Revelatory and Utterly Candid: An Interview with Meg Mullins

Meg Mullins is no stranger to the art of the short story. Her debut novel, The Rug Merchant, was conceived from “The Rug,” originally published by the Iowa Review and later anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2002. Though her short fiction has appeared in various literary journals, (including this one; see: Two Weeks In, published in Issue 25), it had not yet been assembled into its own collection. 

Winner of The Slice’s 2025 Short Story Collection Contest, We Are All Having Fun Here successfully slots itself into that space. Composed of seven separate, yet cohesive narratives, the assemblage of this work effectively offers a panoramic view of our society: our boys, our men, and—at the heart of the collection—our girls and women. 

We Are All Having Fun Here invites the reader into tangled, humorous, relatable webs of femininity, challenging us to confront its kinks, foibles, and sins. As I spent time with these women, I found that not only could I confront them, I recognized them. I know them.

Its efficacy lives in its construction. From the first page of the opening story, “Could Anything Be Impossible,” Mullins displays a deft skill of craft. Armed with veracity as her plough, her prose loosens the surface of the ordinary and reveals something equal parts firm and slick beneath. The book’s depiction of womanhood is dauntless and forthright, while remaining down-to-earth. 

“What To Do With Magic” features an unconventional babysitter, who, at just fifteen, recognizes the societal, physical, and emotional complexity of what it means to be a girl. “A Fair Trade” examines an interpersonal relationship between elderly neighbors, set during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unfurling as an urban legend that feels to be very much in conversation with the tradition of oral storytelling, “Bird” acts as an exemplum, tracing back into a long English lineage, focusing on its daughters and mothers. “Dirt” expertly examines the intersection of grief and the familial bond. The titular “We Are All Having Fun Here” explores the deepest parts of desire, contentment, dysfunction, and validation. “Bea,” a wholly captivating conclusion to the collection, is a meditation on sorrow, sisterhood, consequence, and the persistence of unwavering love. 

Mullins’ three novels, The Rug Merchant, Dear Strangers, and This Is How I’d Love You are thematically concerned with the fundamental experience of what it is to be human. This continues in earnest within We Are All Having Fun Here— the protagonists are not fragmented ideas of people. Rather, they are holistic renderings, carefully written into believable shapes. They are born, they grow, they fail, they learn, they aspire, and they die. And yet, in spite of its depth, I never found We Are All Having Fun Here to be weighty.

The tenderness, humor, wit, precision, and honesty of the collection is reminiscent of its creator. Upon its release, I had the great pleasure of conversing with Meg Mullins about this work. Revelatory and utterly candid, she expounds upon her creative process, illuminates the anthology’s path to publication, and examines the ever-relevant societal treatment of women and girls.

Urgent, timely, and identifiable, the girls and women in this resplendent collection remind us that to be a woman is to be, in many ways, undefined. We can be both brazen and timid, generous and selfish, kind and cruel. We can empathize with the innocent and the damned. We can learn to let all of the interesting, shameful, deviant sides of us show. And maybe then, we’d all be having just a little bit more fun here. 

Alex Stuckey: We Are All Having Fun Here was the winner of The Slice’s 2025Short Story Collection Contest. Many congratulations! What was the pathway to publication like for We Are All Having Fun Here?  

Meg Mullins: Thank you! It’s been a really amazing, surprising, and direct path to publication. I saw the call for entries to The Slice Short Story Collection Content and started pulling together the stories I had been working on for several years, just to see if any of them felt like they belonged together as a collection. I realized very quickly that even though I had not intended to write to a theme, I had, in fact, been writing to a theme.  

AS: As your first published short story collection, how did the process of writing and compiling these stories differ from that of writing and publishing a novel? How was the process similar?  

MM: It was quite different, actually. These stories were mostly born after I abandoned what would have been my fourth novel. I’d been toiling away at it for three or four years, revising and revising, trying to find a way for it to work. When I finally accepted that it just didn’t and wouldn’t, I was thrown into a period of grief. When I was ready, I vowed to stick to writing the things I felt deeply compelled to write without worrying about the product or the eventuality of publishing. It was such a relief to release myself from that pressure; it felt like I’d found a kind of joy in writing that had been missing for a while. 

AS: The exploration of the taboo and its intersections with kink and girlhood are hallmarks of this collection. What drew you towards exploring the dark crevices of the taboo? 

MM: It’s so interesting to think of the stories now that they’re finished and living their own life out in the world. When I was writing them, I felt so tenderly towards the characters that I wanted to give them their full voice and not hide anything. It turns out, sometimes the truth is kinky. And that’s okay with me. I love that literature can hold discomfort in extraordinary ways. But I wasn’t trying to find the dark parts; I just didn’t want to leave any parts out.

AS: How were you able to authentically tackle the sensitive subject matter the stories contain, knowing they’d be read widely, without compromising your vision?  

MM: Dissociation, maybe? I’m kidding, but writing with complete freedom does require you to distance yourself from your ego. You can and should worry about the reader’s experience of reading, but you cannot worry about if they will judge you. So, when I wrote these stories, I just leaned into the arc of the story, the language, the characters’ particular experience and I hoped that readers would be there for it. I do love all of these characters and I believe that my love for them helps a reader steady whatever discomfort they might have.  

AS: Each complex female protagonist manages to evoke a particular feeling within the reader—grief, amusement, discomfort, and at times, frank disgust. How did you go about crafting these peculiar, tragic, multidimensional women?  

MM: Thank you. Sometimes plot shapes character and sometimes character shapes plot. Each story has its own unique chemistry. Especially during revisions, I try to really fine-tune the equations of each. 

 AS: There is one exception to the female-centered storytelling throughout We Are All Having Fun Here—George, a young boy at the center of tragic events, is the protagonist of “Dirt.” At what point of your process did you decide to include a story that homes in on a male perspective?  

MM: I love this question. It was actually quite late in the process. The story was first published in the Red Rock Review and once I saw it in print, I realized that it really did have distinct echoes on the theme of how the patriarchy wrecks us all. George’s shame is real and, in some ways, deserved. But he is innocent. I feel like this same conundrum is true for many of the women in the collection.

AS: How does this inclusion enhance or complete the mission statement of the collection?  

MM: “Dirt” is the piece of the collection that asks the reader to imagine how our culture’s broken idea of manhood is impacting its little boys. Also, even though she’s not the main character, George’s mom is primary for me. She is tasked with raising a son who has endured massive trauma. She will be the one to help George navigate the ripple effects of the tragedy. But how does a woman–how do women–raise boys who are told over and over that women don’t matter? The heartbreak of the story, for me, is that George is already discounting the incredible care his mother is giving him. Not because he’s bad or ungrateful, but because it’s so devalued. We are not taught to revere or even to notice the often invisible labor of repair.  

AS: There’s an extraordinary balance of levity and heft that is achieved throughout. Was striking that balance at the forefront of your mind, and if so, how did you go about aiming to strike it?  

MM: Sometimes, humor is our only salve. I think acknowledging the absurdity can be a relief and a way to sort of nod at each other, writer and reader. Also, finding those places where a moment of levity is possible makes the writing more fun. 

AS: Due to its eponymous nature, “We Are All Having Fun Here” acts as the centerpiece to this delicious assortment of stories. When did this story slide itself into place as the titular piece?  

MM: Cleo, the main character in this story, was one of the characters in the above-mentioned failed novel. One day, long after I’d abandoned the novel, I had this epiphany that she needed to be a main character. As soon as I started writing in her voice, the narrative unfolded. I think it makes sense as the title story because so much of our current culture is about the performance of fun, the insistence on a kind of constant improvement, constant seeking, constant revelry. And this story addresses that head on–it questions the insistence that with the right App or the right partner or the right supplement, we would all be having more fun here.  

AS: The hearty meat of the collection is thickly marbled through with experiences of motherhood and daughterhood alike. As a writer, mother, and daughter yourself, how did these aspects of your personhood converge to birth this work?  

MM: Gosh, (heavy sigh). Well, as writers, we bring our whole selves to the page. We cannot separate from our identities, so I’m sure that being a daughter and a mother is implicit in everything I write. The delight of writing is that I can find myself very much identifying with a fourteen year-old babysitting an infant who fantasizes about seducing the baby’s father while also imagining that father’s discomfort.  

But I will say that it’s a particular kind of sting when my mother and my daughter and myself seem to each have had similar experiences of misogyny in our lives that span nearly a century. Writing the story “Bird” about the 17th century child-bride Mary Davies illuminated how much things have, and have not, changed for girls and women over nearly four centuries. None of this is new, but all of it shapes me and my work. 

To purchase your copy of We Are All Having Fun Here, visit Fork Apple Press.