Maybe it was the mouse carnival that did me in. Or was it the factory where virgins are made, or grocery shopping with Bob Dylan, or could it have been the moment when a man turned into a rainstorm? Helen Phillips’s debut collection of one-page fabulist stories, And Yet They Were Happy, is thronged by wonders. It is the work, as Amy Hempel has said, of a “deeply interesting mind.”
Helen is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Meridian Editors’ Prize, and a Ucross Foundation residency. Her work has appeared in the Mississippi Review, PEN America, and Salt Hill, among others. She lives in Brooklyn. Helen and I went to college and graduated school together, and this interview took place over the past month.
—Reese Okyong Kwon Continue reading "Helen Phillips"…