Last year, short story author Kathie Giorgio released "A Home For Wayward Clocks," her first full-length novel six years in the making. Now, less than a year later, she's set to publish her latest work, a collection of short stories entitled "Enlarged Hearts."
The collection chronicles snapshots of the lives of women who are all connected by the fictional plus-size fashion boutique "Large & Luscious." Not surprisingly, the idea for this new collection sprang from its ties to Giorgio's last work.
"'Enlarged Hearts' started, actually, from my last book, 'The Home for Wayward Clocks,'" Giorgio explained. "There was a story chapter in that book for the miniature mantle clock, 'The Fat Girl Outside,' which also appears in this collection. When I wrote that story, I just thought it would be a good idea to pair something really small – the miniature mantle clock – with something large, which ended up being the Fat Girl."
Giorgio's original intent was to write about one single woman, but "Enlarged Hearts" quickly evolved.
"I thought it would be a linked short story collection, like this one is, but there would only be one Fat Girl and it would be just her story," she said. "I started on the second story and I realized, these are two different Fat Girls, so then I expanded the idea to be many different people who work in the same store."
While each short story in Giorgio's latest collection tells the tale of a different woman, each character is referred to by the simple, anonymous name of "Fat Girl."
"When I wrote the opening line for ('The Fat Girl Outside') – "The Fat Girl kept her world miniature because she was anything but." – I thought she was going to have a name eventually, and she never did," said Giorgio. "Every single one is just called the 'Fat Girl,' because that's just how society looks at them, and that is how they look at themselves; they kind of identify themselves by their weight."
Many of the stories contained within "Enlarged Hearts" explore the scrutiny placed on the Fat Girls by society and themselves, but the collection as a whole reflects a full range of human emotion, elegantly ebbing and flowing with tales of humor and love interspersed with those of sadness and grief.
"I wanted the collection to be a little bit of everything," said Giorgio. "Literary fiction kind of has the reputation of being the 'gloom and doom' genre, that we write about dark all the time, and we don't. I think literary fiction is more focused and it's more lyrical and it doesn't have to be dark, and I kind of wanted to show that in this collection. You can read literary fiction and still laugh at it. It doesn't have to be dark and depressing."
And sometimes, as is the case here, it can be both.
"Probably my favorite story of the whole collection is 'The Fat Girl Goes Steady,' in which she literally ends up meeting Death at Starbucks," said Giorgio. "That story was fun. I was working along, and all of a sudden there's Death crooking a finger at her, trying to seduce her with a cheese danish and a cinnamon dolce latte. I can still remember stopping dead and saying, 'What?!' because I had no clue.
"I love when that sort of thing happens, when the mind just sort of jumps itself and then gives you something that you were not expecting."
Giorgio will present an early release of "Enlarged Hearts" Thursday, March 8 at Martha Merrell's Bookstore in Waukesha. She is also teaching a workshop on "The Flip-Flop of Characters" March 11 at UWM's Spring Writer's Conference.
As for her next project, Giorgio says she's already received a jump-start in that direction.
"What I'm working on right now is the sequel to 'The Home for Wayward Clocks.' I just finished the first draft of it," she said. "I had no plans to write a sequel. Last spring I was about 176 pages into another book, and I went to a warm stone massage and right in the middle of the massage I got hit with the opening line."
And though Giorgio has no official plans to revisit the Fat Girls, she's not writing that off, either.
"Someone asked me that the other day and I was like, 'Oh no, don't say the sequel word again!' I wasn't planning on it; I guess I can never say never anymore."
Contrary to her natural state of being, Renee Lorenz is a total optimist when it comes to Milwaukee. Since beginning her career with OnMilwaukee.com, her occasional forays into the awesomeness that is the Brew City have turned into an overwhelming desire to discover anything and everything that's new, fun or just ... "different."
Expect her random musings to cover both the new and "new-to-her" aspects of Miltown goings-on, in addition to periodically straying completely off-topic, which usually manifests itself in the form of an obscure movie reference.
