I am endlessly fascinated by the conflicts that come up between the sexes.

Gender roles. Power struggles. Dreams and compromises. Trying to find the right balance. Wanting to do the right thing but not necessarily doing it. Those are the things I come back to again and again.

SEX AND THE SHORT STORY: GRETCHEN CLARK & AL RISKE. 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 09

Gretchen Clark interviews Al Riske:

How would you describe Precarious, your short story collection?

The stories are all about love, sex, and misunderstanding. But I didn’t set out to do that. I didn’t have a master plan. The stories were actually written over a period of 30-odd years, and I thought of them as being all very different. But as it turned out, they were all about the same thing—women and men and tensions between them.

Raymond Carver preferred the word “obsessions” over “themes” when talking about his work. Would you say your stories have themes or obsessions?

I am endlessly fascinated by the conflicts that come up between the sexes, so my stories tend to explore all the possible variations, or as m…