“The Do Better Girl” by Gail Upchurch appeared in Issue 39 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
I’ve been thinking through the personal toll of academia and imagining the ways in which financial insecurity, imposter syndrome, and trailing spouses coalesce with the invisible burden Black academics have to grapple with before they even step foot in the archives or in the classroom. In the case of Sherita Wilson, the main character of the story, I imagine a most extreme case, where she makes a dire decision to make quick money in order to help her little brother and mother and herself. I wanted to put the commodification of her mind and body in conversation with the myriad personal costs of being an academic, when full-time employment, especially in the liberal arts, is not a guarantee and familial wealth is nothing she can rely on. This story has gone through several iterations. Each time I revised the story, the image of the ivy vine came into sharper focus as a concrete embodiment of her life’s many entanglements. I kept finding more places to layer the leaves, the vines, the color green. That was the most fun part of the writing process.
What was the most difficult aspect in writing this piece?
Everything! But if I need to narrow that down a bit, I suppose I found it difficult to tap in to Sherita’s despair. I am an academic. Some might say I’m one of the lucky ones to have landed a tenure-track job, but I also have been contingent faculty. Ooompf! I’ve seen those paychecks, and I always wonder: What do people do? This isn’t enough to live on, no way, no how. I wanted to tap into Sherita’s particular hand-to-mouth existence and arrive at verisimilitude as much as possible. I hope I got somewhat close. I am also still jolted by the ending. I really wanted better for Sherita, but any other ending seemed disingenuous. It’s been difficult leaving her in that dark place. I’m hopeful, though, that I can explore and find out what happens to her in a later story.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I’ll go with the collection of short stories I’m devouring right now: If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. He draws his characters with such care that I feel as if I intimately know Trelawny, the main character. Escoffery’s language, at once, seems to melt away so as to create an entirely immersive experience. There is a lingering smell of pestilence, the feel of prickling heat. He also describes his characters’ feelings of loss, misgivings, and confusion with masterful accuracy and has such an understanding of fraught familial relationships. Those are only the small reasons to pick up a copy of the book. Escoffery offers a deft commentary about identity, the main character’s relationship with America, and his attempt to find a place for himself. I cannot recommend this collection enough.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be?
This is an almost impossible question. I’m going to say Dana Johnson because of my love of her collection Break Any Woman Down and subsequent novel Elsewhere, California. I heard her give a talk at the Community of Writers fiction workshop a few years ago, and she said something like, “There’s nothing wrong with writing about regular Black folk.” This is exactly what Johnson does. She highlights the musicality of Black English vernacular in her writing and gives primacy to her characters’ commonplace lived experiences in ways that make them seem regal. That’s really cool. I’m trying to do this in my work, too.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m working on a linked collection of short stories in which “The Do Better Girl” will hopefully appear. At the moment, I have another story out there looking for a home. That story is about a man who has just received the official letter that he’s been denied tenure at the same moment he receives an invitation to attend an academic investiture ceremony in honor of his former lover. I’m excited about the whole collection! Besides this, I’m also writing in the kidscape, working on a couple of young adult novels set in Chicago, my hometown. I’m looking to launch those very soon.
Our thanks to Gail for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “The Do Better Girl” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-the-do-better-girl.
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Gail Upchurch is a writer of young adult and adult fiction. She is a 2022 Kimbilio Fellow, winner of the 2022 Taint TaintTaintMagazine James Baldwin Award, a finalist for the 2022 Pen Parentis Fellowship, a 2021 Tin House YA Scholar, a 2021 Community of Writers Scholar, a finalist for the 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize, and winnerof the 2021 Tupelo Quarterly Prose Open Prize. Besides this, her short story “The Cottage” has been nominated for a 2024 O. Henry Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University’s program for writers, an MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in fiction from Chicago State University, and a BA in English from Howard University. Gail has recent short stories published or forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Obsidian: Journal & Ideas in the African Diaspora, Tupelo Quarterly, Taint TaintTaint Magazine, Torch Literary Arts, and is currently at work on a young adult novel and a linked short story collection. When she’s not making up stories, she is a professor at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Maryland, an assistant nonfiction editor at Tupelo Press, and the chapter lead for the Maryland Chapter of Women Who Submit, a nonprofit organization that empowers women and nonbinary writers to submit their work for publication.