The title of Lori Ostlund’s new story collection, Are You Happy? (272 pages; Astra House), suggests the quandary of whether Ostlund is interrogating the usefulness of the question itself or exploring whether her characters are genuinely happy. A few stories in—with a cast of characters including a girl who is molested by a coach, a loving couple whose son dies, and a woman who discovers a peeping tom—the issue becomes moot.

Gauging the happiness of others and ourselves is a social instinct and a practice, and interrogation is a constant part of that process. Within her stories, Ostlund captures how people struggle to find spots of happiness, like divers coming up for air.

Ostlund’s immense power as a writer comes grasping social dynamics in such precise terms that her insights are almost mathematically poetic (for example, her inventive phrasing of “vertical history” or “parallel sleeping”). She is a master at deploying shifts of observation and noticing small transformations within characters, illuminating her stories’ premises. The brilliant clarity of her writing rewards the reader with distinct insights into the mess of the human world—its vices and vicissitudes—while still rendering the complexity of it all.

Ostlund is also the author of the novel After the Parade, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her first book, The Bigness of the World, received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. And her stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, New England Review, and ZYZZYVA, where two of the stories in her new collection were first published.

She has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has served as the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award since 2022. She lives in San Francisco with her wife, the writer Anne Raeff.

This interview was conducted over Zoom and has been edited for length and clarity.

ZYZZYVA: When did your first book come out?

Lori Ostlund: When I was 44. I won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2008. The collection, The Bigness of the World, came out in 2009; in some ways, this felt like a long runway to publication. That was just the length of time it took–I was doing other things and earning a living and just exploring the world. I think that I had a lot that I needed to understand, including about my voice and style. At one point, after I saw my first story in print, I decided that I needed to stop submitting work to journals and just focus on figuring out who I was as a writer. I wrote and read for a couple of years, and when I felt that I had arrived at my voice, I began sending work out again. That was actually when things felt more difficult, because I still was getting rejections—better rejections, but rejections. It was in the midst of this that I won the Flannery O’Connor Award.

Z: I wonder if publishing later in a writer’s life will be affected by there now being so many platforms like Substack on which to publish.

LO: I’ve often wondered whether we do harm with this whole idea that you’ve got to go right into an MFA program after college, then come out of it and publish your first book with a big house when you’re twenty-seven. This works for some people, but when I was twenty-seven, I did not understand the world. I did not understand my voice.

I don’t think it was a bad thing that I didn’t get really serious about writing until I was a bit older. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I understood that I had a lot of reading and traveling to do first, especially because I had grown up fairly isolated from the world, and when I left the small town I grew up in, I just wanted to be out experiencing the world.

There were six years between my first book and my second, and now ten years between my novel and this third book. But a lot happened in those ten years that changed me, so I don’t regret this.

I have learned that in order to write well, I have to be living fully in the world, and the last ten years have brought a lot of change to my life. First, my wife and I became foster parents for an LGBTQ teen, and then we went on to sponsor LGBTQ refugees via Rainbow Railroad, an organization that worked under a government program to match Private Sponsor Groups with refugees.

Z: Could you tell me more about your involvement with Rainbow Railroad and the LGBTQ+ community in general?

LO: Anne and I became foster parents in 2019, during a period when we were both feeling a bit despairing and wanted to do something to be more deeply involved, something more than just reading the news and donating money and making phone calls, all of which are important, but those things never make me feel useful or particularly hopeful.

We had never wanted to be parents, despite friends suggesting we would be good at it, but we knew that foster parents for LGBTQ+ youth were in short supply, even here in San Francisco, and so we became parents to a teenager.

Then, in 2023, we learned about Rainbow Railroad and applied to volunteer as sponsors. We had to form a team, which we did, and in early 2024, our first sponsee, Cabrel, arrived. He is fully launched now and doing very well. All of this consumed a lot of time and energy, of course, and there were long periods when I did not write. But in late 2022, I went back to working on some abandoned stories with a fervor, and by 2023, I had a collection ready. It includes eight stories and a novella, three of which were written during that final big push. Others were written much earlier, but the collection is held together by some of my main preoccupations, among them the specter of violence that hangs over the LGBTQ community. 

Z: How do you see things having changed for the LGBTQ community, and how is that reflected in your writing?

LO: I was born in 1965, so I came of age in a much different time in terms of being LGBTQ. The last story that I wrote for the collection, “The Stalker,” takes place in the 1990s, with events that are, in part, defined by that time period, a period during which so many of us were still in the closet at work.

The story was inspired by my own experience with a stalker at work—I taught freshman composition for years—and as I wrote, I thought a lot about questions related to power structures in the classroom: specifically, is the professor always the one in power? How does the balance change if the professor is a young woman dealing with a much bigger and older man, one whose actions are erratic, even threatening? How does it change if she desperately needs to keep this job to pay bills? And is she more vulnerable if she is a lesbian and closeted?

In reality, I had a very supportive boss. She understood the situation and managed it as well as one could at that time. But I was interested in getting at a deeper truth, and so while I used the memory of my own situation—the fear I’d felt—as a spark, the story is fiction. Part of a stalker’s intention is to take up space in a person’s head, keeping them frightened and fearful that something might happen. In this collection, I have stories about tragedies that had happened—the “before and after” of tragedy—but other stories, including this one, are about the potential for violence and how living with that fear alters us.

Z: Can we talk about Minnesota, where you spent many formative years? Minnesota’s a particular ecosystem, its frigid climate, except in the summer, cuts through any sort of social bullshit. When you’re freezing, you don’t censor your behavior. I remember when I was there just being glad to see human beings while walking around a frozen lake, where people were ice-fishing and para-sailing on skates.

LO: I’ve lived away from Minnesota much longer than I lived in it. I left when I was 22 or 23. But I write a lot about it because it really shaped me. You have to know the rules, maybe: what people mean by things, how to interpret both what is said and what is not said. I suppose that this is true of all places. But what I have realized over the years is that I don’t always know the rules, or I think I know them, but then I’m wrong. I like being from Minnesota. I feel like it shaped me completely, in both good ways and in bad ways, and I’m interested in places that assert a really strong control. Anne always says that Minnesota is the most different place she’s ever been that does not require a passport. To be clear, she is fascinated by Minnesota and has a real affinity for Minnesotans, but that doesn’t mean that she “gets” Minnesota fully, either.

First, there’s that politeness that can be hard to read. When Anne and I owned our Asian furniture business in New Mexico, there was one time when we were dealing with the phone company, and Anne called them and was really New York-y, yelling and trying to fix the problem that way.  When it  didn’t work, she hung up and said to me, “Call them and be really polite,” because for her, that’s terrifying. If I’m mad at someone, she can tell because I get this certain formal politeness, or the same if I don’t trust somebody or just prefer to maintain a distance. It’s straight out of my Minnesota playbook. It’s not even that I’m thinking about it. It just happens, and she finds it terrifying.

All of this shapes the ways that my characters communicate. My dialogue is often built around restraint and silence, what is withheld, for example. Minnesota also shaped my humor, especially dark humor.

Z: One of the stories in your new collection that I found unusual–and great– was “The Peeping Toms.” Can you tell me about it?

LO: One of the most terrifying things in the world for me is feeling that I might be watched.

Voyeurism freaks me out on so many levels. I think it has something to do with vulnerability and also needing to believe that it’s possible to be really and truly alone for parts of your life. I need that.

Anne and I taught in Malaysia for several years, and at the beginning of our time there, the director of the school called us into his office and said something along the lines of “Your apartment is near the headquarters of the opposition party. I know Americans are interested in such things, so I just want you to know that you should stay away from it. Assume that you’ll be watched and your mail will be read, so we’ll know if you’re up to something.” This is a different kind of feeling watched, of course, than the peeping Tom sort, but it really got in our heads. We didn’t write the whole time we lived there. I think of that a lot now, with the current situation in this country, and I remind myself that we need to keep writing and talking and speaking out.

This story “The Peeping Toms” came out of a time in Albuquerque, when we had a peeping Tom, and I won’t say much more than that because I don’t want to give any spoilers.  But I do find that being watched is one of my writerly preoccupations, along with a related but quite different fear: that of not being seen by others. This fear is connected to loneliness, I think. There are so many lonely people in the world. I can’t imagine that I will ever stop writing about loneliness.

Evelyn Chi’en is the Senior Books editor for Hyphen Magazine, the author of Weird English, and a co-editor of a collection of Chinese poetry.