Joanna Pearson’s story, “Bold Moves”, appears in the winter 2025 issue of The Southern Review. Here she discusses transcendence, scathing narrators, and what writing helps us understand about ourselves.
Halley McArn: Sylvie’s anxiety about giving a reading as a feminist poet in the Deep South is palpable! Why did you choose to set this story at a Christian college in Houston?
Joanna Pearson: Most of my writerly choices start as instinct—and that’s certainly how I first landed on the setting in “Bold Moves.” But the more I worked with the story, the more it made sense to me that a Christian college in the South would absolutely be the right place for Sylvie to end up. Discomfort is productive in fiction, so I knew it would make for a richer situation if Sylvie felt ambivalent about her escape from the preexisting discomfort in her home life. (It would have been an entirely different story, I think, had she flown off to a glamorous awards gala in Manhattan, or gave a big reading at Harvard!)
I’m interested in the way that religion has landed in the crosshairs of our current political and cultural moment. An institution’s religious affiliation can signal a range of things—although I’ll admit that, like Sylvie, I can be prone to make some reflexive assumptions. In the purest sense, I think religion serves our desire for connectedness and our longing for something transcendent. That’s also what poetry offers Sylvie—though she still has angst about it. I believe it’s what literature, at its best, offers all of us. I like this clash, the dirt and grime of lived experience (much like the dirt and grime of the Houston setting, the slightly uncomfortable position of such a college) butting up against something so hopeful.
HM: One of my favorite aspects of this story is how well Sylvie understands people. Her descriptions seem to reduce the people in her midst to a funny, perhaps unfortunate, but compassionate core. By what process do you get to know your characters?
JP: Oh, I love your description of Sylvie’s descriptions, especially the “compassionate core.” You might have put your finger on it. The compassionate core! But I believe it might require a certain ruthlessness to get there? I’m honestly not totally sure how it works when I attempt it, but when I think of other short story writers I love—Flannery O’Connor, Lorrie Moore, Edward P. Jones, Yiyun Li, Eudora Welty, to name a handful—I see how they (and their characters) observe others with scathing accuracy, with such a gimlet-eyed honesty that it’s downright vicious. And yet, it’s also somehow loving, if that makes any sense? These authors are so, so, so interested in how people work. They’re just as hard on the parts of themselves they inject into their characters—by which I mean, they are equally hard on themselves. No one comes out unscathed, but that carefulness of attention is also a gift, you know? It’s sometimes brutal, but I love it.
HM: Sylvie is aware of the way she projects her feelings onto other people “out of her own insecurity.” Yet there are certain moments, like when she assumes two characters are having an affair, when she’s right on the money. Why did you choose to inject moments of doubt into her narration?
JP: Oh, but it’s so human, isn’t it?! The way we can sometimes assess a situation quickly and accurately based on little information other than an intuition, and then other times, the way we can utterly misread something because we’re seeing it through the lens of our own preoccupations. I think both phenomena happen—perhaps even more so in a sensitive person. The fact we can be so good at these assessments from time to time is a little dangerous; we can start to trust our initial impressions too much. To her credit, I think Sylvie knows this. Therein lies the doubt.
HM: Billy, Sylvie’s husband, describes Sylvie as “a beguiling mystery,” but both Sylvie and I have to disagree! As much as her moves are “bold,” they are understandable. How do you strike a balance between interiority and action in your fiction?
JP: Ha, I agree with you and Sylvie! Anyone can seem like a beguiling mystery when we are first falling in love … then the mystery diminishes … and then, if one is lucky, I think the mystery—and appreciation—deepens again.
I sure hope I strike that balance between interiority and action. My husband, writer and beguiling mystery himself, talks about this idea of balancing mass and propulsion in a narrative. I think about that a lot. I want to accumulate mass (description, interiority, backstory) so that things feel textured and real, but I also want propulsion. I find that if I can capture my own interest, it’s usually a good clue that things are moving but the story world is also fully realized.
HM: Though Sylvie struggles with Billy, she still seems amazed by the fact that they found each other in the first place. “What were the odds, really,” she considers, “that you would ever meet anyone with whom you might want to share a life, make a home?” How do you hope readers, by seeing the world through Sylvie’s eyes, reconsider their commitment to other people?
JP: I’ve been accused of overusing the word “simpatico,” but I think it’s a great word because it captures the magic of when you find someone, be it a dear friend or a romantic partner, with whom you truly relate. Though lots of people are pleasant, it’s just rare enough to find another truly simpatico person. What a lucky thing when it happens! I’ll grant that Sylvie has a lot of flaws, but I think she appreciates that fact—and would want others to appreciate it as well.
HM: As an MFA student myself, I appreciated the care with which this story explored the complexities (and hilarities) of the academia-adjacent literary world. What was it like to write a story from the perspective of a writer?
JP: Ha, it’s so fun. I realize there’s an ouroboros-type danger to poets writing ars poeticas, novelists writing novels about novelists, but I like to believe my cheat code is that I tend to write fiction about poets. I feel a great fondness toward characters who are writers—they care deeply about something I care deeply about, too! I also feel entitled to poke fun at them a little bit, in the same way I’d poke fun at myself. I can fill these characters with all my own ridiculousness and neuroses, perhaps even to an exaggerated degree. I recall MFA life fondly (so I hope you’re enjoying it!)—it’s such a brief, charged time. But I suspect I might still find it so interesting partly because I’m now no longer a part of academia, so it’s a world I’ve stepped away from.
HM: How does your experience as a psychiatrist inform your writing?
JP: If you talk to enough people—and if you talk to any specific person long enough—you can sort of start to understand how anyone might do anything. People who seem pretty unlikeable, even odious, at the outset can start to become much more sympathetic. This is a perennially useful concept for me as a writer. (It’s basically the opposite of my experience, say, looking at internet comments, or any other glancing interaction with the public at large, which often fills me with a bleak, irritable, impatient view of humankind.)
HM: Sylvie says that she used to be more concerned with style. How has your writing changed over your career?
JP: I guess the biggest change is that I used to write poetry, and now I exclusively write fiction! I frequently wish I’d studied the craft of fiction more formally (my MFA is in poetry), but there might be some advantages to wriggling one’s way over from another genre. I got a little jaded about poetry, whereas I maintain an amateur’s enthusiasm toward fiction. I just really enjoy it—in this pure, exuberant, totally uncool way! No one ever explained certain rules to me, which workshop stories were overdone, how we’re all supposed to be obsessed with Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or whatever (good book, but I’m not obsessed), so I can do whatever I want and be gloriously unfashionable about it—and sometimes that works out!?
HM: What are you working on right now?
JP: I’ve got a manuscript for a third story collection that I’m trying to tie up (this story is a part of it!). I’m also trying to get traction on another longer project.
Joanna Pearson’s debut novel, Bright and Tender Dark, was recently published. She’s also the author of two story collections, Now You Know It All, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and Every Human Love. Her stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Mystery and Suspense.
Halley McArn is the editorial assistant of The Southern Review and an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University with a focus on prose writing. She’s served as the Poetry and Nonfiction Editor for the New Delta Review and as an editorial assistant at Speculative Nonfiction. You can find her work in Bright Wall/Dark Room.