Lisa Cupolo Crafts Inspiring Stories in 'Have Mercy on Us'

In her first published book, Have Mercy On Us, Lisa Cupolo shares with us her collection of ten extraordinary short stories, which encompass a wide variety of characters from all walks of life with many different voices. Winner of the 2020 W.S. Porter Prize for short story collections, Have Mercy On Us, includes stories set in locations all over the world, including East Africa, Canada, London and Greece. Throughout all the different people and places she writes about, Cupolo describes the connection between them as the “yearning for love, connection, wholeness. Really, it’s about, I mean it’s, sort of, to say it’s Hallmark. You can say that my stories are about love, but what else is there? There’s so many women in these stories that are yearning to find their power and it’s a reflection of me. I’ve always been yearning to…’What’s my power? Am I really good enough?’ So I love creating these strokes of women who seem like they are not capable or powerful in their relationships to do just, kind of, do something interesting or different and surprise the reader.”

At the age of 13, Cupolo was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and while this kept her from participating in many things, it did have a great influence on her writing. “So I had, a really, a lot of time alone, a lot of time for introspection and before that I’d been an athlete and had no sense of writer… I mean, my family read books but it wasn’t a literary house, and so I didn’t have anything to do all day so I did start to read a lot… and then I started to go to library more and get more into reading and so what it made me do was to be an observer of people, more than anything else, because I had to sit out… I sat out at a lot of life during my teens and also in my 20’s, although I was lucky enough to travel but I learned to look at people in a different way and I think that’s what illness does…so that really shaped me as a writer and I was able to, kind of, have empathy for other people and see what they were struggling with because everybody is struggling with something.”

When putting together her collection, Cupolo chose pieces based on a range of stories. Initially when she was first signing her book to agents, they described her stories as too different from one another, but it was those differences that ultimately made her book unique to her audience. “There are a lot of women characters and a lot of locations but I kind of liked that. I liked that it was.. I don’t have the same story that I’m trying to tell over and over again.” Additionally, her decision to write short stories over novels came from her preference for those small moments in one’s life that can create a huge impact. “I like vignettes of people in their lives and people taking one direction or another and I’m always fascinated by the choices we make that shape the rest of our lives… I really love the craft of a short story, and novels you can be a little bit more expansive, I guess, and as a writer… they’re very staccato in the delivery… so you get the shape of it very quickly and you get the trouble very quickly because it’s very important to get trouble straightaway in the story.”