Featured Prose | June 13, 2025

Haley Schmid: What was the biggest challenge you faced when writing “Mouse”? 

Tate Gieselmann: Deciding what to reveal and when to reveal it. Caleb, the protagonist, hides himself from his friends, but also from himself. I wanted to capture that self-deception in the first-person POV. At the beginning of the story, he’s cagey. He tells us his emotions, but not their source. Only as he reveals more of himself to the reader through action and dialogue does he admit the extent of his addiction and depression.  

HS: What was your inspiration for this story? 

TG: San Francisco is where I grew up and where I lived in my early twenties. When Caleb says, “The landmarks of my childhood,” those are my landmarks, too. I’ve also spent plenty of evenings at SoMA skate park. So that was the inspiration for the setting.  

Caleb is a side character in my novel-in-progress, and I wrote “Mouse” to better understand him. He’s pretty different from me, and I wasn’t sure how to find an “in” to his character. Then, one winter morning, I had to kill a mouse in my NYC apartment. Something about the simple brutality of what I did flipped a switch in my head. Caleb’s world and the mouse’s felt metaphorically linked.  

I felt pretty guilty about killing that mouse. Maybe subconsciously I thought writing this story would memorialize him.  

HS: Do you have a favorite scene from “Mouse”? 

TG: When Caleb goes to his father’s office. I wish I had a security guard to put me in a headlock every time I got overly sentimental about the past.  

HS: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? 

TG: I count myself in the “aspiring” column, so, not much. I try to read every day, and if I like a book, I reread it a year or two later, because otherwise I’ll forget what I even liked about it. I keep track of my words/day in a Google Sheet to hold myself accountable. I commiserate with my writing friends. Luckily, I have a great workshop group that meets every other week. Those things all help me a lot.   

HS: What are some of your current projects?  

TG: A novel, some short stories, and a Substack if I can ever figure out how. The novel’s main character doesn’t appear in “Mouse,” but the setting and many of the other characters are the same. It’s about grief and obsession, set in the milieu of S.F. skating. I haven’t read any novels with hill bombs, swellbows, or powerslides, so I figured I’d try to provide one. 

Read Gieselmann’s story > 

Tate Gieselmann is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area living in New York. He received an MFA in fiction from the New School in May 2023. He’s working on a novel about skateboarders, grief-inspired identity theft, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 

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Haley Schmid is a 2025 graduate of the University of Missouri. Hailing from St. Louis, Missouri, she majored in English with an emphasis in creative writing and was a spring 2025 intern for the Missouri Review.