Elizabeth A. Phang

The Harvard Crimson: What is your writing experience before your thesis?

Elizabeth Phang: I took two fiction workshops last year, and I wrote two stories for each. I’m using three of them in my thesis. I had also taken a non-fiction and a poetry workshop, but I hadn’t done any fiction after high school until last year.

THC: What is your thesis about?

EP: I am writing a series of about eight short stories. They all take place in the same relatively small suburban town, each at a different period in time within about a 50-year range. Some of the characters appear in multiple stories at different ages and life stages. The protagonist or narrator of one story sometimes appears in another story as a minor character, or as a character important to the plot but not as the central figure. There will be a story about a ghost. I wouldn’t say that the work has a theme, they are just stories about suburban life. I wanted the passage of time links between the stories to be surreal. A child in one will be an old man in another, but the stories aren’t dated. I want the connection to be subtle.

THC: Did you grow up in suburbia?

EP: Yes. The town is not unlike where I grew up in Maryland. But it has no name for now.

THC: Who are your inspirations?

EP: I was inspired by some John Updike stories. One in particular inspired me to write about older people, “Playing with Dynamite.” For the most part before that I had written about younger people. I like George Saunders a lot—how he addresses the absurdity of suburban living—but I don’t think I write like him. I’ve also been inspired by Barry Hannah, Flannery O’Connor, Bobbie Ann Mason and many others. Basically everything I read influences the way I think about writing to some extent.