Sharon Wahl's first story collection, Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Prize and will be published by the University of Iowa Press in the fall of 2024.  Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Story Quarterly, Pleiades, and many other journals.  In 2005 she started the Tucson-based video production company Open Lens Productions with her husband, filmmaker Jonathan VanBallenberghe.  Her website is www.sharonwahl.com.

Can you tell us a little bit about your new book Everything Flirts?

Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances is a collection of love stories all based in some way on classic philosophers or philosophy texts that have a personal significance for me.  But you don't need to know any philosophy to read these stories!  The texts aren't used in an academic or scholarly way.  It feels more like I'm playing with them, fondly but irreverently, to make stories about a topic that most philosophers have avoided completely: romantic love. 

The book opens with stories of new love—crushes, first dates.  There is a longer story tracing a relationship from beginning to end, followed by stories about breaking up and then starting over, finding just the right person to fall in love with again.  It was important to me for the book to have this overall structure, a structure it has in common with the course of much romantic love, rather than being a random assortment of stories. 

What was the inspiration for this work?

I've read philosophy—for fun, not for school—since my early teens.  So that is one inspiration.  But the main inspiration was a complicated and at times difficult relationship with a philosopher I went out with for about three years. This at least explains the strong link in my mind between philosophy and romantic love!  I also had fun writing a piece that tells the history of western philosophy through humorous accounts of the attitudes philosophers throughout history have had towards love and sex and women.

What are you reading right now? Any books from other university or independent presses?

I love to read, but I'm a very slow reader, which is really frustrating.  I make up for this by reading several books at a time and not expecting to finish most of them.  At the moment I'm reading several short story collections, including Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett, The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan, and Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens.  I like to see how other short story writers determine the placement of stories within a collection, especially mixing longer and much shorter pieces. 

The last novel I finished was The Employees by Olga Ravn, which I liked very much for its form and its imagination; also, I like stories set on starships.  For nonfiction, right now I'm reading Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano: Bookmarkedby David Ryan, a book that mixes thoughts on writing, touring with a rock band, and learning from Malcolm Lowry's fabulous novel Under the Volcano.  I'm also slowly reading Charles Bowden's Blues for Cannibals, for doses of his haunting and gorgeous prose.  I love nonfiction books like this, which aren't about one thing but include experiences and insights of all kinds, making them impossible to describe or categorize.        

I've found that more and more of the books I value most are from small presses, whether established presses like New Directions or newish presses like Dorothy, a publishing project.  The books mentioned above were originally published in the U.S. by Riverhead, FSG, And Other Stories, New Directions, Ig Publishing, and North Point Press—so four out of six are small presses, a pretty typical mix, for me.

Do you have any plans for readings or events for this book, either in person or virtual?

I live in Tucson, and every spring there is a large book fair in town, the Tucson Festival of Books.  I will be going to that, and to the AWP in L.A.  I would like to plan a small book tour—my fantasy is to combine a book tour with a camping road trip across the country.  But at the moment, I have some health problems that make it hard to travel for extended periods.  Fingers crossed this will not be true for much longer!

What is your writing routine? Do you have a daily routine?

It makes me happy when I'm able to write every day, but running a small business (Open Lens Productions, a video production company I started with my husband) and chronic health problems often get in the way.  I try very hard to set aside at least a few months every year when I can write every day.  I think the breaks in routine are easier to handle when writing short pieces, like I am right now.  But I'm hoping that soon I'll get back to a novel-in-progress, and at that point, I think a daily routine will be much more essential.

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Thank you!