A Small Apocalypse 🐍

an interview with Laura Chow Reeve, author of A Small Apocalypse

I’m a sucker for a short story collection with supernatural elements, mostly queer characters, and a strong sense of place, and so on a hot summer evening not long ago, I tore through A Small Apocalypse by

laura chow reeve

. The stories in this collection range in scope, but many center on the experiences of queer Chinese Americans in Florida. There’s Emily, a goth teenager contending with the corniness and racist overpinnings of the Polynesian-themed resort where her family is vacationing, and Grace, a character who follows an online flirtation to Jacksonville in “Rebecca” and finds herself repeatedly mistaken for her date’s best friend, who has long since died. Grace reappears later on in the book, in a story called “Three-Card Spread.” Set a few years after “Rebecca,“ this story finds Grace dating another women and living her life alongside “a little web of dykes who were sometimes born in and sometimes drawn to Gainesville for one reason or another.”

Throughout A Small Apocalypse, characters are shaken when their inner worlds and selves are made visible to others: a young woman comes out as queer and starts turning into a reptile, grief and loss morph into full-on ghosts, and half-white, half-Chinese characters are mistaken for each other and subjected to rude comments at the grocery store. These moments of exposure and their aftermath form the connective tissue and heartbeat of A Small Apocalypse.

I was lucky enough to interview Laura about the magic of Florida, queer friendship, and Daphne du Maurier’s gothic-ass novel, Rebecca. Fun fact: Laura and I met whilst writing for our college’s feminist, personal essay-centric newspaper. We eventually ascended to the rank of editors and not to brag—restructured, redesigned, and turned it into a very big deal on campus. It felt so nostalgic and fun to collaborate with Laura over GoogleDoc, something we did all the time circa 2010 to 2012. I loved this conversation and know you will, too.

Laura Chow Reeve photo by Em White

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Maddy: Hi Laura! I’m really excited to talk about your new collection of short stories, A Small Apocalypse. I think Florida looms large for a lot of Americans as a state to ridicule or scorn–it’s seen as a place for Disney adults, retirees, and the so-called Florida Man. It’s constantly in the news for book bans and legislation targeting trans and reproductive rights. What do you think people get wrong about Florida and why were you inspired to tell queer Florida stories? 

Laura: Maddy! Thanks so much for reaching out to chat about A Small Apocalypse. I’m excited to get into it. 

I love this question! People get so much wrong about Florida and I feel like a lot of it has been covered in Kristen Arnett’s beautiful essay “The Problem With Writing About Florida” published back in 2017. But I guess from my own perspective, I think that a lot of people, honestly a lot of liberals, dismiss Florida as a disposable place because they think it’s full of people who are too evil or too stupid to know what’s good for them (which, by the way, is racist and classist). And sure, I think Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis can go to hell, but Florida is so much more than them. Florida is queer, it’s trans, and it’s steeped in the brilliance of Black, Indigenous and people of color. Florida is the home of the Duval Folx dance party, The Dream Defender’s Freedom Papers, high school students organizing statewide walkouts over the “Don’t Say Gay” bills, the freaky photography of Shoog McDaniel, a network of abortion funds across the state, and, I don’t know, the literal magic of manatees. I could go on forever about institutional disenfranchisement and what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls organized abandonment, but I think my point is that while the attacks you name above are so real and felt every day, there are also so many people in Florida who are fighting back, taking care of each other, and building something new. 

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I was inspired to write queer stories after I fell in love with a person from Florida. We were long distance (lol obviously) and I was visiting them a lot; I don’t know, I fell in love with them and this weird place that they lived and all the people who loved them there. After a year I moved to Jacksonville and I never felt more inspired by a place before. I wanted to write about the queer people who embraced me and the weird, surreal, and haunted home that I found there.

M: I’ve also had the experience of visiting a new part of the country corollary to a queer LDR, and there is something really magical about experiencing a new place whilst also falling in love and having a built-in group of your partner’s friends. 

I want to ask you about Jacksonville and what you love/found inspiring about it and also, there can be a lot of pressure when writing about people and places that you care about deeply, and understand to be marginalized and misunderstood. Was that something you had to navigate when writing these stories and then publishing them?

L: I love so much about Jacksonville. It's Just 30 minutes from the Georgia border, a huge, sprawling, weird city. A lot of my favorite places are alluded to in A Small Apocalypse’s stories. The titular story actually was inspired by my time working at Sun-Ray Cinema, a very special independent theater that felt like a home to me and many of my friends, that hired me and many of my friends. It literally has the best popcorn in the world and probably the best movie theater food ever. One of the bathrooms looks like the red room from twin peaks and a lot of queers have taken good selfies in there; when my partner was still working at the LGBTQ+ youth center, Sun-Ray invited them to bring a bunch of youth to see Tangerine there. Sadly, it was recently announced that the owners of the building sold it to some developers based out of Georgia. I heard they’re turning Sun-Ray into some kind of virtual golf space. I feel pretty heartbroken about it—capitalism strikes again.

As a person who didn’t grow up in the south, didn’t grow up in Florida, I wanted my depiction to feel respectful, loving, nuanced. When I first started writing stories set in Florida, I felt more comfortable writing from the perspective of someone who was visiting or moving there. “Rebecca” was probably the earliest of those Florida stories and it opens with Grace getting off the plane and the humidity smacking her in the face for the first time. As I spent more time there, lived there, etc, the stories became more rooted in this queer friend group and those relationships felt like the real opening to writing the Florida I knew and loved. 

M: The title of your book is A Small Apocalypse, so I don’t think I’m giving too much away when I say that it contains a lot of death. There are ghosts, doppelgangers, and characters who are haunted by grief, memories, missed opportunities, or a sense that they are wrong or defective in some way. I think that mainstream American culture tells a very different story about death–that being alive is the default, and death is something taboo and scary that shouldn’t be acknowledged. What do you think we gain from a more expansive definition of death, or a sense that death and life are ongoing and happening alongside each other? For the record, I’ve always found old movie theaters to be really otherworldly and spooky. Like, the veil is THIN up in here!!

L: I definitely like to describe A Small Apocalypse as a book of ghost stories or, at least, a book very invested in haunting. And, like you already described, sometimes those ghosts are literal and sometimes they are more amorphous. When I was working on the book, I was thinking about worlds ending or world endings. In these stories I wanted to think about those small moments in which it feels like the, or maybe just your, world is ending—your dog dying, losing your job, your best friend moving away. Those moments when you want to dismiss the loss and say, “well, it’s not that bad” or “it could be worse.” And I wanted to put those next to others in which the actual world is ending with some kind of equal weight. And now that I’m talking it through, of course that is also about death. I’m thinking about that thin veil you’re describing and how in the collection there is a deep desire to reach through or past this border between life and death. That’s an interesting border to play on, that space where neither death nor apocalypse is really an “end.” Maybe it offers a less binaristic understanding of both of those things, maybe it’s just a helpful metaphor to describe the ways loss can feel weighted and sticky. 

photo credit to Amanda Torres

M: Speaking of ghost stories, there’s a recurring character in Apocalypse named Rebecca. Rebecca is dead, but lives on in the grief and longing of her friends. Is this a reference to Rebecca, the 1938 gothic lesbian novel by Daphne du Maurier?? And if so, are ghosts kind of, um, gay?

L: It is absolutely a reference to Rebecca! When I was at UCLA getting my MA in Asian American Studies, I took a queer horror class as an elective and wrote my version of “Rebecca” after watching the Hitchcock adaptation. In my version, the character Danny is also an offering of a different interpretation of Mrs. Danvers— not as a predatory and crazed lesbian, but as a grief-stricken friend who loved Rebecca in this beautiful queer way that defies binaries of platonism and romance. It was my fondness for that character that then launched the rest of the linked stories that explore the impact of Rebecca’s death in this web of friends and lovers and exes. 

There is absolutely something gay about all ghosts and honestly and I honestly feel like the “change my mind” meme about it. 

M: Speaking of Danny, you do such a good job of rendering queer friendship and platonic love on the page. I really admire the story that’s set at an all-day barbecue because so much is happening for these characters and for them, the barbecue really is the center of their universe, if only temporarily. What role does friendship have in your own life and writing process? Did any of your irl friends make it into these stories?

L: It felt really important for me to at least try to capture the magic of queer friendships, especially in the south. It’s with southern queers that I learned how to practice being in conflict, what it means to hurt each other and still work at or sometimes stumble into repair. The both buoying and heartbreaking nature of queer friendship shaped so much of how I think about family, relationships, and intimacy. I know I speak a lot about the strong inspiration to write when I moved to Florida, and that inspiration is heavily tied to wanting to write about friendship. And, while I think some of the themes in A Small Apocalypse feel less urgent for me to write about ten years later, queer friendship still feels like a topic that tumbles around in my brain. Especially now as I’m solidly out of my 20’s and heading towards 40—how do those dynamics shift? How does that love grow deeper and more complicated? How do we try (or not) to stay rooted in the intimacy of these friendships while also navigating the heteronormative and capitalist norms and pressures of family making?

There are many of my IRL friends in the book, though mostly amalgamations of people and experiences rather than 1:1 depictions. Since they are all very annoying, I got many texts asking who certain characters were once they started to read the collection as a whole. But I’ve also told them that anything in the group chat is fair game, so I guess it’s what I signed up for, lol. It’s been so fun to share this book with them and I feel truly honored that they trust me to write about us. 

M: I’m asking a lot of those same questions about getting older and queer community, and something I really pulled from A Small Apocalypse is queer friendship as this really expansive, flexible force. It’s a lot to think about, so I really appreciate you writing these stories and discussing them with me.

L: Thanks so much, Maddy, for supporting A Small Apocalypse! It’s been fun to write alongside you again—anassa kata and all that. 🌕

A Small Apocalypse is perfect for wherever summer takes you: the beach, the hotel room, the plane ride to meet your internet boo in-person for the first time ever…. It’s available wherever you source your books, including the library and your local independent bookstore with an aggressive bulletin board and no public restroom. You can read “1000-Year- Old Ghosts,“ one of the short stories from the collection, here.