A New World of Bodies: Allison Wyss’ Splendid Anatomies

by Mark Pleiss

Allison Wyss’ new collection of stories, Splendid Anatomies, represents a playful, funny, sexy—and sometimes grotesque—exploration of the human condition via art, science, and the body. The stories casually fixate on corporal modifications and disfigurement, but they are lovingly told with a joy and humor one might expect from a game of Mr. Potato Head.

Wyss spins 16 tales in 185 pages and covers every corner of a bizarre physiological ecosystem that includes lascivious secretaries, tortured tattoo artists, perplexing mad scientists, and a charismatic fauna of birds, toads, moles, and even a spider that spins gold. The characters are cast within a consistent but surprising array of situations involving two people in an imbalance of power—often in a poorly-paid workplace—where the creation and consumption of art drive larger questions about authenticity, power, and gender.

On the one hand, Splendid Anatomies could be said to offer social critique, but the book delves much deeper into larger questions about the human experience. The personalities of the characters pop as they seek to escape from the tedium of their jobs and search for something that is greater than their place in the world and sometimes even greater than the nature of their reality. Dreams, thoughts, and lengthy descriptions of portals, spirits, and vortexes blow the imagination wide open and invite readers to imagine a place far more interesting than what is explained by science and the natural order.

The book is a madly pleasurable collection of forms and offers the promise of new, exciting findings each time one was to open its pages again. It is with great pleasure and curiosity, therefore, that I interview Wyss here.

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Before we talk about Splendid Anatomies, tell us a little about your journey as a writer and how you ended up at Veliz Books.

I'm not sure it's particularly interesting. As an undergrad, I ended up in a lit class taught by the amazing writer Tony Earley, and he let us write a story as one of our assignments. He liked my story (even though it was surely terrible)--I should have understood the huge compliment that was, but I was only 18. More important, I thought it was incredibly fun to write a story and so I took a bunch of workshops and loved them. I was not serious about writing after college--I just partied a lot and thought of myself as a writer even though I only toyed with my old workshop stories. Then I started taking Grub Street classes (I was living in Boston) and found a phenomenal writing group that made me think my stories mattered again. I did an MFA at the University of Maryland. My life after grad school became about various freelance work in the book world and other (not literary) odd jobs and writing stories around the edges. My time to write completely evaporated when I had a baby, but it slowly came back--only in smaller units of time. Now I cobble together a sort-of career from teaching writing classes, freelance editorial projects, manuscript consultations, and book coaching. Freelance gives me the flexibility I've needed with a kid (and especially having a kid during covid times), but it couldn't happen if I didn't have a partner with more predictable income and health insurance. I like to be clear about that.

And then Veliz Books found me! And thank goodness--I'm not sure I've ever been more grateful to good luck. I had been listed as a runner-up in a contest for my collection and that led Sean Bernard (with Veliz Books) to read a few of my stories that had been published in lit journals and he reached out. Then I was also lucky to find that he understood what it was I was trying to do with the collection, and so I got a great editor to work with and a fantastic home for Splendid Anatomies.

Where did the initial impulse for this collection of stories originate?

It definitely didn't start out as a collection. I was just writing stories and trying to publish them individually in journals. I did have dreams about pulling them together into a book, but most of the stories were written before I had much idea what that book would be about.

I've just always had certain preoccupations--with strange bodies, with unusual jobs, with power dynamics (I love that you talk about that--ask the writers in my classes about how I talk too much about it!), and also with the desire for things to stay as they are. But I didn't know it! It was definitely other writers in workshops and writing groups who pointed out those tendencies in my stories. And of course, because I am me, I took their observations as an insult or a challenge and tried to write completely against those ideas. Which didn't work! Those ideas crept in around the edges in just about everything I tried to write. So I eventually embraced my fascinations and wrote about them more head on. Then I found a sort of license to be weirder too, as I got older and more confident, and also when I had a baby--pregnancy being such a sci-fi experience, after all.

Shaping the collection took some weeding out of stories that were either hitting these ideas too much sideways or were hitting them in too much the same way as other stories did. Turning the book from a pile of stories to its own story that I hope holds together was something I did a little bit on my own, but mostly with the help of an editor after the book had been taken on by Veliz Books.

Many of your characters are working-class heroes of sorts. How have your own experiences with labor influenced the book?

I've definitely had a lot of weird and working-class jobs. I've spent summers on assembly lines, in cookie factories, loading and unloading airplanes overnight for a cargo shipping company. I drove a belt loader. I've worked in a post office and a hardware store and in cubicle mazes. I've spent way too many years waiting tables and bartending, which is not unusual of course, but the experiences in such work are varied and generative for writing fiction.

And I do think navigating strange power dynamics (and they are all strange!) is just a part of the human experience now. I remember one time I ended up my sister's boss and that was just a disaster to the way we interacted both at work and at home.

But what I think my stories try to get at regarding jobs and labor is there's this idea in our society that your job is not personal, or shouldn't be, and yet so many of us do find identity through our work. I like to look at how characters either embrace that identity or buck against it.

Hank lets his duties as a (volunteer!) security guard take over his life and anxieties in a way that is truly unhealthy. Dubby identifies so strongly with her role as a tattoo artist that she fixates on art to an alarming degree and gives up a relationship that really matters to her. Jen can't quite see herself as anything, or claim any identity, in part because her chosen vocation hasn't yet started or come to pass. The narrator of the yogurt story is so invested in her research that she loses the literal boundaries of her own skin.

And yet these characters also learn from their work and find a different kind of empowerment in it. It's one more fraught relationship and one more way to question the line between self and other. Labor, as we horrifically understand it through capitalism, is a system of power and you can get caught up in it or you can resist it. You can see yourself as part of something greater in a good way, or you can be swept away and lose yourself to some overlord executive who only cares about profit and never about you as a person.

I often found myself wondering about the crazy science in the book. Is any of it (or maybe all of it) real?

Science is so weird! It's weirder than anything I can make up and I love that. And I love the border space when I read or write a story about scientific things and I don't quite know what is the strangeness of fact and what is imagination.

And yet, I tend to be a horrible researcher. My imagination keeps buzzing off in different directions, and also I don't like it when what I want to do with a story doesn't fit with what has been researched and found true. So while there's a kernel of science to many of the stories--some nugget that I learn about and then fixate on--it's often only that. I tend to do the research, in fact, after a story has its shape. And if I find a weird detail that fits, oh yeah, it goes into the story. But if I find that I'm completely wrong in my weird theories, I tend to stop the research and let the imaginative aspect of things play its course.

And so, yes, some of it is real and some of it is made up, but I'm not telling which is which!

The book left me thinking about how often we constantly create stories about the value and meaning of the things around us—especially art and bodies. How do you understand this phenomenon in the book or in the world around us?

I think there's a slipperiness to the meaning of objects, especially art, especially bodies. And I feel like many of my characters are grasping for permanence, only to be thwarted.

A question of life--the main problem of life--is its impermanence. The main problem of life is death. And so sometimes we try to find a thing we hope might be undying and hold on for dear life. Maybe that can work for some people, but for my characters it usually does not.

I'm not sure Dubby ever realizes that her search for lasting art will never satisfy her, but I hope the reader figures that out. Ursula thinks, if nothing else, her nose is her one thing, her golden ticket. But even if the nose stays (and we know it won't), the beauty standards surrounding her will fluctuate. I don't know if there's a something in the world to hang on to, but I know I'm looking for it, and everything I try falls short.

And I think that the undying objects are both outside of the body--and so thought to be safe--but also brought into the body, to be a part of the self and identity of the characters. So that problematizes their nature and their meaning. Of course characters are using them, subconsciously, to ward off death and other types of change, but of course it won't work.

I think my favorite story was “Dr. Francis Longfellow Hendrix.” It’s an editor’s transcription of a journal entry written by a scientist who led a failed research project attempting to understand the science of ghosts. It’s so brilliant and unique. I read it as a parody of academic writing and scientific discourse, but so much more. Tell me more about this story.

I am so glad you like that one! It feels really important to what I'm trying to do in the collection, yet it doesn't work quite the way the others stories do, or even how most stories tend to work more generally.

It is absolutely poking fun at academic writing (which, I don't know, I can't help doing--it's an absurd and silly genre, when you think about it), but I think the footnotes and pseudo-science of it are also about these boundaries of what is real and not real, what is body, what is soul, what is self. And that's not to say soul in the religious sense--more in the sense of ghost. And I do believe in ghosts. I think. I'm not completely sure, but I don't rule them out.

So the ghost scientist story is about a person searching for a substance to what is spiritual. This scientist is analyzing the supernatural/ethereal as if it is physical material. Like trying to pop a thumbtack into swirling mist. And the form of the story--the footnotes--have a lot to do with the bigger idea of the book and pushing at the boundaries of body and self. The idea that there's this distant voice pushing at the original one--and also misunderstanding the original--helps frame the strangeness of it, I think. I also like the distance it creates and the oddness of the emotional remove when emotion is precisely what is being studied.

And, then, footnotes are a nonfiction thing, academic or scientific--and that seems like such a great way to pull this fiction into our world, too. I love when frames exist within a story, but I like even more when they collapse or dissolve and how that pushes the imaginary into the real and how the reader has another opportunity to jump all the way into the story, or hopefully to take the story back out into real life, even after they've stopped reading it.

Dissipation is maybe a theme of the book, too, or at least an image/idea I like a lot. When something evaporates it disappears but not really; it becomes a part of the air and eventually a part of everything.

What are your plans for your next writing project?

Well, I'm finishing up a novel. It's a different situation and characters, of course, but it's about a lot of the same stuff--weird bodies and how a person figures out what is and isn't them. It's set in a medical museum! And then I'm writing a lot of flash lately, without much thought to whether or not it's a part of something bigger. I'm just letting it get as weird as it wants, and then I'll see where I end up.

As a writer and reader, I want to thank you for your interview and congratulate you on the book. It is a wonderful contribution literary fiction.

Thank you! You asked really great questions and I am grateful for such a generous and thoughtful read of my stories.

(Mark Pleiss is the author of April Warnings, also from Veliz Books and a finalist for the 2020 Colorado Book Award in Short Fiction.)