Buzzcut
A Conversation with the Up & Coming
In August, Editor-in-Chief Ellie Reid sat down with Niamh Carmichael to discuss her debut novel, Root Stock. A collection of poetry and short fiction, Root Stock explores loss, connection, and coming-of-age through surreal narratives. It was published this past May.
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excerpt from Root Stock
Over a period of several weeks Gabby had watched as the campground grew sparser and sparser by pieces. The weather was more uncertain than she’d remembered it being there, sometimes shifting from placid blue to squalling gales and back again in the span of only hours. After one particularly violent night storm, she walked outside with Peter and Kringle to see a great sprawling oak toppled on top of one of the remaining cabins. Peter and Kringle were overjoyed—that much less work for them—but Gabby was transfixed by the expansive root system exposed by that great upheaval of soil and bark. Ants trudged along thin stems and fat white grubs wriggled in the dirt; she felt privy to something she was never supposed to see and it pulled her heart, the nakedness of it all, that perverse inversion against which there was no defense.
But today was a solidly beautiful day. The trunks grew wide and tall and distant. Sun shafted through, great and glimmering and soft, wavering slightly in a breeze that cooled the back of her neck and tinkled leaves against each other.
A small creek sprouted to her right, spilling over itself in a rush to get to nowhere. Pebbles shone damp in the light. A fish splashed. Gabby dug a coin from her pocket and flipped it in, wishing for something she didn’t know.
She stepped around a huge elm and stopped short. Splayed on the grass in front of her, at the bottom of a huge hill tumbled with fallen logs and leaf mold, was the corpse of a deer, legs bent and eyes open. It was a buck, with a great network of antler nearly the size of her. Curves of the bone sunk into the dirt, bending back the deer’s head, and flies buzzed and lit upon its flank and nose and eye. Gabby didn’t know whether to be awed or repulsed but either way it shocked her, the vivacity of its deadness. The more she’d begun driving on her own, the more she’d grown accustomed to seeing roadkill—so she thought she’d been desensitized, in a way, to mammalian, furred death, but she realized now that was only due to the car’s speed. On the road each dead thing was a blurred mess, a vaguely animal-shaped structure spilling out faded red felt; here the deer was huge, and sculpture-still, and oozing and congealing and stinking sweet real. She stumbled back over her feet and collided with something solid and warm; she yelped and whipped around to see Kringle’s mother.
“Mrs.—Ms. Campbell!” She said. She released her breath and it whisked back the wisps of hair on either side of Ms. Campbell’s face.
Ms. Campbell gazed past Gabby to the dead deer.
“A shame,” she sighed, as wind rattled the woods and jingled a bell high in the branches somewhere. “I used to love deer, you know. The topper of my wedding cake was a little wooden fawn.”
An image came to Gabby’s mind of a four-tiered cake with thick white scalloped frosting, arching like a colonnaded church, and on top, a miniature of the buck in front of them, leaking trails of maraschino down the sides to pool and soak its base, gradually pinking the entire pearly confection as wedding bells trilled somewhere unseen.
She watched as Ms. Campbell knelt and studied its frozen face. They were almost nose to nose, woman and deer mirror motionless, and they stayed like that until Gabby cleared her throat and Ms. Campbell looked up and smiled.
“I’d like to bring it back for dinner."
“Ms. Campbell,” Gabby said. “It has to be two hundred pounds or more.”
“Yes, but who doesn’t like venison?” She said sweetly, already beginning to wrest its antlers from the dirt.
Gabby was disgusted but had no other option: she grasped the back legs and they set about the slow going of dragging it back to the dining hall.
The deer was still faintly warm, and she could feel droplets of sweat on its skin as her shirt began to slick to her back. The deer caught on roots and tree trunks and, when the woods got thicker again, every scrub nearby. Gabby considered sourly the bushes were moving closer just to get in her way; every few feet she had to give the animal a heavy tug to free it from the newest obstacle. Her lower back burned and her arms felt like smoke. She imagined evaporating and joining the water cycle so she wouldn’t have to continue to heave this great dead thing another mile but Ms. Campbell was grieving and so Gabby tried to understand her desire to feed them something better.
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Ellie Reid
Tell me about the summer before thesis. Did you know what you were going to write when you went in?
Niamh Carmichael
I knew for sure that I wanted a collection. Because I did not feel that I had the oversight, or maybe the attention, even, to do a longer work. At that time, I was thinking specifically about a short fiction collection, but ended up adding in three old poems at the end, because they fit so well thematically, and sort of fleshed out the whole thing. But at that time, I was really liking the idea of doing a cohesive short story collection, because I'd been reading a lot of those. I was getting really into Kelly Link, really into Karen Russell. I think I read Carmen Maria Machado during that time, too. So I was getting really into a very specific genre of short fiction that was women-written; sometimes magical realism, sometimes full out-there. But a lot of them—especially a lot of the Kelly Link stuff—what I liked so much was that I couldn't explain what exactly was off about them. Reading them unsettles you, but it's not like you can put your finger on why. I don't think I ended up using any of my summer pages.
Reid
I was going to ask about that, too, because I didn't either.
Carmichael
I think that those of us making long-form works are the only ones who really use their summer pages. I didn't use any of mine. I drafted a bunch of two or three-page starts to a bunch of different stories, and I used a couple of those as jumping points, but then, of course, I completely rewrote them, and they ended up becoming different stories anyway. But I was able to use them as inspiration. Later in the year when I got stuck for new starts, I would go back and say, "Oh, maybe there's something here," and then would totally rework it.
Reid
Do you think your concept of what you wanted your thesis to be changed at all over the course of writing it?
Carmichael
By the end, definitely, because I did end up adding in those three poems. There was something satisfying about the idea of a certain number of stories all packaged together, all in a very specific order. And obviously, I can still have that with the poems added in, but it's a different kind of work. So by the end, it definitely did change. If we're talking about just the stories in general, not so much, because I've also been, my whole life, pretty consistent with the themes that I return to. The stories changed, but not so much their themes, from my summer pages to what they actually became.
Reid
That's kind of nice, though, that consistency. Some sense of knowing what you're doing, at least.
Carmichael
That's something I actually had trouble with for many years. Everything I've written has been about family and family loss. I was nervous that the reason I kept returning to this one thing was that I couldn't write anything else. I talked with all our teachers about it many different times, and they all told me the same thing: If you keep returning to something, it's because you have more to say. You need to keep writing about it. Which logically, yes, I knew, but it was hard to understand and accept.
I would say thesis helped with this, because it requires a theme; I couldn't think of anything to tie the stories together until I said, “You know what? Let me lean into the theme that I've always tried to break away from." There was something comforting in knowing that I could start writing anything, and it would likely end up fitting in the collection. The process of writing thesis was cathartic, then, in that way, because I was able to stop running from this theme and fully lean into it.
Reid
Could you tell me a little bit about your writing process, during your thesis and in general?
Carmichael
So most of my life, I haven't had a process. My writing process for the entirety of thesis was really odd, since what I struggled with most was ending my stories. I can get a great start and a strong middle, and then I can never think of how I want to end it. And so, for most of thesis, I would write the starts and middles to these stories, and then if I didn't know how to end it, I would just move on to something else. Around wintertime, I had to figure out some quick endings, because around that time I was submitting to the Scholastic Writing Awards. With that, not only did I have to submit a finished story, but I had to squish them into the word count.
Reid
Oh, the dreaded Scholastic word count.
Carmichael
It killed me. I had a twenty-page story that I'd been working on for two years, and I had to get it down to 3,000 words. That killed me. But in addition to that, there were a bunch of Root Stock stories that were close to the word count, and asking for an ending, quickly. I only had two weeks. For a lot of them, I stopped them where they were and figured out an ending in that way. But then when the actual thesis deadline came around, I had the heads and torsos for ten different stories, and I had to figure out legs for them. Some of them, I would probably want to redo, just because—I don't know. I felt that I had so much time during thesis to write, but looking back, I never had as much time as I would have needed.
Talking about processes, though, the way I've been going about writing this summer is a bit different. I thought that after thesis, I was going to have to take a several months break from writing, because all the page generation really gets to you after a point, but I've been writing so much this summer. I've been talking to a couple other people about it, too, and we agree that it's really nice to be able to write entirely for ourselves. There is no stress about page generation, or about adhering to a collection. We can sit down and write whatever we've been wanting to. I've started handwriting, which I've never done. I bring my notebook everywhere with me now. That's not really ever been the kind of writer that I've been. But I’d say that my view of my writing and myself as an artist, and YoungArts has a lot to do with this. I could go on about that.
Reid
Go on about it.
Carmichael
Okay, I will!
Reid
I'm also interested in the differences you find in handwriting.
Carmichael
For me, it takes away a sort of filter. There's something so stark about a document on my laptop, and the cursor, dangling there. It’s daunting. I'm seeing the progress of what I'm writing when I'm on a laptop, so I'm a lot more cognizant of what I'm doing, and how it's all coming together. But when I'm handwriting, because I have the worst posture when I'm handwriting, I'm so close to the page, I'm not zoomed out and looking at what I'm writing as a whole. It's really just one sentence to the next. It becomes a lot more stream-of-consciousness.
The main story I've been working on this summer, I started in New York. It was probably 2:00 a.m., and I was just sitting there, hammering around five pages into my notebook. And then I got home, I typed it all up, and I refined it a little bit. That’s what I've been doing now: handwriting, and then typing it up and editing there. And then if I find that there's a part that’s still not clean enough, as happens when writing stream-of-consciousness, I'll re-handwrite it and retype again. So it's been a lot of back and forth and all over the place with handwriting versus typing. But I find that using a hybrid of both helps me the most. Also, sometimes handwriting isn’t fast enough for me. If I have an idea that I really want to get out, then I'll type it instead, because handwriting makes it difficult to keep up with my head, and then you risk losing exactly that which I was trying to find. And that's really frustrating. So sometimes I'll have my notebook and my laptop right together. And I'll hand write and then immediately transfer it over, back and forth, like that. But that's all I’m doing process-wise. I'm still trying to figure out the exact pattern I like, because handwriting is new to me.
Reid
I imagine, though, that transferring back-and-forth helps you live in the work a lot more.
Carmichael
Definitely because it requires you to look at it so much. I'm being in this world, and I'm making so much. It feels a lot more alive to me, because I'm spending so much time with it across different mediums. The words feel more full.
Reid
Second tangent, then—YoungArts.
Carmichael
YoungArts—which changed everything for me. When I submitted my application back in October, I didn't know, really, what it was. Ms. Detiberus [our creative writing teacher] said to our class: Hey, I have this thing. I'll give extra credit if anyone wants to submit to it. I didn’t need extra credit, but I said: You know what? I haven't submitted anything in a while. It couldn't hurt. I was in her office when I got the acceptance letter. We were just hanging out, and I got this email from YoungArts, and it said in big bold: Winner with Distinction, which at first I thought was a lower level, an honorable mention or something. I ask her, Hey, what does winner with distinction mean? And she halted, like—Pause. What?
Honestly, whenever I think about that, it’s crazy to me, because National YoungArts Week was probably the most formative experience I had in the past couple of years. And it's insane to think about the fact that if I hadn't leaned into that whim to apply, I never would've gone, never would have met those people. Leading up to it, everyone who knew anything about it or who had been themselves told me, Oh, it's the best experience ever. It's, oh, it's going to change your life. And I believed that, but I didn't truly understand it until I experienced it myself. I'm also so grateful that it took place in January, about halfway through our thesis process, when nothing was concrete yet, because the experience changed the rest of my book.
And I've never been a stranger to a community of writers, right? I've been at School of the Arts since sixth grade. But there was something so concentrated in that hotel that made the experience different. Yes, everybody at SOA is a practicing artist, but the fact is that by senior year, not everybody cares about their art, which is fair. People burn out. Their parents make them try out, whatever. But to get into that Miami hotel, you have to have such a passion, and it’s palpable during the competition itself. The entire place was alive. I walked through the week awestruck.
But the most important part of YoungArts for me, beyond the community it gave, and the experience it promised, and the performance we delivered, was that it changed the way I think about myself. I'd always thought of myself as someone who writes, right? But I had never considered myself a writer, and much less an artist, and for me, that is a significant distinction. The entire week, there were so many people telling us, "You are artists. You are." They were hammering this idea in, to what felt like ridiculous amounts at times. But I'm so glad that they did. The fact that I had never digested it before is weird to me; you'd think that I would've after having been at SOA for seven years, but—
Reid
No, I know what you mean.
Carmichael
YoungArts was a wake-up call. It reminded me how much I do care about my writing, and how seriously I do take it. That, in turn, affected how much time I put into it, and how much care I have for it. I’m carving out moments to sit down and write, rather than waiting for them to come. When I was writing outside of class, I used to wait for the pressure to build, for so long until I simply had to write. But this summer, I've been intentional about making time, sitting down and doing this, working on it, thinking about it and through it, too.
Reid
Do you have a set routine for writing each day?
Carmichael
No. And I don't do it every day, either, but if I'm not writing something every day, I'm at least thinking about the story I'm working on. I come to cafes, and I’ll check up on my college deadlines and whatnot, and then I'll return to a story. Or at times I always enjoy reading someone else's work, one of my friends’. I'm big on trading writing. That's one of my favorite things to do. I've found that reading someone else's work and providing feedback makes me more excited to work on my own stuff.
Reid
If you don’t have a schedule, or if you haven’t written in a while, then do you find that there's a specific emotion that makes you sit down and say, "Okay, now I actually have to type this out?”
Carmichael
I’ll often feel compelled if I'm reminded of the nature of people. My stories are frequently more character-based than plot-based. That in itself is something I struggle with, too; I'll have an idea for a character, and will write three pages of pure introspection into this character, and then I have to work backwards to figure out what the plot could be. But anyway, character intrigues me—I'll be watching a movie or something, and if I'm really intrigued by a look at a certain kind of person, or a way they're looking at someone else—then that makes me wonder how I could write about a person like that, and their interactions with other people.
Reid
Would you say, then, that most of the stories in your thesis started off with the ideas for the characters, and the plot came after?
Carmichael
Probably. Sometimes a mix. When I say it started with a character, what I really mean is, a lot of the time it starts with one sentence that gives insight into a character. It's not a person with a name and backstory popping into my head, but a phrase, that affords a quick, tiny little look into how they see the world, and then I build from there.
I can think of two main exceptions from my thesis where I thought of general plot before I thought of characters. But for the rest, I started with an idea of perspective, and then I figured out what's actually happening that makes their type of looking intriguing in the first place.
Reid
Do you have any favorite characters from your thesis?
Carmichael
Earl and Dennis, my road trip story, is very close to my heart. I started writing that one, I want to say, the summer after sophomore year. I wasn't working on it continuously that whole time. I would write a bunch of pages in one go and then not look at it for a couple of months. It went through many changes. A lot of the times I had to reel myself back in with that one, because I was leaning into the plot and thereby hiding from the emotion in it, whereas what’s required of me is usually the opposite. I remember one time I wrote three pages straight about a banana truck being overturned on the road, and my friend who read it said, This needs to go. It's fun, but it doesn't do anything. So the road trip story was just like that one. I've written and known many versions of it. It's been so long in the making that I can’t help but love it. And "Big Jo's Grab-and-Go," I like that one.
Reid
It's a hell of a title, too.
Carmichael
Oh, that's what I really like about it: I have so much trouble with titles, but that one came to me. I've never had a title come to me that I love.
"Root System” is worth mentioning as well. That one grew from my summer pages. I like it because it was unsettling in the way the Kelly Link stories were. I probably could've leaned into the uncanny more. But regardless, that story was important because it provided a shift away from full realism, which is what I've done for most of my life.
Reid
I love the idea in “Big Jo’s Grab-n-Go” of two boys who are complete strangers revealing things to each other because no one else around them can understand. I'm interested in why these quiet moments of understanding between two people recur throughout Root Stock—what draws you to writing about them?
Carmichael
It probably started because I was afraid of melodrama. A leftover instinct from that one workshop we all completed in ninth grade, in which the whole goal was to make a story as melodramatic as possible, so that we knew from then on how much was too much. That’s the one thing you hope never to hear in a workshop setting: that your story is doing too much.
So that was the reason: I was afraid of outward emotion. I didn't enjoy writing big, emotional moments, because they were never true to what my voice and perspective would be. I believe there's a lot more to be found in what's left unsaid.
I'm remembering, now, more and more of those little moments. Like in "Cabin Fever" when Gabby and the mom are sitting on the dock: that scene is just chock full of little moments. Small details feel truer to what I, as a writer, can say.
Reid
I have another question about those recurring moments, but first I want to ask whether the order of these stories was intentional for you.
Carmichael
Oh, yeah. I spent a lot of time on the order. I printed out slips of paper with all the titles and spent a lot of time looking at them and rearranging them. By that time, I knew I wanted to add in my three poems, which had been long written at that point. I knew I wanted a poem at the beginning, middle, and end, to bookmark the collection in that way. Ms. DeTiberus helped me with the order of the poems themselves, saying things like, this is a really compelling image to end on, and, I think the end of this one leads to something interesting for the rest of them. She spoke of them in ways I hadn’t considered prior. For the short stories, I was very careful about arranging them in ways that avoided redundancy. I have parallels all over Root Stock, and ordering the book was at times a game of making each story feel distinct.
Reid
I like the way they mirror each other, though. It feels very cyclical. In “Root System” and in "Cabin Fever,” you have images of deer—in “Root System,” it's a family of deer that the main character sees when she’s in the car, and in “Cabin Fever,” you have the dead buck. Were these intentional callbacks to the beginning from the end of the book?
Carmichael
I noticed the callback after, and of course, the image is on my cover. There's other symbols that I've returned to a thousand times in my writing, like birds. Cardinals are a big thing in my writing. Deer were new for me this year. Once I noticed it, I ended up leaning into it, but any symbolism was not intentional at first.
Reid
How do you think that these reoccurring images and themes help the pieces converse with each other?
Carmichael
My main themes—family, family conflict—have always been the defining, central keystone of these stories. And if it's not fully about the former, its presence in other areas of the collection feeds the latter in some way, and vice-versa. I don’t know how the images, deer and all, converse. But I like that you’re asking about it. It’ll make me think about it a bit more myself.
Reid
It’s something to return to, for sure. After my thesis, I had to take a complete step away from what I had written, and couldn't look at it for a really long time. But then you go back, and the distance lets you see all these details that were unnoticeable at the time, because time was just a crunch to the end. But I will say from a reader’s perspective, Root Stock is recurring, and you write towards certain things naturally.
Carmichael
I've obviously read the whole thing because I've written the whole thing, but I haven't sat down and read it as a collection; you could say I’ve thought about the experience of reading it from start to finish, but it's not an experience I've had myself, nor that I’m able to. After publishing it, I needed something fresh, honestly. I would like to reread it, though, because looking back reminds me of the ways in which all of these hold a little place in my heart.
Reid
I really liked your use of the poems to divide your thesis into three distinct sections. How did you decide on that structure, and how do you think the poems—particularly the grief explored in them—help inform the rest of your thesis?
Carmichael
The main thing I like about the poems is that they're all about my life and from my perspective. I think that there's something interesting about having a bunch of stories from the perspective of somebody else, about other people's lives, but having my own experience in there a little bit, too; I think there's something interesting about reading what an author has to say about other people and what they have to say about their own self next to each other.
As for deciding on that structure, that was a really last-minute decision. That was probably a couple of weeks before I published. I wanted this really cohesive experience of a collection, and specifically a short fiction collection, so I honestly don't remember how I came to the idea of putting in poems. I think it was my sestina and my cardinal poem. I was probably talking about how those pieces are very important to me, some of the more important things that I've written in my life. And I was probably being sort of sentimental, saying, Oh, I wish I could memorialize them in this way. And Ms. Detiberus likely said: Well, you can. And you know what? It is my thesis, I can. I hadn’t even thought of that but—my book is my book.
If I was putting one poem in—and I knew I wanted to do the sestina or the cardinal—I knew I had to do both. I think I then went back to the genetic engineer one, which I hadn't looked at in a while, and I was like, There's something here that I like and that I think slots in very well.
Reid
You said earlier that if you could go back, you might change some things in your thesis. What do you think you would change?
Carmichael
This summer, I keep going back to this one story that I've been writing, since it's been informing my writing in a lot of different ways. In certain parts of it, I lean really far into stream of consciousness. Really just a tangential flow of writing. It's my favorite paragraph in the story, but it's almost all one sentence. Actually, I think I had to break it into three because it was too long—But it's totally separate as a subject from the rest of it, which I really, really like. But I had to be really ruthless in keeping it so clean that the tangentialism—which isn't a word—stays clean and concise. Which has been a really hard line to tread, because I want so much to lean into it.
I'm a very maximalist writer. Most of the time, I like to pack as much into one sentence, in one paragraph, as I can. And so I find that unless I'm really, again, ruthless about cutting out what doesn't need to be there… I'm so bad at killing my darlings. I hate it. I really, really do. It breaks my heart. But I think that I would've wanted to do more of that in some of these stories. One that I think of in particular is "The Oozlefinch." I really like that story. I don't like it as much as I would have if I'd been more concise with it. I think sometimes I just go on too much. There's a couple others; "Root System" I would want to return to, because that one I just had the most trouble with ending it. I started that one early in the year, before October, because I read it at Lake Logan, and it was not ended until probably a week or two before publishing. So that was the entire school year, that that spanned. And I had so many different endings for it, and I went with the one that worked the best, but it's still, I don't remember that ending and think: Yes, that was exactly what I envisioned. So it's something that I'm happy with. Everything in here is something that I'm happy with and that I'm proud to have published. But if I had more time and if I went back, I would just want to make it cleaner.
Reid
Then in the opposite way, too, is there something you wrote that you didn't publish, either because it wasn't finished, or because it didn't fit cohesively into the rest of your thesis, that you wish you would have published?
Carmichael
I don't have any pieces that I wish I would have put in here. If anything, it's stuff that I've written this summer that I wish I'd thought to write during the school year. There's definitely a few starts that I had for my summer pages that I'd wish I'd had the time to see through. I have a fondness for the weird little things that I start writing. A lot of the time, I don't see them through because there's not anything actually there, but maybe with enough time I could find something. I do have a good deal of pieces that I pulled from the past, though. All of the poems, obviously, and then “Big Jo's” because that was my YoungArts piece. I wrote that second semester, junior year. So a lot of my old favorites were put in here. But there's a couple things, older stuff, that I liked that I wish could've fit in here but just didn't.
Reid
I wanted to ask about “Saltwater Graves” specifically, because it felt tonally different. It was much more focused on landscape, and the guilt of leaving a home that you love but don't quite belong to. It was a very moving piece, and I'm wondering how physical setting informs your writing even though it's not always the main focus.
Carmichael
That one was a little different, because that one I wrote pretty close to the end. And I did honestly debate whether to put that one in there or not. But it was the kind of thing where I felt that if I didn't put it in, I would regret it. So I did end up putting it in. But I felt that it did sort of stand out because it was—I don't know. There was just a different process to writing it.
I think that place has also been something I've been thinking more about lately, as I'm preparing to move from the only place I've ever lived. I think that a lot of the time I have a pretty vivid idea of the setting in my head, and I feel it comes through in the piece with me just thinking about it. Especially since I am more character-focused. I don't know. Maybe I feel like if I try to put too much place in there, there won't be enough focus on the people. But then, too, sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes I have no idea where I am. But I think it always comes through in little bits and pieces. Like in “The Oozlefinch,” I imagine that set in my grandma's old home that I would go out to visit as a kid. I believe I even said it was in Virginia, and that's where she lived. It was this great old house with forests full of deer right behind it and this huge, sloping lawn. And of course, I never went into the forests as a kid because I was a kid, and I wasn't allowed. So “The Oozlefinch” also served as a kind of exploration into what was past that boundary from when I was a kid. Stuff like that.
And then “Saltwater Graves,” because that one I talk about the marsh, I think. By that point, I was deciding between two main college options, and it was becoming very concrete that I was leaving. And so I had just been thinking about Charleston and about these landscapes and images that I probably take for granted because I've lived here my whole life. And I think I was talking to someone at college, and she was like, wow, I haven't seen the Spanish moss in forever, or the marsh grass. And it's just the stuff that I'm so used to seeing that soon I'm going to be totally missing out on. What I think about a lot is whenever I come home from a trip, and I walk out of the airport and the air smells so salty, and I'm like, how have I never noticed this before? And it's just because I'm so used to it. So I think I focused on the setting in that piece because that’s just what I was thinking about, whereas most of the time, I'm thinking more about the people than anything else.
Reid
Root Stock—I'm wondering how you decided that that was going to be your title, and if you decided before or after you wrote the thesis. You said earlier you had trouble with titles.
Carmichael
I think my title was my very last thing. I had my cover. I gave my artist a different title at first, and then I had to be like, I actually changed it a little bit. My original thing: I wanted to do “& Other Stories” so badly. I really, really love a collection with “& Other Stories.” I had to let go of that when I added in the poems. I considered for a moment that maybe I could do "& Other Works." I don't know why, but I really, really love that format for a title. I was having to decide on my titular piece, and I really liked "Root System" because I felt that it was representative of a lot of other stories in my thesis, thematically, and I really liked my voice in it. I thought it would have been good as the title piece, too. Some of the other ones, like "Hollow Bones"—I really love that story. But I wouldn't have wanted that to be the title for the full thing.
So I had it "Root System.” At first, I had "Root System & Other Stories," then I added in poems, so I just had "Root System." And I told it to a few people. I told it to my mom, I told it to Ms. DeTiberus, and they had the same reaction, which was: Hmm. Not what I was hoping to hear when I was already stressed about generating one. But while I think it works as a story title, it has an odd flow to it for an overarching title, if that makes sense. But I really liked the idea of doing “root-something,” because so much of this is about putting down or picking up roots, whether that's in a place or with people. So much of it is about growing and growing up. I have many stories that are from the perspectives of people actively in the process of growing up, or who have just ended it, or who are about to start, or who grow up over a story’s course. That theme informed a lot of these stories.
And so I liked root-something. I was looking up any terms associated with roots, and then I came across this phrase, rootstock, which is the part of the root where a new growth comes from. And, well, that's just kind of perfect, isn't it? I'm pretty sure the actual term is one word, but for a title, I did it as two. Once I found that, it fell into place.
Reid
We've been talking about this a little throughout as well, but what place do you think writing has in your future? What do you think that looks like, especially after completing this very large project?
Carmichael
I don't know what I want to do with my future. I am probably going to major in English and creative writing at Emory, and then I'll double major in something else that'll help me get a job. So, all of that to say: I don't want to make a career out of my writing. One, because I want to make a living. And two, because I think that if it was tied to my livelihood, I would enjoy it a lot less. But I have realized over the course of this year that I am a writer, I am an artist. My writing is so, so, so important to me. It's a huge part of my life, and it's grown so much over even just the past seven months. My creative writing friends, my YoungArts friends, now my Scholastic friends, and then of course, reading for Trace Fossils. And I'm a reader for another magazine, too. I don't think I would know who I was if I was not so involved with these literary circles and wasn’t writing all the time. So, as a part of my future, I want to continue writing regularly and taking it seriously and submitting to places. And again, I have no idea what I want to do as a career, but I do think it would be really cool to do something in those circles. Something in the publishing world or the editing world. But I also really can't say. I've had so many career ideas, and so far, my answer is that I'll figure it out at college. But writing is always going to be a very integral part of my life, and I want to make the time and the effort to keep it that way.
Reid
Is there anything you wanted to talk about that I didn't ask you?
Carmichael
I think the one other thing that I could always go on about is how important to me my community of writers is. I still keep in touch with so many of my YoungArts friends. I was actually texting one yesterday about how we both have something new that we want to send each other. And then, of course, people in my creative writing class, who I've still been sending stuff to this summer, and receiving feedback from, and giving feedback to. My mentor for thesis was Sean Scapellato, and we met up a few weeks ago, even, and the main takeaway was that we want to keep in touch, and that I can still send him stuff when I'm at college.
I've been really lucky to have so many avenues to bring all these people into my life, and now I have the privilege to stay in contact with all of them. Emory has a great creative writing program, but it's not like Kenyon. It's not a writing college. And so, I've been thinking about how weird it's going to be to not have this built-in circle of writers around me. But I sort of have that already.
Reid
And you’ve been able to cultivate that. You’ve been able to choose it for yourself.
Carmichael
Yeah, which is something that's so, so special to me. I just would not be the writer that I am without it.
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Carmichael’s collection Root Stock can be purchased here.
Ellie Reid is a junior at the University of South Carolina, where she studies biology and English literature. Her poetry and essays have been published in Canvas Literary Journal, Writing South Carolina, and others. She was the runner-up for the Princeton High School Poetry Prize, a six-time national gold medalist in the Scholastic Writing Awards, and a participant in The Adroit Journal’s 2023 summer nonfiction mentorship. Her first book, A Whistle in the Dark, was published in May 2024. When not writing, she can be found sewing costumes, making art, and mucking about in the woods.
Niamh Carmichael (she/her) is a writer originally from Charleston, South Carolina, and currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. She has been published in For Page and Screen, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Susurrus Magazine, among others. She is a YoungArts 2026 Winner With Distinction in Fiction and the awardee of a National Scholastic Art and Writing Gold Medal Portfolio. She also recently published her first book, a collection of poetry and short stories titled Root Stock. When not writing, she enjoys logging films on Letterboxd and scrapbooking receipts.