Garielle Lutz’s past is a bit vague, which is how she likes it. She grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and has lived much of her life outside Pittsburgh, where she builds tight, unusual stories in an unfurnished apartment. She studied with the highly respected editor and educator Gordon Lish “for twenty-six days between June 1992 and June 1997” and considers himself “fortunate just to have been present.” Under Lish, she developed a unique voice, using compression and aphorism to cohere narrative fragments into untraditionally beautiful shapes. Her characters spend their time enduring the weight of everyday life, dwelling on the minutiae of their own neuroses. In a story titled “Slops,” a college professor with colitis maps out all the campus bathrooms in a small notebook. In another, a man passes out pamphlets and gives forty-five-minute presentations (with charts) in search of a prospective wife. Lutz labors at each meticulous sentence, word by word, to create a language of striking insight, peripheral emotions, and reinvented vocabulary. Lutz has published two short-story collections—Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive—both of which should be read by anyone even mildly interested in the capacity of language. She also edits fiction for the online experimental journal 5_Trope.

This conversation took place over the summer of 2005, with the help of many computers.