What Is and Is Not a Body: The Millions Interviews Allison Wyss

Allison Wyss is a writer and teacher in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her debut collection of short stories, Splendid Anatomies, was published earlier this year by Veliz Press. She also writes a popular column on the craft of writing for the Loft Literary Center and her interest in how stories work is evident in her own writing. Her stories are lively and strange and span across known and unknown universes, in a collection in which there are no rules. The stories vary in length and style, though each one shares elements of playfulness and curiosity in the world. When recommending the book to a friend I said that reading it felt, at times, like having a possibly-psychedelic drink with a witch. I think that’s apt, but curious readers should test my metaphor. 

Wyss spoke to me about creating worlds, writing over years, and living in human bodies. The conversation that follows was held over email and then drinks in March of 2022.

Margaret LaFleur: In the acknowledgements page of Splendid Anatomies, you thank your family for “making you weird.” While it’s fair to say the stories in this collection are weird—there are talking spiders, time vortexes, ghosts—I’m curious how you would describe the collection as a whole. What do these stories have in common and what are you hoping readers take from the collection? 

Truthfully, I didn’t know how to thank my family because I don’t really know if they’ll to be thanked after they read the book. But! On the whole I think of the collection as being about body modification, and more broadly about bodies. Many of the individual stories are specifically about bodies and people fighting either with or against them, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. And then for other stories is about problematizing the line between