Tiff Holland's work has appeared in dozens of journals and received five Pushcart Nominations. Her chapbook "Betty Superman" won the fifth annual Rose Metal Press award for short-short fiction.Both of your stories, "Day Bed," and "Stealth," so beautifully capture a mother-daughter relationship in all its weird hybrid forms. Here are two quotes from "Stealth," that describe some of the characters in the mother's hair salon, I can almost smell the perm stench permeating the story. What was your inspiration for these tales?
"Glenda only wore red, red slacks and tops and shoes, and she had her hair dyed red every six weeks right on schedule although the dying was drying it out, making it brittle and hard to style. Mom held a rattail comb between her lips as she resorted to her fingers to lift Glenda's hair up from her head. I watched a large vein on Mom's left leg pulsate."
"Oddly enough, she looked crazier under the dryer than with her shirt lifted to her forehead. Her hair tight in the rollers seemed to make her make-up more extreme, as if the eyeliner was an actual string that held her eyes open really wide."
The inspiration for these stories was my mother's beauty shop. I know I should say "these characters are fictional and any resemblance to any actual person, alive or dead, is purely coincidental" but these are two real-life customers. The beauty shop was a gold mine, is a gold mine now, in terms of supplying characters. People say and do things there, especially if it's the same crowd for years. I could write a book on the dirty jokes alone!
That's hysterical! I hope you do write that book.
Betty Superman," your chapbook that won first prize in Rose Metal Press' fifth annual short short chapbook contest, also explores the mother-daughter relationship in all its intensity. Did your mother read the chapbook and find herself in any of the chapters/stories?
Mom did read the chapbook and recognized herself. My entire life she wanted me to write about her. The exact phrasing was: "why don't you quit wasting your time writing poems and write about my life? We'd get rich!" At one point she wanted me to ignore my work completely and just write her memoirs. I told her she should learn how to type. She was delighted by the chapbook, though. She knew what was true and what wasn't and, in retrospect, I don't think truth was ever that important to her. She told me stories constantly. Now that I know how she felt about truth, I question every one of them.
Haha! I love your mother. I'm still laughing. Oh, that's so great!
Did you grow up in Texas? How does place filter into your work?
I grew up in Akron, Ohio. I got married at seventeen, frankly, to get away from my mother. I married a guy in the Army and we had the good fortune to be stationed in Hawaii, which is the place I consider home. Place is important to my work on many levels: it influences the way people talk, their values and, of course, the scenery. I saw the blimp go by almost every day of my life in Ohio. We saw it one day here in Texas and my daughter was so excited.
You have written a poetry collection, as well. Is there a specific genre that speaks to you more than others?
Well, I haven't published the poetry collection. It's possible it doesn't speak to others as strongly as it speaks to me. A lot of my work in all genres focuses on gender identity, which I believe is what causes a great deal of the tension in the mother-daughter pieces. I did publish a chapbook of poems. I write fiction, poetry, non-fiction, flash. I'm working on a novel. I just listen to what's crept into my head and take dictation. I do wait until I can't stand it anymore before I put any words on paper. That works best for me. Usually, the poems come whole. I follow the prose like a bird swallowing up breadcrumbs. If I'm lucky, there are enough crumbs that I make it to the gingerbread and candy house before Hansel and Gretel run out of crumbs!
Do you enjoy teaching and does that either enhance your writing or constrict it?
I love teaching. It enhances my writing mostly because it enhances my life. It gives me a reason to go out and interact in the world, with my students.
Nice! What are you reading right now?
I'm currently reading Rusty Barnes "Mostly Redneck" which is fabulous!
I'm reading his collection also. It's amazing. I agree. Any writers that you go back to, again and again, for inspiration?
I love to read the Best New American Writers every year, a series which I believe has been cancelled. It featured the best short stories from writing programs, and I found them to be fresh and interesting. I read The New Yorker every week, and I belong to an online writing group with some excellent writers, and their work always inspires me. Otherwise, the stories I teach my classes always inspire me, and I choose my textbooks based on books that have my favorite stories: "Cathedral", "The Things They Carried", "The Yellow Wallpaper are a few.
I am going to give you a first sentence to go with: "She'd never met a coat check girl before." Can you give me a paragraph/micro-flash from this?
--She'd never met a coat check girl before. She had doubted they still existed, but the girl stood before her in a too-short black dress, her mascara running and the glitter on her eyelids flaking off like scales from a lizard. She wanted to comfort the girl, who wore a nametag that read "Carla", but she wasn't the comforting type. Instead she took off her jacket, a purple leopard print fleece she'd picked up on sale at Macy's for five dollars after season, and pressed it on the girl, aware that the girl's reluctance was as likely about her lack of style and general disheveled appearance, as the fact that she was a stranger. She liked being a stranger. She liked being the person who gave someone else a jacket, hailed a cab and handed the driver a twenty, knowing that was all the money she had for the next two weeks. She wanted to be the person who found the guy who had left Carla on the curb, tottering in her high heels in the gray snow, and pound him. Her fists ached to pound someone and that feeling would get her through the rest of the day as she shoved her still-fisted hands deep in her pockets to stay warm and walked quickly, remembering the last person she had really punched, a neighborhood boy who had beaten up one of her brothers. She scrunched her shoulders, not truly cold as since wore a sweatshirt, and moved quickly, and she thought of Mike McCann's face as she sat on him and pounded with first one fist and then the other, stopping only when she knew he'd learned his lesson, not just about not picking on weaker boys, but about girls, too, how a clenched fist is a clenched fist, and not everyone worries about breaking a nail.
WOW! That was so great! Thank you for indulging me on that one. I'm so glad you were inspired by that first sentence. That was a beauty!
Tell us something about Round Rock, Texas that we would be surprised by.
It's famous for donuts that are roughly ten inches in circumference.
Haha! I think you could also do stand-up, Tiff!
- It's funny you say that about stand-up. People ask me that all the time! And at least one student has described my class that way on the response section of my faculty reviews!
Can you end this interview with one quote that says something of your life and writing?
My favorite quote is Patchen's: All At Once Is What Eternity Is, because I believe that to be true. I'm very interested in science and the theory of relativity and I think everything does happen at once—as much as it happens. I'm not sure I believe in events or time so much as interpretation, but I love the sound of the quote, which comes from one of Kenneth Patchen's picture poems.
I LOVE Kenneth Patchen. My sister actually found two of his original prints in a thrift store! Amazing coup!
I'm so jealous—two prints!! I lived in Warren, Ohio, his hometown, for eight years.
Thank you so much, Tiff, for sending Connotation Press some of your incredible work. So honored to have you as our featured fiction writer for this issue.
Thank you so much for having me!!
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