FARMINGTON – A professor at the University of Maine at Farmington recently released her newest book- a collection of short stories entitled “I Know You Love Me Too.” Amy Neswald, who teaches creative writing at UMF, branches out into many mediums beyond the short story, film being one of her many strong suits.
“I Know You Love Me Too” is genre-breaking and otherworldly, yet grounded in the real experience of people. The book orbits around the stories of two step-sisters, Kate and Ingrid, who are learning to deal with the loss of their shared father in different ways.
“We don’t ever really know what other people are going through, despite their behavior and despite their outward trappings,” Neswald said of her characters.
One concept Neswald’s work exposes us to is the idea of Cosmic Realism. Her writing process is fixated on the unique moments of life that can’t be defined.
“Living in New York City you see a lot of weird things that become your reality. With theatre, you see a lot of weird things that also become your reality, things that
other people can’t imagine. All of that builds in my stories because life is weird. It’s super weird,” Neswald said. “When I think about what I’m writing, some of my stuff gets kind of dystopian, or magical, but a lot of it is just realistic fiction, but I still think there’s my cosmic worldview underneath there. Everything we write is our world view.”
Neswald tributes much of her creative work to her grounding lessons as a screenwriter.
“…that’s where I come from. When writing my short stories I would think what are my five scenes that I need in this, and how do they build? In my book, the middle story I feel like changes everything is sort of like a mid-act reversal. I really think about my short stories as short films. So in the course of making this collection and rewriting it, I also had this idea of structure in place. I have a really climatic second to last story and a resolution in the last story.”
Screenplays have very tight linear structures broken up into parts that Neswald describes as “inciting incident,” “midact reversal,” “climax,” “dark night of the soul,” and “resolution.”
Neswald is already working on a novel as her next project, one that she says she “can’t get out of until [she] finishes it.”
“I love that when we talk about stories we “share our stories”…just think of the implications of sharing, it goes pretty deep. What’s happening when we share? When we share our stories it becomes partially yours. I think its very wild. It’s again metaphysical, and where my cosmology comes in.”
Amy Neswald, through her poetic fiction, leaves us asking questions- curious and spell bound by the seemingly normal but abnormal world that she creates. Due to her fascinations with our weird world, she makes the reader just as captivated, and desperately trying to figure out what it all means.
“A great short story vibrates,” Neswald said, and her collection certainly creates a earthquake in the shape of a cataclysmic cosmic narrative.
