
Like many wordsmiths, Emily Greenberg has been an avid reader since the second grade. “As a kid, I was on the quiet, shy side, so books were a refuge for me,” she says. “Everything else would fall away.” It wasn’t until she read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in the eighth grade that she realized that literature could be more than a vehicle for escapism and entertainment. Literature can comment on broader social and cultural issues.
Greenberg didn’t need to be convinced that reading could be fun; she already knew that. The realization that literature could be powerful and influential in a meaningful way was a revelation.
After she earned her undergraduate degree, Greenberg continued to hone her craft. She worked in the publishing industry for a time, continued to write, and joined a writing group. Her professors advised her to wait to tackle the MFA program rather than diving in immediately after achieving her degree, advice she took to heart. “I wanted to make sure it was something I wasn’t going to take for granted,” she says. She knew there would be challenges, and she wanted to be prepared for whatever obstacles she might encounter.
“In Memphis, there’s a bit of resistance or skepticism toward mainstream narratives, a bit of contrariness, and that’s really impacted me as a writer.” — Emily Greenberg
“I don’t consider myself a natural storyteller,” the author admits. “That’s something I really had to work on.” Some writers are natural storytellers, holding court with clever anecdotes, entertaining with twists and turns both on and off the page. Other writers tack toward language, a love of words themselves, or the ability to find the perfectly precise phrasing to trap a scene on the page like an insect caught in amber, forever immortalized.
Greenberg is possessed of a definite facility of language; that much is clearly shown in Alternative Facts, her debut short story collection, as she depicts fashionable women gliding “like figure skaters in impossibly high leather boots.” She studied books on her craft, and she dissected plot-driven narratives, breaking each of them into their respective narrative arcs. In other words, Greenberg never wasted a moment waiting for inspiration to strike. Instead, she worked on making her own electricity.
Now, with an MFA from Ohio State University and a slew of writing honors — including the Witness Literary Award in Fiction and two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions — Greenberg is poised to take the next step in a dream she’s held since elementary school.
Alternative Facts
During a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, Kellyanne Conway, who was then counselor to the president, defended a blatantly false statement about the attendance at President Donald Trump’s first inauguration as President of the United States with the phrase “alternative facts.” This brand of alternative has nothing to do with wearing flannel and listening to Nirvana; rather, it is, as journalist Chuck Todd stated at the time, a synonym for “falsehood.”
Though academics had already begun to debate the complexities of a post-truth society, Conway’s comment seems a fitting lightning rod for the idea that falsehood is becoming increasingly difficult to identify, as is a consensus on what counts as reliable, verifiable fact.
What role does an artist or entertainer play in such a world? What use is fiction when facts prove so elusive? Of course, there is no one source of truth for such questions, and even if there were, Greenberg would be at pains to make plain that she is no self-designated arbiter of authorial truth. Alternative Facts takes as its focal point the nebulous nature of present-day reality.
Memphis in the Mix
“I’ve been thinking a lot about how Memphis has influenced me as a writer,” Greenberg says. “It’s harder in Memphis to self-isolate and only to be around people who look like you, think like you.”
That, Greenberg explains, is a good thing. People sometimes wear their own perspectives like armor, but that makes it so much easier to become entrenched in a mental rut of one’s own making. Maintaining curiosity about one’s fellows in turn makes them harder to demonize, and therefore, easier to have a discussion with.
Greenberg credits her early academic career at White Station High School with helping her to see the wisdom of such an approach. “Even when my classmates really disagreed with each other about important topics, I think we all stayed curious about each other,” she remembers. “We saw each other as complex human beings and wanted to understand how the other person believed what they did. That’s not to say that you excuse bigoted views or behaviors, but you do work to understand how someone came to believe them, what shaped them. You can’t just dismiss somebody who disagrees with you as your opponent or a monster. I think that’s something that’s really missing in public discourse right now, and that informs Alternative Facts.”
It’s a refreshing way to look at the Bluff City, devoid of nostalgic references to the music of yesteryear, a future-forward view that celebrates Memphis as an impossible-to-categorize city filled with diverse communities in communication with each other. Greenberg says that living in Memphis means living alongside history, with the knowledge that the wrongs of yesterday inform the decisions of today. It means, Greenberg explains, that she knows history is written by the victors, but the victors are not always just.
“In Memphis, there’s a bit of resistance or skepticism toward mainstream narratives, a bit of contrariness, and that’s really impacted me as a writer,” Greenberg says, possibly hitting on the one subject about which Memphians will refuse to take issue — our own contrariness.
Alternative to the Alternative
Alternative Facts is populated with real-life figures (doing and thinking fictional things) who played a role in ushering in the “post-truth” era. So-called “reality” television star Paris Hilton makes an appearance, as does noted novelist and paranoiac Thomas Pynchon, whose works so often scrutinize the concept of a unifying conspiracy. Even Bruce Wayne, fictional alter ego of fictional vigilante Batman, makes an appearance, albeit a brief one.
In “Houston, We’ve Had a Problem” one character’s speech is limited to quotations from famous films. Names are often rendered all in capital letters, and Bruce’s quotes are centered in the page, like dialogue in a film script. In this way, even Greenberg’s formatting choices — let alone her choice of individual words — reinforce both the plot and the motif, the idea that art influences life. Indeed, is Bruce Wayne’s dialogue any different than a young person modeling their views of social mores on what they see on the silver screen? This reviewer thinks not. Greenberg’s fiction uses outrageous lies to hint at a subtle truth. Namely, that the stories we tell ourselves and each other matter.
“A lot of these figures use fiction to divide us,” she says, referring to the authors of the post-truth media landscape. “My goal isn’t to use fiction to lie or deceive or manipulate people. I mean, it’s clearly labeled as fiction,” she adds with a laugh. “I do think there’s something to be said for using fiction as a speculative tool to remain curious about each other.”
Emily Greenberg’s debut short-story collection, Alternative Facts, releases February 6th with a celebration at Novel bookstore at 6 p.m.