AnaMaria Curtis is from the part of Illinois that is very much not Chicago. She’s the winner of the LeVar Burton Reads Origins & Encounters Writing Contest and the 2019 Dell Magazines Award, and her work has been published in magazines including Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. In her free time, AnaMaria enjoys starting fights about 19th-century British literature and getting distracted by dogs. “Something Small Enough to Ask For” is her fourth appearance in Uncanny, a quietly poignant tale of memories, relationships, and pockets embroidered on the inside.
Uncanny Magazine: This is a beautiful story of family, sewing projects, and memories. What was your starting point or inspiration?
AnaMaria Curtis: Honestly, I wanted to write a story with the title “The Pocket Dimension” because I thought it would be fun. I’d been playing around with that as a phrase (in a very unscientific way), and that brought me around to the idea of being able to go somewhere not by stepping out into the world but by moving inward somehow—and from there it felt natural to think about literal pockets. I associate sewing with family, so layering that in was the next step. Obviously, the story evolved quite a bit from this starting point (and shed the title on the way), but much of the inspiration really came from playing around with words in this way.
I think, however unconscious it was at the time, that I also meant it as an homage to “Pockets” by Amal El-Mohtar. “Pockets” holds a really wonderful tenderness, and it has a thread about needing something from other people and offering back to them what you have, and I think (hope) that some of that got woven into my story too.
Uncanny Magazine: I love the depiction of Lucy and her relationship with her grandmother. How do you come up with your characters? As you are writing, do they ever do anything you don’t expect?
AnaMaria Curtis: I’m very much someone who constructs my characters rather than excavating or otherwise discovering them. I tend to build characters around what they want (and how that relates to the story I want to tell) and their relationships with other characters. So, when I was creating Lucy, I knew that I wanted her to have a positive, relatively uncomplicated relationship with her grandmother and a more distant, wary relationship with the rest of the world. Other parts of her characterization came in layers, some of which come from me and some of which just sort of fit. She loves the beach and wants to be a marine biologist because the end of the story takes place on a beach—and because I had a really good time walking along a beach with my friend Barbara one time. She picks up a pebble at the end at least in part because I love rocks so much that my friend Fae brought me the perfect stone back from Greece (seriously, it is shaped exactly right for holding, and I love it so much).
Because I build my characters in this way, they don’t often do something I don’t expect. However, they do sometimes refuse to do something, so I’ll have to circle back and figure out why it doesn’t work for them to do that and how to move the story forward in another way.
Uncanny Magazine: One of the themes explored in “Something Small Enough to Ask For” is the tension between memories of the past and living in the present moment. What drew you to this theme?
AnaMaria Curtis: I’m someone who spends a lot of time thinking about things that have already happened and things that haven’t happened yet—and things that might happen and things that could have happened. I think it’s probably in the nature of writers to spend a lot of time living in our heads, but I’m very aware that that can be isolating and a little bit dangerous. In some ways, this story was an instruction manual to myself. It’s me saying, hey, I know, but get out there. Do something. Meet some new people. It’ll be okay.
I’ve moved continents since first writing the story, and my reaction to change is usually to hide, so it’s been advice that I’ve continued to need and (mostly) use!
Uncanny Magazine: The story has lovely descriptions of the embroidery and sewing projects that Lucy and Grandma Irene are working on at various points in time—do you sew? If you do, are there any projects that stand out as favorites? If not, what are some of your hobbies?
AnaMaria Curtis: I do sew! My great-grandmother taught me to sew when I was a kid, and I’ve always really loved the process of creation, of taking a roll of fabric and turning it into something that can be incorporated into daily life as a garment. I’ll be the first to admit that I sew very chaotically, but I have fun. One project I’m very proud of is a dress I created for a company holiday party a few years ago. It was made with stretch velvet, which is a nightmare to sew with, but it was so rewarding to get to the end of it and have my dramatic bishop sleeves and my skirt that hit just where I wanted it to and, of course, my lovely big pockets!
Uncanny Magazine: There is lovely worldbuilding in this story, with lots of little details that help readers feel grounded in this story’s world. What are some of your favorite fictional worlds, in literature or other media?
AnaMaria Curtis: This is a surprisingly tricky question for me! Part of it is that it’s difficult to separate a world from its story or vice versa, and I tend to get really attached to characters and emotional arcs, which are often connected with worlds but are not necessarily reliant on them. That said, I love and have tried to learn from the worldbuilding in The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. I’m not someone who really imagines things visually, but I still feel like I can see the doors of the stone city and the blue castle-within-a-castle she describes in those books. So many small details (all the words for tents!, malak, the not-coffee, not-tea drink!, the giant hunting cats!) from that world still live in my brain.
On a totally different track, Highbury (the setting of Jane Austen’s Emma) is another one of my favorite worlds. I often think about the similarities between worldbuilding in the very traditional speculative fiction sense and the worldbuilding that’s being done in Austen or other fiction written and/or set in the past, where I as a contemporary reader am having to figure out what certain words mean and how different social rules work without explicitly being told. Highbury is this really expertly constructed world where the limited number of characters and the set social dynamics are a huge constraint for the main character and play into the plot in a really interesting way. The world, though it’s technically just a small fictional town in England, is absolutely crucial to who the characters are and what they do, which I just love.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
AnaMaria Curtis: I’m at a bit of a crossroads right now! I’m doing a lot of revision on short stories (one about two codependent high school best friends except one of them turns into a flower at night, one with the current working title “betrayal: the toxic lesbian love story”), but I’m also trying to figure out which longer project idea I want to try to focus on for the next few months. I like to try to write something long every few years just so the mental muscles don’t atrophy, but I love short stories so much, and I always miss the thrill of finishing something quickly!
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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