Daniel Hornsby is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Unstuck. He is working on a novel. His story “The Gargantuans” appeared in the Fall issue (37.4) of The Journal. He spoke to Fiction Editor Brett Beach about giants, myths, and how he used metaphor to talk about the unintentional pain parents inflict on their children.

Brett Beach: Why giants? (Or, to put it another way, what was the original seed of this story?)

Daniel Hornsby: I was at a party with a friend. It was one of those boring parties where the host tries to get everyone to dress up, and so the guests are kind of stuck there in their fancy clothes. Anyway, my friend and I got to talking about her mother, who, like many mothers (not including mine!), had left her scarred and resentful. At one point, I began thinking about how our parents hurt us without even trying, mostly as a result of their size—both physically and metaphorically. I thought it was funny how, when you’re a child, your parents are gigantic compared to you. They’re giants; they hurt you without even trying. And so a few days later I started working on the story.

BB: Where did you struggle in writing the story? How did you get around those issues?

DH: There’s no short supply of stories with couples struggling to have a baby. And there’s probably an equal number of stories in which children adopt some orphaned animal (baby bird, kitten, etc.), which, despite their best efforts at parenting, inevitably dies. On some level, these are two new sorts of myth types. Part of me wanted to combine these two stories, using the giants’ scale as a way to make these old, tragic archetypes fresh and funny. I don’t know if I was able to do this, but that was what I was going for.

BB: What made you go back to the story again and again?

DH: I keep coming back to pieces that set their own rules and vocabularies for themselves. Here, a giant narrator let me play with scale and make funny (at least to me), contradictory statements about size: little houses, small moons, etc. Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel sets a comic tradition for play with giants, and I took some comfort in that.

BB: How does “The Gargantuans” hold up against your other work? Is it similar in theme, setting, view of the world?

DH: Just before I wrote “The Gargantuans,” I’d just finished a story about some children who ride around in a giant, mechanical unicorn, kind of like the Trojan horse. Gigantism and childhood seem to go together—I think there’s a reason fairytales are full of enormous monsters, because childhood is, too. And for much of childhood, there’s really no distinction between reality and fantasy: the fantastic is real, and the real is fantastic.

BB: What is the most important piece of fiction you’ve ever read? (Or: who should our readers go seek out right this second, without even closing the internet down or turning off the stove?)

DH: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is a book that continues to haunt me years after reading it. There’s a kind of subterranean realm that Bolaño’s work operates exclusively within—a brutal twilight zone or dark maze that covers the whole shrinking world. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and Steven Millhauser’s We Others are also both pretty infectious. Davis’ style—her precise sentences and range—and Millhauser’s whimsical ideas and premises have been enough to keep me inspired for a long time.