Tess Uriza Holthe Makes a Short Story Connection

I’ve been noticing a slight increase in the number of linked short story collections lately, so when Tess Uriza Holthe‘s The Five Forty-Five to Cannes showed up among the new releases, I invited her to tell me about its origins. Her debut novel, When the Elephants Dance, was widely acclaimed and a #1 bestseller in her native San Francisco; it will also be the selection for nearby Mountain View’s second annual city-wide book club this November.

The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes wasn’t planned. I was working on my sophomore book and my mother in-law invited me on a three-week trip to Cannes and the Italian Riviera. The whole point was to take a break from the second book and though I was happy to do that, I couldn’t concede not to write at all. So I brought one notebook to log down our travels, the sights, the sounds, and the people, with the idea that perhaps in the future if I decided to set a story in France or Italy I would have a sense of the place.

For the plane ride over, I brought along three short story collections: Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever, Carson McCuller’s The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Storie, and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (the Finca Vigia edition). By the time we landed in Milano I was in a short story frame of mind.

I loved how a character in Ship Fever—I think it was the Carl Linnaeus character from “The Behavior of Hawkweeds”—showed up even for just a second in another short story, or maybe his name was simply mentioned, but to have him exist outside of his short story was a fascinating concept for me. I wanted to play with that concept, the idea of the character continuing on after their short story ends.

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2 July 2007 | guest authors |