In Cate McGowan’s winning story, “Extra Minutes,” nothing dramatic happens at first glance because that’s how optimization works in real life: “quietly, procedurally, in ways that are hard to object to without sounding unreasonable.” Read her work, and then peek behind the curtain as we discuss the story and the prompt that inspired it.
Rebecca Paredes: You wrote this piece in response to our Cult of Productivity prompt, which asked writers to take a critical look at the pressure to optimize ourselves and our work. How did that prompt inform your approach to this story?
Cate McGowan: What struck me about the prompt was its focus on pressure rather than villainy. Productivity culture doesn’t usually show up as a single bad actor. It arrives in increments, in laminated notices, in friendly language about “using your time wisely.” I wanted to write a story in which nothing dramatic happens at first glance, because that’s how optimization works in real life: quietly, procedurally, in ways that are hard to object to without sounding unreasonable.
So instead of writing a story about resistance in the loud sense, I wrote toward accumulation. Minutes shaved here, a break shortened there, a body slowly adjusting to what it’s being asked to give. What is being taken adds up. Raymond doesn’t articulate a philosophy; he feels pressure and eventually finds one small place where it doesn’t follow him. The prompt helped me trust the idea that refusal doesn’t have to look heroic to be meaningful. Sometimes it seems like standing still long enough to notice what’s being taken.
RP: I love that a supervisor asks Raymond “if he’d considered using his breaks more strategically”—for himself—but at this point in the story, he has already found those quiet moments at the river, which becomes a third space between work and home. He keeps it to himself, and he doesn’t tell his daughter Lena. Why is that unacknowledged bit of secrecy so essential for him?
CM: His visits to the river are a secret because once the river is named, it’s vulnerable.
Productivity culture is very good at absorbing anything that gets acknowledged. The moment Raymond explains the river to a supervisor, to his daughter, even to himself, it risks becoming something else: a wellness practice, a coping strategy, a thing that can be optimized or improved upon. Keeping it unspoken is how he protects it from being folded back into the logic he’s trying, quietly, to step outside of.
There’s also something important about Raymond not turning that hour into a story about himself. He doesn’t want credit. He doesn’t want transformation. He just wants one stretch of time that doesn’t ask anything of him. The secrecy isn’t about shame; it’s about preservation.
It was cathartic to write about those moments because lately I’ve been paying close attention to the times I go outside, unplugging everything, noticing bird song, the stars in the sky. The world grounds me when people and systems grind me down.
RP: Lena is such a great character in here, despite only appearing a couple of times. Their conversation about grit stuck with me because Raymond ostensibly “stays” at work for multiple reasons outside of himself—for Lena, for the paycheck. When you were first crafting this piece, was Lena always in the picture?
CM: Yes. Very early on, I knew I needed Lena. I knew Raymond needed someone in his life who believed, sincerely and without irony, in the language adults use: grit, goals, fixing things. Lena isn’t cynical; she’s observant. She notices patterns before she understands systems.
For me, she also complicates the idea of staying. Raymond doesn’t stay because he’s compliant or unthinking. He stays because leaving isn’t neutral. Staying is how rent gets paid. Staying is how dinners happen. Staying is how a child feels held inside something stable, even when the world feels off. Lena gives emotional clarity to what might otherwise read as inertia. She doesn’t judge him; she simply notes what he does. That felt truer and more complicated than giving him a cleaner moral arc.
RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this poem or what you’re working on now?
CM: “Extra Minutes” sits alongside a body of work I’ve been building that’s interested in systems—labor systems, educational systems, cultural systems—and the quiet ways people move through them without ever naming what they’re doing as resistance. I’m drawn to characters who don’t grandstand or burn things down, but who still manage to hold onto something unexchangeable.
I’ve recently completed a story collection that includes a novella set in a small traveling circus at the turn of the twentieth century, centered on a cowgirl figuring out what endurance and labor look like when performance is part of the job. That project let me approach some of these same questions from a very different angle.
I keep coming back to moments where nothing looks different from the outside, but something has shifted internally. Those are the moments I trust most as a writer and reader.
Thank you so much for choosing “Extra Minutes.” It means a great deal to know the story, and Raymond, landed with you.
