Stay for the Festive Rage: The Millions Interviews Lee Conell

Lee Conell’s story collection Subcortical is notable for a number of reasons: elegant plotting, beguiling sentence-work, intriguing premises, and surprising humor. But it may stand out most because of the ways its stories engage with the topic of moral failure. Conell treads nimbly around the many hazards of moral writing, giving the reader a collection that doesn’t reserve moral judgment but still manages to remain hypnotic, entertaining, and fun to read.

Subcortical won the 2018 Story Prize Spotlight Award, and Conell has published stories in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Guernica, and other journals. She was kind enough to answer my questions about managing morality in fiction and other topics related to her collection and her forthcoming novel, The Party Upstairs.

The Millions: Writers are often instructed to write toward moral ambiguity, if writing about moral issues at all. I’m very interested in the way some of the stories in Subcortical work around that dictum. What do you think is the value of moral ambiguity in fiction, and what do you think are its limits?

I’m wary of the whole “write toward moral ambiguity” thing, in part because such a statement seems freighted with—but not upfront about—its own moral agenda. I get that the message is to avoid writing boring and polemical morality plays, but I worry that the dictum itself tends to encourage narratives