Writer Spotlight: Grant Collier
Welcome to the 15th installment of Writer Spotlight. This week’s focus is Grant Collier. I’ve reviewed two of Collier’s pieces, one of them a novelette, both individually on Inkfoundry’s “Get WYSR” or “Why You Should Read” feed. (In case you didn’t know, Inkfoundry is a wonderful and free resource that aggregates short fiction and poetry pieces!)
It can be difficult to see recurring themes with fewer pieces, but they definitely still exist!
Recurring Themes:
Body Horror
Neurodivergence Representation
Loss of Autonomy
Emotive and Rich Parent/Child Relationships
Grief / Loss
Day One - April 9
1 & 2 (Novelette): “The Best Version of Yourself” | WYSR Review
More and more people are deciding to ascend to Nirvana, even Maria’s mother.
"The Best Version of Yourself” is an incredibly dystopian and emotional tale. It has elements of body horror, loss of autonomy/body, consciousness uploading and an encroaching biological drug. It also has a heartbreaking and emotional relationship between mother and daughter, and touches on neurodivergent themes / ADHD.
Day Two - April 10
3. “It Grows Back” | WYSR Review
After Billy witnesses a construction accident, something begins to follow him around.
“It Grows Back” is a horror story with elements of sleep paralysis, night terrors, sleepwalking. There is a theme that what you think about becomes reality, including obsessive thoughts about traumatic events and images. Like “Best Version,” it has body horror! I wonder, too, if Billy is on the spectrum, but I’m not sure.
Emmie’s Personal Favorite: “The Best Version of Yourself”
Summary of Style
Collier writes body horror and dystopian fiction, touching on themes such as neurodivergence, grief from losing a loved one, loss of autonomy, and being mindful of your thoughts.
Interview Questions
What are the themes you tend to return to the most in your work overall? Why do think that is?
Collier: There’s themes I write about on purpose, and those which I write about accidentally. For the former, it’s because I’m interested in them, and for the latter, it’s either authorial laziness, or to give everyone who reads them ammunition to psychoanalyze me.
On purpose, I really like exploring and dissolving boundaries between mental and non-mental things, and questioning the traditional folk understanding of identity. Many of my stories ascribe minds to things that aren’t traditionally presumed to have them. I also like envisioning alternate political possibilities for how to organize society, particularly anything that decentralizes power.
As for accidental themes: I really love a good flashback. It’s such a useful tool for interspersing thematically-relevant details, and it lets me tell a cohesive story without needing to order the character’s life in a way that makes narrative sense chronologically. I really like characters with only one living and/or present parental figure, because I have a pretty minimalist style, and that’s one less character/set of relationships that I have to worry about. I also think it’s possible I’ve never written a single story with a wholly neurotypical main character: this is fully a coincidence, and no further deductions can be made from it.
2. Do you tend to start writing a story idea out of a particular element, like character, setting, or point of view?
Collier: I’ll usually “start” very abstractly, wanting to explore a particular question or theme, like “What if there existed particular thought experiments whose results were unreasonably consistent across people?” or “Can I write a convincing ethical refutation of wireheading while staying strictly within a Utilitarian framework?”
I put “start” in quotes here because this level of abstraction is often not sufficient to spur me into actual literal writing, but merely into extended sessions of undirected mulling. Eventually though, the mulling coalesces into a singular story beat that I want to literally write: a particular plot point, or oftentimes a singular sentence. Once I have that, it’s enough to inspire me to actually start typing words, because I have a ‘goal’ in mind: I can structure the whole story around building to/justifying that singular story beat. For “It Grows Back,” it was the final line of dialogue in the sleepover scene, and for “The Best Version of Yourself,” it was the sentence in the ending scene with unnecessary typographical flourishes.
3. What short fiction author do you look up to? Why?
Collier: I really admire Ted Chiang’s ability to write genuinely novel, conceptual speculative stories that nevertheless have compelling characters and literary flourish. I feel most stories focus on one to the detriment of the other: either we need to tolerate implausible characters as a vehicle for cool ideas, or to embrace conceptual blandness so we can focus on pure Literary Merit. It feels like there’s a sort of uncertainty principle, where it’s very difficult to write in a way that says something simultaneously true about both human nature and nature-nature. I think Chiang is very good at pairing characters with concepts so as to make a story that’s more than the sum of its parts, where these components thematically enhance each other, rather than one being clearly at the service of the other. I aspire to someday be that skilled at navigating this particular liminal space between subgenres, as it’s where all my favorite stories lie.
4. Anything else you’d like to say about your work? Do you have any piece, listed here or otherwise, that you would like to promote?
Collier: (I’m answering both of these questions as one question) (these parenthetical statements don’t count as part of my answer don’t include them you didn’t include them did you)
I’m relatively new to the published writing scene, and I write slowly and shortly. Everything (both things) I’ve published thus far can be read consecutively, in a single sitting. That being said, I’m very proud of what I do have out, and am steadily writing more stories/putting them out on submission. I’m actually just finishing up the first draft of my first-ever novella, and I’m so excited about it that I have to brag about that here, even though it isn’t even finished yet. If you want to be informed whenever I do publish something new, I have a newsletter you can sign up for at grant-collier.com, and I’m on Bluesky at @grantcollier.bsky.social (“at @?” Do I say the ‘at’ twice?) (don’t include that question just edit it to whatever version looks less weird) (you didn’t include these parentheticals in my answer too did you oh no)