Elizabeth Stix
Bay Area native Elizabeth Stix writes, edits, and oversleeps in Berkeley, California. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Boulevard, The Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, and elsewhere. She has contributed to numerous anthologies, including Best Microfiction 2019, Drivel, and 642 Things About You (That I Love). Her work was performed live at the New Short Fiction Series in LA, and her story “Alice” was optioned by Sneaky Little Sister Films. In the early 2000s, she founded the vanguard lit zine The Big Ugly Review. Her stories have won the Katherine Manoogian Scholarship Prize, the Bay Guardian Fiction Prize, the Southampton Review Short-short Fiction Prize, and have been finalists or semi-finalists for the Disquiet Prize, Glimmer Train Fiction Open, Boulevard Emerging Writers Contest, Sherwood Anderson Prize, and others. Elizabeth has a BA from Brown University and an MA and MFA from San Francisco State. When she’s not writing, she can be found staying up way too late doing the NYT Spelling Bee.
X (formerly Twitter): @ElizabethStix
Instagram: @ElizabethStix
Facebook: @elizabeth.stix.16
Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?
The films of Miranda July are inspiring to me. She takes quirky, sweetly wounded people and has them try to make human connection in beautiful, episodic ways. She has such sympathy and compassion for her characters, and also a gorgeous sense of wonder about the world.
What’s the oddest thing a reader has ever asked you?
There’s a story in my collection called “Alice,” about a little girl who has a parasitic Guinea worm growing out of her belly. Her older brother has to get it out over the course of a long suburban summer, a task which requires him to wind it around a slender stick, a little bit more each day, over a period of weeks. I was trying to create a metaphor about parental neglect and the alienation that can come with childhood. After I read this story at a salon at someone’s house, someone stood up and asked me, “Did this really happen to you?”
Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? Does food inspire your writing?
I have a really salty, savory palate. We had a pickle bar at my wedding – that was non-negotiable. That said, my mother told me that when I was a baby, I didn’t speak a word until I could say a complete sentence, and my first sentence was: “I want cheese.” I stand by that sentiment one hundred percent.
Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
It kills me not to finish a book. I have books that I have been carting around since college that I still somehow think I’m going to finish. I have entire bookcases, walls of books, that part of me believes I will read. It would take me decades.
What piece of clothing tells the most interesting story about your life?
My aunt died last November at the age of 100. We were really close. Every time I would visit her, she would ask me to take a pair of her old socks. She said she had too many socks and was trying to downsize. Finally at one of my last visits, I took two pairs of socks just to humor her. One has a treble clef and musical notes on it, because she was a singer, and the other is green like a poker table with pictures of playing cards. We used to play gin rummy whenever I would come over. Now that she’s gone, I put on those socks and it’s wonderful. It makes me feel warm and snug, and bizarrely, wash after wash, they still retain the floral scent of her apartment.
