence, her aliveness, her brashness, and her sense of humor even in the depths of her grief. Her grief weighs differently from Doc’s, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, and ultimately it leads her in some surprising directions.

Q: The words that you use to tell the stories are both apt and original. Dot “growls sleep at the ceiling” and “boils up to the house.” A young woman “developed a vertiginous sense of my own possibilities.” There is a dog “galumphing about after morsels of food or affection.” How do you go about selecting these well-suited words? 
A: I’m so glad you had this reaction! I love writing sentences—casting a line of text out into the blank of the page, mumbling the words as I go, pausing, grunting unhappily, deleting a phrase, mumbling my way forward again—and when the writing is going well, the experience can be trance-like. I sort of fall into the rhythm of each sentence as it develops, and certain words just seem to suggest themselves, arising naturally out of that rhythm. This is another case in which I try not to consciously overthink things. Instead, I try to trust the feeling the language gives me and allow the story to develop in potentially big, surprising ways that are rooted in the small surprises of language.

Q: Short stories frequently concentrate on choices that characters make, and I see that in your stories. You teach creative writing at the University of Michigan. Has teaching writing shaped how you approach writing? 
A: I know the reverse is true: my own experiences as a writer are formative when it comes to how I teach writing, so I always want to make sure a focus on the subconscious, on the “dreamlike” act of actually writing, and the things we can consciously do in our lives to sustain such dreams and make them more accessible, has as a place in the classroom alongside more conventional craft lessons and exercises.

As for how teaching has affected my writing, I think the most obvious effect has been inspiration. With their energy, their excitement about writing, their willingness to dig deeply into themselves in pursuit of art—despite all the noise out in the world telling them that doing so isn’t important because it isn’t profitable—my students consistently inspire me. If you want to have a little bit of your hope for the future restored, spend some time in a good undergraduate creative writing classroom.

Q: What are you reading and recommending? 
A: I recently read Thoreau’s Walden for the first time, and I was stunned by how entertaining it was, how full of energy and cranky wisdom. On the fiction side of the ledger, The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant is a treasure. Anyone with any interest in the short story as a form should be studying and celebrating Gallant; there’s no one better. I also recently got my hands on Patricia Henley’s story collection Other Heartbreaks, and I’ve been wildly impressed—the stories are so clear-eyed, moving, and natural. Why wasn’t I reading her already?

Finally, I might simply offer Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” (in New Collected Poems) as a poem worth reading, taking to heart, and drawing resilience from the state of the world being what it is. My partner has taped a copy to our bathroom mirror, and I’m glad to see it each morning.

Q: What is next for you and your writing? 
A: I’m currently working on two fronts. On the one hand, I’m writing more stories, and already I have a sense of the kind of collection they might ultimately compose. But we’ll see!

My other current project is nonfiction: a hybrid work of memoir, theory, and craft, exploring parallels between angling and art-making in an era during which “the death of the short story” is often predicted and the natural world seems gravely threatened. Yet both these things, I believe, are still capable of bringing us meaning and joy. Who knows whether the title will stick, but because much of the book is set in and around the waterways of Washtenaw and Livingston counties, I’ve been calling it The Book of Small Lakes.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.

Greg Schutz will discuss “Joyriders” and be in conversation with novelist and U-M professor Peter Ho Davies on Friday, March 14 at 6:30 pm at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor. He also will discuss “Joyriders” with Brian Cox on Monday, March 17 at 6:30 pm at Serendipity Books, 108 East Middle Street, Chelsea.