I’ve known for a long time that I disagreed with this, but it took Andrew Porter’s debut collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, to help me figure out exactly why. These are, in every sense, well-made stories–beautifully paced, full of lovely sentences that you’ll want to read aloud just for the pleasure of it. But Porter’s technique is not a substitute for emotional depth or story. The placid surfaces of his characters’ lives crack open when the reader least expects it. Holes, both literal and figurative, open up in unexpected places. Appearances are deceptive, and miscommunication leads to tragedy. These stories are not objets d’art, but nested boxes. Their surface beauty leads us deeper, toward hidden and surprising truths.

Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was recently republished in paperback by Vintage/Random House.

Foreign editions of The Theory of Light and Matter have also been published in both the UK and Australia, and will be published in translation in France, The Netherlands and Korea. In addition to winning the Flannery O’Connor Award, The Theory of Light and Matter also received Foreword Magazine’s 2008 Book of the Year, was long-listed for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was selected by both the Kansas City Star and the San Antonio Express-News as one of the Best Books of 2008.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Porter has had stories published in One Story, Epoch, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” He currently teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio. I first met him in the late nineties, when we worked together at the Center for Talented Youth at Loyola Marymount University. This interview was conducted by email in May-June 2010.

Interview

MARY STEWART ATWELL: In Time Out New York, David Levinson called you “a rubbernecker with a gimlet eye.” Do you consider yourself a rubbernecker? Are most of your stories informed by something you’ve actually observed?

ANDREW PORTER: That’s always a tough question to answer. On the one hand, the plots and the characters in my stories are completely fictional, but on the other hand, a lot of the small details that inform the plot and make up the characters aren’t. For example, I might have a character who embodies several qualities of people I’ve known and the details of this character’s life might be connected to places I’ve lived, jobs I’ve had, or stories I’ve heard, and so at a certain point it becomes hard to know where to draw the line between observation and imagination. My imagination may have created a particular character, but more likely than not the details and personality traits that make up this character are rooted in things I’ve observed.

The first story in your collection, “Hole,” is told by an adult remembering a traumatic event of his childhood, when his best friend and neighbor disappeared into an abandoned sewer in his backyard. This story could have been told in linear form and present time, but you chose to give a retrospective dimension, and also an element of unreliability–the narrator tells us that he tells the story differently every time, so we’re not completely sure that the story he’s telling us is the true one. Can you talk about how you arrived at these structural decisions?

photo credit: jam343

In writing “Hole,” I think I realized early on that this was going to be a story about memory and the way our minds reconstruct memories, particularly memories of traumatic events, and so I wanted to use a non-linear structure that kind of mirrored this process. In other words, I think I wanted the structure of the story to tell us as much about the narrator as the story itself—the fact that he keeps repositioning himself, jumping around in time, approaching the event from different angles. In my experience at least, this is the way most people’s minds work, at least when they’re trying to remember something traumatic. And I don’t know that I could have achieved this effect as well had I simply used a linear approach.

The review of Theory… in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggested that the development of your style had a lot to do with the tradition of the short story associated with your alma mater, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. How do you think that Iowa–both your experience there and the literary tradition it represents–has influenced your work?

I think my two years at Iowa were probably the two most important years in my life, at least in terms of my development as a writer, though this wasn’t because I was producing a lot of work while I was there or because the work itself was particularly good. I think it had more to do with the fact that I was surrounded by so many other people who were serious about writing and who worked extremely hard to produce good work. I’d never been around so many serious writers before, and it had a very profound effect on me. As for the tradition of the program, all I can say is that we were all very aware of it, of course, and while it may have created some anxiety at times, it also probably made us work even harder.

Which writers were you encouraged to read at Iowa? What lessons did you learn from them?

Junot Diaz / photo credit: Oquendo

I can’t remember any of the professors encouraging us to read specific writers, but I know that I was introduced to the work of a lot of new writers through conversations with friends. In fact, I think I thought I was pretty well read before I arrived at Iowa, where I met people whose personal libraries put mine to shame. Anyway, there were definitely certain writers who people were talking about—young writers, like Junot Diaz, who was just starting out, and recent graduates of the program, like Nathan Englander, and Chris Adrien and Julie Orringer, who were just starting to get their stories in print. There was a lot of fascination with young success at that time, which is probably pretty typical in any MFA program.

Barry Hannah was a teacher of yours, and he provided a glowing blurb for your collection. What was it like working with him? How do you think that he will be remembered, as a teacher and a writer?

Barry was a real character and a wonderful teacher. Probably the funniest human being I’ve ever met, but when it came to workshop, he had an amazing critical eye. Maybe it came from decades of teaching, but he had this ability to see right to the heart of any story and to tell you exactly what needed to be done. And, of course, I have a lot of fond memories of hanging out with him during his time there, and I’m also very grateful for his friendship and his steady encouragement during some of those difficult years right after. To be honest, it’s kind of hard to sum up a person like Barry in a few short sentences, but I can tell you that he’s dearly missed by everyone who ever had the privilege of getting to know him.

Several reviewers have compared you to Carver, others to Cheever, and you’ve mentioned Dybek as an influence. Were there other writers you went back to when you were writing these stories?

Yes. Probably too many to name. Richard Bausch, Stephanie Vaughn, Tobias Wolff, Junot Diaz, Jayne Anne Philips. There were certain books, like Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, that I probably pulled of my shelf at least once a week.

What is your favorite Dybek story?

“Pet Milk.”

That’s a fantastic story, but I’m curious about why you chose it. “Pet Milk,” like many of your own stories, brings together layers of narrative, and the last paragraph gives us three different time perspectives in the same moment. Is it partly that nostalgic quality in the story that appeals to you?

Yeah, I think that’s definitely a part of it, but I also like the fact that virtually nothing happens in that story. I mean, it’s just about a moment, a small moment, but it’s captured so beautifully and written so elegantly that it somehow works. In some ways I feel like that story is held together almost entirely by the language and the imagery—the swirling pet milk connecting to the King Alphonse drink and then connecting again at the end to the swirling image of the train. It’s almost like a poem in that sense, which I guess isn’t that surprising considering Dybek was a poet long before he was a fiction writer.

I recently heard Junot Diaz say that for him, the untranslated Spanish in his work represents the part of any book that has to remain a mystery–that can never be completely grasped, even by the best reader. Your stories contain a lot of what, for the lack of a better word, I’ll call lacunae–letters that are referred to but not included in the text, events that are described in such a variety of ways that the truth about them remains opaque. What do these figurative white spaces in the narratives mean to you?

When I finish writing a story, I always like for there to be certain unanswered questions. I want the reader to feel satisfied, of course, but I also like for certain things to remain unknown. I guess it’s simply my way of reminding the reader, and perhaps myself, that none of us can ever really know the “true” story, that there are always going to be certain unanswered questions.

In the story “Azul,” a couple hosting a teenage exchange student make a number of bad decisions that almost lead to the student’s death. However, the narrator in particular is so likable and honest that the reader may sympathize with him in spite of herself. Did you always know that things were going to go wrong for this couple, or is that something that became clear to you as you drafted the story?

That’s an interesting question. In the initial version of that story, which didn’t include the accident at the end, I kind of let the narrator and his wife off easy. The story still ended at the party, but it was a very quiet, almost meditative sort of ending. It wasn’t until later, after I showed the story to my girlfriend (now my wife), that I realized that the ending needed to be changed. I think what she said to me was something along the lines of “Are you really going to let this couple get away with acting like this?” In other words, where there was so much bad behavior, so much irresponsibility, there needed to be some consequences. And though I’m usually resistant to changing my endings once I’ve written them, I realized that this time she was absolutely right.

Is sharing the story you’re working on with friends and family usually part of your revision process? If so, could you comment on how that influenced another story in the collection?

My wife is probably my main reader at this point, and I basically show her everything. When she says something is finished, or when she says something is ready to be sent out, she’s always right. In fact, some of the stories in my collection—like “Departure” and “Connecticut”—might have never left my hard drive had she not been so enthusiastic about them. I tend to second guess myself a lot, and so it’s nice to have someone else there whose opinion you trust. As for another specific example, all I can say is that the stories that made it into the collection were generally those stories that got the thumbs up from her.

photo credit: Aunt Owee / In *Departure,* Amish teens gather at a south-central PA diner, to the fascination of teens from the public high school. Porter explores what happens when the 'English' date Amish girls or fight Amish boys, commenting subtlely on the troubled present and future of the Amish way of life.

In my favorite story in the collection, “River Dog,” the college-bound narrator is told that his ne’er-do-well brother’s rape of a local girl “has nothing to do” with him–something that he clearly can’t accept. Many of your narrators are faced with a similar dilemma, unable to believe that they’re not somehow responsible for the tragedies and crimes they witness. Were any of these stories written from a different point of view in an earlier draft, and if so, why did you decide to change them?

To be honest, I can’t remember ever changing the point of view of any of these stories, though I have played around with the idea of writing additional stories from the perspectives of some of the secondary characters. I think once I arrive at a point of view I tend to stick with it. I may end up abandoning the story, but I never really change the lens through which I’m telling it.

Beginning fiction writers are often told not to have narrators who observe more than they act, because it’s not interesting to the reader. Of course if writers followed this advice, we wouldn’t have The Great Gatsby, or Tristram Shandy, or some of Alice Munro’s best stories. Why are peripheral narrators useful, both to you and to writers in general?

Frank O'Connor

That’s a great question. I often give that same advice to my own students, though of course I don’t always follow it myself. To be honest, I don’t know that it’s something I’m thinking about a lot in the early stages of writing a story. Usually I’m just trying to figure out who the character is, and what the character wants, and what might be troubling the character. And I guess often times what’s troubling the character is the very fact that he or she feels isolated or alienated within the world of the story. In other words, the peripheral perspective kind of grows out of the character’s conflict, or perhaps is the conflict, the fact that the character feels somehow on the periphery of his or her own world. This kind of relates to what Frank O’Connor argues in his famous essay “The Lonely Voice” —that short stories tend to be about outsiders and outcasts, people who feel alienated or marginalized within their immediate communities. So perhaps that’s one important advantage of this type of peripheral perspective—it can serve to underscore the character’s own sense of alienation—something that, say, a character like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby certainly feels.

Many reviews of your collection have spoken about the themes and locales that recur in your stories, but there also seem to be some sentence-level echoes between them. There are several minor and major characters named Alex, for instance, and more than one character is described as “not right” in the head. How would you describe the common world that these stories inhabit? Did you think of them as linked, and if so, in what ways?

I never really thought of the stories as being linked, but it’s true that there are lots of echoes between them, thematic and otherwise. In some ways theses echoes—for example the repetition of the phrase “not right” in several of the stories—were things I only noticed after the collection had been published, when people brought them up to me. In other words, they were purely accidental, but I suppose on some level it’s not that surprising. I mean, there are so many things going on in our minds on a subconscious level, so many strange connections being made, so many common themes and images that keep reappearing, that it seems inevitable that these type of repetitions might occur.

You said in another interview that before you got serious about writing fiction, you wanted to be a filmmaker. When you write fiction, do you ever think about how you would shoot it as a film? Are there any other ways in which the language of film is useful to you as a fiction writer?

I don’t know that I’ve ever made that connection before, but I suppose on some level my process is very similar to a filmmaker’s process. I don’t write my stories in a linear way, for example. I tend to just generate a lot of raw content, and then go back later and piece it all together, much like a filmmaker goes back and edits a film. And when I think back on my early interest in film and becoming a filmmaker, I remember spending a lot of time thinking about scenes, scenes that weren’t necessarily connected to larger stories. I remember thinking about what type of lighting I might use, what type of music I might use, and so forth, even when I didn’t know how the scene itself might connect to something larger, and this is very similar to the way I approach fiction writing. I just start with small moments and build from there.

photo credit: Jim Sneddon

Are you also writing your novel in individual scenes, then revising those scenes as parts of a whole?

No, I actually wrote the first draft of my novel in a much more linear way. I went section be section, chapter by chapter, but within individual chapters I suppose I used a similar approach, generating a number of different scenes, or versions of a scene, before deciding how I wanted to piece the whole thing together later.

How is the novel going? When will it be out?

I have no idea when the publication date will be, but it’s going well so far. I recently completed a very rough draft of the novel and will be trying my best to finish a final draft by January. We’ll see. I tend to be pretty superstitious when it comes to talking about works in progress, but I can say that the novel is set in Houston and that it involves a family going through a crisis.

It seems to me that the position of many of your narrators, looking back on their own pasts with compassion, humor, and sympathy, is in some way analogous to the position of the teacher who may see in his students versions of his past self. You’ve been a teacher of creative writing for some time now. How does being a teacher affect your work, in positive and/or negative ways?

One of the great rewards of teaching for me has been seeing some of my former students actually begin their own careers. At this point some of my earliest students have already completed their MFA degrees and are now out in the world, publishing stories, picking up teaching jobs, going to the AWP Conference, giving readings, and so forth. And it honestly make me so happy to see this. And yes, this is partly because I remember myself at their age, and I see them going through the exact same things I went through, and I remember of course how exciting and how terrifying it was. And so I guess that’s one of the nice benefits of teaching for a certain number of years. You begin to see the results of your efforts, but you also remain in close contact with a younger generation of writers, and you begin to see your relationship with these students changing. After a while, they stop seeing you as a mentor and start seeing you as a friend and a fellow writer, and that in itself is inspiring.

You’ve had the experience of hearing your work read by actors, both on NPR’s Selected Shorts and at an event at the Knitting Factory that included Rainn Wilson and Amy Brenneman, among others. What was it like to hear your stories read in voices other than your own?

Eric Stoltz reads from *The Theory of Light and Matter* / photo credit: One Story

To be honest, it was completely surreal, especially the actor event in Hollywood. To see someone like Eric Stoltz, who I’ve admired for years, or Justine Bateman, who I watched on TV as a teenager, read my work, it’s kind of hard to describe. But I also have to say it was very educational. I mean, you realize why these people are called professionals. I remember that Justine Bateman did a very humorous reading of the title story in my collection, a story that I’d never really considered very humorous before, and I remember realizing then how much could be achieved simply by pausing in the right places, by controlling your delivery. And so that was wonderful to see, another person reinterpreting my story in a way I’d never considered before.

Who are some fiction writers, past or present, who we should be reading but probably aren’t?

Two of my favorite short story collections—Mark Costello’s The Murphy Stories and Stephanie Vaughn’s Sweet Talk—have both gone out of print, and so if there’s any way you can track down a copy of either of those collections, I’d certainly recommend reading them.

And there are some wonderful collections that have come out in the past year—Lori Ostlund’s The Bigness of the World and Laura Van Den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, for example—that really impressed me. And then of course, there are certain established writers who I’d always recommend—Dan Chaon, Charles D’Ambrosio, Julie Orringer, and Chang-rae Lee, to name a few.

Further Resources

– In this short interview with One Story, Porter answers questions about his story “Azul,” which first appeared in Issue #72 of the magazine.

– On Random House’s website, read an excerpt from “Hole.”

– Watch/listen to Porter read his short story “Departure”:

- At Largehearted Boy, Porter offers up a playlist for stories from The Theory of Light and Matter.

- Read more about the Hollywood event–featuring readings of Porter’s stories by Matthew Armstrong, Rainn Wilson, Andrew Porter, Justine Bateman, and Nathan Fillion–on the One-Story blog–and see photos from the night here.

– Shopping for a copy of The Theory of Light and Matter? Buy your copy from Powells and support an independent bookstore.

“Whatever you do, stay in the room.” So advises Ron Carlson in his book on the craft of writing, appropriately titled Ron Carlson Writes a Story. He knows what world exists on the other side of the door: a world full of televised sports, dirty dishes, iced mochachinos. A world full of distraction from the task at hand. Writing, he argues, is about staying in the room, pushing beyond the point where your eyes glaze over and your fingers refuse to type. That’s where the magic lies.

The first time I encountered a Ron Carlson book, I was a few weeks into my first real job, trying to convince a bunch of high school students that, Of course, The Old Man and the Sea relates to your experiences. You’ve been alive, what, fifteen years? Isn’t Santiago’s grand struggle against the unstoppable approach of death totally obvious to you? A friend of mine had mentioned Carlson’s name, said I might like his stuff. I was spending my Saturdays at The Boston Public Library in Copley Square, grading papers and roaming the stacks, as if somewhere amidst the million books I would find the answer for what I wanted to do with my life. That’s when I plucked Ron Carlson’s The News of the World from the shelf.

Here, at last, were stories I wanted to tell: a father covers his roof in horse manure in order to sustain the myth of Santa Claus; a man is haunted by the faces of missing children staring out from his milk cartons; a husband (whose wife’s name is Story!) drops a basketball in the middle of a lake, then attempts to swim to it in the dark, an act that recreates a sperm’s journey, a ritual intended to remedy his wife’s infertility. The collection even included a story about Donkey Kong! I knew then that I would continue to teach—I had to pay back some loans. But I would write, too. Ron Carlson had given me permission to tell my stories.

So I was particularly excited when I heard that Carlson would be traveling to Ann Arbor in February to read at the University of Michigan as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series. And I was even more excited to have the opportunity to speak with Carlson during his trip. Like his stories, he has a sly humor that is tempered by his seriousness about the craft of fiction. He speaks like someone you know: your father, your teacher, your coach. He tells jokes, shares advice. At dinner he orders sloppy joes and root beer. He makes you want to stay in the room.

Ron Carlson is the author of four story collections and five novels, including The Signal, which was just released in paperback in June. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. His stories and monologues have been featured on NPR’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. Last year he received the Aspen Prize for Literature, an honor previously bestowed on Salman Rushdie. He now lives near Los Angeles and directs the creative writing program at the University of California – Irvine.

Interview:

You’ve been teaching in one capacity or another for forty years. Do you see yourself more as a teacher or a writer, or have the two become so connected that you don’t really separate them in your head?

They have become inextricable, but I was a writer first. I was a young guy, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five-years-old, who stubbornly taught against the grain. I knew other people who thought that way. You paid the bills with teaching and you wrote, but what happened to me is I went to teach at a prep school. I came out of a big public school in Utah, but I ended up in this all-male prep school in Connecticut [The Hotchkiss School] where I got captured by the men. It was bizarre. I was newly married, twenty-three-years-old, and I ran into these master teachers, these guys who had given their lives over to teaching. It wasn’t like you went home, because you lived at school. It was hard—the preparations were exhausting, and then I had to run a dorm with twenty boys on my floor. Crazy times. I’ll write a novel about that some time.

For example, I couldn’t skate but I ended up coaching the hockey team. We also had Saturday classes. For ten years, I taught grammar to sophomores on Saturday mornings, and I liked it. I became a guy who saw where the leverage was. I was energetic, so I learned how to teach, and I learned how to write underneath it. In my third year, I told the department chair that I quit because I wasn’t writing my book, and he said something ridiculous, he said, “To hell with it, take the spring off, we’ll pay you for the spring, and you don’t have to come back.” He saw the big picture. He said, “You’ve got to be a teacher, but you need to get this out of your system so go.”

So I went to Mexico in March and finished my book [Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald]. I called the school in August and said, “I’m coming back.” I served seven more years and loved it. I wrote my second novel at Hotchkiss, one page at a time. Class ended at 12:40pm, I had hockey practice at 1:30, and I would write in the spaces between. I was a teacher who wrote some books. I was never more alive. I’ve never had two years off to just write. If I hadn’t been a teacher, I’d maybe have four more books. But I would have let all the books go in order to teach.

Going back to those years in the classroom and those boys on Saturday mornings, what literature did you enjoy teaching?

There wasn’t much experimentation. You didn’t bring in anything new. I spent ten years reading and learning to love everything I should have read in college—all the Victorians, all the Romantic poets. It fed me in a way that I couldn’t tell you. We read The Odyssey every year. Moby Dick. Then you bring it up to Death of a Salesman, Gatsby. Winesburg, Ohio was particularly poignant in a prep school setting.

What is it like to reach a point in your career where your own books have become part of some schools’ required reading?

Well, it advances the discussion. Now that people have read my work, it’s a privilege. And it’s always a bit of a surprise because everybody knows more about you than you’re used to.

Supposing that you aren’t the author for a minute, are there any Ron Carlson stories you’d enjoy teaching or sharing with students?

I’m teaching a graduate class this winter called “Forty Stories and One Poem.” That course is oriented on the question “How was that story made?” I’m only interested in how the story was made. Yeah, it bleeds out, and people are going “Wow,” but I say, “Hold the ‘wow.’ I don’t care about the ‘wow.’”  Where does the story start? How does the writer move back? What’s the transition? I’m all nuts and bolts and craft, and I love to share my stories that way. I’d love people to read “Blazo” [from Plan B for the Middle Class] that way or the stories in At the Jim Bridger. I’ve been to a lot of reading groups where people have read my novels, and that’s illuminating. I rarely talk as a writer. I’m always talking as a teacher.

Can you recall a book from your youth that brought you to writing, not necessarily one that made you say, “I want to be a writer,” but “This is the kind of writing I want to do”?

Someone just gave me Robert Stone’s book of stories Fun with Problems, and I read the first paragraph and I put it down and went to write. So Stone, and Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano. That book is uneven, but even at its low points it’s higher than anybody else.

What I try to do as a teacher, and what I loved as a young writer, is seeing what is possible. When I think of my influences, I think of Richard Brautigan. I think of Ionesco. I think of Cheever. There’s something lovely about being brutally sincere. Simple honesty. Hemingway was a powerful influence when I was in college, but you’ve got to be careful when reading Hemingway. You can’t read him too early. You should really hold the Hemingway until you’re twenty-five. There are also parts of Fitzgerald that I read in college that still get me, passages where he lets go: the center sections of his story “May Day” and  “The Sensible Thing.” That’s where I began to see the viable connection between language and emotion.

In terms of your own writing, you’ve said that the key to success is “surviving the draft,” a process you’ve equated to a refusal to drown. Do you have any tips for those of us out there in the water?

They say that teaching creative writing is a series of offering tips, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think the way forward is always remembering why you wanted it, why you wanted to write. You’ve also got to marry yourself to subjects that have your total attention. That’s so easy to say. It’s like saying, “Find the right person to marry.” But success lies in this 100 percent commitment, even when the writing feels comical or odd. Your desire allows you to stay with the project, allows you to stay in the dark, to survive in the dark. If you’re always in the light when you’re writing a story, it’s probably not a story I’d care to read. One of the reasons we continue this very delicious mystery of talking about creative writing is that you can’t learn about the dark by turning on the lights. Everybody has to go off into the dark. And the reason we’re doing it is not for glory, but for our love of our material. That’s the cornerstone.

You’ve described the stories in your first collection, The News of the World, published in 1989, as “wishful,” and you’ve said that when writing them your imagination “took a sunny turn.” About ten years after that book’s publication, you gave an interview in which you said, “I’m a nice guy, but that’s an impulse I’m slowly conquering.” How is that working out for you?

What you want as a writer is to earn your turns, to earn all the changes. Even when I was in my “sunny” stage, there’s a lot of rube in my stories. If you write a lot, you’ll see that you weren’t even aware that you were writing about the person you would become or the person you had been. A writer has to play with a full deck. You can’t just play with the face cards. You have to reach. A writer’s progress isn’t linear. You don’t go two, four, six, eight. Now I think there’s a clear light and a clear shadow in my work. That’s what you want. Readers are smart, and they want to be taken seriously. They don’t want a gratuitous nod at the good and the bad. I’ve never tried to do that. So-called “happy endings” are very difficult. I don’t even know what a happy ending is. But a dark ending can also be facile in a literary sense. You know, “Cheryl would never be the same again.”  Really? I’m not so sure.

The best writing is recording. We begin with what we know, and we move toward what we don’t. I think that’s fiction’s role. The life I’ve led wants me to be an optimist, but that’s my life. It doesn’t mean I can turn the music up at the ending of every story. I know about craft choices. I know how stories function. What we’re looking for at all times is honesty presented in language so that we can see the world again. Can you surprise me again with something I already know? It’s more important to be real than nice or bad.

You spent a lot of time in your four story collections writing about domestic life: families, husbands, wives, suburbia. Your last two novels in many ways are books without roofs. In other words, they’re stories that take place almost exclusively outdoors with people sleeping in tents, under the stars. Why do you think you’ve gone in this direction as a writer?

I don’t know. I wanted to write a book about work, and that’s Five Skies. I did some temporary work at a fair once where we put up seating and took it down and put up fences and took them down. It was bizarre. So I wrote a page of dialogue, and I’d been reading Rick Bass, and one character asks another, “Did you ever make anything that lasted?” And then I wrote a section about a truck sliding through a snow fence, and it was visceral. I could feel that. About halfway through I saw the real arc of the story, and I freaked out. I called my editor and said, “You’ve got to understand, this book, there aren’t any women in it, and it’s all out of doors, and it’s in the West, and it’s about work. It’s not going to fit.” And he said, “Go. Go nuts.” So I wrote the book, and I was very happy with its reception.

In fact, last year, Five Skies followed best-selling novels such as The Kite Runner and The Secret Life of Bees as the “state book” for the Read Across Rhode Island program. How were you involved in the events surrounding this program?

First of all, those people are the sweetest people of all time. Whenever you go somewhere and meet readers in a room, those are special people. I went to Rhode Island twice for events and it was a dream. We had so much fun. At one of the colleges they had a lecture, and somebody analyzed the book, and somebody cooked all the food from the book, and they acted out a chapter. They were nuts. Then I went to a breakfast later in the year—maybe five hundred people—and some of my old students were there. One guy was in his fifties, he’s a surgeon, and he had skated for me at Hotchkiss.

Does it help with your future projects to think back on the anxiety you felt while writing Five Skies now that it has been so well received?

Yes. That’s why it’s better to remember that you’re only as good as your thinking. In the current world with all the noise, the Internet, and so on, it can be problematic for writers. A lot of things want to divide you. People should talk about that more. A writer can’t multi-task. Multi-tasking is like saying, “I quit.” It’s a phrase people use to explain why they’re doing two things poorly. Both of my last books were received well and got some recognition, but that has nothing to do with what’s next. It’s like flipping a coin. You can stare at that tails for an hour, and it won’t affect what happens next. I’m trying to stay calm about the book I’m writing now because it’s kind of flat, but that’s going to be the way it is. There’s nothing particularly sexy about this next book and that’s OK.

That’s interesting because a lot of people reacted to The Signal by labeling it a thriller. Do you see the book that way or is that description too limiting?

It’s very difficult. I have trouble saying what a book is. I say The Signal is a backpacking book, and that’s good for me. I made a decision while writing The Signal that I was going to add some voltage, so I put in some higher profile plot points. It was a really interesting decision when I realized there’d be firearms. I didn’t want it to just be two characters in the woods. I wanted other issues, so I used what I know about writing to make the rest of it have a purchase in credibility. So, yeah, I pumped it up at the end. If it was my only book ever, I might not have done that. But then I thought, “Come on, you’re going to write more books, so let’s put it in.” There was something fun about it. When you tie a knot like that, and then untie it, it’s a kind of pleasure.

Let me throw a Ron Carlson quote at you as a way to address your writing process. You said, “I’m not going to wait for eight months of free time to write a great big book. That would be like a snake eating a pig. I want to nibble. I want to eat every day.” Still nibbling?

Absolutely. On the best days, I can get ninety minutes or 700 words. You use whatever ritual you can find. You push. I’ve written some stories five sentences a day for a hundred days. A lot of days I’d stop in the middle of a word. I’d know how to pick up, because I knew how to spell. But during my busiest times at school, I have to keep myself alive with blips, maybe only two days a week. Ultimately, the goal is to be working more days of the week than not.

I’d like to ask about the ways that your love of movies has influenced or hovered in the background of much of your writing. A number of your characters are connected to Hollywood in some way, either as professionals or as movie-lovers, and several of your works include epigraphs that are from films. What kinds of movies interest you, and how has your appreciation for on-screen stories affected your writing?

In my formative years, movies were something you saw rarely. You saw them once, or if they were on TV, you made sure to watch. I loved horror movies and all the old science fiction. It was the 1950s, so we had It Came From Beneath the Sea, and all that stuff got me. It still does, because that’s what I rent on Netflix. It’s pathetic. Someone will come over and I’ll say, “You want to see the octopus that attacked San Francisco?”

Really, all culture has affected my writing. Songs, stories, especially ballads, Western ballads. I grew up in a time when we had a monolithic culture. We all had the same twenty references in television, in movies, in song. And now there’s such a multiplicity, such huge diversity.

In a long-ago interview you mentioned that you were working on a screenplay for your story “Life Before Science.” Then, in 2008, your story “Keith” was made into a movie. Many readers have also suggested that Five Skies and The Signal would translate well to the screen. Do you see more Hollywood in your future?

All my work is under option, and I wish them the best, but I’m not following it. There’s one piece I have that I’d like to write the screenplay: my story “Beanball.”  I did write a screenplay for my novel The Speed of Light and there are inquiries about that every few years. Really, film is just a windfall. When someone buys the rights to your book, you’ve got to let go. My plate’s full with teaching. If I was worried about money, I might go scrambling, but I’ve been blessed not to do that. I never had to write anything for money because I had a job and that allowed me to write crazily. I had to write and not let my students know what I was writing. And I’ve been lucky. I’ve published just about everything I ever wrote. So, no, I don’t plan on doing anything in particular for the movies. I would much rather spend the day at my house having a pot of coffee, having gotten in my six hundred words. Maybe go to the post office on my bike, call a friend, write for a bonus hour. That really is the center of my life.

Further Links and Resources:

• Read Ron Carlson’s story “At Copper View,” which was originally published in Five Points Vol. V, No. 1. This story was collected in At the Jim Bridger. It was also one of fifty stories short-listed for a 2001 O. Henry Prize.
• You can also read Carlson’s introduction to the Fall 2006 issue of Ploughshares, in which he discusses what makes a good story.
• Here is a 2009 interview with Carlson from the New West website where he discusses his new novel, The Signal.
• Listen to an audio version of Carlson’s Christmas story “The H Street Sledding Record.”
• Ron Carlson describes teaching as “an act of investigation,” much like the process of writing itself, in this brief clip about teaching in the UC-Irvine writing program:
• Here is an interview with Ron Carlson from UC-Irvine’s 2009 Literary Orange Festival:
• Watch The Gold Lunch, a short film by Joanna Kerns adapted from Ron Carlson’s story:

Marie Mockett / photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

As a child attending antiques fairs and visiting galleries with her father, Marie Mutsuki Mockett soaked up the behind-the-scenes details of the latest fakery or debate over the authenticity of a piece of Japanese porcelain. The dealers presumed the little girl hovering around the edges couldn’t follow their highly technical verbal sparring. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Mockett explores that idea of access to another world – be it the antiques trade, or Paris or a Buddhist temple in the remote countryside of Japan – in her debut novel, Picking Bones From Ash (Graywolf, 2009).

The daughter of an American father and Japanese mother, Mockett saw firsthand the opportunities and constraints of moving between languages and cultures. Her keen attention to the details of cross-cultural experience comes through vividly in Picking Bones From Ash. The novel’s two main characters, Satomi and Rumi, must adapt to a wide array of geographical and social settings.
Picking Bones from Ash follows three generations of women. The book begins in 1954, with Satomi and her single mother running an izakaya, or pub, in the Japanese countryside. Through her mother’s belief in her ability, and constant supervision, Satomi becomes a piano virtuoso, leaving to study in Tokyo and, eventually, Paris. In Paris, Satomi begins a relationship with an American named Timothy Snowden, a charismatic young antiques dealer. Rumi appears in the second part of the book, decades after Satomi’s story has left off, and the reader soon learns that Rumi is Satomi’s daughter. Mockett fills in the missing pieces of the puzzle through the voices of the two women, in a story that encompasses ghosts, old secrets and the need to understand the past. The novel is set in Japan, San Francisco and Paris and touches on ideas of travel, ambition, and what it means to be a stranger in a strange land.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s short stories have appeared in many publications, including LIT, Epoch, Phoebe and North Dakota Quarterly. Her 2008 essay, “Letter from a Japanese Crematorium” won a distinguished essay citation in Best American Essays and was anthologized in The Best Creative NonFiction (vol. 3). She recently published an essay in The Morning News on the allure of flirting via avatar in the video game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

This interview was conducted in person on May 6, 2010, at Mockett’s Jackson Heights home, with her young son, Ewan, in attendance.

Interview

LEE THOMAS: You studied East Asian Languages and Culture at Columbia. What was the path from finishing that degree to becoming a writer?

MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT: I always wanted to be a writer, it was a really early ambition, and for some reason I didn’t want to study literature or writing in university. I occasionally started to take an English class at Columbia, and just could never finish it. I think I wanted reading to be my own thing. I was attracted to studying Asian languages and cultures, and so I did. But all the time, I was working on different books. In high school I had been working on my fantasy trilogy, I had my big map and flow-chart of who was related to whom. Then I got to college and thought, ‘OK, I can’t really write that anymore,’ and was going to write a novel about Fisherman’s Wharf and Monterey, very John Steinbeck-like, which I continued to work on after college.

You were recently at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and I also noticed grant acknowledgment from a variety of sources on the copyright page of your book – the National Endowment for the Arts, Target, the Minnesota State Arts Board and others. How did those organizations help you?

Those [grants] are procured by Graywolf, which is a nonprofit publisher. I think that’s just how they chose to distribute the money that they received. It may have been that those grants went more generally to Graywolf, and they chose to put some of the funds toward my book. Graywolf is just a different publishing model.

How did you link up with Graywolf?

My agent submitted [Picking Bones From Ash] to them. He thought that Fiona McCrae would like my book, and that she would be a good editor for the book, and that Graywolf was a really good place for a first novel, which I think is true. It’s a great place. But I think it’s probably a great place at any stage of a writer’s career. I think they’re probably one of the few places left that actually wants to nurture the writer and thinks of writing as art and as something that takes a long time. It’s interesting because I think in the last couple years, you’ve had writers like me, who have started at Graywolf, but then you have people who have left larger houses to seek refuge at Graywolf. People go there for a lot of different reasons, but it’s always the same thing – they care about writers and artists and are very devoted.

Did you make a conscious decision to skip an MFA?

For a while, every year, I would think about applying. I didn’t say, “I’m just not going to do it.” I think I really didn’t want to, if I really had a burning desire to [I would have gone]. There are times when I think if I had gotten an MFA, maybe I would have worked more quickly or would have had a more sophisticated understanding of … everything. The one place that I always thought I might like to apply to was the Warren Wilson program, because most of writing is being by yourself with a computer. In general I just felt very protective of what I was doing, and my development, and wanted to be able to ask for help when I felt I needed it. I had a purist, idealist, unrealistic idea of what it was to be a writer and an artist. Me, up against a blank piece of paper, doing what I wanted to do, how I wanted to do it.

In your novel sacred objects have a lot of meaning. How do you feel like the material culture of American and Japan influenced your storytelling?

Mazarin Chest (detail) Victoria & Albert Museum

Noh Masks, Horniman Museum

Language plays a really interesting role in the novel. Characters have varied linguistic abilities in Japanese, French and English. How do you feel like those questions of translation and understanding play out in the conversations characters are able to have? You speak English and Japanese – German too?

German was my first language, but my French is better than my German at this point. I’ve been on the inside of different languages, and in situations where I’m not expected to understand what’s happening, but I do. Watching my mother, who is incredibly fluid and articulate and nimble in Japanese, really struggle in English –something that I was aware of from childhood – has made me aware of what can happen when you can speak a language and when you can’t. You’re right, there’s the whole part in Paris where Satomi doesn’t speak French particularly well, or doesn’t have confidence, and then gains confidence and people wonder how she managed to learn French. These are things that happen when you travel overseas, and have to struggle with another language. This is the thing about being a foreigner, if you go to Japan and speak any Japanese, people are shocked, like you’ve managed to accomplish the impossible. I’m very aware of how physically in place and out of place people look. There are so many things that we are constantly telegraphing that put us in a particular culture that we’re not aware of. Having been aware of that for much of my life, I wanted to write about it.

Your level of fluency, I would imagine, constrains the idea of yourself when you’re in a different language.

I think it definitely changes who you get to be or how you’re perceived as you go from culture to culture.

Do you feel different in, say, English versus Japanese?

Sure. My husband and I were talking about this last night, because he’s European, he’s from Scotland. And I said, “You realize there are plenty of Americans who will tell you that there’s something about me that doesn’t seem completely American.” And he said, “Well, yes, I can see that.” But if I go to the U.K., I feel very American. And language is, of course, more than just speaking a tongue, it’s also picking up on humor. I was watching Glee with my mother and she can’t get half of the references. It takes a very high level, not just of language skill, but of cultural understanding to get half of what’s being said on that show. And then there’s the physical vocabulary that you have when you travel. I feel when I’m in Japan much more aware of my personal space. I’ve also been in situations with friends, I almost said foreigners, but I mean Westerners who are in Japan, and they don’t notice that they’re taking up a ton of room in the subway or train and they’re getting in the way or speaking loudly when it’s not appropriate. I’ve watched my mom move physically with a certain amount of freedom and confidence over here, and then in Japan look out of place because she’s been here for so many years. So, all these things make it hard if one wants to travel and have a sincere relationship. How do you know you’re really getting along with somebody? Just because you can shoot the breeze? Or because there’s something at your core that you’re really relating to. I think when you have an international relationship or marriage; it really demands that you figure that stuff out.

Picking Bones from Ash has three generations of very strong women and is told from two of their points of view. Did one of them speak to you first?

I always thought the story was supposed to be Rumi’s story, but Satomi was really bossy and gradually took over the novel. I know you hear writers say that, and I always thought that sounded sort of pretentious, and yet it’s really true. [Satomi] just had so much to say and she had strong opinions, and once she started talking I couldn’t stop her. There are some people that really love her – she’s independent and carved out her own space in the world. And there are other people who hate [Satomi], and think she’s not a nice person and, you know, she probably wouldn’t care.

When Satomi and Timothy Snowden visit Amsterdam, there’s a scene where she says that she’s “fallen into a storybook and was watching the characters come to life.” She goes on to say, “This is the difference between traveling to a foreign country and trying to live in one, as I was doing in Paris. Countries, like people, are at their most beautiful when you visit them briefly and allow them to enchant you over a short period of time.” I was wondering what you think the difference between that kind of pleasure and the pleasure of knowing a place intimately over time might be?

This is something I thought about a lot. One of my favorite books is The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, and he talks about travelers, and who is a real traveler, and who is not a real traveler. I was born and raised in the United States, and so I have a strong connection to the landscape in different parts of this country, and I’ve been going to Japan since I was a child, so I have a pretty intimate and personal connection to Japan. My husband is from Scotland, and I’ve been going to the U.K. for the last 10 or 12 years now. The first time I went to the U. K. I was 17 and had won an essay contest and was awarded a trip. I went around and saw only the most beautiful things, and I came back raving about Europe and, like a lot of Americans who travel to Europe for the first time, had this idea that it was better. It didn’t matter what it was; it was just better. Now that I have a more personal connection, certainly to the U.K., it’s a more three-dimensional place. I have ongoing relationships with people there. The election is on today, and we’re wondering what’s going to happen with the election. I feel that when you really, really are connected to a place, you have harder and more interesting questions to ask, versus a quick trip, where what you see are the most beautiful things.

Do you think that there is value in knowing the flaws of a place?

Oh, sure. People say that if you go and live in Japan for a long period of time, people go through incredible waves of love and hate with Japan. It’s the most beautiful place, everything is efficient, they take care of their children and their families, the food is healthy, nobody’s fat, the trains run on time. On the other hand, with enough exposure, you also realize that [Japan] has incredible restrictions on certain human rights and civil liberties, and actually I don’t even think Japan is the worst offender, if you look at other parts of Asia. So for a naturally curious person, you would want to know the good and the bad. I think that you can’t be exposed to a place without learning what’s good or bad about it. There’s a very natural impulse, certainly when I was younger, to think that anything foreign was better. I think the world is more complex than that. I do think that for novels that are set in Asia, that are sometimes written by Westerners, a sort of classically historical novel, is in what I call the ‘beautiful Japan mode.’ I have a deep knowledge of Japan, and so I was trying to write a book from that point of view. [That project] was more challenging than I realized.

It feels a little like being infatuated with somebody, versus being married to her. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has said – I’m paraphrasing here – that to really love someone, you have to love even the bad and unappealing aspects of that individual. That real love is accepting, even appreciative, of a person’s flaws.

I think that’s probably true, as long as people aren’t getting hurt. There was a really funny article that I read a couple of years ago about how so many Japanese were going to France, and then France wasn’t what they thought. And so there was a Paris recovery course that they take, to get over the trauma of going to France and have it not be what they expected. Which, in a country that doesn’t really have a lot of mental health services compared to Western countries, I found really fascinating. A lot of people go to Japan and either find it a really alienating

Tokyo via Keokierra

The landscape, both in the opening chapter and then later on when they’re at the temple where Masayoshi is a priest, is magical. Are there places from childhood, or now, that you find to be magical?

Absolutely. You know, I’m a writer, so while I’m sitting here going on and on about “What is the truth of the experience?” I’m also a terrible romantic. I’m very susceptible to a beautiful, atmospheric place and I get very enthusiastic about these things, since I’m a Northern Californian. Japan is very beautiful. They know it, and they take very, very good care of a number of their most beautiful locations and make them even more beautiful. For me that’s just nothing short of magical. But I feel that way about places in the States too. I was in Japan two years ago for the cherry blossoms, and everybody goes on and on about the cherry blossoms in Japan, but it really was the most beautiful, ecstatic experience. It’s spring, so it’s warm, and there are cherry trees as far as the eye can see because they’re indigenous. You could be on a bullet train going from city to city and there are cherry trees beside the bank of a river, and in the town and then all the way up the

Kiyomizu-dera at Night, Kyoto, By carlyshells

Parenthood is central in Picking Bones from Ash, especially the tension between desire and discipline. Satomi and then Rumi almost get swallowed up in parental desire for them to be gifted in a particular way. How do you view the pull between a parent wanting his child to play the piano or learn about Japanese antiquities, and the child maturing and eventually wanting to break with her parents?

You look at someone like Tiger Woods or Beyonce, did they want to be doing what they’re doing? Do they know? There are an awful lot of arts that require training from a very early age. You look at the amazing Soviet gymnasts back in

Childhood Memories, By foreverdigital

Has becoming a parent yourself changed anything for you as a writer?

I don’t know. We’re still finding that out. Part of what I was thinking about when I wrote this book was the number of people I know who are writers or want to be writers or artists, who do not want to have children because they think it’s going to get in the way of an artistic career. This is one of these subtle questions. Once you have a child there’s the whole stay-at-home mom versus working mom debate, and also the women writers who have children and don’t have children debate. I was thinking of people who really feel very strongly [about this]. Somebody once said to me that for every child a poet has, two books of poetry don’t get written. Men don’t have the same kind of pressure on them because they have wives who will take care of the children, but it’s different for female artists. So Satomi has a point, if she’s going to be this great, talented person, she can’t be putting all of her energy into a child, if she doesn’t have any support to help raise the child.

François, in a conversation that he’s having with Rumi, says, “Remember, the most important thing in life is to be able to see things as they really are.” The idea of truth, and not only what is true, but does the truth matter, and what part of the truth matters, drives many of the characters. For both children and parents, there is that sense of wanting to know.

I think that that’s true. Of course when you’re a child, you parents seem to know everything and have all the power, and then you discover that they’re just human, they’re not gods. Then you yourself become a parent and you realize that your parents were just doing the best they could, in most cases, just as I’m sort of basically doing the best I can here. The search for truth is something that is very important to me, and I wanted to write about it in a way that wasn’t too heavy-handed. That’s a very Buddhist idea, to try to see truth through illusion.

Do you think there’s a difference between the way that Buddhism and Shinto perceive truth?

Well, Buddhism is very focused on the truth, seeing truth and having insight, and not being confused by illusion, and as a result is considered much more of a philosophy or a philosophical religion. Whereas Shintoism is concerned primarily with purity, and in many ways morality doesn’t come into play into Shinto. It’s such an old and animistic religion. It’s not monotheistic, and it’s not trying to regulate behavior in the same way that we think of religion regulating behavior. It comes from a much more chaotic universe with many more gods and demons, and even the gods themselves may not be particularly kind.

I do think it’s very old world to be very integrated into your family, and to accept the power structure of the family. It’s much more new world for us to forge out on our own and do things that are very different from our parents. With that comes a lot of wonderful freedom, to redefine ourselves or be truer to some sort of inner nature that we might have. That could mean that we lose our family ties, but that could also mean that you see through the illusion that your parents have cast over your life. In my novel we have characters that needed to move out beyond their family and parents, but at the end of the book also have to be able to come to terms with their parents. I think that’s a very modern struggle.

As with most things, there’s a dark side to that freedom, there are certain trade-offs to that lack of structure?

Children's Day, By Amirjina

Isabella Bird

People’s only exposure to Europe or Asia or Africa was often through reading.

Right. And the odd exotic specimen, Pocahontas going off to England, and suddenly there’s a Native American on display. It’s really hard to imagine what it was like. You think about how, even now, we’re shocked and startled when we meet a foreigner, it would just be even worse and more intense [back then]. My family has a wheat farm in Nebraska, and I go in the summers and I’m the most ethnic person around. I realize I look very out of place.

Travel is threatening though. This weekend I went to a Japanese restaurant that we love in New York, and we met a Japanese family there. They had come for a three-day shopping trip, and of course, there they were eating in a Japanese restaurant. Which is sort of like Americans going to Japan and then eating at McDonalds. Travel’s hard. If you really engage in it in an authentic way, which, again, is why I love The Sheltering Sky, it’s challenging. It’s existentially challenging. I think you can step into a foreign country and it doesn’t quite feel real. They’re all just pretending to go to work. They aren’t really watering geraniums in their window boxes. They just put those out to make it look like it’s a storybook place. But, no, places are real.

You just went to Kansas City and met with people who had read your book as part of the book club for the Kansas City Library. What is it like to meet your readers?

Mostly it’s just really cool. I obviously loved to read before I knew I wanted to be a writer, so in an ideal world people are reading my book and thinking about things and, I hope, enjoying it. But of course a writer spends an awful lot of time on her own constructing a story, not interacting with people, so there’s an element of unreality about meeting people who have actually read the book. For me it just reminded me of that early love of books, that pure love for books that I had, before I was embroiled in the process of the agent, and publishing and reviews and all of that. So, it really was just an extremely pleasurable experience and a reminder of what the whole thing was all about in the first place.

The debut novelist space feels very, very crowded. There are books that get a lot of attention early on, books that grow slowly, books that fall through the cracks, and books that maybe shouldn’t have been published in the first place. You’re aware of all these things once your book has been published, and aware that everybody else who has published a novel is aware of these same tensions. It’s so hard to get into this group of debut novelists, and then you’re in and it feels crowded, and so to have an experience where I just get to talk about the book is really nice.

Have you been surprised at all by readers’ reactions to anything in the book?

I guess I feel more interested and curious than I do surprised. Once the book is done, it’s out there – it’s everybody else’s book. As a reader, I’m aware of the fact that how I read isn’t the way that everybody else is going to read a book. So I know that the way that people will read the book will be different, or they may pick up something that I hadn’t intended. I guess I don’t have an illusion that I have any kind of perfect control over the entire experience from here on out. I do the best job I can so the book feels right, and then it’s up to other people to respond to it. It’s flattering, actually, if people pick up on different aspects of the book. I was surprised by how feminists embraced the book early on, because I wasn’t thinking about feminism.

What are you working on now?

I have about 60 pages of a novel in progress that will again be about a specially talented girl, and will examine the intersection of spirituality and modernity. I’m also working on a few short articles, but am trying not to talk too much about them so I don’t jinx them. But I will say this: I’m leaving for Japan soon, hoping to get some research done. Prior to writing the Crematorium article, I didn’t know I could write nonfiction. But that piece was so successful, I feel eager to try my hand at writing some more pieces on the Japan I know, that others might not see or hear about in the mainstream or weirdness-seeking news.

You recently found out that you were shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize. Congratulations. You wrote on your blog,

What would you say to that writer?

You just have to keep working. You really do have to fight, and keep writing, and keep submitting, and doing the best work that you can. Assuming your work is of a high level, you just have to keep sending it out, and you never know what kind of an opportunity will arise from something that you’ve published. One thing can completely change a career. I’m somebody who was afraid to submit. It’s not an uncommon problem. And I still find it hard, and I still go through phases where I just can’t. Most of the time, I think, it’s better to put yourself out there, because then you have a chance of something coming back. But if [writing] is something that you really, really want to do then you have to keep fighting, and keep working. Eventually something will happen, it just will if you’re good. It’s very difficult. The industry is at a really interesting point right now. I kind of struck the jackpot, getting to publish with Graywolf. They’re a small press, but they’re a really great small press. Paul Harding [published by Graywolf] just won the Pulitzer. It’s a chaotic time in the industry, which can be depressing, but there’s opportunity within chaos. My father always used to say to me, “Look, people do it. People become published authors. They become part of that world. Why wouldn’t it be you?” It’s not magic. It’s just a lot of work.

photo credit: Philip Chaon

Reading Dan Chaon’s latest novel, Await Your Reply, we may not trust the identity-shifting protagonists as they flee and reconstruct new selves, but we always trust Chaon to guide us through the mysteries of who these characters will become. The book maintains its humor and humanity despite severed limbs, questionable mental health, Russian mobsters, and Psycho-like accommodations. Chaon’s work has always shown a fascination with what he used to call, in workshops at Oberlin College (where I had the good fortune of being his student), the “spooky” side of life: ghosts and unanswered questions, disappearances and visions, but also the stranger echoes of our own human chambers and relationships. While his stories often hinge on the morbid and unusual, readers don’t have to work hard to suspend disbelief; ultimately, Chaon’s work doesn’t strive to show us the freakishness of his characters’ worlds, but the familiarity of them.

Await Your Reply has been named one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, Salon.com, and the American Library Association, among others. Chaon is also the author of the novel You Remind Me of Me, which was nominated for a National Book Award, and the story collections Fitting Ends and Among the Missing. He is a beloved teacher at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

This interview was conducted over email in March and April of 2010.

Interview

DANIELLE LAZARIN: Await Your Reply hinges on lots of small mysteries, which slowly get solved, but which also often open up into larger mysteries. The book has a lot of resolution, and the reader feels very sated, and yet you still, in typical Chaon style, leave plenty of questions for the reader to answer on their own. You seem more comfortable than a lot of writers with the unknown; I’m thinking in particular here, of the endings of the title stories of your collections Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, both of which refuse to answer mysteries that the characters themselves cannot solve. 
How did you, as a writer, become comfortable with leaving questions unanswered in your stories?

DAN CHAON: My fascination with unanswered questions started early on. As a kid, I loved ghost stories, unsolved mysteries, unexplained phenomenon. I also had a soft spot for the boy detective genre of children’s fiction—Hardy Boys, The Three Investigators, etc.—but I always felt disappointed by the resolution. One of the first pieces of fiction I wrote was a series of stories about a boy who investigated mysterious events which could never be solved. This was when I was about ten or eleven, and already I felt this weird resistance to the concept of closure.

Later, when I was in college, I remember being drawn to the famous Freud essay “The Uncanny,” in which he talks about the concept of unheimlich. His general thesis is that the uncanny is anything we experience in adulthood that reminds us of earlier psychic stages, aspects of our unconscious life, the primitive experience of the human species, etc. Those moments when we draw close to a feeling of helpless unknowing, when we sense secrets that won’t reveal themselves, the way we do in early childhood.

For some reason, this reminded me of discussions we were having in my English class about “epiphany,” —I was taking a Joyce class at the time—and there was this essay by Robert Scholes, “Epiphanies and Epicleti” which is contained in the Viking Critical Library edition of Dubliners. Scholes calls an “epiphany” “a moment in which things or people in the world revealed their true character or their essence.” In Stephen Hero, Joyce calls the moment of epiphany “a sudden spiritual manifestation.”

In any case, it’s not an idea that Joyce can take full credit for. In Greek drama “epiphany” refers to the moment when a god appears and imposes order on the scene before him. I suppose you could say that. In any case, the idea of epiphany has a lot to do with the notion of seeing and not seeing; or as they sing in “Amazing Grace,” I once was blind, but now I see.

In more contemporary fiction, that idea of epiphany, moment of being, “imposed order,” etc. is often based on metaphorical connections between “secular” moments/objects and “spiritual” insight. A few famous examples might be the wonderfully rococo description of Jazz music at the end of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”; or, much simpler and more understated, the drawing of the cathedral in Carver’s “Cathedral” and the single paragraph, which I still find incredibly moving:

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.

The term epiclitus also comes from the Greek, and according to Scholes, it means, “summoned before a court,” or “accused.” Scholes says: “Thus, the epicleti may be considered the accused, summoned up by Joyce to stand trial as specimens of Irish paralysis.” In other words, Scholes says, an epiclitus is an moment in which a character fails to have a revelation, is left trapped, unable to change or escape from the mundane world. Note, that there’s almost always a sense of indictment to this kind of ending: social—spiritual—existential failure.

So almost all of Beckett’s work leads toward this end, and the absurdists, and Blanche Dubois’s “depending on the kindness of strangers,” and some of Cheever’s darker stuff, like “The Swimmer.” (Some would argue that the end of “The Country Husband” is a clueless, epiclitus ending narrated as if it’s an epiphany…)

Katherine Mansfield

Anyway, I’ve often thought that “epiclitus” doesn’t necessarily have to be an indictment. One of the cleanest examples of epiclitus in 20th-century short stories is Katherine Mansfield’s wonderful, “Daughters of the Late Colonel,” and it’s also very moving and beautiful. Here’s a moment in which the two spinster sisters edge close to a moment of insight:

“It was only when she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight or by the sea or into a thunderstorm that she really felt herself. What did it mean? What was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to? Now? Now? She turned away from the Buddha with one of her vague gestures. She went over to where Josephine was standing. She wanted to say something to Josephine, something frightfully important–about the future and what…”

But then it’s gone before she can grasp it, and the story ends with this exchange:

“I can’t say what I was going to say, because I’ve forgotten what it was…that I was going to say.”

Josephine was silent for a moment. She stared at a big cloud where the sun had been. Then she replied shortly, “I’ve forgotten too.”

Anyway, basically the two terms are flipsides of the same idea–the notion that there is some state of revelation, insight into mystery, moment of being, or what-have-you which is either grasped (epiphany) or lost (epiclitus). We (the readers) often pity or feel slightly superior to those who don’t get their epiphanies. It’s frequently presented ironically.

And yet…as for me, I guess I’ve always felt personally and emotionally closer to the searchers, rather than to the finders…to those who don’t get answers, as opposed to those who do. For me, the experience of epiclitus is closely related to the experience of the uncanny, but also to the experience of complex and problematic emotions, like yearning, and awe, and psychic unease, which are of particular interest to me. That precipice of endless uncertainty, of the impenetrable—those are the moments that I’ve always loved in literature, as well as the moments that have haunted me in life.

I’ve read and heard many times over that McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, in which your story, “The Bees,” appeared in 2003, ushered in a new era of genre-bending in “literary” fiction. Do you think it’s at all true that books like Kelly Link’s story collections, or Lauren Groff’s Monsters of Templeton, for example, might not have fared as well say 10 or 15 years ago? Do you think the reading public’s openness and acceptance to a more fantastic kind of story within the literary really began in the past decade or so?

Not exactly. I think there was a certain period of American Literature—maybe about fifty years, 1950-2000, let’s say—where “realism” and “literary” were more or less synonymous, and that had to do with the rise of genre as a commercial category as much as anything. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of our canonized writers had no qualms about working with the fantastic—from Hawthorne and Poe to James and Wharton—and my sense is that a lot of the prejudice against fantasy, horror, etc. started with the New Critics in the 30’s and 40’s. There’s probably a long essay in that, which I won’t write.

If there has been a change, a lot of it, I think, was borne of frustration and boredom. By the mid-1990’s, the domestic mode was starting to feel like a prison to a lot of younger writers I knew. Many of us had grown up during the heyday of commercial SF and Horror in the 1970s, and that was what we read as kids. Personally, I started out as a straight-up horror writer, and it was only when my creative writing teachers told me that they didn’t accept “genre fiction” that I began to work in a more realist mode. I would say that the restrictions were good for me, and that I really needed to broaden my emotional range and explore character more fully. At the same time, I think that a lot of the creative energy and impetus in my work comes from the fantastic, the supernatural, etc. I think there’s a little glimmer of it even in my most realistic pieces—and when it’s not there, the piece doesn’t feel as alive to me. But I also don’t think I’m exactly in the New Fabulist mode, either. I’m sort of caught in-between.

But anyway, it’s hard to make sweeping statements about literary culture. Whether we’re in a new era, I don’t know. 
 


The novel is told through three characters’ points of view: Lucy, a small town girl who’s run off with her high school history teacher, George Orson; Ryan, who’s recently reunited with his biological father; and Miles, who is searching for his less-than-stable twin brother, Hayden. Each of these stories get equal weight and time in the book; was it always this way? Did you always envision the novel as having three narratives you were setting on a collision course?

Yes. It actually started as three separate short stories, which I was working on while I was waiting for a different (unfinished, moribund) novel to figure itself out. I kept toying around with these three narratives, and I had the instinct that they were connected in some way, but I didn’t know how. 
 


How did this work for you as you were writing? Did you work towards the mystery solved, or walk into it and hope to find an answer? The collision course you set these characters on: holy moley. We know it’s inevitable, although how the characters will collide is, as we all as writers strive for, also pretty surprising. I am hard-pressed to talk about how many delicious turns and progress the book makes without giving anything away.

The first draft of the book was really a process of figuring out what the connections were…and it was exciting to write because things kept surprising me as the three stories developed. Of course, it was also scary because there were times when I painted myself into a corner, and I didn’t know how to get out. I honestly didn’t know how the book was going to come together until the last hundred pages, though I knew from the beginning that the opening chapter and the closing chapter would happen on the same night.

I tend to think in terms of very abstract structural elements. Each chapter is a kind of building block, or episode, and I know it has to move the plot forward. But I can’t write plot until I get to know the characters, until understand why they do what they do. With this kind of novel, that was a very reckless method of writing, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without my fantastic editor, Anika Streitfeld, who read through the book as it was being written, chapter by chapter; and my wife, Sheila, who talked me through the book’s movements and managed to get me out of a number of dead ends. The big plot reveal in the last chapter was actually her idea.

Is there a method of writing for you that doesn’t feel reckless?

I don’t know. I always feel like other writers must have things figured out better than I do…they have outlines, they know what’s going to happen to their characters, maybe they draw diagrams. It worries me a little, now that I’m starting work on a new novel, that I never actually know what I’m doing. Eventually, I’m going to stop getting lucky and it’s all going to end in tears.

I love that Miles and Hayden are twins. There’s something delectably creepy about twins (see The Shining, for starters) and so full of literary potential for doubling and contrast. Was this a conscious decision from the start: did they start off as brothers, or perhaps one character to start?

I knew that they’d be twins from the beginning, and in fact that was one of the first things I knew about the book. I’ve always been fascinated by twins. When I was a kid, growing up in rural Nebraska, I was the only kid in my grade at school, and I felt like a freak compared to the other children, so I used to imagine that it would be great to have a twin, someone who I could relate to. I was also really interested in playing on the uncanny, creepy aspects of twins—the doppelganger stuff, the stuff about split-personalities and psychic connections–a whole body of iconic, suggestive memes that have been around for a long time that seemed like it would be fun to dig into.

I took many of your classes when I was an undergrad at Oberlin. As many as I could. In fact, I believe I was told by the department chair that I could not “major in Dan Chaon.” I know I’m not alone in being a devotee of your classes. (Are you blushing yet?) Can you talk a little about your identity as a teacher—and a much-stalked one to boot—and if, and how, this differs from your identity as a writer? How do you manage to reserve energy for your own work while teaching? Do you feel like you draw on different resources as a teacher than you do as a writer?

I feel like teaching makes me a better writer. I’m lucky, because my students at Oberlin are so smart, so talented, and so mature—I don’t really feel like they’re kids so much as people who share the same passion, and we’re in a lot of ways on the same journey. We’re all asking the same questions, none of which have a single, easy answer: how do you write a good, compelling scene? What makes a character come alive for a reader? What makes a sentence beautiful? These are questions that I struggle with all the time, just the like my students do, so it’s not like I’m really on a different level. I’ve just being doing it longer.

It is hard to teach and write, of course. A big problem is that a lot of times I’m more interested in my students’ work than I am in my own. But at the same time, I feel like I’m always learning and getting ideas when I talk with students. Talking through a student’s problem can often help me articulate something that will apply to my own work, and so there’s a give-and-take that proves to be valuable for me as a writer.

Await Your Reply, deservedly so, made a good number of end-of-the-year best of lists. I know you’re a voracious reader. What books did you love in the past year?

I used to put out a list of my favorite books every year for my students, and that was fun. I read a lot of contemporary fiction. I’ve gotten away from making lists, though, in the past few years. Partially, that was because I got to know a lot more writers, and I started to feel weird about ranking them, or leaving friends off my top 20, or whatever. A few years ago, one of my year-end lists (which I thought of as a private gift to my students) made its way onto the internet, and a couple of my friends had their feelings hurt by it. So I’ve gotten wary of this kind of public declaration. I don’t generally do reviews, for the same reason. Maybe that seems cowardly, or too politic.

But, anyway: here are some of the books that I read and enjoyed in 2009, not in order and not inclusive of all the books I loved: Lynda Barry, What It Is; Josh Bazell, Beat the Reaper; Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage; Ron Currie, Jr., Everything Matters; Amy Gerstler, Dearest Creature; Terrence Holt, In The Valley of the Kings; Victor Lavalle, Big Machine; Nami Mun, Miles From Nowhere; Sheila Schwartz, Lies Will Take You Somewhere; Jean Thompson, Do Not Deny Me; Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

How “pure” is your process—you sent me a playlist for the novel—do you listen to music while you write? Do you read other books? Talk about the a book or story’s progress with friends or family?

My process isn’t pure at all. In fact, it’s very dirty. I feel like my books are very patched together, and collage-y, and I’m always bringing elements of other works to bear on my own work. I do listen to music almost constantly—I make playlists that are supposed to get me in the right mood for writing about particular characters, and I read constantly while writing. I also watch TV and read comics, which is frequently a big influence, especially on plot, since I love serial structure.

There are a very few people I actually show my work to while it’s in progress, but I talk about aspects of the story to a great number of people. Sometimes I make up an alternate version of the book I’m writing, because that’s somehow easier and more useful to talk about. In any case, a book exists for me in so many different versions that it’s a long, long time before I have any idea what the final form will look like. 
 


Do you think of your characters as having certain taste in music, or is it music that you think is evocative of them to you?

Most of my characters don’t have very good taste in music. At least, they don’t share my taste in music.

Instead, the music I listen to is often a jumping off point for getting into a mood for a particular character or scene. The idea for Chapter 7, for example, came directly from a beautiful sad song by Josh Rouse called “Michigan,” which starts out “Dear Mom and Dad/I’m living in Michigan with Uncle Ray…” As I listened to the song, I began to get a sense of Ryan, driving through those woods, on his way to the cabin, and I had him writing a letter in his head to his parents which he would never send.

Another song, “My First Soul” by a band called Auld Lang Syne was absolutely essential to me when I was writing the last chapter—through it, I came to discover Hayden’s humanity, his sadness. It’s the song that I’d want to play over the closing credits of a movie of the book.

There is familiar geography in this book—your native Nebraska, and the Midwest, in particular—but also much farther reaches that we’re accustomed to in your fictions: Las Vegas, and the Artic Circle, for starters. Were these places you visited, to envision your characters inhabiting?

Some of the places are quite familiar to me—Cleveland, where I now live; and Lake McConaughy in Nebraska, where I spent childhood vacations. Other places, like Las Vegas and Ecuador, I visited; and still others, like Inuvik, NWT and Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, I only researched—through books and travel brochures and online, via YouTube videos. I chose places that would have the quality of stage-sets, because that was the mood that I wanted to create. 


You’re a somewhat recent user of both Twitter and Facebook. Do you consider these professional or personal accounts (in 2010, is there a difference)? How has that more public presence affected your persona as a writer? Did you read, for instance, Ben Yagoda’s essay in the NYT Book Review about replying to fan e-mail, etc.?

Well, it’s different for novelists than it is for non-fiction people like Yagoda. I don’t get that many emails, and I always answer them. I don’t think I’ve done that much to cultivate a “public presence.” I do occasionally use Twitter and Facebook to notify people when I have a reading or something, but mostly I just post links to stupid things that I find funny or interesting. I don’t generally tell people what I’m eating, or where I’m at, or what I’m experiencing emotionally at any given time. I haven’t put much energy into developing a compelling persona for my Internet Self. 
 


Await Your Reply strikes me as so contemporary without ever really making dated references; it addresses the age we’re in: of identity theft and turnover, of rapid and far-reaching communication. And yet there are great throwbacks, a sense of nostalgia running through the book as well: a dried-up lake and ghost town in Nebraska; a hypnotist named Mr. Breeze, ancient civilizations, Hayden’s past lives, etc… Can you talk about these juxtapositions and how you see these worlds overlapping?

The contemporary aspect of the book wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind when I first started writing. I started out wanting to work with pastiche, to draw on iconic gothic and dark fantasy imagery—spooky, post-apocalyptic landscapes, carnivals and mysterious ruins and roadside attractions; tropes from Hitchcock and Lovecraft and Bradbury and DuMaurier and Shirley Jackson; imagery from House of Mystery comics and bad dreams. I wanted to use all the clutter that haunted and fascinated me, and put it to work.

But at the same time, I wanted to put all this stuff in a contemporary, realistic setting, with everyday characters. I did do some research about identity theft, and hackers and trolls, and this wasn’t that hard since I spend a lot of time on the internet anyway. But most of that stuff wasn’t a big driving force. The heart of the realistic part of the book was the fact that I was raising teenage boys, and I was remembering a lot about what it felt like to be a teenager. Ryan and Lucy are sort of an amalgamation of my experience and the experiences my sons and their friends were going through; and even Miles and Hayden are sort of manchildren, stuck in adolescence, which I think is the real theme of the book.

I’ve always admired the way you don’t idealize children, or parent-child relationships; in fact, many of your youngest characters are at turns realistically creepy and flawed and not sickeningly precocious. I’m thinking of “The Bees,” or “Big Me,” and of course, Await Your Reply, where your portrait of young Hayden is neither cuddly nor average. How does raising sons change the way you write? I mean this on a practical level, as you raised your children with another writer and teacher, but also the way it changed your point of view. Did it become harder for you to write children and the parent-child relationship when you had them yourself?

I did a panel at the Associated Writing Program Conference this year about writing from a child’s point of view, and someone noted that students, at 18, 19, 20, are so close to childhood that they ought to be able to write about it vividly. But I disagreed. I think we are never further from childhood than in those years; and we are never closer to our childhood selves than when we have kids. I don’t write autobiography, but I certainly drew a lot on my experience as a parent, and my observations of my own children, which always drew forth vivid memories—memories I wouldn’t have re-encountered if I hadn’t been a parent.

Now that they’re older, do your boys read your work, and do they recognize some part of themselves or you in it?

It’s funny, because my sons and I frequently read and discuss books together. Most recently, Paul and I both read Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere, because he’s going to be attending Columbia College in Chicago, where Mun teaches. We had a great time talking about it.

But we have never talked much about my work. I know they have read some of my stuff, and they’ve mentioned aspects that they liked. I know, for example, that both of them really enjoyed “The Bees.” But we haven’t delved very far beyond that. There would definitely be details, large and small, that they’d recognize from real life in the books—particularly Await Your Reply—but they haven’t asked about it.

What’s in the pipeline? Stories? More novels?

I have another novel that I’m working on, which I’m under contract for. After that, I think I’d like to finish a collection of stories I’ve been working on for a while. I’m also playing around with screenplays and maybe a television pilot.

Does the “dirty” process you described earlier apply to projects as well? Do you move freely between these projects or try and finish one at a time?

I usually work on several at once—often, it takes me a while to figure out whether they are separate projects or part of the same thing, and in fact I’m still in the midst of that right now, trying to decide whether these fragments I’ve been messing with are really part of the same thing or whether I’m actually writing six or seven different books.

I was struck by the irony of the fluidity of the world that these characters live in. On the one hand, most of them make a conscious choice to leave behind the person they were at one point, changing their names or locations or occupations for a chance at a better life. But often in this disappearing act they discover that who they are is maybe too easy to shed, and not all of them find the freedom they’re looking for. In fact, many of them end up with a fate worse than the one they thought they were avoiding (see Ryan, on page 1, next to his severed hand). Here’s Lucy, on changing her identity:

Each of your characters has, in varying degrees, this “dear-God-what-have-I-done” moment. I wonder if you could talk a little about the difficulties of these shifts for them, of this kind of struggle between their internal and external identities, between the public and private personas we all move between. Without, of course, giving too much away.

As I mentioned before, I think this book is very much about adolescence—that time when all our adult choices are before us and we could be anyone, as Ryan says in his final chapter. This is stuff that really interests me, and I’ve written about it before. In some ways, the novel is a kind of extension or rewrite of my story “Big Me” and there’s a passage in that story that I mulled over:

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it’s hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years? How many end up nearly forgotten, mumbling and gasping for air in some tenement room of our consciousness…

That was one thing I was thinking about. Then I was also looking at it from the other end. As I was writing the book, my wife was very sick, and I knew that our time together was not going to be very long. I was intensely aware of the way that possibilities and futures that we imagine for ourselves would be taken away, and so I was also aware of those moments when we realize that our choices are not infinite.

When I lost Sheila, my life was shattered. Ironically, I now find myself once again in a situation in which I have to try to imagine myself into a new life, I have to try to remake myself without her, to fill up the blank slate of the future with something. I feel like I have been brought back full circle to the place I was when I was eighteen or nineteen, and I don’t like it one bit.

American culture tends to focus on the beauty and freedom of transformation, we worship the metaphor of the journey, but at the same time, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we long for home. 


In the novel, Hayden and Miles’ mother says “Oh Hayden,” she would say, with exasperation. “Why can’t you make up stories about happy people? Why does everything have to be so morbid?” This struck me as a nod to your own work, in which folks are not the particularly happy-go-lucky type, but also to the common complaint about “literary” fiction in general, that it’s too morbid, too depressing. Care to confirm, deny, or defend?

I don’t know how to answer, really. I know that I’ll never be accused of being too uplifting, and the passage you quote is definitely a nod to comments I’ve heard about my own work, and complaints that I’ve heard about literary fiction in general. Maybe I don’t understand what it means when people talk about a happy ending. Maybe I don’t understand what people want. I like the idea that literature draws us closer to other lives, and that the experience of knowing what it feels like from the point of view of someone else, and that it expands our ability to sympathize.

The question, then, is whether a work leads us to hope or towards despair. If a story moves abnormally toward “happy” resolution, isn’t that creating a false expectation, which will eventually disappoint? If a story moves toward the worst-case-scenario, doesn’t that also over-exaggerate?

I think that many people read doubt as sad and certainty as happy, but I’m not so sure.

Further Reading and Links

– You can download excerpts from each of Dan Chaon’s novels and collections on his website.

– Here’s the video trailer for Await Your Reply:

– Via last.fm, listen to the soundtrack for Await Your Reply.

- Online interviews with Chaon abound: here are two of our favorites: in The Believer; on NPR (it describes meat as a reward for writing!).

– If you’re shopping for copies of Dan Chaon’s books, support indie bookstores by buying from Powell’s: Await Your Reply, Among the Missing, You Remind Me of Me, Fitting Ends.

After reviewing The Good Thief for FWR, I continued to think about it a lot. In fact, I decided to teach it in one of my classes at the University of Michigan this winter, partly so I could think about it further. So when Hannah Tinti visited campus this spring, on the tail end of what sounded like a mammoth trip through Europe and back, I jumped at the chance to sit down with her to talk.

From the author’s website: Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her first novel, The Good Thief, is published by The Dial Press and Headline. The Good Thief is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award and winner of the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Hannah also recently won the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for her editorial work at One Story.

Interview:

Charlotte Boulay: I’m so happy to meet you because I love The Good Thief so much and I just taught it in a class on writing about visual art.

Hannah Tinti: I have photos of visual art I’m going to use in my talk later.

Oh, great! Well, in this class we talked a lot about all the great descriptions in the book, and how you represent things visually. Were you inspired by visual art?

Work by Lee Bontecou: Image from the artist's Facebook page

When I’m working on something like this—something that has a certain time or place or mood—I have a bulletin board over my desk, and as I come across things that are in that vein, I start tacking them up. I had a couple of photos from The Gangs of New York that I had up for visuals on describing some of the places the characters went; I had photos by Edward Curtis, a photographer who took pictures of native Americans in the 1800s; I had stuff by Lee Bontecou. I love her work.

Oh, I don’t think I know her.

Her stuff is sort of steampunky. She builds out from the canvases and there are these giant weird holes.

Were you thinking of the mousetrap factory?

Work by Lee Bontecou: Image from the artist's Facebook page

For the mousetrap factory I actually had an image from a children’s book. Bontecou does giant mobiles and these kinds of canvases that are almost mechanical looking. She also makes weird giant crazy fish out of plastic. She’s a pioneering female abstract artist. And she’s still alive. I had gone to an exhibit of hers, and then I just became a little obsessed with her dark vision, and her interesting take on something that’s abstract but makes you feel a lot of emotion, particularly when you stand in front of it and it comes out at you. It almost envelops and sucks you in. It’s really cool. So I used photographs of her work, and also Edward Gorey. Then, when I was writing about the dentist, I had this photograph of someone selling teeth on the street—I think in India—and also images of early dentures. I had photographs of early mousetrap patents, and all sorts of weird images to help create that dark, slightly scientific mood.

So even if the particular reference didn’t make it into the novel they all contributed to the ethos?

Yeah, it’s generating a feeling; when you look at them, you think. That’s the kind of feeling I’m trying to capture. I have no idea how to articulate it that well, but something about those images was doing it for me.

Well, perhaps this darkness is connected to my next question. I found most of the characters in the book to be extremely sympathetic—the main characters, that is, not the hat boys. How do you make yourself inflict violence on characters that you care so much about?

I knew from the start that I wanted to have a happy or a somewhat happy ending for Ren. I wanted to end in a positive place, because it was the only way I could drive myself to put him through all of that. I am drawn to that sort of darkness, I think, from growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, and being around that Halloween stuff all the time. That Gothic world is very normal and natural to me. I’ll show some pictures in my talk tonight of graveyards, which were my playground.

Was there a point in your evolution as a writer when you realized that what was natural to you was actually really interesting material for readers?

I think I realized that I always tended a little toward the dark in things. That’s where I started to really find my voice as a writer, and I started to figure that out in grad school at NYU. I took a class with A. M. Homes, and she’s very dark. She made us do a lot of writing exercises, which had never really worked for me. But she pushed us in a lot of different directions and she challenged us to try new things. One exercise I’ll never forget was this time she gave out photographs and asked us to write something from an unusual point of view. For me it was this photograph of a kid holding a giant rabbit. He was in a sort of British, shared backyard with all this laundry, and he had a towel tied around his neck. So I had this idea that I was going to write from the mother’s point of view, and that the kid had been taken away from her by child services, so she was having to defend herself as an abusive mom by telling her side of the story. But she’s telling it without realizing what she’s revealing to this social worker. And I remember when I turned in the story, A. M. Homes wrote, “Oh, my God, this is disgusting,” and I was proud because I had grossed out A. M. Homes.

I also think it was the first time I had captured something. I think for every writer there’s one story where you make a breakthrough, where you move from the mediocre—not quite clicking into place, not knowing what’s pushing a story—into telling something that’s really exciting, or something that people are really going to want to read. That was the first time I’d ever touched that, and for me it was by going to this dark place, and then investigating it, and realizing, Why is this working for me? and Why is this working well for the readers?

And it was the first time in a workshop that people were really excited about what I had read. Every time before that was really dull and terrible. This was the first time people thought, “This is kind of cool.” And so I thought, They are reacting to something; what is it? And I think that’s partly how you find your subject. Then you just keep trying to hit it from different places, and to understand it, because often it has something to do with you inside, and you’re trying to get at that something.

It’s fascinating that you remember the photograph of the boy and the rabbit in such vivid detail.

Oh, yeah, for me it was really a changing moment in writing.

Did you pick the photograph, or did Homes give it to you?

No, she gave it to me.

So that’s a good teacher, too, to pick out something that would maybe resonate with you.

She’s a good teacher. She’s a tough teacher. She was the kind of teacher who didn’t coddle her students, and I got her at just the right time—when I was really ready for someone who wouldn’t let me get away with anything. By contrast, a lot of teachers only talk about the good stuff, or are only encouraging. But she would just say, “You did not do this. This is terrible. You are not accomplishing this POV. You are not accomplishing these characters.”

Do you feel like all writers should be able to, or develop the capacity to, take that kind of criticism?

I think that the ability to take criticism and thoughtfully implement it in your work is key to building your skills as a writer. I see this a lot from the editorial side of One Story. There are certain writers I work with who I try to show how something is not quite tracking or not quite coming across. Then I’ll give examples of how I think they can fix it, and discuss challenges and ways they can work it through. When you’re working as an editor, your relationship with a writer is a companionship, working side by side, versus the teacher telling the student, “Go this way” or “Go that way.” So, I think that there are some writers who are able to take the criticism I give them and make it their own and really turn a story toward a wonderful new direction, and there are some who I really have to handhold and lead every step of the way because they’ll do a rewrite and start taking steps backward instead of moving forward, which is a terrible thing to see as an editor. When I get a new draft of a story and I realize that they’ve just taken two steps back instead of moving the story in the direction it needs to go, then I’m just like, “Oh, God, now we’ve got to start all over again.”

Wow, that’s an enormous amount of work.

It is an enormous amount of work. The writers I see who are light on their feet and able to incorporate changes and really make them their own in this way—it’s magical when that comes together. There’s a story that I worked on with Rob McCarthy called “Stag” that we published about a year ago. Something about the ending was not quite coming together, and we kept talking about it and trying to get at what was going on in this last scene with the father and daughter. And I’ll never forget—when he finally sent me this revision, all he had added were about two sentences. Yet it suddenly made the whole story make sense. That was so exciting for me. We just talked about it; I didn’t tell him what to write. I just said, “There’s something here that’s not quite working. I don’t fully get what you’re trying to say.” And he just isolated it and it was magnificent.

So that makes it worth it.

Oh, yeah.

I get One Story on my Kindle.

Oh, cool.

How did you work out that deal with them, because I don’t know of many other literary journals that you can even get on the Kindle?

Maribeth Batcha, my business partner, pushed that; I didn’t have that much to do with it. Now the next thing is getting on the other platforms like the iPad, which all have their own delivery systems. I know we had to jump through a lot of hoops to get on the Kindle because I don’t think they saw the market for One Story, or the way it would work. But we had a contact somewhere on the high end who helped us actually get our phone calls returned, and we hooked it up. We’ve gotten a lot of new subscribers from Kindle.

It’s interesting to me because it seems in some ways that the One Story format fits the Kindle so well—I don’t know if you see One Story’s format as a response or a pushback to the amount of information we have in our lives otherwise. It’s very nice to sit there and just focus on this one thing, instead of a thousand things at once, but then I’m getting it digitally, which is traditionally a realm of over-information, so there’s a little paradox there…

I don’t read it digitally, but Maribeth does. I think that’s definitely something we were thinking about with One Story, but mainly we were just looking at the mistakes that all these other literary magazines were making, and thinking about how we could come up with a business plan for a magazine that would succeed in these places where they were failing. This is the way literature is going: you have to be leaner, meaner, and smarter. And the small presses, large presses, and literary magazines that are doing this are really finding audiences, whereas the ones that are doing things the old way are losing audiences.

So the organizations that succeed are the ones that aren’t trying to do too much?

Yes. Our thing was that the biggest problem with literary magazines is that they don’t come out frequently, so you forget that you even subscribe to them. I mean, the Kenyon Review is a great magazine, but when I get it, I’ve always forgotten that I actually subscribe to it. Whereas, when you miss a New Yorker, you’re like, “Where’s my New Yorker?” So we went to every three weeks. Originally we wanted to do every two weeks, but it was too much work. Still, when people miss an issue of One Story, they call or email us. Publishing so frequently develops a relationship with your subscribers. Our subscribers are very loyal because they’re constantly getting the magazine and feeling like they’re getting in touch with us, that they have a stake in the magazine. Also, these large journals–which are basically like publishing a book–are very expensive to print and mail and get carried in bookstores. We do subscription only. We only print as many as we’ve sold. We do print on demand.

Another aspect of our model is that we made a rule never to publish an author more than once. So, 135 issues so far and135 different writers. There’s always going to be a fresh voice, and that’s something we’re giving to the subscribers as well. Publishing One Story as we do allows the writer to take the spotlight in a way that they do not in an anthology, which normally someone would buy, flip through, read the writers they know, and skip the ones they don’t. So even though the magazine might have 5,000 subscribers, only 500 of them are actually reading your story. Everybody reads the whole issue of One Story.

The other thing is that the format is light, easy, unintimidating. The envelope is like a little gift in the mail, at a time when most people’s mailboxes are full of bills, not real letters anymore.

To change tack, my students wanted to ask you some questions. We talked a lot about how certain images and symbols in The Good Thief keep circling back; just when you’d forgotten about the wishing stone, for example, it appears again. Caitlin wanted to know at what point during the writing process you thought about which objects would have repeating roles. Did you have that plan before you started, or did that evolve?

I don’t plan or plot; I just sort of go and see what happens. It’s like using a divining rod—I try to find the scene and write it, and whatever I spit out I try to make sense of later. I think the most important thing to do is to trust your subconscious, that it is actually tying things together even though you don’t think it is. For example, the scene where Ren is in the kitchen and the dwarf comes down the chimney—I had no idea what was going on. I just had him filling his hot water bottle, and then I was bored, so I thought, What’s something that could happen right now? What if somebody comes down the chimney? Originally I thought it would be an animal, because I grew up in an old house and that used to happen all the time to us. But I figured a man, perhaps coming to rob them, would be more interesting. Then I thought, A man wouldn’t fit. It would either have to be a child or a dwarf, and I already had a kid in the book, so I made it a dwarf.

So he crawled out, and then what was he going to do? Well, I had him take a bath. I had him eat food. Then I made him go back up the chimney. I didn’t know who he was or why he was there. It took me many, many drafts until I figured out that he was Mrs. Sands’ brother, and that this was paralleling the relationship between McGinty and Margaret—brothers and sisters—and the theme of caring for each other this way.

He was also an example for Ren of a different way to lead your life. Do you withdraw from society the way the dwarf does? Do you cut off your emotions the way Dolly does, and just murder everybody and not care and not connect to people? Do you become an alcoholic like Tom? Do you lie your way through life like Benjamin?  How do you deal with not quite fitting in and not quite being who people think you should be? I didn’t know why he was there, but I knew he was important, and I just trusted that I would figure it out.

The wishing stones came in later because I originally wrote the middle of the book in the first draft, and then I wrote the beginning and the end.  So the very first scene I wrote was when they dig up the bodies and Dolly comes back to life. Right after that, I wrote the scene where Dolly and Ren become friends. Then I thought, Who is this kid, and how did he get here? Next, I wrote the chapter where Benjamin comes to pick Ren up from the school, and the chapter where he meets Tom.

When I showed it to my editor, she said I had to write more about the school and more about the lives of these kids before Benjamin arrives, to get to know the character before taking Ren on this adventure. So I went back in a fleshed out that world. That’s when the wishing stones came in, and they started coming back in different ways. Same thing with the river and the hand. Now I give one wishing stone away at every reading!

Jessica described the book as being almost cinematic. We’ve talked about the images, but she wondered whether you were inspired by any films?

Jean Simmons (young Estella) with Martita Hunt (Miss Havisham) in David Lean's 1946 film adaptation of Great Expectations

I do love movies, and I watch them a lot, but I don’t know if there was any one movie I was thinking of. I definitely visualized the book; I did see things in my head, particularly in the first chapter I wrote. I had a vision of a graveyard scene, and it was almost like a camera shot: a boy holding the reins of a horse, night, big iron fence, grave robbers, what’s the situation? So in terms of movies, I probably drew from the original Great Expectations with Alex Guinness. It’s beautifully done in black and white, and Jean Simmons plays Estella. She was probably only twelve or thirteen, and she was perfect. Another movie I thought about a lot, because it works, is Pirates of the Caribbean. I know that sounds crazy, but I think the reason that movie works so well—the first one, the other ones weren’t so good—is that it is extremely clear what each character wants. Johnny Depp wanted his boat back. Geoffrey Rush wanted to be alive again. Orlando Bloom wanted the girl. The girl wanted adventure. It was so clear. So how did the desires of each of those characters intertwine? I thought that if I could do the same thing, I could really track my characters through the book.

And the last question from my students is: Why are there so few named strong female characters in the book, the exception possibly being Mrs. Sands?

That’s one thing people ask a lot: Why is this a boy’s book? It started that way because of the circumstances. I had this scene in the graveyard, and it made sense to me that the lookout would be a boy in that situation, not a girl. A girl raises so many sexual issues and a lot of other things that I really didn’t want to deal with. I really wanted the book to be an homage to the classic boy’s adventure tales that I read when I was growing up: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist—the young boy falling in with dangerous characters, having adventures, finding his way in the end. The female characters actually make everything happen in the book. Mrs. Sands provides Ren with what he’s always wanted, which is a home and someone to love him; Sister Agnes provides Ren with what he was missing, which is what happened to him and his origins; and Jenny, the Harelip girl who only gets a name at the very end of the book, kills the bad guy and saves Ren and Benjamin. So even though their roles are smaller, they are actually making everything happen. They are powerful but minimized, and my plan for the next book is to write more of a girl’s book with more female characters, so we’ll see what happens.

Well, I don’t think of it as a boy’s book at all…and not that the larger number of male characters is a fault. I read all those classic novels as a kid and never thought about them being boy’s books.

Neither did I. I think people ask me because I’m female. If I was a male writer, I wouldn’t get asked that question as much. The same thing is true of questions about violence in the book—I think if I was a man people wouldn’t ask about that either

I read a lot of different genres, as many people do, and I read a fair amount of “YA” literature, which I think is a kind of useless category because it encompasses so much stuff, but this novel seems to be solidly placed in the literary fiction genre because it successfully combines aspects of horror, mystery, and adventure. I worry sometimes that fabulous books are getting stuck in genre cracks. Do you think about that at all? Or that sometimes because of a marketing decision by a publisher something gets categorized as “YA” when it very well could be literary fiction if some other publisher had picked it up.

Well, we did wonder whether this book was going to cross over to YA. There was never really a question that it should be published as YA, although my editor brought the galleys down to Random House’s YA area, and she made schools aware of the book. My editor’s feeling was that it would be easier for it to cross from adult to YA than from YA to adult. And it naturally found its way into YA because it won an Alex Award, which is given by the American Library Association for books that are written for adults but can be recommended to younger readers twelve and up. So as soon as that happened, which was right before the paperback came out, it started getting pushed in that direction and I started doing events at many more schools, particularly junior high and high schools. That’s been fun. I knew it would work for that market because I had been doing a lot of book clubs and I did one that was a club of mothers and sons. It was a group of friends who all have sons around the same age, and they’ve been meeting for five or six years. They all read the same book, and then they get together and cook a themed dinner with food from the book. So they got in touch with me.

What was the dinner for The Good Thief?

Oh, it was hilarious. They made the Mother Jones Elixir for Misbehaving Children. It was actually root beer or something. And they had a hilarious graveyard cake with R.I.P. written in icing and stones made of Nilla wafers. It was so much fun, and I called in and they sent me pictures, and the book really did appeal to both the mothers and the sons, and they could talk about it. When I was writing, I was not thinking about the audience. I was just trying to write the book. I knew the kind of book I wanted to write, and that I wanted to do classic, old-fashioned storytelling. I think that’s the best thing you can do. If I’m going to work on something for six years, which is how long it took me to write The Good Thief, I want to write a book that I want to read. And I wanted to read the kind of book that made me fall in love with reading, that made me really excited to read books, that made me want to stay up late at night and not put the book down, and at the same time explore issues that I’m interested in. I did try to give each story an arc that would keep the reader reading.

The book is dedicated to your sisters, and you thank your mother in the acknowledgements. We’re in an age of memoir that bashes family, or maybe I’ve just read several of those kinds of books lately. Did you have a lot of family support while writing this book? Is family support different for fiction writers than for essayists?

I think it depends on the writer. I was lucky that my family valued books. My mother was a librarian at Brookline Public Library in Massachusetts in the 60s. And my mother and father are first generation Americans—their families were immigrants, and they were each the first to go to college in their families, and it mattered a great deal to them that we love books in the same way they did. I don’t think my extended family has read my work; this is not their world. For me, growing up in that kind of environment was invaluable. I was reading above my level at a very young age because there was so much reading in the house. A special night was when we got to bring our books to the table. Instead of some families who watch TV while eating dinner as a special treat, our treat was that we got to read while we ate. That made a difference. My family has been supportive of me, although there were many times when I got the talk: what are you doing with your life? You’re wasting your time. Because it takes so long to make any money from your writing and so many people never do, really. So they definitely sat me down with concern a few times.

What are you reading lately?

I just read Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin. It was really good, particularly the first story, which kind of blew my mind.

Is he someone you knew before? That collection has been getting a lot of attention recently.

Well, it just won the Story Prize, so I was there that night and heard him interviewed. The book had been on my radar, but I hadn’t picked it up. His interview with Larry Dark that night was really interesting. I think the Story Prize is definitely helping to raise the profile of story collections, which is great. I also read a lot of books that haven’t come out yet, for blurbs and things. There’s a great book coming out called The Wake of Forgiveness that’s going to be out this fall from Bruce Machart, who we published in One Story the first or second year we started. He’s been working on this novel for a long time, and it’s a sort of epic: a sons and fathers in 1890s Texas story about horse wrangling. It’s awesome. I read so much for One Story—we have a great story coming out by a guy named Cheston Knapp. Is the first story he’s ever published, and it’s called “A Minor Momentousness in the History of Love.” It’s about an actual tennis match from Wimbeldon in 2001 between Sampras and Federer, but the story is really about the ball boys and girls and the weird love triangle going on during that very famous match. We’re really excited for that to come out in our next issue.

My last question is about the end of The Good Thief. And maybe I won’t spoil the ending for people by quoting the final line in the interview—

I always read the end of books before I read the beginnings, so I don’t care.

I think it’s just one of the most beautiful last paragraphs. I’ve thought a lot about the ending, and especially the last sentence. Teaching it was a bit hard; I’m a poet and I teach a lot of poetry in this class about visual art, and you can only go so far in explaining what something means before you ruin it. But my question is: how did you know that the final word needed to be repeated four times, not two or three or five?

I think this again goes back to writing with intuition and gut versus the technical place, which you hopefully go to later when you’re editing. Writing that last chapter I tried to go to that intuitive place. Figuring out how to end the book was hard. Originally I ended on the image of the Harelip’s shawl draped over the grave, and the idea of the grave and the person who was dead and forgotten, with the shawl giving it some connection to life again. There was the idea that this grave was chosen. I was trying to get at something there yet I wasn’t, and I realized it was because the moment was too far away from Ren. I had to go to where he was. Ren had been through these events and had these physical and emotional missing parts of himself. And even though he had found the physical part and had, in many ways, closed the emotional gap by finding a person who loved him, he was never going to be 100%. There was always going to be a part of him that was missing, and missing Benjamin, because Benjamin might reappear, but he might not. There’s no 100% happy ending. Ending in that emotional place felt right when I read it. Repeating the last word four times is better than three times because it just feels right. Normally I have a rule of threes. I give this structure lecture about the magic number three—this is the trinity: a priest, a rabbi, and a minister. When you have something happen, the first time is setting it up, the second time repeats it exactly the same way to create a pattern, and the third time something different happens and you break the pattern. That’s the classic form of writing a short story.  But there are a few stories that use four. “Reunion,” by Cheever, is a very simple one page story where he makes something happen four times and it’s amazing the fourth time it happens. It’s a great teaching story because it’s so short you can read it in class in five minutes and then you can break it apart and teach it. Doing something four times slams it home. You’re taking a risk, but for me it felt right at the end of this book.

Further Links and Reading:

In his most famous novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, as well as in his novel-in-progress, An Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church, Gurganus is at once compassionate and critical as he explores the people, communities, and culture of this problematic region, his home.  His stories put me in mind of the ethnographic phrase “thick description,” anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s term for concentrated depictions based on observation through which eloquent interpretations of a culture can be made.

I sat down with Allan in November when he was visiting Ann Arbor as the University of Michigan MFA program’s Zell Distinguished Writer in Residence. We began our conversation talking about Geertz, and from there our disussion ranged from sexuality to southerness, from his affinity for the 19th century to how reading the work of fellow writers can be a shaping force in one’s fiction, from gardening between paragraphs to Halloween political activism, and plenty more about teaching and the craft of writing.

Interview:

Dana Kletter: To prepare for your reading, and this interview, I found myself rereading your collection White People, which brought to mind Clifford Geertz’s phrase “thick description,” and this quote by him on the meaning of culture:

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

Allan Gurganus: Well, I was taught to write about what I knew and white people seemed to be all I knew anything about, if that.  I studied color theory in art school, and black is defined as the presence of all colors, and white is defined as the absence of all colors, and I look at my skin and I see that I’m pink or wheat colored or brown and I realize that our Caucasian race has been in charge of Western Civilization for thousands of years.  How weird and typical that we would name ourselves for the absence of all color, for a vacuum.  It is an assertion of Calvinism, of self-loathing, of fear of sensuality and sexuality.   And the very phrase “white people” just strikes me, always, as kind of hilarious.  And so I tried to see what that definition would mean on the basis of the stories that I’d written and tried to shape the collection around that concept. I went back in the galleys and put the word white in every story and tried to hook it into a kind of train that held together as a unit, as well as separate stories.

So, there was a kind of epiphanic realization about whiteness?  Was that before you assembled the collection?

I’ve loved that title and that title has been in my book of titles for many years. I had saved it back and that seemed the perfect book for it.  And then I found in writing “Blessed Assurance,” which is one of the later things I wrote, that it seemed to add another element to what you were talking about before—that definition of culture, ethnography.  I think we could all…every tribe could write all of world literature about its own posse, its own traits.  But the fact that white people have been in charge of the culture for so long is a way of diagnosing what’s right and wrong with the culture, and why those webs you talk about can seem so claustrophobic and disappointing ultimately.

In addition to fiction, you write political essays, columns in the New York Times, etc.  And you have been an out gay writer since your first story was published.  There’s a lot of political pathologizing of sexuality, getting louder as the issue of gay marriage becomes a matter of referendum.  What are your thoughts on this?  Is there a way for literature to play a part in gay rights?

I’ve been both edified at the progress that the culture has made around the issue of gay rights, and disappointed at the same time. I feel there is this glass ceiling, as there was a glass ceiling for women’s advancement, for gay rights.  There’s a kind of tacit agreement that, okay, it’s not good to throw beer bottles out of passing cars at two guys holding hands and yell “faggot” and so forth, but when it comes to granting full and equal rights to a gay couple I think we still have some great distance to go.  And that is where leadership comes in.  I mean, Obama said he would be a fierce defender—that’s a direct quote—of gay rights, and here’s the Maine referendum, which I think could have benefited immensely from a single sentence of support and of fierce defense from him.

I’ve tried to exercise as much patience as possible.  It is not that I have a male bride I’m waiting to marry, but I think that it is a simple way of talking about the whole collective experience and I can’t imagine that if Polish Americans were allowed every right in America except the right to marry other Polish Americans that there wouldn’t be riots in the street.  And the patience with which we’ve treated our exclusion boggles the mind, just as the patience that African Americans have exercised in not burning down the whole bloody enterprise is just miraculous and shows you what faith in God can really do for people.

So I’m waiting and watching and hoping and trying to content myself with the advances that have been made, but never resting.  And really never being casual about just how bigoted people really are about this issue.  I don’t understand it.  I’m only interested in the people that I’m interested in.  It’s not like I’m on the street hitting on married men and children.  What harm am I doing?  And yet I think the word “sex” in homosexual is the biggest problem.  The best sex in the minds of most Americans is the least mentioned and the least visible.  It’s why, after genealogy, porn is the biggest enterprise on the Web, because people can do it in the privacy of their home and feel the communication underground with everybody else and be reassured that there are four trillion sites that will minister to their every whim about foots and boobs and animals.  But let two men stand up and say I love you in public and they’re shamed and pilloried.  Something is sick and wrong.

So it is moving but it is not moving fast enough for me, and I don’t think I’m going to see in my lifetime the kind of progress I’d hoped would be made.  On the other hand, I think things have changed.  If only for the younger generation.   Kids don’t seem to care—straight, gay, bi-, what’s his story?—in that kind of user-friendly neutral judgment kind of way. I’m very heartened by that.

In contemporary high school television dramas and movies there’s a stock gay character, which would never have been true when we were growing up.

Isn’t it beautiful how it has happened?

Is there a role for literature in this?  I was thinking about an interview I read in which you said something about James Joyce making the novel safe for sex.

Well, I think the natural course of literature will be that the great romantic novel can be written about a relationship between two women or two men.  Not a pathologized investigation or expose.  But that is how we will know that something major has been achieved, when the story of two men who fall in love and spend forty years with each other is considered dramatic and interesting and credible.  Because that is the heterosexual romance—my one and only, house, home, kids, dog, car.  It is hard to just will that into action, just say I’m going to write a happy love story between two gay guys.  It has the feel of poster, it has the feel of political coercion.  But I do think that is coming and it is something I really look forward to.

You were part of this Bloomsbury symposium at Duke last year, and Bloomsbury was a place where sexual orientation was fluid.  When you said “romance” before, I thought of E.M. Forster’s Maurice.  What is your interest in Bloomsbury?  I mean literary, obviously, but is it also an interest because these were people who were allowed to be overtly, sexually, what they were, whatever they were?

Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970)

Well, it helped to be the children of the ruling class of England. [Laughter.] Working people have less confidence and less assurance that if they are busted in a men’s room that mama or daddy will get them out.  But I think there is something magical about this pan-sexual connection in which married Maynard Keynes is pursuing the boys that Strachey is after and Virginia Woolf is admiring, and Harold Nicholson is pursuing the fathers while Vita Sackville West is after their mothers.  There’s something very romper room about that license to operate.  And yet here’s E.M. Forster—who is, I think, one of the great writers of the 20^th century; I think Howard’s End is one of the books I would save from the fire, highly influential—here’s the liberated guy with the sinecure at a university, celebrated as a novelist, who couldn’t publish the novel that he secreted in his bottom drawer because his reputation would have been ruined.  At least according to his own Edwardian lights.  There’s something so sad about that, that he hit that glass ceiling in his own life, his own sense of possibilities, and he couldn’t proceed.  Now all the sales proceeds of that book are given to gay causes, and that’s fantastic, but think what he might have written if he had given himself permission to let that go and just be himself and wrote.

One of the paradoxes of coming out is that everybody knows you’re gay from the time you’re born.  When I finally came out to my parents, very late in their lives, they just sort of forced me to, and I thought, “Oh God, do we really have to go through this drama?”  They said, concurrently, “We’ve always known you were gay” and “How dare you do this to us.” Gee willikers, which of these am I to believe?  And if you have had forty years to get used to this idea, couldn’t you be a little kinder to me, in that I’ve tried to be kind to you?  But there’s this appetite for punishment that is unaccountable, it is one of these things about human beings.  When I think about Forster just dithering his last thirty-five, forty years away it just breaks my heart.

Or A.E. Houseman, writing his encoded poems.  When I was a child I read things that made me feel my existence was justified.  I found myself in them.  It’s how you become a writer, I think.  You first find yourself in someone else’s writing.

Alan Turing memorial statue in Sackville Park, Manchester

Absolutely.  But the taboo.  Here’s Alan Turing, who broke the enigma code that essentially let England beat the Nazis, but because he had a male lover who was slightly underage, the police prosecuted him and he wound up committing suicide on account of it.  It is only in the last six months that England has finally come out and tried to reverse that conviction.  But it is a little late for him.  That’s what you want—not any sort of special exemption, just what equal rights means.  It is just the opportunity to proceed with your life without having to crimp the hose or tie yourself in knots or put pins in your skin or beat yourself up over something that you have no control over.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing a collection of stories and novellas I’ve tentatively titled Assisted Living, which are the things I’ve published in the last six or seven years.  And a lot of unpublished material because novellas are so hard to place in magazines.  I’m also working on a novel that is a companion piece to Oldest Living Confederate Widow, called The Erotic History of the Southern Baptist Church, speaking of getting sex out there. [Laughter.] That’s been in the works for many, many years, but I’ve been actively working on it in this incarnation for about a year and a half or so. It has been kind of joyful because I grew up in a religious household.  My father was a born again Baptist, my mother was a Unitarian Universalist who moved south and went to Presbyterian Church as the closest substitute she could find, and my brothers and I were bartered souls being shunted between these two denominations.  The Presbyterian side won, thank God, but I’m fascinated by extreme stances, religious and moral.  And how those stances tend to engender extraordinary erotic feelings.  The more you suppress Eros, of course, as we know, the more rampant it truly is.  And so it a fascinating opportunity to go back into American history (the novel starts about 1870) and trace these lines and try to figure out what went wrong with American religion and how it ties to the Calvinist roots.

Will it be a companion piece in the same way that Home is to Gilead?

Not quite that literal, though some of the characters walk in and out of each book.  It is set in the same town—about three miles out of the town, at an old Baptist church.  But I’m beginning to feel that I have this sort of Google Earth Weather Satellite vision of the whole community, and it is wonderful, very comforting.  When I’m insomniac I can walk from the church to the town and know what’s on the way.  It is not based on a lived landscape, but a dreamed landscape, so it is very real to me.

A dreamed landscape…did you dream it?  Or create it?

Created and then became a landscape in dreams.  It is partly based on how far my grandfather’s farm was from town.  And I’m sure it is based on seeing a million country churches, and visiting some.  But I’m fascinated with the geography of a small town, how much city ways mean in a town of 3,000 people in 1900.  And how they look down on the country people who bring their shoes in tissue paper and put them on just down the city limits and try to blend in.  It is very powerful, for me especially, given the complexities of our current world—in terms of communication and just being exposed politically—to go back in time, say, to 1888, and create a farm with no telegraph poles, where if a man wants to go see another man he either walks or rides a horse.

And for me it slows down the hectic rate of invention that we’ve learned to move at. It gets me in touch with an individual soul to state the simplest needs of a story and to play it out on a kind of puppet stage, on a kind of sparser scale, that’s elegant as a horizon with these vertical figures in front. To lift them out of the chaos that I’m feeling in our world as it is now.  You know, people are so divided against themselves and each other.  And the paradox of communication is that the more things you have to answer in the course of a day, the less you really know.  By the time you take your vitamins and return your emails and phone calls and Skype messages, there’s very little left.  It is like being perpetually at the far side of a ping pong table and trying to keep the balls coming back over.  So for me to inhabit the 19^th century is a beautiful balm, a great comfort.  It is kind of a laboratory for me, in which I take issues from the 20^th century and I trot them back.

I realize that I was born in 1947, that I was born three years nearer the 19^th century than this century, and my allegiance—my real nationality—is 19^th century.  I don’t feel akin to what’s going on.  And I guess this is how they get you ready to die. [Laughter.] I’ve heard so many people my age and older say we were so lucky to have fallen in history when we did because we got the best of a kind of 20^th century stability growing up after the war, and getting the comfort of returned GIs providing for their children, then getting to rebel against that after our teeth had been straightened.  And then being wild and crazy, which some of us actually got to live through too.  So I do feel I’ve lived through a particularly blessed period of human history.  But my daydreams, my insomniac reveries, are really set in the 19^th century.

I once interviewed Cynthia Ozick and she said that while she was writing Heir to the Glimmering World, she kept Forster’s A Passage To India on her desk as a talisman. Do you have a talismanic book you are keeping on your desk?

Well, the one volume that has been most useful is the 1888 Sears Roebuck catalogue.  It’s fantastic.  And they reprint them, it’s not an original copy.  You can get it for $7.00 on line and it is 650 pages thick.  If you want baby shoes, I’ve got the first, second and third best pair.  It lets you see everything—what would do and what was considered chic.  It is full of heartbreaking testimonial letters.  “Dear Sirs, That $2.50 Sunday suit you sent me sure looks like a $3.50 Sunday suit.”  The description of the hats takes about half a page because there are just so many doodads and gewgaws on them. You could order wagons and horseshoes.

And houses too, right?

Exactly.  They’d come on the train. In two days you’ve got a new house.  And good houses, too; they are still standing.  So literarily my model is Middlemarch, which I think is just everything a novel should be.  And One Hundred Years of Solitude is a great, great book that I consult.  I had a great blinding insight about how to use preexisting books to create a new book.  I bought a brand new copy of Middlemarch and One Hundred Years of Solitude and then I started the first chapter of my novel.  I worked until I couldn’t work anymore, and then I read the first chapter of Marquez’s novel about community, and then I went back to mine.  And then I read the second chapter of Eliot and then went back and worked on mine.  And then the second chapter of Marquez and then back to mine.  And it was as if I had created a stream that was flowing between two very different shores and that the minerals of each bank were leaching into mine, liquid essence at the center of the book, conforming and shaping.  It is a very beautiful experience.  I’m fascinated with how reading can be used not just as a source of information or even a source of generally inspiration, but as a shaping force in the creation of fiction.

Is this the first time you’ve consciously used this as a technique?

It is.   It just sort of developed.  I just thought, you know, what should I do?  Because I reread both and they’re both very much about villages. They’re very, very different kinds of books, but with roughly the same number of characters and a lot of connections.

I feel like that is something I learned to do when I was in the MFA program here, to be ignited by another author’s prose, to use those prose to guide and inspire your own.

To be able to use other literature for that, it is so exciting.

What are your thoughts about MFA programs?  There’s lots of talk about them being “bad” for your writing.    I know you went to the venerable Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Well, it’s hard to argue with anything that gives you two years to write. And I guess I’m a believer, because I’m going back to Iowa to teach in January for a semester.  I’ve always promised Connie Brothers—who has been second in command since I was a student—that I would come back and teach, and so this seemed like the perfect time to do it. I’m really looking forward to it.  I’ve enjoyed reading the student work here at Michigan.  Very talented.   I can think of a million things to say to students, among that I’m looking forward to talking to them, but also I really just want to check in with what people that age find to be interesting and important, right now.  That’s a great asset, a great tool for me.

Beyond the MFA, into the writing life, how do you maintain, persist, protect and nourish your writing?

Well, I don’t read the Times Book Review every week.  I just do my work.  That’s the secret. I didn’t publish my first book until I was forty-two, even though I started publishing when I was twenty-five.  I’m in no hurry, as long as I have a house to live in and enough to eat.  I’m very patient with the work, and I don’t want to show work until I think it’s really got something going in it that’s kicking and essential.  I look at the people who publish a book a year, and it’s mostly junk.  You can have a baby every ten months, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. What you risk is becoming a brand name, and some of the people who started publishing when I started have done exactly that.  They literally hire people to write their books for them, and then they go out on tour, which seems to me the wrong way to do it.  I’m all for staying home and writing and sending anyone else on tour.

I was lucky in that I was published in magazines, I had a readership,  and people saw what I was trying to do.  But I have this great respect for what a book should be and it hasn’t changed.  I want it to be important and significant, as the great books have been to me. It is a way of repaying a huge debt.  People say that a novelist is just born at forty, only when you are forty have you had enough heartache and enough death in your foreground first of all to know that you’re mortal. That’s the basic drivers’ license for being a writer: I too will die.  And I think about that a lot.  It is very hard to know that. But until you are forty or fifty or sixty, you can believe that you and Jesus Christ might be the two holdouts.  But I think that to live to be forty is to realize that you are part of a community, that you’re flawed, that you have certain talents and you lack certain others, and it is to know how much you want to work, how much you want to tell.  That has to be preeminent.

I’ve taught some extremely gifted students, but the ones who have gone on to have careers as writers are often the ones who have less inherent ability and more will and more need to tell the stories.  The most talented student I ever taught wound up writing code in Silicon Valley, and as far as I know has a perfectly happy life.  But it is that will, that need to get up and do it every day, that is the governing droit d’état.  I look at people of my generation or the younger generation who got a huge amount of attention early, in their 20s for instance, and it has just maimed them.  They’ve stayed Johnny one notes; they’ve stayed party boys or wunderkind.  And I think it is better to have waited until you have some vision that includes not just you as first person singular, but “we.” That’s the movement of human life—from the singular to the plural. And making your own story big enough and useful enough to include everybody else.

Marilynne Robinson is a very good argument for that: not many books, but all of them important, particularly for writers.  You wrote about Housekeeping in a New York Times book blog.

An amazing book.

In particular, you talked about the names of the triangle of female characters: Sylvie, Ruth, and Lucille.  The way Sylvie captures the wildness and strangeness of her characters, “the woods come indoors only briefly”; and Lucille as “light, with all its truth-tellings; and Ruth, named for her, “that Biblical paragon.” How are you naming the characters in your new book?

I have certain names that I’ve carried around with me forever.  I have journals and I save titles and phrases and character names.  Sometimes I have to create a character to go under a name.  The preacher, the faith healing preacher I’m writing about now, is named Dicy Pilker.  I just love to say it. I can’t even remember making it up. It is as if I found it. It has a kind of inevitability.  The name shouldn’t be completely on the nose about the meaning of the character, it should be slightly askew so that you could miss the larger meaning.  But I love naming.  I think that’s how Adam became the possessor of the Garden of Eden, when he was allowed to name the animals and became responsible to and for them at that moment. I always admire when I’m reading someone else’s book and the names are completely perfect.

That is something that I actually love about the south .  I knew a woman in North Carolina named Zora Byrd Fish.

Oh, my god.  That is a poem.

I do feel like naming your characters is part art, part magic. I’m not sure how it works.

It is an incantation.  Sometimes you have to look through the phonebook.  Sometimes you just overhear somebody called something.  That’s magical.

What activities in your life stimulate or feed into your writing.  Teaching?  Gardening?  Political activism?

Gardening is a joy because I believe in a kind of rangy English gardening that makes order look like natural spilling generosity. And the beauty of working where I live, where my garden is, is that I can go out between paragraphs and weed or clip or cut back and not commit language so that I am still on the page.  Political activism sounds kind of dreary when you say it like that, but everything I do in the community, including an open house that I have every year at Halloween for the neighborhood kids and anybody who wants to come, is political theater, though it is sometimes more deeply disguised than others.  Last year the election fell just after Halloween, so we had an occasion to have an Obama character and McCain and a twenty-one-year-old boy dressed as Cindy McCain.  And we lost three or four Republicans, but it was my house and my candy and they can come and go as they like.  But I like to think that I’ve shaped the minds of sixteen years of children in this town of five-thousand people, who know that somebody is crazy enough to put on this pageant for no money, and is willing to be foolish and dress up and to open up his house to anybody who walks in.  And whose biases as a storyteller and as voter as a citizen are on display.  The theme this year was healthcare—of course nothing could be scarier—so I showed an insured person and an uninsured person with the same disease at comic extremes. Kids are much smarter than a lot of people think they are; they really pick up on what’s going on. So something as simple as having this once a year for all these years I think has made a difference to the kids in the neighborhood.  I know this from people who have stopped by and talked to me.

So it is not that it is any less fun for not being political, it is much more fun for having these encoded messages. And I’d like to think my work has some of those too.  One of the things I’m happiest about is that “Blessed Assurance” is now required reading for the ethics course at Harvard Business School, so to whom am I accountable?  It is a big question.

Your novel Plays Well With Others was an act of commemoration and remembering, and to me that is political also.

Absolutely.  And one reason writers create characters is in order to defend them, and defense is inherently political.  And it is why there are no great Republican novelists—it is because you have to come to the rescue of your babies. And I don’t think Tom Wolfe is a great novelist.  Everything I do in terms of shopping, conversations with checkout people, my relation to the Mexican-American family that helps me paint my house or clean my house periodically and their citizenship, is something I’m very involved with. In a way everything is artistic, and in a way everything is political. It is foolish to do too much separating between the two because they both give energy and a forward thrust to the work, if that can be translated.

But you don’t want to be didactic?

There’s a place for that, and thank God there are people who are perpetually on guard, and I appreciate and respect them, but I want to be a painter not a poster maker, that’s the goal.

And how does teaching feed your writing?

Teaching is for me very profound. One reason I don’t teach all the time is, I think, I haven’t really found the balance between writing and teaching.  When I’m teaching I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, you know, “I have to tell her about Henry Green and I have to lead him to Isaac Babel and the adverbs only at the beginning and not at the end.”  You know how it is, Dana.  It’s parenthood times forty, but it is parenthood in a kind of intellectual or spiritual way—you’re guiding them or guarding them much more than they know.  If you are a good parent, the kids don’t really understand how much you love them or how much you are concerned for them or it would drive them mad or make them hate you.  But I can remember certain decisions I made in teaching twenty-five years ago, certain connections I made for students, with students, in terms of sending them to books.  I had a student at Sara Lawrence who was a very talented comic writer, and I sent her to Donleavy’s The Ginger Man and it led her to correspond with him and then visit and they’ve become inseparable friends.  And she’s in Ireland all the time, making a film about him, and it is kind of great because I’ve never met him, but those are the kinds of moments when you know that you really made a connection and a correct assumption about another person.

And just as sex is a subject that must not be talked about, the role of teaching is a subject that should be talked about much more directly, and it is typical of the culture that artists and teachers are disrespected so completely.  Only when the artist has made a certain amount of money are they worth discussing. I make very much the connection between writing a book and having a class you teach graduate, or these tireless teachers who year after year put on four shows with high school students and all the mishegas that goes with that.

Teaching creative writing and composition is part of the MFA program at Michigan.  I think all of us struggled with that balance, and I do think it has to do with loving your students, but is there a way to be a good teacher without loving your students?

You can’t be the kind of person who doesn’t love them, but to do that completely is to risk sacrificing your work, which is not a fair trade in the long run.  I’ve seen this with teachers of mine who published one book and then got stopped by the teaching.  They wind up really hating the talented students and doing damage to them, and that’s a horrible, horrible condition.  If that power goes wrong it is like they turn into a super villain who was maimed and fell into the acid and is getting revenge.  It is terrible.

What’s the most important thing to teach your students?  What have you learned from teaching them?

More and more I think about reading and the role of reading and the relation of writing and reading.  It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world, but it is something that is assumed or left out. More and more for me it is reading nonfiction—reading straight history, and reading books about science, brain chemistry, things that are just beyond my reach, but which I find very, very exciting and inspiring to try to hold on to.  I don’t have the technical terminology, but I’m smart enough to hold onto the movement of the book while it is happening and to see the implications, and I think that is important—not just poets reading poets and novelists reading novelists, but to be grazing in the world, reading newspapers, reading things online, exciting yourself about the world, just keeping fresh to what’s happening.  I just wish I had four hours extra every day to read.

Further Links and Reading:

~For more about Allan Gurganus and his work, or to find links to his books, biography, and essays, please visit the author’s website.

~You can also listen to Gurganus read his story “A Fool for Christmas,” originally broadcast on Christmas Eve 2004, on NPR.

~Here is an essay by Gurganus entitled “Lessons of Likeness,” published by The American Scholar. It was originally delivered as a lecturer on March 8, 2008, as part of the “American Pictures” program sponsored by Washington College, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

~And here is a conversation between Allan Gurganus and Donald Antrim published in BOMB magazine in 1997.

Adam Haslett: photo credit Beowulf Sheehan

Between September of 2008 and February of 2010, our financial system experienced a meltdown that had been set in motion by years of deregulation and corporate delinquency. The strange thing? Unregulated trading, unethical banking, the prospect of a massive economic collapse—all grace the pages of Adam Haslett’s debut novel Union Atlantic, which, as the crisis was unfolding, was being edited, designed, bound, and shipped to bookstores by Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday, which now had a novel of eerie prescience to deliver to the world.

Though perhaps “eerie” is the wrong word. After all, when you talk to Haslett, you learn that he is a political news junkie, someone deeply interested in and attuned to the economic and social forces that shape our lives—someone who links to “Talking Points Memo” on his website. He’s also fascinated by what he calls “the psychology of power,” and speaks of his time at Yale Law School (which he attended after the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and before writing the novel) as an immersion in the language of power. Knowing all this, Union Atlantic starts to seem less an uncanny foretelling and more the reflection of a writer who’s simply been paying attention.

The glimpse into market forces is just one dimension of Haslett’s novel, the heart of which is the conflict between Doug Fanning—a young, ambitious senior manager at Union Atlantic bank—and Charlotte Graves, a retired history teacher on whose family’s Massachusetts land Doug has built an ostentatious mansion. Charlotte believes her two dogs have begun talking to her—one in the voice of Cotton Mather, the other channeling Malcolm X—and admirers of Haslett’s celebrated 2002 short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, will recognize the empathy with which Haslett draws this solitary character, whose mind sometimes utterly distorts reality and sometimes grants her extraordinarily sharp perceptions of it. Rounding out the central characters are Nate Fuller, a high school student who becomes infatuated with Doug while being tutored by Charlotte, and Henry Graves, Charlotte’s brother, the president of the New York Federal Reserve.

You Are Not a Stranger Here was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and has been translated into fifteen languages. The winner of the PEN/Malamud award in 2006, Haslett has published fiction and essays in such places as The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope All-Story, The Barcelona Review, Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Stories, and National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. We sat down to talk when he visited the University of Michigan as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series.

Interview:

Kate Levin: I’m excited to talk about your new novel, but first, take us back to the beginning of your writing life. What were your earliest stories like?

Adam Haslett: I started writing short stories when I was in college. The first short story I ever wrote was about a mother, in a house, on her own, getting progressively drunker as the day went on, while her husband was at the office. It was called “1952,” and the story ends with the woman going to visit her neighbor—because she’s just sort of alone—and the neighbor is an old lady, and the woman finds her dead. So, you know, it was a bright start. [Laughter.]

I think fundamentally I started out, and remain, a Romantic in the capital “R” sense of the word. There are emotional states that I have experienced, or that I intuit, or that I have imaginatively experienced, and I want to communicate those experiences. And often, particularly in my first book, those are states of extremis.

I’ve always begun with people alone. My characters always begin with themselves, and so first it’s the relationship of the characters to themselves—that constant unending narration we have in our heads—and then they move into the world. And I want to track how they continue to relate to themselves once they encounter the world.

Before getting your MFA, you’d spent a year as a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Did you arrive at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, then, with a bunch of stories and a clear idea of what you wanted to work on there?

Provincetown, at the Fine Arts Work Center

No. Other than to keep writing, no. I spent most of my time at Provincetown writing one story, “War’s End,” which is in the book. At Provincetown I had the privilege of a year, full-time, no distractions, no domestic stuff, no classes, no job, nothing, so that’s when I became what I think of as sort of a professional writer, you know—every day, I wrote.

So you went from writing alone in your room in Provincetown to being a student at Iowa. Was that the first time you’d had lots of readers’ eyes on your work, and what was the experience like for you?

Well, I took one writing class in college, which functioned in a workshop style, so I wasn’t entirely new to it, but certainly it was more intense. I think if anything I was leery. I should back up and say that I went in with very low expectations—I went expecting nothing except time to write, and if I were to get anything from a workshop, or a teacher, then that would be gravy. That was my own understanding of what I was doing. So in that sense, I think it was easier to have a good experience, because it turns out I was there with some good people and had some good teachers.

One last MFA-related question before we leave that world: I noticed that your new novel’s main character, banker Doug Fanning, has a young secretary who’s described as feeling powerless because she has “an advanced degree in short fiction.” I hadn’t realized until then that she was supposed to be a former MFA student! Was that a little bit of gentle derision on your part, or a wink and a nod to those of us MFA-ers who might be reading?

[Laughter.] It was sort of a wink and a nod. It’s also from Doug’s point of view—and Doug thinks of himself, because of the control he has at the bank, as what he calls “an artist of the consequential world,” not the “observer of effete emotion” that Sabrina Svetz wants to be. So that’s Doug making a distinction between art and the world, which is certainly more pejoratively drawn than I would draw it.

Your story collection, You Are Not A Stranger Here, was published in 2002. You’ve said in an earlier interview that you begin a short story by hearing a voice or catching hold of a certain sentence rhythm. Do you summon a voice or a rhythm when you’re sitting down at your desk? In other words, do you write your way into a certain voice? Or do you hear it first and then try to nail it down with words?

It’s more the former. The reason you have to spend so long at your desk is because you need to be there when it happens. It’s nice to think that you’d walk down the street and something would come to you whole cloth, but it doesn’t happen much. It has to do with a certain calming of the mind, quieting the voices of distraction. I meditate every morning before I work, and that’s a process of getting rid of a lot of the things that block out those quieter, subtler voices in your own mind. So, I don’t know if I can say that I can summon those voices, but maybe I can hear them better. It’s sort of a negative skill, the skill of concentration. It’s the skill—increasingly difficult, it seems to me—of blocking out a manic culture, in order to be able to listen to something that, when you first hear it, is a wisp of a nothing of an echo. And if it’s ever going to have life, you have to pay attention to it, take it seriously, let it be more important than other things that are way more produced and slick and loud.

To dive into the collection itself, the two opening stories, “Notes to My Biographer” and “The Good Doctor,” seem to have an interesting inversion to them. In the first, the narrator, an aging inventor in the middle of a manic episode, rails against “the mental health establishment” and appears to be off his meds. The second story is told from the point of view of a psychiatrist who tries to engage a reclusive patient in talk therapy, only to find that the woman just wants to take her meds. Now, I could be reading far too deeply into it, but did you put these stories side by side to show us the two sides of that “mental health establishment,” patient and practitioner?

No, the only factors that went into the sequencing of the stories were that there were certain stories I wanted to keep away from each other, so that dictated where they would go. I was aware, also, that half were set in England and half in America, so I was doing a little bit of variation of that.

Ah, so much for my theory. So, while the subject of mental illness isn’t the only thing that unifies the collection—there’s also the solitude of the characters, for one—it’s certainly present in a number of the stories. When did that theme make itself apparent to you? Or did you just think of yourself as writing isolated stories, with some outside readers then pointing out, hey, you could cohere your collection around this theme?

Well, it was certainly something that came from outside. First of all, I didn’t think of myself as writing a collection, until I signed a contract for it. So, definitely, I thought of them as individual stories about individual characters—and they’d been written over four years. I didn’t really think of them as having shared themes in particular, so it did take readers, critics… “mental illness” was sort of the headline of the New York Times review, so it traveled under that banner.

Interesting—how did you feel about that “banner” being placed over the book?

Well, that’s complicated… there’s a lot of things to be said. On the one hand, there’s the real biological fact of mental illness, but I also think that phrase is a kind of conceptual suitcase that people can keep closed. And once you open it, you find out that it’s a label for a variety of human experiences that many of us have the edges of, and these lines aren’t so easy to draw. So the phrase itself rarely appears in the collection. I’ve said before that if I’d set the same characters a hundred years earlier, they would have simply been considered eccentrics. That I’m writing about people whose experience is, in this day and age, seen through the lens of psychiatry, says as much about the culture as it does about those people.

In between writing your collection and your novel, you went to law school at Yale. Was that based at all on a desire to have an occupational footing in the “consequential world,” as your character Doug thinks of it?

Yeah, sure. There’s something fascinating and appealing and alluring to me about the psychology of power, and particularly the psychology of anonymous power. And so going to law school was in a sense like learning a language. Law is the language of power in this country, probably more than in any other country in the world. So that was interesting, but I think the exercise of it—the work—is just too boring. Do you know what I mean? So I don’t know that I could ever sustain the interest to try to be a powerful person. I don’t think that’s what I’m interested in, power of that particular kind. But it’s allowed me to be a fly on the wall in a lot of places where I otherwise wouldn’t have been.

Did you write fiction while you were there?

Well, the way it worked was I went from Iowa to there, and then I signed the contract for the book [You Are Not A Stranger Here] in the spring of my first year, and then I took the next year off to finish the book. And then I went back to finish law school, and the book came out the last year I was there. When I was actually attending classes in law school, I would say I did more editing than actual drafting, but that was just a question of time.

I’m curious about how you taught yourself to write a novel. Did you read a bunch of novels and kind of try to learn by diffusion, or did you just let yourself write your way into problems and write your way out?

I think it was more the latter. I mean, I had a guiding overarching ambition as a writer—not particularly for this book, but just as a writer—which had to do with the two things I’ve loved most in my reading, over the years: the sense of social scope in the nineteenth-century novel, and the psychological intensity of Modernist fiction—Faulkner and Woolf and Proust. And I didn’t want to sacrifice one to the other, or have only one or the other. I wanted social scope and I wanted interior intensity. So my ambition was to try to get both of those things into the book. I started with characters, but some of them were characters that were already in a place, in a world, that was demanding their attention. In a sense, the conjuring act happened right away—I mean, if you choose to write about the head of the New York Fed, it’s not going to be a quiet domestic novel.

One of the things that struck me about Union Atlantic is just how much “world” you give us. There was a piece by the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels in the last year or so arguing that literary novels should be more like “The Wire”—so, avoid locking us in a room with two people and telling us about their relationship, and instead give us more social context, more political context. First of all, I don’t know if you’re into The Wire—

Sure, sure, I love The Wire.

Me too. So, as a novelist, what’s your take on what Michaels is saying?

Emile Zola (1840-1902)

I mean, Tom Wolfe twenty years ago wrote an essay in Harper’s that was basically saying that writers should be more like reporters. I think this is a theme that goes all the way back to Zola and naturalism and writing that is a kind of reportage as opposed to just the marriage plot. I mean, at that point, everything was in the realist vein. Zola is someone who was fascinated by—the way The Wire is—social strata. In The Wire, you know by what kind of car they drive where they fit into the Baltimore world, and one of the things I love about reading Zola is, like, one of the first things you learn about someone is how much they earn. Not because he thinks it’s the deepest thing, but because he knows how close to the surface that is in everybody’s understanding of how people fit in. So, yeah, that’s the curious outward-looking part of me that wants to have that—and also, just as someone who reads a lot about politics every day in the news, and thinks about it a lot, and gets worked up about it a lot, it is frustrating to read so much contemporary fiction that has essentially lobotomized what is an omnipresent, 24-7 flux of stuff that’s coming at us. So, unless that’s sort of justified, it’s beginning to border on the inexcusable. It’s an incomplete rendering of our experience.

Now, you can write historical fiction, which I, you know [laughter], shouldn’t say too much about—but you can write historical fiction and obviate these problems, right? You can write a novel set in the nineteenth-century, or the middle of the nineteenth-century, and you can write a marriage plot, and generate all your drama in the conventional manner that has been for two hundred years. But obviously, you know, that’s not my project.

You mentioned that you’ve written some short stories since completing the novel.

Not many, but yeah.

Is that sense of “the world” more a part of the picture in your short fiction now that you’ve had the experience of writing this socially-minded novel?

Well, it’s interesting, because the last short story I wrote was a short story in which the main character is Obama, so, that’s in “the world.” [Laughter.] He’s dealing with a lot. And that came about because an editor said, “Look, do you want to do this?” I didn’t just sit there and say, “Oh, I think I’ll write about Obama.” But it was interesting, and I enjoyed it. The short answer is, I don’t know the answer, because other than that one project I haven’t really gone back to writing short fiction and thinking about it. I think the point is that if you want to show relationships between micro and macro systems, or experience, it’s very hard to do that in the form of one character, because very few people, given the breadth of—how low the low are, how high the high—the gaps in income and privilege and power that we live with, it’s very hard to put that in one story.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. So, let’s dive more deeply into the novel, starting with Doug, the banker. I was surprised to see that the novel opens with a scene of military combat in 1988, when Doug’s a naval officer on a ship called the Vincennes, in the Persian Gulf. The present of the novel takes place in the run-up to the Iraq War. Which aspect of the character came first—his military identity or identity as a finance guy? How did you build this character?

Well, I thought at the beginning that Henry [Graves, the president of the New York Federal Reserve in the novel] would have an opposite number at the bank, Union Atlantic, in Jeffrey Holland, the head of the bank. But I found him to be a little dull on the inside. So, I was writing a scene of Jeffrey Holland, and Doug kind of came in as the second-in-command and he just seemed more…I was just more interested in that figure. So that’s how he began, and that’s how I started writing more about him. I’m trying to remember the first scenes I wrote of Doug… I can say that I wrote the Vincennes scene in the Persian Gulf not at all clear if it would be in the novel, because, you know, it could easily not be, and it wasn’t clear to me that it was Doug, but it became so. I guess it was understanding him in office life that was what first gave me a way in to Doug. There’s a whole culture, or a hierarchy and a balancing act, with all these different actors in the building, and he’s got a relationship with all these different people and is controlling information.

In that opening Vincennes scene, we witness Doug committing a highly immoral act, and at that point I thought, well this is a character we’re just going to indict—but actually he becomes much more inflected over the course of the novel. We learn about his class background, his mother’s alcoholism. Can you talk about these elements—when they developed, and how important they are to Doug’s characterization and to the book itself?

Well, that was pretty early on. That Finden (the town) represents something very particular to him—that I knew early on. There’s a “fuck you” contained in the act of building this house, and it is heard by his neighbor. So, that sense of resentment of the privilege in which he now takes part was key to this kind of anger. He’s an angry guy, and… how should I put it… both the worlds that he’s operated in—the military and the financial world—if there’s an emotion that vivifies those worlds, I would say it’s a certain kind of male anger. It’s more obvious in the military, it’s more abstracted in finance, but it is powerful. And we have been living with its consequences for a long time. And we still are. I didn’t realize this until later, in writing Doug—I didn’t realize that that’s what I was getting at, why it was important to have the military and the finance stuff together. Not together, like, we see the systems operating together, but through an individual, who participates in both cultures.

Besides Doug, there are three other central figures in the novel: Charlotte, Henry, and Nate. In a recent interview, you were asked which of these four characters you identify with most, and you’d said that in creating each of these characters, you had to expose a part of yourself. I’m really interested in that idea, and wonder if you could say a little more about it.

I think it’s a messy, kind of always-in-process… process. [Laughter.] I don’t think you can write about a character for a long period of time if they don’t interest you, and the interest comes from them being both different, and yet preoccupied by, bothered by, rankled by things that bother, preoccupy, and rankle you. So, in a sense, I always find myself most comfortable writing about someone, or sets of events, that are thirty degrees off from my own experience. Enough to be able to freely—and without trying be true to my life or anybody else’s—import things that are of interest to me. It’s not autobiography, nor is it biography of character. I think it’s like letting those quieter voices that we were talking about earlier get louder so that you realize that a character is headed in a certain direction, and then the brave thing is to let go and let them be something that might be shameful to yourself. I think shame is actually pretty heavily involved in the process.

Confronting one’s own shame?

Yeah. Writing about people wanting things that you find shameful to want. And even if you know you’re writing about a character, the book’s going to have your name on it, which is a good thing—if no serious internal trouble has been overcome in the writing of a book, then there’s not a lot of blood on the floor, and it’s not as interesting to me.

You finished your book the week Lehman Brothers collapsed. How did it feel to you, when the economy actually tanked, to know that you’d just finished a book that very wonderfully delineates—for people who don’t know how banks engorge themselves, and skirt regulations—how a collapse like that could happen?

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Image from Wikimedia Commons (photo credit: Dmadeo)

It was disorienting, because I’d spent so long thinking and worrying over what level of detail to go into on these subjects in the book itself, and wondering if anybody would even care about the Fed or banks. It was disorienting, because it was such an outsized event for everybody, and yet for me, when I started reading about meetings of bankers at the New York Fed, I was like, oh yeah, I wrote that scene about a year and a half ago. So that was uncanny. And I suppose, selfishly, the concern was that the book would be—I mean, I knew that it was inevitably going to be read in light of that. It just can’t not be. But my only worry was that that would somehow overweight the financial aspects of the book at the cost of the rest of the things that are going on, whereas what had led me into the Fed in the first instance was not banking or finance per se, but a way that we’ve chosen to govern ourselves, which is the tyranny of abstraction in economics as a natural science, which is so much bigger than the Fed.

You’ve said that you started working in the novel after reading a book about the Fed. I was wondering what other kinds of research you did for the book, particularly of the non-reading kind. Did you gain access to the corridors of power?

I did not go and visit investment banks. I did visit the New York Fed—I was an associate at a law firm where a guy there used to work for the Fed, so I was able to go into the New York Fed. Now I currently have a friend who’s a lawyer there, so I’ve been into the gold vault, and I’ve seen the boardroom, I’ve seen the building, so that was all very helpful. And I met with a recently retired Fed official about some of the mechanics. But most of it was reading. Other than some scene setting, ninety percent of it was reading.

A character like Jeffrey Holland, say, who you said you’d imagined early on as a central character—there’s something about the way you describe his bearing, his physical presence, that made me think you’d done some careful observing of powerful people.

I was thinking of Bill Clinton. I was thinking of the large, seductive, sharp, smart, garrulous, kind of winner, and all that that comes with. I mean, he’s not as smart as Clinton, but, yeah.

Do you have a second novel in the works?

I have ideas, I have characters, I have some very preliminary sketches, but I also have a desire to approach it differently, and quite possibly write some of it in the first person.

Besides trying out the first person, how else are you thinking of approaching this second novel differently? Will you outline or map it out?

Well, you know, I’m not an outliner. And I didn’t know a lot about the plot of this book until it developed as I went along. I don’t know whether it’s so much an outline as wanting to know—which maybe I can’t, and it’s just a fantasy—what the central tensions of the book really are, so that one can move to the starting point of that tension. As opposed to the 200 pages of work where you’re like, oh, it’s about that, at which point you then start again.

Further Links and Resources:

• For more about Adam Haslett’s work, or to find links to his recent writing, interviews, and features, please visit the author’s website.

• Check out “Night Walk,” Haslett’s most recently published short story, featuring protagonist Barack Obama.

• Or read Haslett’s story “Notes to my Biographer,” published in 1999 in Vol. 3, Issue 3 of Zoetrope: All Story.

• You can also read “The Beginnings of Grief,” which appeared in 2002 in Issue 32 of The Barcelona Review.

Heidi Durrow / photo (via author website) by Timothi Jane Graham

About Heidi Durrow

Heidi Durrow and her debut novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, seemed to have been just about everywhere last winter, from the New York Times and Publishers Weekly to NPR’s All Things Considered and The Daily Beast. And the phrases reviewers have used to describe Durrow’s novel represent a kind of wish list for any fiction writer, first-time or otherwise: in The New York Times, Louisa Thomas praised its “vividly realized characters”; in the Dallas Morning News, Karen Thomas wrote of its “hauntingly beautiful prose”; and in the Washington Post, Lisa Page called it “not just a tale of racial ambiguity but a human tragedy.”

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I. and the sole survivor of a family tragedy. The book’s warm reception makes it easy to forget that the novel, which won the 2008 Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice, was twelve years in the making—a story Durrow had a hard time writing and a hard time publishing. “The writing, editors and agents would say, was great, but there was no market,” admitted Durrow, who, like her protagonist, is biracial:

“No one could relate to a half-black and half-Danish girl. I had a couple of teachers along the way who encouraged me to abandon the project and realize it would never be published. I didn’t listen.”

Then again, Durrow has never been the type to sit back and wait for good fortune to find her. The middle child and only daughter of an African-American enlisted Air Force man and a white Danish woman, she is a graduate of Stanford University, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Yale Law School. In 2007, she launched Mixed Chicks Chat, a weekly podcast on race and society, with Fanshen Cox, an actor, producer and friend. In 2008, the duo created their annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival in Los Angeles, an event that has featured artists such as Angela Nissel, Kip Fulbeck, and Kim Wayans.

Durrow is currently promoting The Girl Who Fell from the Sky around the country, and that tour has provided her with an opportunity to meet up with listeners and festival attendees, as well as readers, who have their own mixed race stories to share. “It is an absolute dream to be able to share this story with a wide audience,” she said. “It’s even more amazing to hear from some readers that it has changed them in some small way. That’s what I’ve always wished to do with my writing.”

This interview took place via a series of e-mails, while Durrow was crisscrossing the country.

Interview

MARY WESTBROOK: I was so moved by the idea of language in the book. Both Rachel and her Danish mother, Nella, struggle to communicate in their adopted cities (Chicago and Portland), and Rachel seems keenly aware of the loss of Danish from her life once she moves to her grandma’s house. There’s also a heart-breaking scene in which Nella uses a slur to refer to her children, and a friend, Laronne, corrects her. Can you talk about the novel’s treatment of language?

HEIDI DURROW: Language is a central part of Rachel’s identity. She has a whole language of words, her mother’s language that is trapped inside her… because there is no one around to speak Danish with any longer. Like Rachel, I grew up speaking Danish. There are simply some words that don’t translate well—which means the story is mistranslated.

Nella struggles with language in a different way. She’s learning new words and doesn’t know how to assign meaning to them. When she unknowingly uses a racial slur to refer to her children, she’s devastated. She knows the powers of language and words. Words—labels specifically—are what we all either embrace or struggle against as we attempt to identify ourselves.

The point of view revolves between several characters. Did you always envision the story told in this way, with this particular group of characters telling the story?

The book began as a third-person recounting—told from Rachel’s perspective—Rachel all grown-up. The problem was I couldn’t figure out what had happened to her beyond her adolescence. I didn’t have a take on what her perspective would be about the fateful day on the rooftop after having gone to college, for instance, or marrying, or falling in love. I knew that the story of the novel would be her growing consciousness of what that accident meant to her. I realized I needed to tell it from her perspective—first-person present tense. Her character warranted an immediacy. The other characters slowly developed when I realized how unreliable Rachel was. She had to be. She was only slowly coming to understand her place in the world.

Heidi Durrow / photo by Frank Stewart

Were certain characters easier to access?

I created Laronne to give Nella an advocate. It was imperative that Nella be humanized in the way a friend could. I created Jamie/Brick because I think every tragedy needs a witness. In life, really, when something bad happens, you need to have someone who says, “Yes, a bad thing has happened.” Roger grew out of a similar need—I wanted the father figure to explain his absence. There are so many missing fathers out there; I can’t explain [why they’re gone]. I gave Roger a chance to explain. And Nella had to have a chance to speak for herself. It was important for the reader to hear about her despair in her own words so that they could—if not forgive—understand what she was trying to do.

While I was reading The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, I couldn’t help but think about the importance of pacing in this novel, of spooling out the right information at the right time. Another writer might have decided to lead up to Rachel’s accident, for instance, but this story seems far more invested in the aftermath of the tragedy.

I originally started the book with the accident, but it didn’t work. The reader needed to care about the characters before there was a tragedy. Because the book is told from different perspectives, I spaced out the information [through the chapters]. This is really how we come to “know” things [in real life]: we put stories together from different sources. Maybe that [impulse] was also a function of being a journalist. You have to back up your story with different sources.

You’ve said that the book took twelve years to write. Can you talk about that process, from the initial inspiration, to the hard work of writing the book?

I started the book in 1997 after reading a newspaper article about a terrible tragedy in which a family perished, but the girl survived. I was haunted by this. I wanted to know—“What would the girl’s survival look like?” I wanted to give her a voice, and a future.

How does a story usually start for you—with a character, with a place?

I start a story with a question. One for which I don’t have an answer. [Even if I don’t] come up with an answer by the end of the story, at least I’ve engaged with the question in a new way. The questions that started The Girl were, “What would the girl’s survival look like?” “How does a girl who loses her family in that way go on to fashion a life for herself?” “How does she learn to love again?” “How does she learn that she is lovable?”

photo by lowjumpingfrog (via flickr cc)

What was the most challenging part of the process for you? The most invigorating?

The most invigorating part of the process was striking upon Rachel’s voice, and finding a way to keep “growing up” her voice. I kept writing and re-writing until it sounded right to me. The most challenging part really was believing in the project. I didn’t listen to the no’s. I took them as information. Kept sending out the writing. Kept revising. And kept true to the vision I had for the book. There were many years where there was just my dogged belief that kept me going. Sometimes that belief waned.

Were you ever tempted to put the book away entirely? What kept you going?

It was the story I had to tell. Beyond the rejections, and also writer’s block that I suffered for a couple of years, I kept going by putting myself on a “regimen.” I sent out my work to everyone. The Poets & Writers’ deadline section was my bible. I posted all the deadlines on my calendar and submitted excerpts from the book to contests, and literary journals, and grants. For every rejection I received for a story, I sent the story out to two more journals. I spent a lot of money on postage, but finally, exponentially, I got some good news.

You share certain biographical details with your protagonist, Rachel. Are you fielding a lot of “Are you Rachel” questions? Do you think readers react differently to you or to the book if they assume the story is based on your life?

I make sure to tell audiences at readings that the accident part of the story is not my story, but inspired by a real story. I can see them all breathe a collective sigh of relief because they’ve been worried about me and want to handle me with kid gloves. I get the “Are you Rachel?” question a lot. And, “Is Grandma your grandma?” “Is Roger your dad?” On and on. I think people ask those questions because 1) they’ve read the book; and 2) they are rooting for Rachel to have grown up okay—maybe even like I did.

When you were interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered, you were asked whether Rachel’s story reinforced the idea of the “tragic mulatto.” You answered that, for Rachel…

The question of the “tragic mulatto” was also the topic of the March 3 episode of your Mixed Chicks Chat podcast. The two conversations got me thinking: how did you prepare yourself for interviewers who want to talk about the issues addressed in the story, versus the story? For that matter, do you see the two things—the social issues and the story—as separate? Do you ever feel as if you’re being asked to speak as “the” representative for biracial women?

I won the Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change. Of all the awards I could receive, this is the most meaningful, because it means that the book speaks to issues of import to our citizenry. In that way, I don’t mind that when I’m interviewed I am speaking as a representative of biracial women. I’m heartened that people are interested. I do wonder, though, when the book is critiqued as being not enough about the biracial experience. To that criticism I say, “Well, okay, but it’s not a position paper. It’s a story.” As a story it doesn’t provide answers but new questions or new ways of looking at the old ones.

As you’ve promoted the book, what questions have surprised you?

I am most surprised by the generosity of people who share their stories. I have had a number of people “come out” to me, for lack of a better word, about their blended families, or about their grief, or about simply being a young person struggling against the labels, like geek or nerd, that they’d been assigned by peers. I love that they have connected with Rachel despite differences in age, race or culture. They’ve connected their own stories to the stories I’ve told and suddenly feel empowered to talk about it.

poet Remica Bingham

I’ve heard the poet Remica Bingham talk before about the difference between poetry and the “poe-biz”—the difference between writing poetry and getting poetry out into the world. I think most writers have a fantasy about what that the experience of a first book will be like—how did your expectations line up with reality?

There is much you, as a writer, can’t control about your first book, but there were certain things I did to help my book reach the largest possible audience. First, I wrote the best book I possibly could. That seems facile, but I remember the moment I read the final draft on a cross-country flight. At the end I thought, “This is a book.” It was the first time my manuscript felt like a book. I am not bashful about telling everyone about what I have written… whether they can identify with the mixed-race themes, or a coming-of-age story, or whether they even read fiction. Recently I told one guy seated next to me on a flight about the book, and he ordered it that very moment (love in-flight Internet!). That was pretty cool.

You’ve also worked as a journalist and a lawyer. What drew you to those fields, and what draws you to fiction? Do the fields, which seem so different on paper, ever overlap?

I always wanted to be a writer, but I also wanted to be financially secure because I grew up poor. I chose professions that allowed me to write but also would provide me a good, steady paycheck. I was the first person in my family on either side to graduate from a four-year college, and I was driven to make the most of the opportunity. I did practice law, but ultimately, I knew that what I would do best at would be what I loved most, and then I worked to fashion a life as a fiction writer… I am still certain I don’t know how to write a book. I know how to write the book I wrote, but the book I’m writing now is a whole new game. I’m writing and revising and trying to figure it out.

You write across genres. Do you feel more at home in fiction or nonfiction? Do you move back and forth between essays and stories pretty easily?

Fiction is a bit easier. There is more possibility to be poetic. I like lyrical language. I like beautiful sentences. I like the sounds of words next to each other—all of those things are important in fiction in a way that is more heightened, I think, than in nonfiction.

You have embraced technology in a way not all writers have. Can you talk about how or why media like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and podcasts have made a difference in your writing life?

Writers today are supposed to have a “platform.” You have to have some peeps behind you. Technology has been a great way to connect with people and get some peeps who could support me—and buck me up when my spirits were flagging. I started my blog in 2006 when I was so frustrated by all the rejections that I had received for the manuscript. My blog readers became a great community—and they supported me. It was so reassuring that someone out there cared what I wrote about. Facebook, Twitter, a blog, a Web site—they are all ways to connect with readers—a real genuine connection that isn’t about selling something.

When you are not promoting a new novel, what is your daily life like?

Book tours are not conducive to writing, at least not for me. It’s frustrating because I am inspired by so many of the stories that people share with me and I am desperate to get back to the page. I am a binge writer, although I do write religiously first thing in the morning—three pages written longhand and a sentence of affirmation written ten times in a row. I keep that practice going now on the road, too. It grounds me. Some really wild, raw, good stuff gets written during those times. Other than that I have become a seasonal writer. I write in the fall a great deal, and in January and February. The rest of the year is almost exclusively dedicated to the festival.

Panel from the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival / photo from http://www.mxroots.org/

Let’s talk about that festival—Mixed Roots, which you and Fanshen Cox created in 2008. How is the festival financed? What makes it different from other festivals?

We have a few festival sponsors: the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), Zerflin Graphic Design. This year Target has stepped in for our Family Event, and we will have a Target Free Family Day at JANM with lots of activities for kids and families centered around issues of identity. We received a generous grant from the Aaronson Fund: Social Justice Works!, and then the rest is donated by family, friends, and podcast listeners. The festival is a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts and donations are tax-deductible. Our operation is extremely lean. We have traded on our relationships and done everything we could on our own. I was our website designer until this fall (it’s amazing what you can learn from a library book). Now Grassroots.org has provided us with a volunteer web designer. We staff the festival for the two days with volunteers—friends and family. Festivalgoers know almost my whole family: they are the people ushering, and welcoming people in.

What has been the most surprising aspect of the Mixed Chicks podcast? Do you have a favorite episode? Is there a topic you haven’t addressed yet that you’d like to?

It’s surprising that we constantly have new ideas for the show. You’d think that the whole “mixed thing” could run dry of topics or guests, but we have a backlog of requested shows and guests who we’re trying to fit in. There are so many things we’d still like to address. The best ideas come from our listeners.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky begins with an epigraph from Nella Larsen’s Passing. You named Rachel’s mother after Larsen, and I’ve heard you call Larsen your muse. What other writers do you turn to for inspiration?

Toni Morrison / photo by Angela Radulescu, via Entheta (Wikimedia Commons)

I love Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid. I love Barbara Kingsolver, and Alice McDermott, and John Edgar Wideman, Russell Banks, Dorothy Allison. And I also turn to poetry when I’m looking for inspiration: William Stafford, Audre Lorde, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich. I wish I were a poet.

Do you have any advice for young writers?

Be careful about sharing your writing. I found it was so easy to be shut down by “critiques” in workshops. I read a writer say somewhere that the workshop is “an inherent fault-finding machine.” As a beginning writer, young or old, what you need is someone who can ask you good questions about your work so that you keep writing. My editor, Kathy Pories, did that for me. That’s the main thing. You’ve got to keep writing. Whatever helps you do that—do that.

Extras

• Visit Heidi Durrow’s website and read her blog.
• Hear Heidi and Michele Norris discuss “Reimagining ‘The Tragic Mulatto’” on NPR’s All Things Considered.
• Read an excerpt of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky or hear audio excerpts from the novel.
• See Durrow read in a city near you, or check out this footage from her book tour:

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky: Book Tour from Heidi Durrow on Vimeo.

• Order your copy of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky from Powell’s.
• Read Durrow’s short story “Ethnic Lego Girls Carry Spears” in Smokelong Quarterly.
• Subscribe to Poets & Writers magazine at a special discounted rate for Fiction Writers Review readers.

Charles Johnson: photo credit Mary Randlett

Charles Johnson taught creative writing at the University of Washington from 1976 to 2009. His first book, a collection of political cartoons entitled Black Humor, appeared in 1970 when he was twenty-two years old. In fall 1972 Johnson introduced himself to John Gardner, author of many distinguished novels and then professor of English at Southern Illinois University. Under Gardner’s tutelage, Johnson began writing his first published novel, Faith and the Good Thing. His critique of the phenomenological aesthetics of contemporary African American fiction, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, appeared in 1988.  Following the well-reviewed Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson wrote his masterpiece, Middle Passage (1990), which won the prestigious National Book Award, making him just the second African American male to win the prize, following Ralph Ellison in 1953 for Invisible Man.  Johnson published a fourth novel, Dreamer (1998), and three collections of short fiction: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986), Soulcatcher and Other Stories (2001), and Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories (2005).  Some of Dr. Johnson’s essays about his spiritual life and Buddhist philosophy appear in Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (2003). Charles Johnson has written more than twenty screenplays, including the script for the prize-winning PBS film of Booker T. Washington (Booker, 1985). Moreover, he has written or edited the text for such nonfiction books as Black Men Speaking (1997), Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery (1998), King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. (2000), and Mine Eyes Have Seen: Bearing Witness to the Struggle for Civil Rights (2007).  Dr. Johnson’s body of work has garnered many prizes, most notably a MacArthur Fellowship (1998), and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature (2002).

During the last few years that Dr. Johnson taught at the University of Washington, I was lucky enough to study with him in UW’s MFA program. I grew up in New York and New Jersey and lived a mostly nomadic life in my twenties; I sold bread, washed dishes, built rock staircases in the Adirondacks, doled medication to schizophrenics in a halfway house, drove a truck and planted trees for a nursery in Albuquerque. When I moved from New Mexico to Seattle in 2005 and took my first workshop with him, he led me to new reckonings with regard to how I was able to perceive the world. His example challenged me to consider the possibility of a morally coherent world, a world where all things are possible, including goodness and virtue. His mentorship has been a gift that I am in no way capable of reciprocating.

I am not alone. Counted among his former students are such authors as Johanna Stoberock, G.W. Hawkes, Kathy Alcala, and David Guterson. He’s mentored scores of students, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. And there are dozens—if not hundreds more—whose writing and whose lives he’s challenged and inspired by his work, by his thought-provoking example, and by his kindness, compassion and integrity.

The following interview took place as a series of email conversations in January and February 2010.

Interview:

WATTERSON: Let’s begin with mentorship. Who were your first mentors and how did they contribute to your growth?

JOHNSON: My first mentor was the prolific cartoonist/writer Lawrence Lariar. When I was fifteen I began studying comic art in a correspondence course with Lariar, who published over 100 books, wrote detective fiction under a couple of pseudonyms, was a Disney studio “idea” man, cartoon editor for Parade magazine, and editor of Best Cartoons of the Year. Some summers when I was in high school I’d travel to New York City to see if I could score some assignments with magazines and publications located there, and I’d visit him at his home on Long Island, where he gave me some of his original work and good, professional advice. Back in Evanston, Illinois, my home town, I began publishing my stories and illustrations when I was 17. And for the next seven years that’s what I did when I went away to college, publishing two collections of political cartoons, Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation-Time (1972) and over 1,000 drawings and illustrations. I also created, hosted and co-produced in 1970 the PBS how-to-draw series, “Charlie’s Pad.” Last week I was at University of Houston-Victoria, and one of my hosts told me he saw the show in Texas in the early 80s when he was a kid. Each of the fifty-two, fifteen-minute lessons was based on the course I took with Lariar between 1963-65, and we stayed in touch until I moved to Seattle to teach at UW in 1976.

Could you talk about how John Gardner’s mentorship helped you grow as a writer?

When I met Gardner—when I was in my second, final year of a master’s-degree program in philosophy and working as a journalist on a small newspaper in Southern Illinois (journalism was my bachelor’s degree)—I had already written six novels in a period of two years (the second in that series was an early attempt at doing what later became Middle Passage). Prose rhythm and voice were two things Gardner was skillful at doing, so I began my focus on those elements of craft during the nine months I wrote Faith and the Good Thing with him looking over my shoulder. We hit off it, I think, because Gardner had an interest in philosophy, and I admired the example he offered as an imaginative fiction writer who was also a scholar of medieval literature, a literary critic, a poet, a musician and composer of librettos, a playwright, and not a bad painter (I have one of his still life oil paintings and two sketches of characters from his novel Jason and Medeia in my home.) In his fiction work I saw formal virtuosity, a respect for the moral and spiritual life (at least for Christianity in his case, which I appreciated since I was raised in an African Methodist Episcopal church), and he was as prolific and dedicated to creating as my earlier teacher Lariar. One of the six novels I’d written before meeting Gardner was accepted for publication when I was working on Faith, a book that was very much in the style of James Baldwin, which is why I believe the publisher liked it. I asked Gardner if I should publish it because with Faith I was finally getting a handle on the original approach to philosophical fiction that I’d been trying to achieve. His advice was, “If you think later you’ll have to climb over it, then I’d say, no.” So I requested it back from the publisher, and I’ve always been glad I did. That novel simply wasn’t my philosophical vision so, though it was difficult to turn away from a book contract (every young writer wants to get published), I did, and gambled that Faith would be published when I finished it, which it was when I was twenty-six.

Gardner’s influence helped me understand all of what is at stake when we write. He told me a novel should be as perfect as one can make it before you submit it for publication; he counseled often that, “Any sentence that can come out should come out.” Knowing him ratcheted up my concern with craft—experiments with form as a meditation in itself—and literary aesthetics.

As a philosopher and a Buddhist, you must have had spiritual mentors who influenced you. Can you talk about their impact on your literary and spiritual life?

I can’t say that I’ve had a particular spiritual mentor. But I am fond of the work of scores of Buddhist writers as well as those who follow a spiritual path in other religious traditions. And I took formal vows, the Ten Precepts (as a lay-person or upasaka) with my friend, Claude AnShin Thomas, a mendicant monk and author of At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey From War to Peace.

As you know, the poet and memoirist E. Ethelbert Miller is going to be one of the writers who will appear onstage at this tribute event in Denver in April 2010. Would you reflect on your friendship with him?

Poet Miller tells me we first met at a PEN/Faulkner ceremony when my first story collection, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, was a nominee in 1986. I like to call him BrerBert and Mr. Wizard because of all the remarkable things he accomplishes as an arts activist. In this country in general, and in Washington D.C. in particular, he is “Mr. 411,” the person who you call for an answer to any question about contemporary black writers or black culture. He has a heart as big as all outdoors. He is a relentless advocate for emerging and often forgotten writers or those who have not received the recognition and support they deserve. As a matter of fact, he has lobbied to get jobs for writers. There is simply no one like him.

Would you speak about your friendship with the late playwright August Wilson?

I recently published a story (or maybe it’s really an essay) on the fifteen years August and I had eight to ten-hour dinner conversations about Everything until five in the morning here in Seattle at the Broadway Bar and Grill (in other words, until they had to close and kicked us out.). It’s called “Night Hawks,” and appears in the summer, 2009 issue of Kenyon Review. A slightly shorter version (by 1000 words) was published in the spring 2009 Lincoln Center Theater Review when director Bartlett Sher directed August’s play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone—the same performance that President Obama took First Lady Michelle to see. It took me several years after his death to reach a point, emotionally, where I could bring myself to share in a literary work the wealth of impressions and personal details I’d accumulated in my head about America’s most celebrated black playwright. Writing this piece was very hard, because he was my friend and rather like a brother because we were born just three years apart, and grew up in the same cultural and racial worlds of the 50s and 60s. (The latest edition of my novel, Oxherding Tale, has a cover that August came up with, and he gets in the book credit for cover design and art.) I recommend that readers of this interview take a look at “Night Hawks” in Kenyon Review for the full story of our friendship.

I love that essay. I remember a moment when you talk about how August Wilson used to dream that after finishing his ten play cycle he would take a decade out of the spotlight. And how he’d emerge from that long span of seclusion like Eugene O’Neill did after his decade out of the public eye. What is it about the power of silence and isolation that can be so nourishing for one’s work?

I think every artist needs a quiet place where he can hear himself think without being constantly interrupted by others, by their needs and concerns. This is very much like needing to have a quiet, secluded place for the practice of meditation. Often during my life I’ve simply had to disengage from the social world in order to finish a project—like the month I spent in January, 1998 writing the twelve stories for Africans in America (later released as my third story collection, Soulcatcher and Other Stories). In our society we’re constantly bombarded by external stimuli—the phone ringing, the 3,000 product messages we’re exposed to daily and, of course, the needs of our spouses, children, family, friends and students. August simply wanted the uninterrupted time to think about and work on a novel he very much wanted to write, to create new plays not related to his ten-play cycle, to spend quality time with his wife and young daughter, and to sit on his porch reading a big stack of books he never had the time to get to since he was producing a play for the cycle every two years or so, seeing it through production, living away from home (Seattle) for months at a time, answering the questions of reporters, and doing public events of one kind or another. One has to “let go” these public exigencies in order to create. August and I talked about this problem—the constant “performance” pressure we lived with—all the time. To be honest, that’s one reason I retired from teaching last year after thirty-five years in the classroom. Just a day or two ago I read an interview by actor Linda Hamilton about her years of working with—and being married to—director James Cameron, and one statement she made stuck with me. She said Cameron once said anyone could be a husband or a father, but there were only five people in the world who could do what he does, and he was committed to pursuing that. Is this selfishness on his part? I don’t think so. In order to serve the art, which will become a gift to others (and the culture) perhaps for generations, an artist often has to just step away from the quotidian demands of public life and the social world.

In “Night Hawks” you talk about how you and August Wilson both had parents who were raised to value good manners, promise-keeping, personal sacrifice, loyalty to their own parents and kin, and a deep-rooted sense of decency. Do you ever find yourself disillusioned by new evidence of a loss of these values?

Yes, I’m very saddened by the erosion of those values in contemporary American society. I think about this every day, and this sea change will be dramatized front-and-center in my next novel.

There’s that moment toward the end of “Night Hawks” when you and August Wilson left the Broadway Grill, where you’d been talking for hours, and went to a nearby IHOP. As you sat at a table, you could feel the tension in the air, and then two guys stomped a third guy’s fingers and kicked his face to pulp. When the three of them fled, you looked around and noticed August was gone. His instincts from growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh kicked in, and he scrambled to an exit at the back of the restaurant. What advice would you give to writers who in their work want to address the violence they witness?

Be honest about it. That scene I described isn’t pretty. I just tried in the best journalistic fashion I could muster to put on the page with the greatest granularity of detail I could achieve what was given in perception to August and me in those brief, violent moments, unadulterated and uncensored. Later in this piece I venture an interpretation of what that violence means, or at least what it meant—as I see it—when you view it through the lens of our lives as black American male artists who grew up in the 50s and 60s.

In what ways did your friendship with August Wilson, a writer of your generation, anchor you as a writer? Have your friendships with writers significantly contributed to your life as a writer?

Except when we’re collaborating on projects with others, which I’ve done a lot of, the activity of writing is lonely, very solitary. That’s never bothered me because I was an only child and from kidhood learned to find ways to amuse myself for hours on end with no one else around. Nevertheless, sharing thoughts, feelings and experiences with another artist on a regular basis is refreshing. That person becomes like a mirror. Their experiences and practice can clarify and bring a subtler understanding to our life and creative practice. This is so because regardless of the discipline we’re talking about—writing fiction or plays, drawing, acting, etc.—there are commonalities at the core of the creative process and the creative imagination. (I would even extend this to the sciences and philosophy.) The other is always a helpful mirror for understanding ourselves better.

When I asked you this question three years ago, you said you wrote at night. Since my wife is pregnant and due in July, this question comes up for me a lot, and so I want to ask you to explain again how you managed to maintain a disciplined writing life while being a husband and father. If you were to write a manifesto on how best to generate new work and also fulfill one’s role as a parent, what would it say? Does generosity matter? Is there something powerful about the idea of serving?—serving one’s work, serving one’s family? Could it be that one’s various roles have an underlying unity?

Congratulations, Zach, to you and your wife! This is happy news. Regarding your question, I have to confess that in sixty-one years of living I’ve never taken a vacation. Not once. When not teaching, or doing speaking engagements, all my free time—summers, holidays, weekends, etc.—has been devoted to the dove-tailing creative projects I’ve had since I was an undergraduate, and to the things I love to study (Sanskrit, the logarithmic progress today of developments in the sciences, Buddhist sutras, and philosophy). Sometimes during the summer, I’d send my wife and kids off for a month of vacation with our relatives in the Midwest or South, and I’d stay in the empty house with the cat or dog, writing novels and screenplays. (They came to understand early on that sometimes Daddy is “here” physically but mentally is living somewhere else for a short period of time until he finishes the project(s) on his desk.) There have been more days than I care to remember when I taught or lectured, here or abroad, without going to bed the night before; nights when I suddenly and involuntarily burst into tears from total fatigue while working at three a.m. on some project with its deadline looming. My being a Buddhist has always helped. Thirty years of practicing meditation helps. When working, with my full concentration focused on an object (especially an imaginative one—a fiction, a drawing—as it takes shape in the world), I utterly forget myself and any personal concerns I might have at the moment. The illusory “self” disappears and there is only the present moment of doing, being completely absorbed, serving the work, which I know will financially serve my family’s needs, and ideally serve in the long run literary culture. It also helps, I guess, that I’ve been a martial-artist since I was nineteen-years-old and love to work out. My doctor told me last fall that I’m healthier than most men my age and I could live to be 100. In our home gym, I regularly get on the treadmill for 100 minutes, bench-press 240 pounds, review my old Choy Li Fut kung-fu sets (the fighting system friends and I taught for ten years at our studio here in Seattle in the 80s and 90s), do sets of twenty-five push-ups, etc. I like to turn on my I-Pod (filled with hours of soft jazz, anything with a saxophone in it) and sweat. Those hours in the gym are (for me) like a mini-vacation from the demands of the social world. So all these things flow together—mind, body, spirit—and reinforce each other in the realms of family, profession, and personal discipline. It also helps to remember something once said (I believe) by William James: “The essence of genius is knowing what to overlook.” I’ve always ignored everything that doesn’t relate directly to my family’s well-being and the particular work, creative and intellectual, that I was given to do in this life-time. If something doesn’t serve that, then it’s not on my radar screen.

You addressed slavery in Middle Passage and Oxherding Tale and its legacy of racism in Dreamer. How do you feel about the persistence of racism in our society, and whether or when or how it will ever end?

I don’t believe what we call “racism” will ever end. Racism is based on our belief in a division between Self and Other, and our tendency to measure ourselves against others (which is a natural thing, like looking at others and wondering, “How well am I doing?”), and to judge them as either better or worse than ourselves. Sad to say, it is also based on fear. This constant measuring of ourselves in a social context is something human beings will always do until they experience—as a Buddhist would say—awakening, which frees us from judging others or ourselves. And, in my humble opinion, it will be a very long time before all the billions of people on this earth awaken.

Would you be willing to share some of the lessons you learned from your parents and talk about how they felt about your career?

I always told my Dad, who died six years ago at age eighty-one, that he was the one who taught me how to work. Especially how to work unselfishly for the sake of one’s family—I remember back in the 60s when there was a time my father worked three jobs a week (construction during the day, as a night watchman in the evening, and helping an elderly white couple fix up their suburban home on the weekends). Seeing him work like that every day taught me that a person with a strong back and a good mind could accomplish anything he (or she) set out to do. My mother, who died in 1981, was the person in my family who gave me an appreciation for books, learning, and the beauty of art. They were always proud of me—their only child—and I never, ever, wanted to do anything with my life that would make them feel ashamed, because of all the sacrifices they made for me.

You mentioned earlier that you withdrew a book from publication, a novel that would have been your debut. Can you talk a bit about what you learned from writing six apprentice novels before Faith?

Those six “apprentice” novels, as I’ve always called them, taught me that a person who wishes to be a writer must write all the time. Every day. Even if only in your writer’s notebook or journal. They also taught me that 90% of good writing is revision. I’d write three drafts of those first six books, finishing one every ten weeks, but I hadn’t learned until I did Faith how to revise—that true revision is re-envisioning every sentence and paragraph, deepening and polishing them for music and meaning until no more revision is possible. And so I learned to generate pages. My ratio of throwaway pages to keep pages is often twenty-to-one. For Faith (written in nine months), I tossed out 1200 pages; for Oxherding Tale (written in five years) I tossed out 2400 pages; for Middle Passage (a six-year project), it was 3000 pages; and for Dreamer, more than 3,000 over the seven years I worked on that book. However, as Gardner mentioned to me in the early 70s, as the years—and decades—roll by, it becomes possible to write fast and with a high level of craft or professionalism because you no longer make the mistakes you made in your youth. Also because by the time I sit down to do a first draft of something, I’ve already composed in my head (or sketched out notes for) the opening sentence and thought a great deal about the movements in a piece. In other words, one of my cultivated, literary habits when I think is to revise a thought—playing with diction or word choice, and sentence structure—before I speak or put pen to paper. It’s just one of those habits you develop from writing for forty years and teaching for thirty-five

You mentioned earlier that your next novel will dramatize the erosion of values in contemporary American society. Can you say more about your inspiration for this novel?

My inspiration is the lack of civility and the disinterest in civilized living that I see every day around me in contemporary America, the lowering of personal and professional standards, the selfishness and violence and anger, and the absence of shared values in a country that has been culturally Balkanized for my entire adult life. I’ve been addressing these matters in my essays and articles for a decade now, especially the essays in Tricycle, Buddhadharma and Shambhala Sun. In the new philosophy book I co-authored with Michael Boylan the first story is my tale, “The Cynic,” narrated by Plato, which was originally published in Boston Review. He describes the moral collapse of Athens after the Peloponnesian War. What happened to the Athenians is, in my view, very much an analog for what we are seeing in America today. We have our ruthless people like Thrasymachus and Jason in Euripides’ Medea, our political leaders like the ones described by Thucydides (“Inferior intellects,” he wrote, “generally succeeded best”). And we certainly have our teachers at the universities (in the humanities) who are the spitting image of the Sophists.

Your book Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction: Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing, which you coauthored with Michael Boylan, is coming out this month from Westview Press. From advance praise for the book, I gather it combines writing exercises with short fictions starring Plato, Kant, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Can you say more about this new book?

What I want to say is that from start to finish this is Michael Boylan’s book. He was inspired to put it together after reading a few of my short stories that have philosophers as protagonists (Plato, Descartes, the Buddha, Martin Luther King Jr.). But Boylan did all the work, all the heavy lifting in terms of pedagogy. He wrote six new stories of his own about traditional philosophers, but with my stories and his on Hannah Arendt and Iris Murdoch, he expanded the list of thinkers beyond what is in the usual philosophy textbook to include women and people of color, in the West and East. He wrote the introduction for each section; the study questions for both the stories and classic, primary texts; and provided the glossary at the front of the book and the “philosophy games” at the end. He explains the difference between direct, deductive presentations (philosophy), and indirect argument (fiction), and shows teachers how to get their students to write in both ways with intellectual rigor. Boylan is an outstanding educator. My contribution is minimal compared to his. But I have to add that this new book, my eighteenth, is an addition to my body of work (as well as to Boylan’s—he’s published over twenty books and ninety articles on philosophy and literature, as well as a novel of his own, The Extinction of Desire, for which I wrote an introduction) that makes me enormously happy. It should be very helpful to everyone interested in the relationship between philosophy and literature. Last week the publisher, Westview Press (they are Boylan’s regular publisher), sent me a lovely card that said, “We are tremendously proud of this book, as I hope you are, too.” Well, I am. And I’m in Michael Boylan’s debt forever.

Thank you for your time and energy. May your work continue to unfold in ways that surprise and delight you. We look forward to reading more.

Thank you, Zach.

For Further Reading:

For more on Charles Johnson, including a bibliography, links to selected work, and a list of his top twenty books, please visit the author’s website.

You can also read an essay by Johnson in the Summer 2008 issue of the American Scholar, entitled “The End of the Black American Narrative.”

Or read a 2009 article on “what you should expect from a worthwhile fiction workshop” that Johnson wrote for Writer’s Digest, entitled “A Boot Camp for Creative Writing (Uncut).”

Helen Oyeyemi / photo by Kate Eshelby

To say Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, White is for Witching (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday), reinvents the Haunted House story would be a vast understatement. Oyeyemi manages to dismantle and rebuild the haunted house narrative brick by brick, creating a book filled to the rafters with innovation. The novel attempts to unravel the mysterious disappearance of Miranda Silver, a young woman in Dover, England who is afflicted with a rare eating disorder that compels her to eat only inedible substances, and with living in a house that has a mind of its own. But for all its terrors – there are scenes that will make your skin crawl with fearful delight – Witching is also a book about the weight of ancestry, the nature of xenophobia and the impossibility of saving the ones we love.

At 25, Oyeyemi has established herself as a writer in control of both the supernatural realm and stories of young British women dealing with the often upside-down real world. Her first novel, The Icarus Girl (Doubleday), was published to great acclaim during her first year at Cambridge University. The Icarus Girl tells the story of Jessamy, a bi-racial Nigerian and British girl who meets a magical friend named Tilly Tilly on a visit to her grandfather’s compound in Nigeria. Jessamy invites her new friend home to London, where things go terribly wrong. Her next book was The Opposite House (Anchor Books), about a young Cuban woman, Maja, living in London and trying to negotiate her past and her future, and the intersection of her story with that of Yemaya – a Santeria emissary living in a parallel spirtual world.

I met Oyeyemi when we were both in residence at Hedgebrook Writing Retreat on Whidbey Island in Washington, where she won me over with a short story about a girl in a wedding dress and a probably-dead boy. We conversed across many time zones (she in Cambridge, myself in San Francisco) on the magically real wonder of Skype.

Interview

NEELANJANA BANERJEE:When I first met you, I was prepared to dislike you (and your writing) for being a child prodigy. Do you ever feel like you have to defend yourself as a young writer in the publishing world? Does it affect the way you have to present yourself?

HELEN OYEYEMI:No. I think it affects the way I’m reviewed. I’ll read reviews and I’ll know they’re coming at it from a sort of: “Oh, well done, you can write,” kind of thing. Or there are people that just evaluate [me] on the whole youth thing, and hopefully that’s going to go away because I’m actually quite old now.

The story of your first book is somewhat legendary: You were 18 years old, secretly writing the novel that would become The Icarus Girl and when you had some 20 pages, you sent them to an agent you found in the phone book. Is all that true?

It was really to get advice and was just curiosity to see whether, I don’t know, if [the writing] was going to turn into something eventually, because I only did just have those first 20 pages … so it just wasn’t a serious inquiry. I thought: “Well, if he tells me I can write, then I can sit on it and do something later,” but he was quite urgent about it in an exciting way and I guess that’s why all this happened.

Had you written a novel before that?

I had lots of short stories about [the character] Tily Tily. They were really quite short and quite bad. Tily Tily would just show up and ruin someone’s life and then leave pretty quickly. The beginning of The Icarus Girl was the best shot I’d had at the whole Tily Tily thing.

I think your work is fascinating. As a person of color and an immigrant, your books really speak to me because of the fresh ways you tackle issues of being bi-cultural. Where do you think the origin of your style came from?

I’m not quite sure. It’s not really what I want to write about. I’d rather write a heart-warming tear-jerker or romance or something just nice, but it doesn’t work. These two things just keep coming out, the immigrant thing and the supernatural thing. But I don’t process consciously. I do like reading [supernatural narratives]. I like imagining that sort of stuff. I find ordinary realist narratives just lacking in something, like realist narratives just aren’t real for me. They don’t make that much sense. Whereas reading stories in which the world suddenly changes, I’m like: “Yeah … that makes sense.” Strange mental states, all that stuff, just seems to be a more – not an honest way – but a more interesting way of describing the world.

I recently saw the writer Dan Chaon (Await Your Reply) at a reading and he told a story about a creative writing class in college where he turned in a “genre” story and was told: “This kind of writing is not accepted here.” Have you ever felt that people take your writing less seriously because it is not a “realist narrative”?

I don’t really think of it as speculative or genre writing, and I think I’ve been quite lucky that people haven’t labeled it that way either, but maybe it is just because it is because of being black and being an immigrant to be honest, so that they’ll just go: ‘Oh, it’s just magical realism,” and just try and maneuver around the fact that a lot of crazy stuff happens. They’ll be like: “She’s talking about something else, a whole nother experience.” When really I’m saying, there actually is this racist house. It can be more easily read as a metaphor when you’re talking from the standpoint of an “other,” so it’s probably easy to get away with it if you have another identity issue going on.

Reviews of White is for Witching especially [in England] have been kind of wishing that it would not be about the supernatural and that I would just get down to the nitty gritty of immigrant life. While reviews in America and Canada have been like “Yeah, the supernatural bit is great, but maybe there is too much of a political agenda.” I can’t win. (Laughs.)

Speaking of magical realism, would you ever use that term to describe your work?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

No, I wouldn’t. I think there are so few books that it actually even applies to. I’m starting to think it’s actually only [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez that it applies to. Even Isabelle Allende doesn’t really write that, whatever that is. I don’t write [magical realism]. I just call what I do … stories.

In all of your books, there are some really scary parts and horrific moments. I was surprised because I feel like I haven’t experienced that frightened feeling while reading since I used to read Stephen King when I was in middle school. It made me realize I miss the sensation. Is there a special process to writing frightening narratives?

Edgar Allan Poe

It’s hard to say … but when writing it, I am conscious of wanting to be affecting in that way. So there are points of the story when I’m like “Ha! Ha! Ha!” (sinister laugh), when I was writing and feeling really good about it, because I was freaking myself out, so I hope I’d be freaking other people out as well. Just like you with Stephen King, I remember reading him and being like: “Oh my god. I can’t believe what is being done to me.” And that was fascinating that there was like a whole technology to it. He handled the story that well that he could suddenly cut you, and then withdraw and keep going. I’d come to Stephen King after reading some heavy existential texts and it was just a whole other way of seeing what a book could do. And Poe as well, another great master.

Another of my favorite parts of your writing is your ability to explore reality on all these different levels. The characters are dealing with certain supernatural occurrences, but then also dealing with being young people in 21st Century Britain. For example, Maja’s younger brother Tomas in The Opposite House, is dealing with racism in a very real and sometimes hilarious way. At one point, when describing a fight at school to Maja, he says of his classmates: “[B]ut they were all on my side, because we’d watched Roots in history last week.” In White is for Witching, Miranda is dealing with some powerful supernatural events, but still ends up at the local pub where the girls are described as “all strawberry lip-gloss, halter-neck tops and bare legs.”

It was something I hesitated about at the editing stage [of White is for Witching], but it made the characters that much more real to me. If you’re going to have things swing into strange territory you’ve got to have some sort of foundation that’s at least familiar and “real” – otherwise, everything’s at a certain pitch, which is like “Ahhhhh!”

In White is for Witching, and all your books for that matter, there is a really interesting range of characters when it comes to ethnicity. The main characters in Witching are white British, but there are Kosovans, Azerbaijanis and Africans. Why did you chose to write the novel from the point of view of Miranda and her family?

Initially, I wanted to write the book about this black family moving into this racist house but it just seemed far too obvious. I could just see how it was going to go and you don’t want to write when you already know all about it. I thought it would much more interesting to have a girl living in this house that’s essentially poisoning her and for her to not understand fully what is happening. It seemed a lot more insidious. [This story] says a lot more about the race situation and the whole immigrant situation than just having a black family move in and be instantly repelled – because that’s just not how it is. It’s much more all these little hints and unsaid things, that’s how racism works these days. It just ran alongside my whole idea I’ve been developing about vampires and how vampire stories are really about race. Well, I thought, I’ve got to have somebody who’s part of the dominant group – I could tell it from that perspective. It was a fun, interesting experiment as well, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do it. Because there were all those times growing up when I was like: “Ahhh, white girls … I don’t know! I don’t understand them. We’re so different.” Then it turned out that Miranda is the character I’ve most related to, because she’s having a crack up, and I’ve had one of those. It was easier to come from that perspective.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Hedda Gabbler. I just read A Doll’s House.

Do you read when you write?

I do tend to read after I’ve got the quota done for the day, otherwise life just seems really bleak.

Sometimes I think that being a writer means you never really get to go on vacation. When you finish a book, do you not write for a long time, or do you start on the next one immediately?

After I finished White is for Witching sometime last year, I did take two months during which I was just reading lots and thinking lots, but it was in preparation for the next book. I do think you have to just keep doing it or suddenly it just becomes really hard to get started again.

White Cliffs of Dover, by Diamond Geezer

Further Resources:

– Visit the book’s official website, and, watch the very cool book trailer for White is for Witching:

– Check out Juniper’s Whitening and Victimese, two short plays by Helen Oyeyemi.

– Listen to Helen Oyeyemi’s 2007 conversation with NPR’s Michel Martin about The Opposite House.

– Order a copy of White is for Witching from an independent bookstore.