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Essay by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif •

What do short stories have in common with jazz? Like the innately improvisational quality of jazz, the nature of the short story genre—constrained by the need for a high amount of drama in a limited number of words but free from the more complex structure of a novel—allows for spontaneity and exploration. In Detonator, Peter Mountford takes advantage of this fluidity, and the beauty of the stories in this collection lies in the way they unravel before your eyes, evolving in unexpected, delightful, and often humorous ways. 

In our interview about his upcoming collection, releasing in September 2025, Mountford identified two key ingredients that form the basis of his craft: the trouble and the wisdom. In other words: Plunge the characters into as much trouble as you can to create that sense of high drama and follow the threads that emerge to seek out the usually unanticipated wisdom or meaning that is born from it. If there’s a common theme across these stories—which vary dizzyingly in setting and character and voice, from a funeral in the Scottish Highlands to a party in war-torn Sri Lanka, a sexually submissive woman asked to kill her brother to a man bedridden by an orgasm-induced tumour, a grieving mother and daughter at odds over what to do with the family hotel to a father unable to share the horrors of the Vietnam War with his curious daughter—it’s the interplay between trouble and meaning, and how to get from one to the other. The result, as the collection’s name implies, often demands a kind of demolition. 

Each story is unique in the kind of trouble the characters encounter, but the collection firmly and cleverly sidesteps falling into the trap of melodrama. Mountford is careful about monitoring the dials of drama to ensure he is anticipating and preempting his readers’ tolerance levels. Particularly, the tragedy and misery are offset by black comedy and moments of absurdity that illuminate the ridiculousness and randomness of life, and the way tragedy and comedy brush up against each other in unexpected ways.

Within this unending search for wisdom on the path to destruction are deeply profound moments where the characters express a self-awareness of the meaning in their situations, or more poignantly, when they fall just short of seeing it, allowing us as readers to fill in the gaps. In “Mr. McNamara’s Suit,” the narrator describes the nature of Minh’s work as a drycleaner: “By cleaning up people’s mishaps—lipstick on a shirt collar, cigarette smoke in a borrowed sweater, a menstruation stain on an ivory Vera Wang gown—Minh had found that his job was, often enough, to absolve his customers of a certain shame, to help them forget.”

Calling himself “absolver-in-chief,” Minh assigns a symbolic value to the otherwise menial nature of his job. This perception of his role is challenged when he learns that his favourite customer Bob is Robert McNamara, who had been Secretary of Defence during the Vietnam War. He cannot absolve Bob, because he is unable to absolve himself of his own memories of the war.

In “Detonator,” the rambling, stream-of-consciousness style of narration cleverly captures the narrator’s hazy state, the result of debilitating brain damage. This gives rise to sly moments of dark humour and observations about the absurdity of his situation, but also forces the protagonist into conflict with his own narration, as he recognises through the haze how his relationship with his wife and daughter deteriorated in light of his ongoing affair. He caveats his insistence that he loves his daughter, whom the narrative keeps forgetting about, with a mournfully self-aware, “but now I’m protesting too much,” and realises only after his (now ex-)wife’s death years later that his narration never mentioned her by name: “Her name was Hannah. I should have said that earlier. But the truth is that she was never there until she was gone, and then she was everywhere.”

In this way, Mountford’s characters are beautifully complex, endearing and frustrating in equal measure. It’s through their contradictions that we’re able to find the meaning in their stories. In “Pay Attention,” Vivian is a career-driven feminist who nonetheless plays caretaker to the men in her life and seeks a surrender of control through a sexually submissive relationship. When her husband points this out, she counters firmly with, “No, you don’t get to evoke your concept of feminism to shame me out of my kink.” The dichotomy of Vivian’s character is further thrown into harsh light by the geopolitical context lurking in the periphery of the story, which is set in Washington, DC, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s first election. Mountford is subtle about the way he weaves political and historical context into the stories, never allowing them to overshadow the personal, but inevitably feeding into each other. Vivian and her husband discuss the appointment of a new Secretary of Education while preparing to have sex, blurring the lines between the political and the intimate.

Equally complex and rich with interiority are Mountford’s settings, which are vivid with tactile details and soaked in physical specificity that allow readers to viscerally inhabit the spaces. A child of expats who spent many years living abroad, Mountford’s experiences allow him to capture the temperature of a specific place at a given moment in time, evoking the mood in Sri Lanka or Ecuador during turbulent moments in their histories. Moreover, many of his characters are outsiders within their settings, often at odds with these unfamiliar spaces. That disconnectedness creates an inherent drama but also allows them to play the role of observers to the incongruities and absurdities within these places. In “La Boca Del Lobo,” Maria, a Bolivian local, observes this about her lover, a tourist: “And like other foreigners who remained, his loneliness had ripened and then fermented into a kind of spiritual sourness, the evidence of which sat not so much in his face as in his collapsed posture.”

Over the course of our interview, Mountford revealed to me just how much of the stories included fragments that had been plucked from his own life (including an almost verbatim conversation with Russell Crowe, as seen in “Barbarian Fantasies”). I could picture him sifting through his catalogue of interesting anecdotes, examining each one to see how he could repurpose it to turn up the drama in order to create more trouble for his poor characters. In “Love of Her Life,” Sarah finds herself stranded at a funeral in the Scottish Highlands when the bus carrying half the mourners breaks down at the pass. This is based on an experience Mountford himself had, but he used the bizarre situation as a jumping-off point to explore a character left stagnated after giving up on decision-making in her late twenties, some years earlier, and also threw in an extra bit of trouble by stranding her with her ex-husband’s new girlfriend, with whom she develops a sexual connection. While some writers start a story with an idea about setting or character, Mountford is more interested in crafting a situation with the most dramatic potential, and allowing all other factors to work in service of it.

When I asked Mountford whether he would ever consider turning any of these stories into a novel, he made an analogy I found interesting: Novels, he said, are like a miniseries, contained enough for a cohesive story but lengthy enough for multiple complex plot strands and characters. Short stories are like a feature length film, limited by the amount of time they have to capture a viewer’s attention and investment in the characters and story. The stories in this collection are so powerful because of their brevity, because of their jazz-like improvisational quality of following thread after thread in search of meaning alongside the characters. Moreover, their profundity lies in the way they’re mere snapshots of human existence that showcase the absurdity and wisdom that can exist alongside misery and trouble. This closing paragraph from “Pay Attention” sums it up best: “Our history is inside us and can’t ever be extracted because it hasn’t been inserted, it lives between the membranes, saturating the soft tissue—it lurks within the cells, glowing gently, warmly, illuminating us from within.” 

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Shehrazade Zafar-Arif: I’d love to start with what inspires you. When you conceive the idea for a story, does it start with character or setting? Or is it something else entirely and then those two components come a little later?

Peter Mountford: I think it changes a little bit by story, but very often for these longer stories, which I tend to write now, I start with a situation that is very compelling to me, a character and a place and a premise of a problem, usually as high drama as possible. I have no idea where it’s going to go, but it’s something that I find engaging and something that will power me through a story. I have a piece for Poets & Writers coming out in November, 2025, about the long short story and I interviewed a few writers, including Adam Johnson, and they described a similar process, where you have no idea where it’s going, just that your character’s in trouble. 

Sometimes it’s drawn from experiences I’ve had, but not always. Take “Barbarian Fantasies”—I was living in Ecuador when Proof of Life was filming there, and so I had the experience of being in Quito when this huge Hollywood production showed up, with Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan. And Russell Crowe had a driver quite like the driver I described in the story, a sort of man about town, though he wasn’t sleeping with my girlfriend or anything, as happens in the story. I wasn’t working for a hedge fund like the narrator. All the story elements were different from what I experienced, but I do remember that feeling of the Hollywood production being in town and being very disruptive. And the brief interaction the main character has with Russell Crowe where the character’s wearing a cream sweater and Russell Crowe makes a sort of homophobic comment to him, that is a verbatim conversation I had with Crowe. But everything else was just invented around it.

 

SZA: That’s really interesting, how real life can feed into your inspiration.

PM: Yeah, I sort of had to make the history aspect, what was happening in Ecuador at the time, a bit more intense. So I shifted the years a little and I had to shift what the protagonist was doing for work—I wasn’t doing anything as exciting as he was—and I made the relationship with the girlfriend more fraught and troubled. He ends up living in Ecuador semi-permanently, which I obviously didn’t!

 

SZA: On that note, I loved how the settings you create in each story are so rich with detail and specificity. How do you go about evoking the mood of a certain place and allowing your readers to inhabit it so completely? How much have your own experiences living in Sri Lanka and Ecuador shaped how you write about them? 

PM: I can’t write a story set in a place I’ve never been—I tried, it didn’t go well. So I have to visit and have clear memories—I need to have a tactile feel for a place.

When I wrote “Horizon” I hadn’t been to Sri Lanka since I was ten. I did return before I wrote “One More Night Behind the Walls,” which has a scene—where the book’s cover art comes from—where the kids watch this palm tree burn. I put that in the story thinking I’d made it up, but my siblings recently informed me that it actually happened. The swimming club in that story was somewhere we spent a lot of time. The decorative brass cannons that stood by the front door—I remember, as a seven or eight-year-old, running my hand over them and how smooth the metal was. Those kinds of tactile details mean the world in fiction, and it’s very hard to invent that level of specificity that allows the reader to enter the space, unless you’ve been there and you’ve smelled it and heard it and you can feel the temperature in a visceral way.

 

SZA: “One More Night Behind the Walls” is actually my favorite of the collection—you really captured the vividness of a child’s experiences during that very fraught time in Sri Lanka, and it makes sense that it was partially inspired by your own experiences.

PM: My family moved to Sri Lanka a couple of weeks before the civil war broke out in July 1983, and we lived there for three years. So that story is very much my experience of that summer, which was very bloody, the constant sense of danger in the air.

 

SZA: A lot of your characters are outsiders in their settings—expats, immigrants, visitors, often at odds with the spaces which they inhabit. What draws you to these sorts of narratives? Is some of it your own experience as an expat or does it feel like the most interesting entry point for a story?

PM: I do think it’s the former—I was one of those third-culture kids, you know? In Sri Lanka until I was ten, and then right after we moved back, my mother got sick with lung cancer and died six months later. And so it was difficult as a fourth grader; I felt especially, essentially weird. When I left for Sri Lanka as a kindergartener, I was a very “normal” kid, and then by the middle of fourth grade, I was a space alien. I made no sense socially. Though an extrovert, I had all these memories of wartime, or being chased by an elephant, hiking in Kashmir, of all these unbelievable and strange experiences that I could never explain to my classmates. But I didn’t know who He-Man was—I’d missed that part of my cultural education. And so I was forever a bit of an observer afterwards. Wherever I’ve gone, even when I’m not abroad, I feel that same sense of not belonging. That’s true of a lot of writers, you notice what’s weird and absurd about humans in any given context. And you latch onto stories. I’ve been gathering stories throughout my life, stockpiling them. 

But there’s also an inherent drama in a character that feels disconnected. When you’re writing short stories you need a pretty high level of trouble—you want to put your character in financial trouble, and give him health problems, and mess up his relationships, and on top of that make him feel disconnected from everyone. You do these two things: turn up the trouble, but also search for the meaning and the wisdom inside that trouble. Those two processes are ongoing simultaneously as I’m writing into the void.

 

SZA: That feels like a common thread across these stories. Process-wise, it sounds like you’re quite an exploratory writer. Rather than sticking to a structure, you find a thread and you unravel it to see where it takes you, with those two things, the trouble and the meaning, in mind. Is that fair to say?

PM: Within the trouble resides the wisdom. The lesson is a growth that comes out of this specific type of acute difficulty, and usually the lesson is something counterintuitive or complicated. 

I think one example of a story that didn’t work that way would be “Love of Her Life,” for which the process was back to front. 

From the outset I was very focused on the “aboutness.” The first writing I did for this story was about the concept of the fraught nature of decision-making in adulthood, and so I was very interested in the idea of a character who had made a lot of rash, haphazard decisions in her twenties and her life went haywire as a result. So then in her thirties she decides to essentially forgo making important, or even many unimportant, life decisions, which is of course itself a decision, but the result is a disaster of a different kind because it’s a maddening quality of existence. It’s like how the best couple you know gets married and it’s a fiasco, while a chaotic couple gets married and it works out really well—just this randomness to life which is what makes it exciting as well as challenging. And so that was something I was cooking from the outset of the story, and the rest of it built itself around that idea. But I didn’t know where it was going to go when I started.

I knew I wanted to write about a funeral. Again, the premise was very loosely based on an experience I’d had. A friend had died in Scotland and her funeral was in the Highlands. There were two buses and one got stuck on one side of a mountain pass while the other got through, and so half of us were at the wake without the other half for four hours. But every other aspect of the story diverges from there. 

 

SZA: You really captured that sense of the randomness of life in “Love of Her Life.” I also couldn’t see where it was going when I started it and it was a pleasantly chaotic reading experience!

So we have trouble and meaning, or wisdom—but humor also feels important in your writing, and I especially loved the way you use it to draw out both the absurdity and profundity of certain moments—such as the funeral in “Love of Her Life” which is intrinsically tragic but somehow opens the door for a lot of bizarre humorous situations, or how the sex-induced brain aneurysm in “Detonator” is described. How do you navigate the line between what’s funny and what’s tragic and how the two intersect? 

PM: I’ve been to a lot of funerals, and anyone who’s been through terrible grief will tell you that there’s a lot of laughter that transpires simultaneously because life is ridiculous. The great trap of writing about pain is when the narrator or author appears to take their pain more seriously than their reader. So I always look for the absurdity, and I think that’s just been how I’ve lived. The orgasmic aneurysm in “Detonator”—I’d read a personal essay about a guy who was at his brother’s wedding, and after the rehearsal dinner he went back to his hotel room and masturbated, but had a brain event while orgasming—ended up in the hospital. This completely derailed the wedding. It’s an interesting and agonizing disaster. Ridiculousness is best when it’s right up against tragedy. It feels kind of exhilarating and it makes the tragedy more acute and the humour more acute too.

 

SZA: You’re right, there is sometimes an inherent ridiculousness even in horrible situations that trigger a sense of comedy, so it’s interesting to see how the two brush up against each other. Do you ever feel like you have to dial back the humour or the drama slightly, to reel yourself in in order to maintain that balance between absurd and maudlin?

PM: I do try to monitor those dials really closely all the time and so there’s a lot of feeling out what the reader’s experiencing, moment by moment. I have a craft essay coming out in the fall in Writer’s Digest, which is about reading your readers’ minds and emotions and monitoring their experience very closely. This is something I teach my students—you have to be within your POV character’s experience very fully, but at the same time, you need to keep focused on the reader’s experience. You have to be able to anticipate when something feels off or is confusing to a reader. That’s why I’m wary of the moments when a narrator is taking their tragedy more seriously than the reader. If the narrator is weeping over their loss and the reader isn’t weeping? It’s a bad situation for the reader, and it’s embarrassing for the writer. 

 

SZA: Sex plays a similar role to humor. The stories are full of sexual encounters that are random or poignant, meaningful or meaningless, and often a little bizarre, sometimes the focal point of the story and sometimes a gateway to explore other aspects of human nature. Could you talk a bit about how you approach writing about sex and the role it plays in these stories? And how do you avoid, as you said, taking it more seriously than the characters and readers do?

PM: Sex, in literature, like money in literature, has a lot of built-in metaphorical heat; these are features of life that are a bit taboo, in part because they reveal us in ways that are unexpected. I have no desire, or probably capacity to write erotica, but I am interested in humans who are having intense and powerful experiences and sex is one of those. People have a kind of universal fear and love of money. Likewise, lust brings out irrational and impulsive behaviour in people, taking them to the point where they become immune to logic. So it’s exciting to put characters into a space where they’re making decisions that have a lot of psychological implications, but they may not be particularly aware of them. 

So for example, in “Pay Attention,” which I wrote right after Trump’s first election, I was interested in the Women’s March and how it required a lot of labor for women in a way that felt like a reenactment of old gendered patterns—who’s going to knit all those pussy hats? Certainly not the men. How would a woman, who is a strong feminist but also sexually submissive, navigate this? So I moved the story to Washington, DC, and put her husband in a policy job so there’s this literal closeness to the ascendance of Trump. But I was just as interested in her sex life, and how she’s in this position of taking care of all these men—her husband, her son, her boyfriend who’s also her dom, her brother who’s had a stroke and needs constant care—so I thought it felt like a natural and understandable emotional response to want to be dominated sexually. I liked the complexity of wanting to be tied up and spanked by a man, but it’s also uncomfortable for her because she’s upset about Trump’s election. I liked that contradiction at the heart of it.

 

SZA: I thought Vivian was a really compelling character—that dichotomy of her being a caretaker but also craving that loss of control through her sex life made for a really interesting dynamic.

You wrote these stories at different points in your writing career before you brought them together for this collection. How did you decide how to order them? Did you have a sense of progression in mind? Was there a common thread running through these stories that meant that progression felt obvious?

PM: The original composition had slightly different stories in it. I got rid of some, brought others in. I wanted there to be contrasting tones between the stories as you read through the book—not that everyone always reads collections of stories in order. But I did want contrasting tones of voice, and I wanted to be cognizant of not having lots of female points-of-view one after another, or a string of male first person narrators in a row. But it was really difficult, and I’ve heard other writers of short story collections struggle with this sort of thing as well. Looking at some of those older stories, I did have to rework them, because occasionally some of the craft was, subtly, of a writer who was earlier on in his practice. “Horizon,” for example, had a lot of choices that I see now with my MFA students in terms of narrative distance. The sort of complicated, subtle skills that can take years to learn. So I had to go back and fix those—if only for consistency. But the process of ordering the stories was a lot of trying to find contrast in terms of tone and style and content. 

 

SZA: And what was the thought process behind choosing “Detonator” as the title story and having it close out the collection? 

PM: There is a kind of compulsive destructiveness in a lot of these characters—they have reasons for doing the things that they do. They’re not irrational, but in any of these stories, you’ll find a character who’s in a tough spot and ultimately has to make a decision, and quite often their decisions are ultimately a little destructive. I’m interested in how people wrestle with borderline impossible emotional situations, and the role of destruction as an answer. That’s very much in “Detonator” but it’s also in many of the stories. As the last story—again, I was looking for something that kind of gathered up these themes in a way. 

The story was very difficult to write for a lot of reasons—including just the logistics of it, since it takes place over the course of seven or eight years, and there’s death and multiple divorces and the characters all age; the narrator has brain damage by the end; there are multiple relationships transpiring in tandem. The narrator himself is deeply confused throughout—he has cognitive impairment, so is unable to coherently process what’s transpiring—but, as the writer, I had to be fully aware of everything and in control of all these moving parts. So it was a difficult story to write and emotionally taxing as well, but it also felt like a good landing place for the whole book.

 

SZA: And then in contrast you have the opening story, “Around the Corner,” which is so much shorter but also has that preoccupation with death and destructiveness and self-destruction, so it felt like they made for apt bookends.

PM: Exactly. “Around the Corner” is the only nonfiction piece in the collection. It transpired at that swimming club in Sri Lanka. I remember standing by the pool and watching these Australian boys who were by the wall looking down at this man who was going to commit suicide on the train tracks. I didn’t go to look. The Australians ran away at the last moment, to avert their eyes, but that memory lodged itself in my mind, and it feels connected to a throughline of guilt—not that I could’ve done anything about this man killing himself, but that doesn’t stop the guilt. There’s a sense throughout this book of terrible shame in part because of the characters’ destructiveness, but also because, often in life, people find themselves in situations where there’s no decision that will not be harmful in some way. You have two choices, and both are, in a sense, harmful. 

 

SZA: As someone who’s written both novels and short stories, what appeals to you about the short story genre versus the novel? What’s more challenging and what’s more liberating?

PM: I love reading short stories and writing them. I’ve taken a swipe at a couple novels but there always gets to a point by page fifty or sixty where you’re kind of wrestling this giant octopus. You’ve got all these story elements you start having to outline, and it’s just so difficult in a sense to make it compelling for the long haul. I lose interest. I think I’m built more for the improvisational art of a short story. Adam Johnson said something similar in my interview with him for Poets & Writers—he compared the short story form to jazz. I think if it’s surprising to the writer, it’ll definitely be surprising to the reader, to paraphrase Robert Frost, and that’s where the excitement comes in. Often what happens in the process of writing is very unexpected to me, and sometimes I’m just looking to excite myself in some way, and locate some sort of burning bright wisdom in this pile of trouble. It’s just so exciting as a process and so much fun, and so I write one or two long short stories per year now. And I adore these longer stories, because they have the depth and complexity of a novel but without the troubling, exhausting commitment. 

 

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PETER MOUNTFORD is the author of the novels A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (winner of the Washington State Book Award in Fiction), and The Dismal Science (a New York Times editor’s choice). His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Southern Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Sun, Ploughshares, and Guernica. He lives in Seattle and teaches creative writing at University of Nevada, Reno, at Tahoe’s low-residency MFA program, and through his own company, Mountford Writing.

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SHEHRAZADE ZAFAR-ARIF is a British-Pakistani freelance writer based in London. She is an editorial assistant for interviews and craft essays at CRAFT. Her short stories have been published in Fiery Scribe Review, Stanchion, Peatsmoke, Untitled: Voices, FEED, FeelsZine, and the Grimm Retold anthology, and she writes theatre and book reviews for the London Box Office, Shakespeare Bulletin, and The Japan Society Review. She previously interviewed Deni Ellis Béchard for CRAFT. Find her on Twitter @ShehrazadeZafar.