Erika Krouse on Save Me, Stranger, Her New Short-Story Collection

After Erika Krouse’s critically acclaimed debut collection, Come Up and See Me Sometime (which earned her Best New Paperback Writer honors in Westword‘s Best of Denver 2003), and her smash-hit memoir about working with victims in the University of Colorado football scandal in Tell Me Everything, she returns to her short-fiction roots with a new book of stories: Save Me, Stranger.

The book will be released on January 21, and Krouse has numerous events lined up to make it easy for fans to get the live-author experience while picking up their signed copy. On February 3, Krouse will be at West Side Books (3434 West 32nd Avenue); on February 22, she’ll be at Lighthouse Writers Workshop (3844 York Street) for the official launch; and on March 4, she will bring her book to the Tattered Cover (2526 East Colfax).

“It’s a very different brain process to work on short stories,” says Krouse, She returned to the short form in part as a response to the tragic suicide of friend and fellow author Cort McMeel, who passed in 2013. “I was supposed to meet up with him the day after he died,” Krouse explains. “It was a big blow. None of us who knew him saw it coming.”

In that moment of loss, “it was strange,” she recalls. “My brain just moved to this other place. I wrote a short story that became the title story of this collection, inspired by what had happened. The story isn’t about suicide, but it is about someone putting themselves in a position in which they lose their life in order to save another person. That survivor then has to deal with the guilt and the self-recrimination. It was how I was working through it.”

But that one story didn’t satisfy Krouse, and she says she became somewhat obsessed with this question: Can we save each other? Is it possible? And if so, is it even the right thing to do? “What do we owe each other?” Krouse sums up. “That’s a question I don’t know the answer to, and the question I still can’t answer. But this collection of stories is all about that idea.”

Krouse believes that short stories are perhaps the best vehicles not only for dealing with these sorts of questions, but for writers in general. “First off, the short story form is able to be far more experimental,” she insists. “You get to play with all these different techniques, try new things when the stakes are a little lower in terms of a writer’s investment of time.”

But the biggest asset of the form is “the opportunity to explore so many different voices,” she notes. “You get to be that other person for a while, live that entire other life.”

An entire other life, according to Krouse, is exactly what each short story should be. “I always think of it this way: If a person were to tell a story that encapsulates their entire life, that’s where short fiction lives. That’s the story you should be writing. The thing – the event, the time – that defines them. I mean, a novel does that too, but in 300-some pages. A short story can do it in ten or twenty. How incredibly cool is that?”

The stories in Save Me, Stranger are evidence of that. Each one is an opportunity to offer up a killer opening line laden with potentiality and promises, and a last line that’s the satisfying summation of the emotional trip she’s just taken readers on.

That’s not to say that Krouse is doing the same thing in 2025 that she did back in 2001 with her first book. “My style has changed, and my work has developed,” Krouse says. “I’m not the same person I was then, and we’re not living in the same world, either, so it makes sense. I think of my early stories as a great dress I wore in the ’80s. Awesome, but not something I’d put on now.”

Krouse has been working on this new collection for several years, enjoying the publication of several of the stories in various well-regarded national journals. Even so, she says she had to let go of some she’d originally planned to include in the book. “It comes back to that idea that we’re living in a different world than the one I wrote a particular story in, say, ten years ago. Or even five,” she says.

She mentions one story she was able to salvage: “It was about a young woman who had an unplanned pregnancy, and in the original story, she made a certain choice, but reading it from a contemporary viewpoint, it seemed to suggest that I as the author was anti-choice in terms of abortion. I’m not; I’m extremely pro-choice. But in the interim between the time I wrote that story and now, Roe v. Wade was abolished. Choice had been taken away. So I had to revamp that entire situation and its trajectory in the story in order to reflect what I believe about a woman’s right to choose.” About a third of the collection is all-new work.

Krouse is glad that Save Me, Stranger is coming out now, during this period of American history, because she believes short stories have the opportunity to be much more relevant than longer works. “Some writers spend ten years writing a novel,” she says, “and by the time it might be published, the world has utterly changed around it. The short story can go from idea to on-the-page in as little as a few months sometimes.

“But they’re also just cool little things in and of themselves,” Krouse grins. “I love ’em.”

Erika Krouse’s new collection Save Me, Stranger: Stories hits shelves on January 21. For events and more information, see her website.