Interview with Modern Microfiction Writer, Emily Rudie

Emily Rudie is a writer from St Paul, Minnesota. She graduated from the University of St Thomas in 2022 with a BA in Creative Writing and Digital Media Arts, as well as a minor in Film Studies. Her unconventionally styled short story “for Darlena.m4a” caught the attention of the Papers Publishing staff and was published earlier this year. We spoke with her this week about styling decisions and inspiration for writing.

Rian: Where did the inspiration for “for Darlena.m4a” come from? Is Darlena a real person (or based on one), and was this story from a real experience?

Emily: During the peak of the pandemic, I had an Instacart shopper named Darlena—since I had far too much time on my hands and not a lot of people to talk to, I spent some of an afternoon thinking about how pretty a name like Darlena is and my insatiable curiosity about people I’ll never know. The speaker isn’t me and the story isn’t mine, but the piece was inspired by that day.

Rian: It is a really lovely name. I wonder if she ever got to know what she inspired. Now you said Darlena was a real Insta-shopper you had, but you aren’t the narrator, would you say the piece fits more into the “fiction” or “creative nonfiction” genre, or somewhat both?

Emily: It’s definitely a piece of fiction! I sometimes enjoy writing stories that take real things, people and moments, and then elevate or twist them in a way that might not be rooted in reality anymore but still feels meaningful.

Rian: You certainly retained the meaningful air! The narrative is extremely heartfelt - touching on what seems to be feelings of loss, fear, some lgbt themes - were there any concrete ideas behind all of that?

Emily: There were certainly ideas and feelings that I intended to explore in this piece, but I think the beauty of short fiction is that there is so much room to take whatever we need from it.

Rian: We do love the freedom afforded by short pieces. Talking on formatting, how did you settle on the idea of composing the piece as a transcript of a recording? Is there any reason behind the timestamps scattered throughout?

Emily: I’m a huge fan of recording little voice memos, and also a fan of exploring unconventional ways of writing a story, so I included timestamps to make it easy to imagine the piece as a transcript of an audio file.

Rian: It isn’t an approach we’ve seen before, I think it really helped create the world and atmosphere we were reading. I could imagine being infatuated by Darlena myself. Lastly, and I feel it’s quite important, are you much of a musician yourself, or are you more like the narrator?

Emily: Aside from poorly belting the occasional unsolicited show tune, I’m not much of a musician!

Rian: That’s fair! I think we can all agree you have wonderful fiction writing skills to make up for that! So, what can we expect from you towards the end of 2023? Have you got any plans for future writing?

Emily: I’m working on a little bit of everything! Hoping to keep it up with microfiction and start some bigger projects in fiction and nonfiction—it’s easy to stay inspired by so many cool writers at Papers!

Rian: Thank you so much for your kind words. We’re very excited to see what you’ve got next! Thank you for this talk today!

You can find Emily online at:

Instagram at @emily_rudie

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilyrudie/

Soon she’ll be available at emilyrudie.com.