A Conversation with Featured Author Didem Arslanoglu

Any and All Ideas Are Fruit in Need of Harvesting

Didem Arslanoglu's satirical and hilariously gross story “No, the Girls Are Not Cruel” appears in our Summer 2026 Issue. Senior Editor Dina had a chance to chat with her about her methods of writing, coping with anxiety, and window egress. Please enjoy!

Dina Dwyer: I’ve read “No, the Girls Are Not Cruel” about seven or eight times now, and enjoy it more with each read as I catch new details. It’s positively jam-packed with them. It’s overwhelming, and I know that was deliberate. Do you have a notebook handy for interesting tidbits of specificity? And can you talk a little about how you came to write this supremely weird piece?

Didem Arslanoglu: Thank you! Yes, and it’s completely non-linear: things I ate and smelled and stepped on and overheard that day, internet slang, trends, and jargon that confuse me, dreams, weather phenomena, Yelp reviews, spam texts, PDA, urban legends, etc. I am obsessed with collecting and working through the excesses of daily life. When I wrote this story last year, I had weird boundaries with my phone and was often darting between Los Angeles and the Bay Area to visit my parents, both places I feel with economies of toxic aesthetics and self-optimization brought on by influencer/tech bro culture. Not to slot either place into oversimplified perceptions, but it can be hard to ignore if you feel particularly sensitive to it (and social media) or are stuck in a bubble. It was sort of a product of loneliness from that time, and I think out of it emerged this idea, a group of women abandoning the boundaries of singularity and folding themselves into a larger organism for liberation.

DD: While “No, the Girls” is satire, you’re not entirely uncharitable to your characters. They display a fierce intelligence, wit, and (maybe quasi-) assertiveness. Do you think that sense of doom or loneliness is what drives so many women with these positive qualities to continue patterns of behavior that appear quite petty/middle-schoolish when viewed from the outside?

DA: I think sometimes, though maybe especially in your twenties. Like the fictional Girls, intellect and dovishness still don’t protect us from feeling lonely. If anything, women with these positive qualities, sharpness and ambition, might feel loneliness more acutely because they’re hyper-aware of every social mechanism happening around them, regardless if they’re participating in the thing or not. I thought about cults and sororities a lot when writing this. I think the pettiness, especially in this story, is a sort of intelligence that got smushed in an echo chamber and redirected entirely inward, toward maintaining belonging instead of outward, toward the world.

DD: I think that’s one of the saving graces of aging. You eventually just stop giving a flying fuck.

DA: Absolutely. I want to be like my mother when I grow up. She could walk across an NBA court mid-game because she needs to pee or something and not give a rat’s ass.

DD: I've noticed the pieces in your body of work hold a common theme of anxiety. How does writing assuage your anxiety, especially if you are writing about anxious characters? Do you think there is utility in anxiety (at all)?

DA: When writing about anxious characters or situations, I lean into a kind of method-acting-on-the-Google-Doc approach—overstimulating myself with caffeine and shrill, repetitive music tends to wring out my brain like a sponge and lets me tap into a frequency I can’t fake normally. But I also write like that most of the time. While writing doesn’t completely assuage my anxiety, I find it gives it somewhere productive to go so I can live out the worst-case scenario of something or explore an compulsion, then look at it and be like, oh, yeah, that’s just part of being human, duh. Go caress a blade of grass between your thumb and forefinger or something. It’s situational, but I think some level of anxiety has its moments of artistic merit and from it can come serendipitous discoveries, plots, working through an arc. My anxious characters are forever hyper-analyzing and dithering over something, which can be exhausting to read but I think makes them feel alive on the page.

DD: That vivacity is one of the facets of "No, the Girls" I love, with the others being the postmodern DeLillo-esque listing, and the visceral, vulgar details. Before final discussion of what pieces to accept for this issue, a comment I left on your story was, “I love pieces about horrible women that don’t involve men, and bonus points if they’re really gross.” What are some of your favorite pieces of media that inspire this delightful vulgarity?

DA: I’m inspired by Cronenberg’s subversive nastiness in Videodrome. Gone Girl, a classic, also Tár, and Ingrid Goes West which makes me laugh. A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh, and Frankenstein! I love all stories about grotesque, pervasive women.

DD: Love Cronenberg. Just watched Dead Ringers for the first time a few weeks ago. So nasty, haha. But speaking of losing one's appetite, what’s your favorite ingredient to cook with?

DA: Oh, this is a hard one for me. I love to cook and generally stick with the basics, aromatics, but I love those big fat hedonistic Maldon sea salt flakes. Also, smoked paprika and sumac!

DD: I love smoked paprika. I put that shit on damn near everything. Will have to try the sumac. So what’s your favorite imaginary ingredient?

DA: I’m going to say a self-basting, ethically sourced, readily made something like maybe a duck that browns and de-glazes itself out of enthusiasm that you wouldn’t feel guilty for consuming?

DD: I feel you on that. Maybe in the future we'll get something we can all deal with that's also nutritious. Back to writing-chat: several years ago you wrote a small novel titled Luca, but lately you’ve had several short stories published. A lot of people think that short form is a stepping stone to novels, but I disagree and would argue they are separate entities. What’s your opinion?

DA: OMG. I birthed Luca my sophomore year of college and have not heard that name in years. (I’m taking a drag from a cigarette as I say this. Just kidding.) I’d also push back on the idea that short fiction is a farm league for novels as they’re such different disciplines. Writing and editing longer work has personally been good practice for craft and, consequently, my short stories. I think ultimately, everyone’s career looks different and writers can publish whatever form serves their work best and don’t have to follow an industry-defined trajectory. 

DD: I think choosing a form that best suits the work is truly the best way to go. Too often I see pieces that have been truncated to fit some word limit (Weird Lit's for example—3000 words) when the story was really just getting going. I call those "stepsisters’ toes" like the German stepsisters of Cinderella in the original story. Are you planning on submitting any longer works for publication or finding an agent for anything book-length? Or are you focusing on short form exclusively?

DA: I recently finished editing one of those—stepsisters’ toes—which is around 11k words and is now being sent off into the ether, aka the Submittable trenches. I’d really like to continue working on my novel, but I simply can’t deny any short stories that come to me in dreams. I tend to chip away at long-form but get distracted by new ideas and tell myself, OK, after you finish this short story, you’ll continue on the Big thing. And then a year goes by and I have seven short stories and only one weird, half-baked chapter on my novel and I’m okay if that’s how things fare for a bit. Any and all ideas are like fruit in need of harvesting. I say this but am also pleading with God that I can commit to the first draft of my novel this year. An agent would be cool but that whole process seems like a gaping, murky pond I don’t know how to traverse quite yet.

DD: Sometimes the best works happen over a long time period. As far as murky agent ponds, the best and only thing to do is cannonball right in. But let’s talk subterfuge. I was also a child of strict parents, but my bedroom window certainly didn’t pass building egress codes. When you climbed down those trees to hang out with your pals, how did you get back unseen to your room again?

DA: Ha! I was fairly athletic and especially nimble in high school, so climbing back up wasn’t too difficult. The trees were beside the roof of the apartment below us, so there was an escape route of sorts. It helped that my mother could (and still can) sleep through nuclear war and my father routinely wore earplugs at night. I was a sneaky teenager.

DD: Was that when you lived in Silicon Valley?

DA: Yes! In Cupertino. I believe that was the third apartment we’d lived in at that time. Sometimes the universe will line it up so conveniently that while you’re traversing 16-year-old hormones, your apartment is placed in perfect symmetry with a climbable tree.

DD: Quite lucky! Since you’ve lived in so many places, my usual request of some fun facts about where you live seems like a scattered task. So how about a few points of interest from your travels/living situations that you’d recommend another writer do/see/visit for inspiration?

DA: In Los Angeles: WiSpa, Sideshow Books, The Museum of Jurassic Technology (specifically the aviary on the rooftop), Echo Park Lake, the Santa Monica Airport Observation Deck (if you’re OK inhaling jet fumes), every independent donut shop in East L.A., and any AMC but especially AMC Burbank 16 for enhanced magic, laughing, crying, caring. I also admire Venice Beach for its unrelenting, heroic cheug and believe there are flickers of gold spanning those two miles, starting from CVS Clowerina, for inspiration. In Istanbul, whatever Anthony Bourdain said about walking in someone’s shoes and eating their food, do that there. A long ferry ride on the Bosphorus, Arter, Çiya Sofrası, Pera Museum, bumming a cigarette from your barista then returning the favor, asking an old uncle about his childhood, buying a bag of treats from Migros and feeding street cats. In Philadelphia, the Parkway Central Library, Champ’s Diner, and the bathroom on the eighth floor of Anderson Hall. In the Bay, driving through the Santa Cruz Mountains in early Spring to see California scrub oak and flowering pear, the Wave Organ at the Marina jetty, Voyager Coffee off Stevens Creek, and though technically not the Bay, a weekend trip to Cambria during peak pupping season (January, I think) to witness elephant seals become mothers.

DD: I've been to many of those places, and hope to see the sights in Turkey some day! Thanks so much for chatting with me, Didem, and for letting us publish your truly bizarre and delightfully gross story.

DA: Thank you for everything!

Didem Arslanoglu is a Turkish-American writer living in Chicago. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Astrolabe, Cleaver Magazine, and New World Writing. She can be found on Instagram @officialclamchowder. All photos and screen captures on this page are her own.