Our fiction team this week is thrilled to publish 'Foundling', a new short fiction story by American writer Shauna Friesen. The link to the full story is here, and it's a part of our growing fiction vertical, where we'll publish our favorite short fiction from our open calls for submissions.
Shauna Friesen (she/her) is a mountain climber, rock collector, and author living in Los Angeles, CA. Her words have been featured in Gone Lawn, Chestnut Review, Foglifter Journal, and Vestal Review, among others. Her website is here.
Recently one of our fiction editors Emily Linehan corresponded with Shauna about her work, influences, and how this particular story came to be – in particular the ending. This is a transcription of their conversation.
On Influences:
Emily Linehan: Would you like to speak to your style in writing, and your influences? I was personally reminded of Claire Keegan’s empathetic perspective and simplistic language.
Shauna Friesen: I’m so honored - I am such a fan of her work!I have been a voracious reader all my life and my influences come from so many places, but Toni Morrision, particularly her book Beloved, has been an enormous source of inspiration for me in the last couple of years. She does not shy from the strange and dark sides of the human experience, but at the same time creates such a sense of beauty and hope through her gorgeous use of language and metaphor.
Her exploration of mother/child relationships in unconventional forms, along with books like Chouette by Claire Oshetsky, Monstrilio by Gerardo Samano Cordova, and Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel have been inspirations as well!
On her ‘little boy’ character:
Emily Linehan: I was struck by how realised yet reclusive your characters were in ‘Foundling’, especially the little boy. How did you come up with this child’s wild nature?
Shauna Friesen: His character emerged very naturally and very clearly as I crafted the story. Both the mother and the young child are grieving something lost in their own ways, and carrying difficult experiences with them into the relationship they forge over the course of the narrative.
Few answers are offered about the boy and his background, and I wanted his erratic behavior and unpredictability to offer a window into his past experiences without articulating them in any direct way.
On her descriptions:
Emily Linehan: As an Irish writer, I personally really enjoyed your descriptions of Midwest America. How important is ‘sense of place’ in your work?
Shauna Friesen: Sense of place has always felt as important to me as character. I spend a lot of my own free time these days traveling, road tripping, and getting to new places, and I am always searching for the poetry in different landscapes.
I tend to practice a lot of visualizing exercises before I begin to write--looking through photos or sifting through memories and notes from certain places or times. I grew up in the Midwest, so I have a lot of memories to draw from to capture that landscape. Midwestern America has a very particular way of feeling both vast and open, and yet somehow also insular and stifling. You are right at the heart of everything, but a thousand miles from the edge of anything. That feeling can really breathe down your neck.
On Story Ending:
Emily Linehan: That ending! How did you come up with it? Did it occur naturally through writing or did you have this idea in mind when beginning this story?
Shauna Friesen: I tend to be a more exploratory writer, beginning with a few sentences or a concept and trusting the story to guide me from there. Sometimes an ending finds me along the way, and sometimes I need to write several endings before landing on the right one. This was definitely a case of the latter - I probably wrote four or five endings before I knew that this was the best fit for this particular story.
I always prefer endings that leave me with an unsettling mix of both hope and unease. There are certainly heavy consequences and difficulties ahead for these characters - but perhaps some moments of joy and healing, too.
Shauna Friesen
Shauna Friesen (she/her) is a mountain climber, rock collector, and author living in Los Angeles, CA. Her words have been featured in Gone Lawn, Chestnut Review, Foglifter Journal, and Vestal Review, among others.
Emily Linehan
Emily, a Tipperary native, has shown a great interest in all things literature from a young age. She has been published in the anthology Cork Words 2, Icarus, and is a 2021 runner-up in UCC's Eoin Murray Scholarship. After completing her M.Phil. in Creative Writing with Trinity, she is currently in TEFL teaching, and submitting furiously to literary journals.
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