Erika Krouse’s reaction to a friend’s suicide guided her short story collection

Erika Krouse is the author of four books of fiction and nonfiction, including her new collection of short stories, “Save Me, Stranger,” and her recent memoir, “Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation,” which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Edgar Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Housatonic Book Award. Krouse  mentors for the Book Project at Colorado’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where she won the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence.

SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate?

Erika Krouse: I began “Save Me, Stranger” when a friend/writing compatriot died by suicide, one day before I was supposed to meet up with him. I couldn’t have prevented his suicide, but I wished I’d had the chance to try. I also felt shocked into the realization that the person who died this way was a stranger to me, and that under dire circumstances, we can become strangers to even ourselves.  I wrote the title story out of guilt and remorse, but the same ideas—rescue, strangers, chances—kept swirling around using different scenarios, different parts of the world, different characters. It felt like trying to solve facets of a puzzle using stories.

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SunLit: Place this excerpt in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole? Why did you select it?

Krouse: “Eat My Moose” is about an Army veteran in Alaska who becomes a professional euthanizer, after his cancer abates from helping others die by suicide. That story is the fourth one in “Save Me Stranger,” and it’s a different idea of rescue; in this case, killing people saves them. I picked it because it was also the last story I wrote for the collection, and I always like the last thing I wrote best. 

SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write? 

Krouse: Each of the stories had a different origin. “North of Dodge” is about some kids I met at my job when I was 19, driving an ice cream truck around Omaha’s ganglands. “The Pole of Cold” came from my decade-long obsession with the coldest town on Earth, after I had sent a goodbye letter to my mother there as a symbolic gesture. “The Standing Man” came from a man I saw leaning against a pole by a Tokyo train station, asleep but standing squarely on his feet. “Jude” came from my grandmother; she buried two husbands and gave birth to two children, and none of them knew her real name. “Fear Me As You Fear God” came from a haunted bed and breakfast where I worked as a night manager while hiding from a stalker boyfriend. “I Feel Like I Could Stand Here with You All Night and It Would Be the Worst Night of My Life” originated from when I confronted the clerk of an Ohio consignment store selling a real Nazi flag. Real experiences inform everything. I believe in the Hemingway model of writing, that you have to live a varied life so you can write.

SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?

Krouse: Writing “Save Me Stranger” reminded me how diverse short stories can be. The short story is by nature an experimental form because they don’t have to carry the same page-turning structural weight as a novel or memoir. They can fly! Writing “Save Me, Stranger” gave me even more respect for the genre, and a desire to explore it more.

“Save Me, Stranger”

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SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?

Krouse: Every story is its own challenge, and whenever I finish a story, I have no idea how to write another. I think, “Goodbye, writing…Thanks for the good times.” So I never thought the stories would amount to a book until I took stock and realized how many I had. Each voice also has its own challenge when I try to figure it out; it’s like following an unmarked trail closer and closer to the voice, trying to eavesdrop, trying not to interrupt.

SunLit: What’s the most important thing – a theme, lesson, emotion or realization — that readers should take from this book? 

Krouse: I hope readers are asking the same questions I am. Can we save each other? Should we? How can we? What do we owe each other? And where are the boundaries? 

Other than that, I hope readers take away emotions and realizations that are unique to them. It’s good if you can manage to write something that means different things to different people. I wouldn’t want every reader to feel the same emotions while reading my work. I’d feel that I failed in that case, especially with a short story collection.

SunLit: You’ve set the stories in “Save Me, Stranger” all over the world: Tokyo, Siberia, Thailand, Alaska, Auschwitz, Colorado, and more. What is your relationship with place?

Krouse: I grew up moving a lot, and never felt like I belonged anywhere in particular. The home I felt most connected to was Tokyo, but it wasn’t my country. When you don’t belong anywhere, you belong everywhere. But even if you’re writing about a place you know intimately, you still have to research it, so I try to learn everything I can: what people eat, what the air feels like, the plants, animals, religions, things people say, how they spend money, everything. Writing a story about a place is like creating a home there, and I think I often write searching for home.

SunLit: Tell us about your next project.

Krouse: I’ve started working on a historical murder mystery set in the 1920s. I’ve never written a historical novel before, nor a murder mystery novel, nor a successful novel…so I’m a bit adrift. It’s uncomfortable, but for me, that uncomfortable feeling usually means that I’m doing something worthwhile, if only to me.

 A few more quick questions

SunLit: Which do you enjoy more as you work on a book – writing or editing?

Krouse: I most love that place between writing and editing—heavy revision, when you’re ripping a story apart by its seams, tossing away old chunks, manically writing new ones, transforming the existing trajectory into something you could have never anticipated.

SunLit: What’s the first piece of writing – at any age – that you remember being proud of?

Krouse: The first piece of writing I’ve been proud of was probably my memoir, “Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation.” Of course, that was just three years ago, and pretty late in my writing career.

SunLit: What three writers, from any era, would you invite over for a great discussion about literature and writing? 

Krouse: Great question! Enheduanna, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, and Toni Morrison. I think they’d fight. 

SunLit: Do you have a favorite quote about writing?

Krouse: I like to apply this Yiddish proverb to the practice of writing: “You can make the dream bigger than the night.”

SunLit: What does the current collection of books on your home shelves tell visitors about you?

Krouse: That I don’t know how to alphabetize.

SunLit: Soundtrack or silence? What’s the audio background that helps you write?

Krouse: Silence! I play instruments, so if there’s music, I start playing it in my head and it distracts me.

SunLit: What music do you listen to for sheer enjoyment?

Krouse: Oh, everything from Tom Waits to Beethoven to the Rolling Stones to Nina Simone to Liz Story to Patty Griffin to whatever’s on the radio. 

SunLit: What event, and at what age, convinced you that you wanted to be a writer?

Krouse: I fell off a 500-foot cliff when I was 22. I wanted to write books before that, but surviving the fall convinced me that I’d better just go for it, because I was stupid enough to die young anyway.

SunLit: Greatest writing fear?

Krouse: That I’ll die before I finish whatever I’m working on. That’s how I know the idea is pretty good.

SunLit: Greatest writing satisfaction?

Krouse: Meeting some of my favorite writers. People say, “Never meet your heroes,” but my heroes are amazing.