Half a decade later, I spoke with Butler again on the breezeway of his Northwest Florida home surrounded by his three napping bichon frises. His nineteenth book, the novel A Small Hotel (Grove Press), had just been published in August. Whether he’s talking about leading workshop, writing from the dream space, or what to do with “bone headed” reviews, he has a way of stating ideas that is simultaneously practical and radical, and even with the tape recorder running, the graduate student in me found herself reaching for a pen.

Butler is currently a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. He lives in Capps, Florida, which has a population of one.

Emily Alford: In your book on writing, From Where You Dream, you explain that all literary fiction must come from characters driven by yearning. Please explain your definition of ‘yearning.’

Robert Olen Butler: Yearning seems to be at the heart of what fiction as an art form is all about. It’s based on the fact that fiction is a temporal art form—it exists in time—and it’s also an art form about human beings and their feelings. Any Buddhist will tell you that as a human being on this planet, you can’t exist for even thirty seconds without desiring something. My favorite word is yearning because it suggests the deepest level of desire. My approach [to teaching writing] tries to get at essential qualities of process for the aspiring artist beyond what is inherent in the study of craft and technique. This notion of yearning has its reflection in one of the most fundamental craft points in fiction: plot. Because plot is simply yearning challenged and thwarted.

How would you advise a writer struggling to figure out what a character wants?

I’m just fussing at your semantics, but “figure out” implies a thoughtful process in a kind of self aware and conscious state. You don’t analyze the character or look at the character and try to come up with a sound bite of a description of what the character wants. That’s not the way to do it. It’s more like intuition.

You sit with the character, you hear the character’s voice, you get a feel for the character because she’s emerging from your deep unconscious, not as you, but as a stranger in a dream, which we all have. And, you’ll be tempted—because of the way you’ve been trained in craft and technique and, indeed, the way you’ve been trained in literature, especially at university levels—you’ll be tempted to try to translate her into ideas and themes and structures and descriptions of her psyche and her desires. But with yearning, as with all elements of character, I advise just being with her in the way that you’re with another human being. [Think of] the process of falling in love with somebody, or meeting somebody where there’s a chemistry that allows for falling in love. It’s a sort of proximity, or awareness.

At what point does learned technique comes into the process?

The novelist Graham Green said that what you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. Now, my sense is that this runs even deeper than his initial context. This is absolutely also applicable to all the craft and technique you learn. The only craft and technique that you have legitimate access to as an artist is the craft and technique you’ve basically forgotten. That which has gone out of your conscious, analytical mind goes into the same compost heap—the dream space and the unconscious that I always talk about. It dissolves and continues to function in shaping the material of your unconscious self.

That way you establish a sense of the deep there-ness of a character and her reality. A writer ends up creating a character of whom, at the end of a story or a book, the reader may say, “I’ve known this character all along, in a kind of evolutionary way. There are things here I’ve noticed all along, but now they all coalesce for me.” The way all that happens is that the character is created absolutely in the senses, in the moment. Our “knowledge” of a character really is knowledge of gesture and tone of voice and the selectivity of sensual impressions around her that is done by her emotional state. If the artist carefully chooses these, and by carefully I don’t mean thoughtfully, the object she’s creating is organic.

Would you advise writers coming from a workshop culture, where technique feels paramount, to write until they forget what they’ve learned?

Exactly. Or forget that and start writing. It’s not as if those things are erroneous. As an observation about the way many stories effectively work they’re absolutely true. What’s erroneous is the assumption that the thoughtful analysis and willful insertion of that in the work is the creative process, and that’s where the great misunderstanding happens, because, in fact, it’s the antithesis of the process.

Your workshops focus very much on yearning and writing from the unconscious. Most workshops focus on making whatever manuscripts students turn in as close to “finished” as possible. Oftentimes, you tell students to put manuscripts away. What happens when the advice always seems to be to just keep revising until some journal takes it?

Learning to revise from your head leads you to anticipate. It begins to shift your motivation for writing. Real artists write not to be published, not to be famous, not win prizes, not to get sex. You write because you have some deep intuition that behind the apparent chaos of life on planet Earth there is order and meaning, and the only way that you know to express that vision of order is to go back to the way we live that chaotic life, in the moment through the senses, and pull bits and pieces out of it and reassemble them into these narrative parts. If you start perverting that with other motives to write, your ability to become an artist is severely hampered, if not destroyed.

You may become a very polished, published writer, and you may even have a literary career because a lot of book critics don’t have a clue as to how to read an aesthetic object either. But the kind of thing that endures, the kind of thing that those writers began setting out to create, the kind of literature that will be read two hundred years from now and still illuminate the human condition has been lost because of settling for this other thing.

The terrible taint on the artist’s ambition is to be thinking about publication, much less writing for it, much less writing and revising for that. The sad thing is that there are people capable of creating real works of art—I’m afraid that there are future artists who are getting diverted into just being future writers and published writers, and they’re going to end up settling because creating real works of art is a scary thing. Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. You have to stare down your demons every day of your life. Asserting technique to get published in some literary journal is really safe, and artists are not safe. If you’re starting to feel safe, you’re not pushing deep enough.

I’m glad you mentioned safety because I think your new novel A Small Hotel is fearless. Most writers shy away from sex scenes, especially sex scenes between people who love one another because we think, “Cliché!” and “Sentimentality!” A Small Hotel is a novel based around the inability to say the words “I love you,” and it challenges what intimacy is, where intimacy comes from. These are the things people avoid writing about so as not to come off as sentimental. Did it ever occur to you to try to avoid sentimentality?

I don’t think I’ve ever written an un-risky book, so no, it didn’t occur to me. This is the book that has come out of my unconscious. It took the death of my parents. My dad was eighty-eight when he died a few years ago, and then my mom died two and a half years later at ninety-two. When [my father] died, they had recently passed their seventy-first wedding anniversary. The two of them were shaped by familial forces that were very similar to the way Michael and Kelly were shaped. The foreignness of saying ‘I love you’ was the only model either of them had seen in their childhoods. The communicating of it was just the surface manifestation of the feeling, but it shaped their ability to either feel love or express it. That sort of thing gets passed on and on.

Michael really loves Kelly, but he cannot say it. He does not speak that language. Kelly deeply needs it, but she cannot ask for it. She says in the book, ‘If you have to ask it doesn’t count’. And that’s the terrible ironic, tragic reality of so many relationships in this life, and that’s the way my mom and dad lived. But they decided to speak the word and to speak it, frequently. Never a day in my life went by where that word was not used freely and openly. When my father died, I thought my mother would die immediately after, just because of the intense symbiosis. They found each other, my mom and dad, when he was fourteen and she was sixteen. They got married when he was seventeen and she was nineteen. And in the seventy-one years that followed, they just willed that word and that expression into their lives every day. It was a heroic act on their part because, in retrospect, I don’t think either of them either felt it or knew how to feel it. There’s not a day that went by where they didn’t argue furiously as well, but they had to end up saying, ‘I love you.’ It became kind of a compulsion. And there are problems with that too.

Seeing the arguments had an effect on me too, but my ability to feel it and speak it, that feeling of love was preserved in a way that it wasn’t in them. The heroic thing about them is that they knew to create the illusion of love. So, that’s where this novel came from. You know, fuck sentimentality. There have been some fabulous reviews of this book and there have been some absolute boneheaded reviews of this book, and it’s a kind of litmus test for the reviewers in some ways, and that’s fine. I don’t worry about being called sentimental and I just write the books I’m given to write.

I’ve read the good reviews and the boneheaded reviews. I wonder if the reason writers won’t write about love is that some reviewers simply can’t stomach a book about love.

To love and to express it is to be vulnerable. To create works of art is to be vulnerable, and it’s hard for people to let themselves be vulnerable. Especially in this world, where the internet lets us democratically savage one another, it’s even scarier, but the courage to be an artist means also the courage to love and to express it.

Further Links and Resources

Adios, Happy Homeland! is Menendez’s fourth book of fiction. Her first collection of stories, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, was a 2001 New York Times Notable book of the year and the title story won a Pushcart Prize. In addition to her other books—Loving Che (2004) and The Last War (2009)—she’s worked as a journalist and prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald. Now Menendez is establishing a creative writing program at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. She and I met in cyberworld and chatted about balancing the memories of the past with the demands of the present.

Let’s begin with process, Ana. I read your first collection, In Cuba, I Was a German Shepherd, when I first started writing fiction and I remember being shocked that you could link stories that way.  At what point in the process does the tie that binds them together emerge?  Do you begin with character or idea or story?

With In Cuba I began with one character: Maximo. And almost every story grew out of his relationships. It was a fictional treatment of what I had seen in my own community. My mother was forever running into someone who knew someone who knew someone with whom she went to school in Cuba. It seemed to me as a child that all Cubans knew each other.

Was it a similar process with your latest collection, Adios, Happy Homeland! ?

With Adios it was different. These stories grew out of the prologue, which itself grew out of someone else’s fiction: Borges’ “An Examination of the Works of Herbert Quain.”  With In Cuba I wrote the stories as a spider spins its web. With Adios, the writing was much more linear: one story led to another, led to another in a pretty direct way.

There is a shared thematic link of flight in Adios, Happy Homeland, but I also saw truth as a permeating idea.  The Prologue ends with the declaration “…just because it never happened doesn’t mean it isn’t true” and in “Cojimar” we’re told, “truth is the strangest thing you’ll ever know.”  In “Flying” the word true/truth/truly appears on almost every page.  So, is wrestling with truth the writer’s ultimate goal?

For me, yes, this wrestling with truth is paramount. It’s the obsession—or I should say puzzle—that has driven all my books in one way or another. In Adios this working out of the truth becomes even more important. The prologue, after all, is written by a creolized version of a fictional author who is presented as a real writer, in a short story that reads like a non-fiction obituary/retrospective written by an Argentine author who sounds like an Anglo-Saxon scholar!

And why might fiction be a fruitful place for this?

Fiction—any art really—is the best way to explore the dynamic between what is real and what lives only in imagination. And the mystery of fiction– the open-ended, indirect poetry of it — is the best approximation of what it feels like to be alive.

The characters of In Cuba, I Was a German Shepherd straddle worlds and geographies.  When I interviewed Jennine Capó Crucet, who is also the daughter of Cuban exiles, we talked about the simultaneous push and pull of being from a place people are often trying to escape. It seems no matter how far you get from home, either for writers or for these characters, there exists this distant voice calling to you. In the title story, Juanito declares, “Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba, I was a German Shepherd.”  What can we learn about identity and place in the present if we’re still living in exile?

Interesting that Jennine wrote her Hialeah book while living elsewhere. That certainly has been true for me as well. I’ve never written about Miami while I was living there. The one book I wrote while in Miami is set in Istanbul – a city I still miss as well. All my characters, in one way or another, are divided and trapped by their loyalties. In Adios, one character says, “we’re always leaving.”

Do you feel that way, too?

For me, leaving is the way we learn about identity and place. Travel far and long enough and you realize there is no such thing as a fixed “identity” – though this is often so difficult a realization that we cling to the outlines of who we thought we were.

You play with language in Adios, Happy Homeland! We get Google translations, dream parables, mythical prologues, and made up glossaries.  You conclude with a fictional bibliography. Even some of the traditional stories have magical qualities.  Was it liberating to write in less traditional forms?

Yes, it was really a joy to write this book. The most joy I had since I was a twenty-seven-year-old living in New York City and working on my first collection. I started Adios after abandoning two novels that were boring me to tears to write. I realized that I hadn’t read a novel I enjoyed in years—yet I was reading every short story that came my way.  Who was I kidding! So I sat down to write fragments, more for my own amusement than with any idea toward a finished work.

Did it stir the creative process even more?

Absolutely! For the first time in years, I found myself sitting at the keyboard for hours, forgetting to eat, returning late at night. That’s when you know you are working honestly: when it stops seeming like a job and takes on the form of the old obsessions. As I started linking up the stories, the ideas started coming so fast that I had to open a new file just to keep track of them.

I’m wondering about structure.  How did you decide to order the risks you took on the page?

I had a lot of help on the ordering. Initially, I just put them down in the order I wrote them. But a few friends who read it thought there were too many non-traditional forms near the end of the collection. With the help of my fantastic editor, Elisabeth Schmitz, I was able to re-order them in a way that seemed more cohesive. She did the same thing with my first collection, by the way, and now I can’t even remember the original order I gave them—hers was so perfect.

Do you consider this collection a tribute?  To whom or what are you paying homage?

Yes, very much a tribute to Cuban writers of both prose and poetry (though in the case of Cuba, I think it’s all poetry, even when labeled prose). Those writers were on my mind with every piece, most strongly in “You Are the Heirs of All My Terrors,” which I wrote as a tribute to the late, brave Reinaldo Arenas.

In your blog post “1989,” published with The Huffington Post, you wrote: “I grew up into a culture where nothing was what it seemed, where liberation meant tyranny, where hope begat doom and optimism was for the mentally deficient.” Are you acknowledging this divide between reality and truth when you deconstruct and reconstruct myths in Adios?

Reality, truth, imagination, desires, delusions—I think these themes have always played a role in my writing. Not so much the hard lines that separate them as the way they bleed into one another, the way our delusions become reality, the way we construct truths out of our desires. The self, our personal histories, are themselves a powerful work of the imagination. Throughout our lives we are sifting, re-ordering, constructing and deconstructing our ideas of who we are.

You balance journalist and fiction writer. Many writers have day jobs – we’re writers, but also teachers, editors, parents. Do you struggle to separate the writing worlds or do they relate?

“Balance” is quite a hopeful term! In truth, it’s a real struggle. I’m fortunate that I left journalism in 2008. I doubt I could have written a collection like this while still working as a journalist. Truth, or rather, accuracy, is such an overriding concern in journalism that it can’t help but influence the fiction one writes. Of course, it seems to have only fostered Garcia Marquez’s imagination. But most former journalists end up writing in a more minimalist vein. It took me many years and an extended hiatus to muster the courage to write in a different way.

At the moment, I’m working at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, setting up a new creative writing program there. The job is incredibly gratifying and I find that thinking about writing and reading feeds my own work. The biggest challenge I have right now is finding time to write fiction while caring for a nine-month-old baby!

That I completely understand! Such a juggle, isn’t it? Babies and books. And speaking of feeding your work, what writers have influenced you most?

James Joyce would be the first. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve read Dubliners. “The Dead” is one of the most perfect short stories ever written. It has an ineffable quality that transcends the form. It’s impossible to summarize it in the way, for example, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is possible to summarize. To understand “The Dead” you must read every line to the devastating end. I love Kafka and Borges for the way they take on dreams and shatter “reality.”

Alice Munro is a master. I just love everything she’s written. Though she writes in a more realist vein, her stories are beautiful and moving and I never finish one without feeling I’ve just spent some time with a genius. And I’m a huge fan of Haruki Murakami. I remember the first time I read one of his stories in The New Yorker and I thought, you can do that? You can thumb your nose at the tidy ending? It was exhilarating.

Are there other short story collections that you recommend that link by theme or character well?

Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics would have to be at the top of the list—it’s a strange and beautiful ride taken in the company of a “cosmic know-it-all” as one critic described. Same with his Invisible Cities—you don’t know whether to call it a short story collection or a novel in parts or even poetry. But it’s all sublime.

Which writers do you return to again and again?

Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock is gorgeous—I learned so much reading and re-reading that collection. I would also include W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants in this list, though maybe it’s more accurate to call that a novella collection or even a “novel” as I think the publisher described it. All of these fit my definition of a good collection: The whole adds up to much more than the sum of its parts.  When you’re done reading them, you are haunted, sometimes for years.

Further Links and Resources

So naturally I was on the lookout for things I could learn from such a different sensibility, and something quickly and firmly leapt out at me. Livesey urged one student to more freely release basic information about setting and character identity, which the writer had artificially withheld in the interest of creating a small bit of suspense. It takes very little authorial energy to orient the reader in the sensory world of a fiction, she argued—to “take care of the reader,” as she put it—and failing to do so can leave the reader awash in distracting and unnecessary questions.

Since I picked up that phrase from Livesey, I don’t think I’ve run a workshop in which I haven’t used it, and over the years it has taken on a broader meaning for me. Taking care of the reader isn’t merely a matter of dispensing appropriate facts as necessary. It’s a commitment on a writer’s part to maintain the reader/writer relationship, and to honor the fact that readers co-create the work with their own voices and imaginations. Our works reach fruition through a symbiotic relationship with readers that we must attend to and maintain. If we offer them only a murky, imprecise experience, have we really held up our end of the bargain as writers?

In The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey certainly upholds hers. The novel, as its promotional campaign stresses, is a modern (set predominantly in the early 1960s) take on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Though the resemblances are close, including a five-part structure, they are not ponderous or strained. One could labor over the similarities between the characters, such as Brontë’s troubled gentleman Mr. Rochester and Livesey’s troubled gentleman Hugh Sinclair, or Brontë’s ill-fated schoolgirl Helen and Livesey’s ill-fated schoolgirl Miriam. But such comparisons are unnecessary when taking in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, and looking for them instead of letting Livesey’s tale live on its own merely distracts from it.

The book’s eponymous heroine Gemma, orphaned spawn of a Scottish mother and an Icelandic father, is in trouble from the start. Thrust into her aunt’s protection when her beloved uncle dies, she is treated as a servant girl and worse. The first movement of the novel, which covers Gemma’s escape from her adoptive family, filled me with unease over her physical and emotional safety in ways I did not expect. She is also a spooky, elvish girl, tending toward a receptivity to the supernatural that Livesey calls “second sight.” The first impression one gets of Gemma is of someone who will be frequently on the run, a delicate but scrappy survivor with no real place in the world who will land on her feet and create one.

Livesey might easily have pluralized the word Flight in her title, since her heroine is so continually escaping. She flees her family for a new kind of oppressiveness as a “charity student” (a euphemism for child laborer) at a girls’ boarding school, and must escape that when the school closes. She finds work as a governess on Scotland’s remote Orkney Islands, caring for the niece of banker/landowner Hugh Sinclair, whose clutches she also escapes. Her string of flights eventually brings her to Iceland, where she connects to the birth family she barely knew and had long since forgotten.

Throughout the book, Livesey gives us terrific atmospheres in which Gemma’s drama can unfold: the aunt’s house is positively Gothic, the boarding school Dickensian with lost hopes, the Orkney Islands packed with stark beauty. Publicity buzz on The Flight of Gemma Hardy calls it a “breakthrough book” for Livesey, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be. It’s ambitious—not many writers among us would risk treading on Charlotte Brontë’s toes—and although it leans on Jane Eyre, it insists on having a life of its own that does not depend on its famous predecessor. Livesey has been an outstanding writer for quite a while now, and Gemma is the work of a talented, assiduous novelist truly hitting her stride.

Interview

Steven Wingate: I’ve heard you speak eloquently about a subject most writers shy away from: the mid-career challenge of not “recycling” tropes and themes from your earlier work. The Flight of Gemma Hardy is your seventh novel, and it deals with landscapes (rural Scotland) and human situations (a young girl isolated) that appeared in your earlier books. How did you keep your imagination fresh for this novel, and what about the characters and material made you confident you could pull it off?

Margot Livesey: I had of course written about a young girl in rural Scotland in Eva Moves The Furniture but writing about Gemma felt like a different project in a number of very significant ways.  Eva is born in 1920 and grows up into the Second World War. Gemma is born after that war and what her future holds is that great tidal wave of feminism and women’s liberation that swept over Britain and the US in the late sixties and seventies. I purposefully set the novel before that tide took hold, at least in my part of Scotland.

Perhaps more crucially Gemma faces very immediate and personal adversity. After her uncle dies she is forced to fight her own battles, and she does so with determination. In writing her story I was trying to create not just a character but a heroine.

Advance reading copies of Gemma contain a “Dear Reader” note in which you speak of “writing back to Charlotte Brontë.” Did she continue that correspondence? By this I mean, did your relationship to her (and to Jane Eyre) as touchstones change over the course of the novel?

From the day I started writing Gemma I have not dared to look back at Jane Eyre but my relationship to the novel has undoubtedly changed. I am even more admiring than I used to be of Brontë’s wonderful use of setting to contain the five acts of her novel. And I love even more, in memory, the poetry of the passages between Rochester and Jane. I am also a little indignant on Jane’s behalf at Rochester’s sometimes cruel teasing and testing of her.  Perhaps Brontë felt that was necessary because of how unlikely it was that an aristocrat would marry a governess.

In this note you also talk about stealing from your own life. What thefts were you aware of when you began the novel, and what thefts did you discover along the way as you worked through the drafts? Do you feel a difference in the way you render conscious and unconscious borrowings?

I knew as I embarked on the novel that I would be making use of my difficult stepmother and the grim boarding school I attended for four years. Only as Gemma began to grow up did I discover that I would be drawing on my deep sense that books and exams were a way to escape my present life. As for the role that my romantic life played in my creation of Gemma’s, I think that’s best left to the reader’s imagination.

The book’s opening is quite propulsive, and gave me a sense of physical fear stronger than any I’d felt from your work before. There’s also more of the natural world in Gemma than I remember elsewhere; a stark Scottish landscape becomes, through the heroine’s observations, almost lush with birds and plants. Did you always conceive of the book as having so much elemental “fight or flight” physicality to it?

What a lovely question! Again I think, I hope, I learned from Brontë and her ability to make each of Jane’s five homes in the novel so vivid and so atmospheric. My father was an ardent bird watcher and it was one of the few activities that we shared. I can still recognise most Scottish birds by flight and song.  So it felt natural to make Gemma aware of birds who often seem so much freer than we. And of course this is linked to my desire to create a heroine, a young woman who goes out into the world and notices that world as she encounters dragons and struggles towards wholeness and happiness.

Another Jane hovers over this novel—a certain Ms. Austen—especially in the middle, when Gemma comes dangerously close to a rushed marriage. I think particularly of Mansfield Park because of the analogy between Gemma and Fanny Price, two poor daughters adrift in a class beyond their own. Austen’s works took place at the rise of the bourgeoisie, and Gemma Hardy deals with another soft revolution: the sixties. Did you feel yourself in conversation with Austen as well as Brontë?

I owe much to Austen’s keen sense of the importance of class, an importance that the Brontës, as a family, were always eager to ignore or minimise. Then too there is Austen’s wonderful ability to write satisfying romances that fundamentally depend on her heroines coming into their own.

Midway through the book Gemma has a line: “I shrank from wearing a dress whose history I didn’t know.” That says a lot about her sense of propriety, which makes her rather a prude. Her insistence on propriety often saves her, yet the deeper she gets into her own life story, the more dishonest she becomes. How did you feel about her as you brought her to the threshold of her choices?

Well propriety and honesty are, in my mind, rather different and indeed sometimes at odds. Gemma is troubled by her own dishonesty even as she tries to be responsible and perform whatever duties are demanded of her. But she is also sophisticated enough to realise that living under an assumed name is not the worst kind of lie. I have to confess that I was always, shamelessly, on Gemma’s side as she faces various trials and torments.

What’s your next project? Are you taking any down time, and if so how are you using it?

I am trying to do something that strikes me as hugely challenging: write a novel set in America.

Further Links and Resources

Jody Lisberger taught fiction at Harvard with Joan Leegant, and they were MFA students together at Vermont College. This interview recently took place over email.

In terms of moving from stories to a novel, do you think writing a collection of stories made the job of writing a novel easier? Did having those prizes under your belt for your first book create pressure for your second?

Readers and writing students sometimes assume that writing stories is “practice” for writing a novel—that you start “small” and then grow—but I think most writers would say that’s not the case at all. Stories as an art form have their own set of demands. And lest anyone suggest that short fiction is a lesser art, we can look to the work of such story masters as Alice Munro, Grace Paley and Edith Pearlman, who won the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story and whose latest collection, Binocular Vision, was just nominated for the National Book Award.

That said, while writing stories first didn’t make writing a novel easier for me, writing fiction for a long time before tackling this particular novel made a difference. I began writing fiction around 1990 and published Wherever You Go in 2010. That’s 20 years. I teach writing, and one of the hardest things I’ve had to do is tell a student he or she needs to master more of the craft before shackling him/herself to a big project. It’s not that writing stories is easier; it’s just that you can labor on a story for a few months and then put it aside and start another. This allows you to let go of what’s not working and move on.

I was very grateful to have received those prizes. I was 53 years old when the collection came out, and a lot of water had flowed under the bridge by then. When I turned to the novel, I didn’t experience the prize-winning as pressure but as affirmation. Permission to keep going. A prolific story writer once told me that with each story she published, she was given permission to write another one. That’s what kept her submitting and submitting. That’s what those prizes felt like for me.

After writing stories, did you expect Wherever You Go to take seven years to complete? Why seven years?

I don’t entirely recall what I was thinking when I began the novel, which was actually the second half of a two-book contract (the first was the story collection)—probably more along the lines of it taking three or four years. It’s hard to sometimes remember why it took so long. It’s a little like childbirth: you don’t remember the pain, otherwise you’d never do it again. Though I can point to some factors. First, I wrote an entirely different story for a few years, about a group of young women in Jerusalem. When I finished, I saw that it was kind of flat, but on the sidelines were a couple of antsy guys who were almost pacing the perimeter of the narrative, begging to be explored. Who were they? Why were they so agitated? They had a lot of potential. So I pulled them forward and began to write their story, and eventually they became two of the main figures in Wherever You Go. I think that was in year three or so.

I also didn’t work on the book for seven solid years straight. I took a long break from the manuscript at one point, due to a medical issue, which was immediately followed by a visiting writer stint in Israel. All told, I didn’t look at the manuscript for almost nine months. It was the best thing I could have done. When I returned from Tel Aviv and looked at the pages, I knew exactly what I had to do. I wrote straight through and sent it to my agent and that was that. I’m not one of those writers who plans or outlines anything beforehand—thinking about a story doesn’t work for me, I have to discover it in the writing—so I’m groping my way for a very long time. I’ve learned to more or less trust the process and not get too anxious when I don’t know where I’m going for years on end.

One craft challenge is that you tell the story through three distinct and alternating third person points of view. How did you decide to use this structure? Were there points where you questioned your decision? What are the pitfalls to his approach that you think fiction writers should consider? What about the pleasures?

When I was still writing the unsuccessful story of the Jerusalem women, I was experimenting with a kind of omniscience—and it wasn’t working. There was too much distance; I couldn’t sink into any of the characters. I was also indulging an ironic, almost comic tone that was keeping me from getting at the truth of these people’s lives. It was, in retrospect, something of a defense on my part. I think I was reluctant to get inside these people for fear of what I’d find. As I said, that story was a little flat, and the flatness was related to the overly distant point of view. When I started over with the sideline characters, I wrote them in third-person and everything began to flow.

In terms of the structure, I knew from the get-go that I’d be exploring more than one person and that I was interested in the circumstances in which their paths would cross. So that dictated the structure. Three voices has a nice symmetry; it also lends itself to the image of a braid, which is how I ultimately saw the back-and-forth nature of the chapters. If you’ve ever made a braided bread—not coincidentally, the traditional Jewish challah is a braided bread—you also know that often you start the braiding in the middle, at the point where the three strands overlap most powerfully. That’s how it felt when constructing this book. I sensed early on, without knowing the specifics of the narrative, that the three lives would cross when a major event happened in the middle of the book. That too dictated the structure, even before I knew what that event was going to be.

Which is not to say the braiding was straightforward or obvious. I was continually rearranging the alternating sections. For a time, I thought I’d give 50 pages of the first character before shifting to the next; then I thought that would be too trying for a reader so I shortened the number of pages the reader would have about Character A before moving to Character B. Then I feared that structure would be jumpy. I laid out sections on my floor and moved them around. At one point, I hung a clothesline across my writing room and hung sections by clothespins to see how they’d flow. I needed to know what the experience would be like for the reader—what the reader would know or not know, how the reader would encounter the characters in the various permutations. In the end, you just have to hope what you chose is workable and satisfying. No book can be perfect, or perfect for every reader.

Of the pleasures of this approach is that I enjoy reading a narrative with multiple voices. I like the interplay, the variety of tones and rhythms, the subtext that exists in the spaces between the voices. So being able to create such a narrative was deeply enjoyable. I loved inhabiting the different consciousnesses and being able to use a range of colors and tones.

One of the biggest lessons I try to teach students is how to recognize the intrusion of an omniscient voice into their third person stories and novels—a voice that keeps them from getting or staying close to their point-of-view characters. Do you have any particular advice for getting closer?

One thing is to get rid of your preconceptions about a character and allow the character to speak for herself and reveal herself in gestures and conduct. Or if you can’t get rid of your preconceptions, then at least be aware of them. Too often this sort of distancing occurs when we’re engineering the story and don’t want the characters to mess up our plans by being themselves. So we keep things on the surface where we, the writer, are in charge, even to the detriment of the narrative.

One way to get your characters to reveal themselves is to put them in a scene and listen to them talk and watch their body language. Students and early stage writers often think the only way to get inside a character is by giving his or her interior thinking, which can be done to excess where we hear every thought or internal curse word, when many times the most vivid revelations come by way of gesture: the drumming of fingers on the table, the picking at the food, the moment a character chooses to look out the window instead of answering a ringing phone. With gestures like these, you need only a brief or fleeting interior thought to accompany it—and it says volumes. Then you’re getting closer.

I’m assuming there were some particularly difficult parts to write in the novel, given the presence of addiction, assault, exploding bombs and a devastating affair. Can you talk about how it felt to write these scenes? For instance, did Aaron stop short in his assault not only because he couldn’t go on but because you couldn’t? How much do you think a fiction writer should push herself to tell the ugly truths of people’s thoughts and actions?

I may have the opposite problem about telling ugly truths. I have a hard time illuminating the positive. One of the attractions of writing fiction for me is being able to illuminate the dark stuff, to write about the troubled and problematic. So I don’t have a problem with going there or writing about it, though I do have to watch that the tone is not overbearing for a reader.

Which points to a challenge I need to be aware of, which is to allow my troubled characters to rise above stereotype and their own darkness. For instance, an earlier version of the scene in which Aaron begins to assault the woman went substantially further. But then I realized that Aaron would never go that far; that he wasn’t such a bad kid, just a troubled kid. In writing about Regina, who is an addict, I discovered in the later drafts that the reader didn’t see enough of her other sides, her promise and brilliance, so I had to go back and add those to give a fuller picture. It was still the truth—that’s always the touchstone, you’ve got to write the truth—but I had left out some of the more positive elements in my desire to explore the darkness.

You didn’t mention how it felt to be exploding bombs and seeing people die in the novel. Care to comment?

Yes, there is a scene with a bombing. And it was—you’re correct—hard to write. I labored over those details. I wanted to get across the drama and gravity without making it gratuitously violent. I also needed it to be factually accurate. There was a point during my research when I wondered if the FBI would show up at my door because I was spending so many hours online reading about how to make bombs. And you are correct in flagging these as emotionally difficult scenes. I was sobered, as I was writing, by the enormity of what was taking place. I could see this invented building and garden and lawn in my head, and I could smell the burning.

You mentioned tone and coloration earlier. I find the tone of voice, assertion, and cadence that goes along with Aaron’s third person point of view to be particularly strong in an edgy, unnerving kind of way. Was this on purpose? Did you deliberately try to create different intensities or tones in the points of view? Was anyone’s point of view easier to write than another’s?

Thanks for that comment about Aaron’s voice. I loved writing that voice. His edginess and boldness were purposeful in that this was very clearly who Aaron was: a kid with a lot of issues and a lot of strong feelings, and not a lot of opportunity to express—or vent—earlier in his life. Feeding his voice was also a great deal of the political sentiment fueling the book. Aaron is angry and impatient with what he sees as excessively conciliatory views mouthed by either politicians or naive Americans who he believes don’t grasp the situation in Israel. I’ve heard these sentiments, heard voices like Aaron’s, so it was natural that he’d sound the way he does.

Yona’s was the hardest voice for me to write, the most reticent in terms of revealing herself to me. I think that’s because her story was the most personal. I had a much easier time with the two male characters—Aaron because he’s mouthing a lot of rhetoric, which I loved playing with, and Greenglass because his spiritual struggles were something I liked writing about. There are portions of his interior thinking that come straight out of some of the most beautiful Talmudic and biblical passages, and I loved writing those.

Though the three main characters have distinct sensibilities and yearnings—spiritual, psychological, ideological—which, in turn, lend themselves to different shadings and tones, there were times in the drafts when I had to modify the voices so they wouldn’t sound so similar. For instance, each character has problems with their fathers, and I had to work on that so the narrative wouldn’t be repetitive. As I said earlier, I like novels with multiple voices, but writers have to be careful that the voices have variety. I read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections twice while working on this novel, mainly for the unplugged voices that carry that book. Those voices gave me permission—again, that word—to unplug my own characters’ voices. I also saw in The Corrections that I knew instantly whose consciousness was behind any given section because the voices were so vivid. Vividness is important. You want your reader to not just know your characters and be interested in their story but to be enlivened by the narration. You want them to be eager to hear those voices ringing off the page.

Curious that you mention characters’ problems with their fathers. The novel is hugely about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but do you also want readers to see this novel as ahistorical and about father-child disappointments? Did you intend the novel to weigh so heavily on fathers? From the start were you deliberately reaching for something more personal than political, or did that sort of just come about on its own?

No question that father-child relationships weigh heavily in this book. I didn’t put the father issue in there—just as I didn’t put the Israeli-Palestinian issue in there—but that’s what the characters were about and that’s where they brought me. When I said earlier that I’m one of those writers who doesn’t plan, I’m also one of those who doesn’t know what the themes or complications are going to be until the story is underway, until it’s being written. Once I began to explore Aaron and Greenglass, it was apparent that he had a troubled relationship with his famous novelist father. And once I had Greenglass walk into his parents’ New York living room and look around, I discovered he had a fraught dynamic with his father, too. So the family issues were right there alongside the political ones, and they grew up organically around the characters.

The family stories are as important to me as the political elements. Not surprisingly, they’re also connected. Our personal histories drive our choices, including political choices that may, on the surface, look like they’re based entirely on ideology but in truth are also based on psychology. That is what ultimately emerged while writing the book.

In trying to listen to your characters, what has been the hardest thing about writing fiction for you, if you can focus on just one thing?

Probably the hardest thing has been wanting to know what their story is before they’re ready to tell me. Or, as Ron Carlson put it so well in his book Ron Carlson Writes A Story, before the characters even know the story. Carlson talks about needing to “survive” the writing of the story, meaning needing, as the writer, to just stay there in the room, at the desk, in the chair, and wait. This is the hardest part.

I don’t mean only ignoring the impulse to get up for more coffee or to vacuum the rug or check your email. I mean the impulse to leap at some glimmer of an inkling about the storyline and then rush to create a whole narrative out of it because you can’t stand spending one more minute in the state of not-knowing. Carlson counsels staying close to the details your sentences offer you—someone walks over to a window: great: What does he see? Maybe that will help the narrative unscroll. It’s painstaking. That’s why I think so many writers want to outline. But I’m like Carlson; he says he can’t think his way through it. He has to wait for it to come out in the writing. That’s the hardest part. To sit in the chair and wait.

Aaron’s father churns out popular but melodramatic potboilers about the Holocaust. How did it feel to take on this theme? The novel is also risky in rendering a less than flattering picture of Jewish extremists in the West Bank. Were you worried how that might be taken by Jewish-American readers? As an American Jew yourself, who albeit lives and teaches in Israel for a portion of each year, were you worried about not getting the sensibilities right and being viewed as a literary interloper?

The use of the Holocaust for art is a loaded but important topic. There’s a lot of excellent literature that takes the Holocaust as its subject, for instance, Maus, by Art Spiegelman. But there is also a lot of not such excellent literature on the subject, and I ask myself where the line is, and what makes work exploitative and what makes it okay. I think we have to be careful about writers suddenly finding the Holocaust “rich” or “art-worthy.” I don’t mean to suggest that the only people allowed to touch the Holocaust must be, like Elie Wiesel, survivors. Rather, my concern is with what happens when the events themselves recede into history and become, instead, “mere” subjects to be used by writers interested in them primarily for what they offer in the way of built-in drama. Or, worse, for what they offer writers like Aaron’s father, which is built-in sympathy.

The novel also touches on another use of the Holocaust that is very touchy. And that’s the use of the Holocaust for bolstering Jewish identity. It’s an issue much discussed in Israel,  which carries deep and abiding scars of the Holocaust since so many of its citizens were and are survivors, and where many are saying we need to look at the shadow side of this self-identity. That shadow side is explored in the book through Aaron and his need to see the Palestinians as the new Nazis, i.e., the archetypal enemies of the Jews, and how that colors his thinking and drives his conduct.

As for my portrayal of Jewish extremists on the West Bank, I did worry how American Jewish readers would respond, though I have to admit I loved writing that material. These are ideologues and radicals; they live for their cause and are certain of the rightness of it and use pretty startling rhetoric. Actually, I’ve been fascinated by radicals ever since I was a student in the sixties. Their commitment, their passion, their ability to rationalize violence: who are these people? What allows them to justify what they do? I wanted to find out, so I wrote about them.

Fortunately, my concerns about American Jewish readers turned out to be largely unfounded. American Jews are sophisticated about Israel. They aren’t looking to read another Exodus.

That said, it was imperative that I get the details right and capture the sensibilities, and not come across as some carpetbagger or interloper writing about Israel from an American perch without sufficient insight into the society. I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel in the last decade, either traveling there or teaching there, and I lived there for three years in the late 1970s, but, still, one worries. One of the most gratifying reviews came from an Israeli magazine that said it was hard to tell I wasn’t a native Israeli since I’d gotten the pulse of the country so right. That was enormously meaningful to me.

How do you think your starting to write fiction later than some people might have played into helping you write this novel? You had a career as a lawyer before taking up fiction at the age of 40. Does that experience make a difference? Did you ever feel discounted as a writer, or taken less seriously?

There are a lot of myths out there about writing, including that if you’re a real writer, it’s all you’ve ever wanted to do. And the converse: that if you pursued something else, you’re not the real thing. Then I think of the poet Wallace Stevens, who was a vice-president at an insurance company and apparently enjoyed it, or William Carlos Williams, a doctor. Or Chekhov, for that matter, another doctor. Or Annie Proulx, who first published in her 50s. Some of that myth-making is propagated by the media and our youth-obsessed society, which then seeps into the literary culture. I once got an excruciatingly apologetic email after my story collection came out, asking me for my age, because I was being considered for a prize as an “emerging writer” but the cut-off was something like 39. I was 53.

More disturbing than my own personal encounter with these myths is what it says about our society. It takes time to develop one’s craft and to find one’s voice. Not everyone is going to start doing that at age 22 or 25; not everyone has the financial luxury or life conditions at a relatively young age to allow them to spend years honing their craft either on their own or through continued schooling. This was put forth most trenchantly by the brilliant writer Tillie Olsen in her 1978 bookSilences , where she talked about why there are so few women’s voices in the literary canon, along with other voices at the bottom of the economic ladder. Which was where Olsen lived and struggled. Her fiction is extraordinary—her novella Tell Me A Riddle is deservedly a classic—but her output was small. Her life did not readily yield up the conditions for writing. This had nothing to do with her talent, her commitment, or her drive, and everything to do with the realities of her situation.

We all have situations we have to work with and around in order to do our writing. Economic pressures, family needs, illness, psychological hurdles, even—dare I say it?—other interests. Grace Paley was a political activist all her life and said that writing short stories and poetry, versus novels, suited her because it allowed for that. Piling on myths to make us further question our commitment or ability or talent is not helpful.

As to whether starting to write fiction later than some (most?) helped me write this novel, I don’t know. But I sometimes joke that one of the plusses of starting when I did is that, during the long years before I published anything, I didn’t have my parents looking over my shoulder and telling me to give up and go to law school already. Because I’d already done that.

Would it be fair to say that once you’re on the promotion road, nobody much cares about how old (or young) you are? What has been your experience in promoting Wherever You Go? Do you have advice for fiction writers, who nowadays realize that promotion is part of the job?

I know many writers dread or, at best, approach the promotional side of things with the same enthusiasm one reserves for a root canal, but there have been numerous unexpected pleasures for me associated with these efforts. Actually, the age factor has been one of them. Audiences at book talks tell me they find my relatively late foray into fiction inspiring, or at least interesting. People want to hear about risk-taking.

Overall, I’ve found the promotion to have a lot of upsides. One has been experiencing the generosity of other writers, who’ve put me in touch with reviewers or invited me to author events or, like you, hosted me at their campuses. It’s also been uplifting to meet so many readers. I gave more than a hundred book talks in the year after Wherever You Go was published, and though we wring our hands saying nobody is reading serious fiction,  that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve also discovered the vast world of book bloggers, people who read and write about books not for pay or professional advancement but out of the sheer love of reading. Which is pretty amazing. They’ve been very generous in their response to Wherever You Go, posting thoughtful and often wonderfully written reviews, many saying the subject matter was entirely new to them. All of this has been tremendously heartening and one way to combat the sometimes punishing toll that publishing can take on one’s spirit, where you’re at the mercy of critics or your book is ignored in the press or an Amazon reviewer has been mean to you or you’re enduring any number of the myriad ups and downs that exposure can bring.

I think fiction writers need to adjust their expectations about what their publisher can and cannot do in the way of promotion, and then decide how much they want to take on for themselves. Time spent on promotion—and it takes time, no question—is time not spent writing fiction; on the other hand, if you devote five or seven years to writing a novel, you may decide it’s worth devoting one more to getting the word out so that readers who’d be interested in your book will hear about it. I also think many of us suffer from a romanticized notion of what publishers used to do for writers back in the day. In fact, not every writer was sent on “the book tour,” and often those tours were terrible—near empty bookstores, inappropriate venues. Because of the Internet and the shift to a greater egalitarianism in the reviewing world, there are now many more opportunities for writers to get their work out there than there used to be. Rather than bemoaning a somewhat mythical past, I say we should seize the bull by the horns and be glad for such robust online activity around writing and literature and books.

Dare I ask, what do you suppose the bloggers will be blogging about for your next book? Can you tell us a little about it?

I’ve got a very early stage novel underway set in central Massachusetts about late middle-aged people who leave their conventional lives, where they did all the “right” things, to form a commune with the goal of making their lives truly their own before it’s all over. Talk about the psychological driving your choices. I’m 61 years old. This is much on my mind.

In closing, can you speak specifically to what you had in mind in calling this novel Wherever You Go? As you set out to write a new novel, do you suppose you are seeking to take us to the same “place”? What do you think we as writers and readers need or want to find, wherever we go?

The title comes from a famous passage in the biblical Book of Ruth in which Ruth, the Moabite, pledges allegiance to her mother-in-law Naomi after the men who bound them together have all died: “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.” It’s a poetic passage that invokes loyalty—to a person, a land, and a God. Which is, of course, one of the main themes explored in the book, the idea of committing oneself to a particular land and a particular vision of God’s plan, whatever the cost. I wanted to hint at the underside of that unconditional loyalty, suggest there’s a steep price to be paid for such fealty.

But, as you imply in your question, “wherever you go” has many meanings. This is a story about expatriates and individuals seeking to reinvent themselves in a new place, who take their baggage—literal and metaphorical—with them wherever they go. The question of how much your past drives your present is also one that the book wrestles with, the tension between the old and the new.

Until you posed this question, I hadn’t thought about the phrase “wherever you go” relating to what a fiction writer does for a reader, by being a kind of guide or, perhaps more aptly, a siren, luring them to go where we want them to go, asking them to accompany us on a journey. There is definitely something to that in the pact we make as writers with readers: I’m going to tell you the truth, but it will be through the means of invention. This requires that we as writers have to earn the reader’s trust and cooperation. We have to write with authority—get the details right, stay true to the characters, use all our powers of observation so that we illuminate the human condition with honesty and insight and compassion. This is the reader’s right. All of us— readers and writers—should settle for no less.

Further Links and Resources

“It’s not my job to decide who comes into this world and who doesn’t,” she said. It struck me as an intensely humble decision on her part, and I’ve always remembered it. So it felt like deja vu (in the best way) when I read Leah Hager Cohen’s The Grief of Others (Riverhead, 2010), which centers on a similar event and its aftermath within the Ryrie family in the suburbs of New York City. Ricky, mother of two and hard-shelled financial analyst, knows that the child in her womb has anencephaly—a neurological defect in which the brain and skull are undeveloped—but gives birth to him anyway, despite not having told anyone in the family about the coming tragedy of his short life. Simon Ryrie lives for only fifty-seven hours, all of them in his mother’s arms, and Cohen weaves a moving family history out of the reverberations (and preverberations) of this event.

Like most families in literature, the Ryries are a mess, and Simon’s brief life only intensifies their tensions and their personal rudderlessness. Ricky’s scenic designer husband John has a twenty-something daughter from a previous relationship, and for all his jovial “fuzziness” he is as lost from his family as she is. Their high schooler Paul has gone from popular kid to outcast, and their adolescent daughter Biscuit has become obsessed with mourning rituals. Moving back and forth in time, Cohen gives us characters who are raw but beautiful, who move through the pathways they have made in life but always keep looking for other pathways that could lead to another self they might have been, or might still become.

Throughout her writing career—which dates back to her 1994 nonfiction book Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World, about a Manhattan school for the deaf where her father worked—Cohen has naturally been drawn to the dynamics of communities outside the public eye, or living in eddies where they might easily escape notice. The 2004 novel Heart, You Bully, You Punk explores the life of a teenage math whiz, her father, and her math teacher. For Glass, Paper, Beans (1998), she shadowed a Nova Scotia lumberjack, a quality controller at an Ohio glass factory, and a Mexican coffee grower, and combined that reportage with far-reaching observations about the nature of everyday commodities we use without thinking.

Cohen is intensely curious about the world, and especially gifted at finding small, ornate microcosms that show us how people view their own humanity, and The Grief of Others continues that aesthetic program. As a book of personal deja vu for me, it paid off immensely; I left it feeling that I understood the woman I’d met who wanted to have her baby, even though she knew it would die, far more intimately than I had before. But I also grew to understand—and this is a credit to Cohen’s art—those people who could not square themselves with the complicated decision to give birth to something so ephemeral.

Leah Hager Cohen is currently the W.H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches fiction, nonfiction, and intriguing courses of her own design. She also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University and contributes frequently to The New York Times Book Review.

Interview:

Steven Wingate: What struck me most about the book is how aware your characters are that each individual moment in their lives is full of portent—that every single decision defines who they are, and that life is a continuous moment of truth with no “time outs.” I’m thinking in particular of Ricky as she calculates how she can drive off of the Tappan Zee Bridge leading out of Tarrytown, but this boiling down of life to moments like this happens throughout the novel. What leads you to such moments and how do they come to you on the page?

Leah Hager Cohen: Oh dear, the very first question and I’m afraid I have no good answer. I suppose you are talking about a certain kind of acuity and attunement, a sharp awareness of the moment as it is being lived? It’s difficult for me to address how this happens, since it isn’t something I’ve consciously cultivated. It’s simply how I have always experienced life. Back in adolescence, I remember having an epiphany that the whole idea of hyperbole is fallacious—since nothing we perceive, nor any words we are capable of using to express it, could ever begin to approach the fullness of the thing.

In a short essay attached to the review copies of The Grief of Others, you talk about your own miscarriage and how it played into writing the book. Yet the book doesn’t feel fully (or even predominantly) autobiographical; the narration follows a lot of people in various different directions, and it’s ultimately about the Ryries as a unit. Did you always conceive it this way, or did that focus on the collective build over time?

I began with the character of Biscuit. It was her and her alone, to start: a ten-year-old girl riding her bike to Hook Mountain with a pocketful of chicken bones and fireplace ashes. Who was this kid? What was she doing, and why, and what was going to happen next? In my effort to understand her whole, round story, I was led to the other characters. But very early on the book suggested itself as an ensemble piece. In fact, in an earlier draft it was even more of an ensemble, because Baptiste and his Grann were more major characters.

You’re right that the book is not particularly autobiographical, other than the setting, for I did spend a large part of my childhood in Nyack. But the characters were mysterious to me, and a large part of what drove me to write the book was a desire to understand each one as fully as I could.

Ricky stands at the center of the Ryrie family and the clearest center of the novel, since her personal decisions drive so much of the action. She comes across to me as a thorny character: cold, willfully deceiving, loath to reach beyond the confines of herself into generosity and love. What went into the creation of her character, and how did it feel writing her?

I don’t see Ricky as you describe her. I see her as hurting, and in her pain she does act sometimes ignobly. But in a way she is more honest than John, her husband. While he makes an effort to pretend all is well, she cannot summon the will to do so, and her evident sadness, her subdued withdrawal, express more accurately than his joviality that something is seriously amiss within their marriage.

I also have sympathy with her difficult position: almost from the beginning of their relationship, it has been a given that John occupies a kind of moral high ground to Ricky’s low ground. In families as well as in relationships, we often unwittingly assign people roles that then circumscribe our ability to see them fully, in all their nuanced complexity. Part of Ricky’s grief and rage come from this long-standing, unacknowledged perception that has ill-served her and her husband both.

That said, it was challenging to write Ricky, because she is fairly defended and emotionally somewhat unsophisticated; she’s still stuck in that little girl self who needs to ask her father, “Am I good?” We all have our limitations, but Ricky may be particularly limited in her ability to realize her limitations. In this sense, I had to open my heart very wide to feel I could first grasp and then convey who she is.

The adolescent Biscuit is obsessed with ritual—she throws those chicken bones and ashes in a river, steals a library book about mourning customs worldwide, etc. She knows that her family needs mourning and ritual more than anything else, so within the book she functions as a soothsayer. This in turn lends a metaphorical layer to her character, a position from which the reader can see contemporary American society. What was it like to work with Biscuit? And are we, from the perspective she allows, a society that has lost its rituals?

You may be right in noticing ways in which Biscuit operates to an extent as soothsayer, but I never related to her as anything but a specific individual. I think if I’d set out to write her as a metaphor, I would’ve landed flat on my face. Working with her was pretty delightful, especially in the section of the book when she is two years old, with her pacifier and her diapers and her limited language skills, all regal toddlerish obstinacy and idiosyncracy. She cracked me up.

As for societal rituals, certainly they have changed; at the very least, 21st-century rituals incorporate new ways of relating to technology, virtuality, globalism, temporal and geographic boundaries, spirituality and mortality. And yes, I think that as a society we probably do have fewer shared rituals, in part because as a society we are increasingly less homogenous. So this may be more gain than loss.

You break the fourth wall at the end of the novel by asking the reader “what more is there to tell?” It’s not something we normally see in fiction, so I’m curious about why you made that choice. Was it a spontaneous decision for you, or something you knew was coming down the pike from the early phases of the novel?

As I neared the end of the book, I began to fret, because I was having a hard time seeing my way clear to what that ending should be. This was at a point where, with other books, the ending would have already made itself clear to me. Then all at once I saw how it should end, but I went into a new sort of fretting, because what I saw seemed so radical and rule-breaking, at least for me, as a writer of realistic fiction, not meta- or experimental fiction. In the end, though, it felt so absolutely right that I followed my impulse.

When my agent sent the book out to editors, it was interesting to see how many of them said they loved the book, but might I consider changing the ending? vs. those who loved the book with the ending as it was. I think it was about fifty-fifty.

You have a Columbia University graduate degree in Journalism, and that journalistic training shows up clearly in your nonfiction books. Do you feel it come into play with your fiction? If so, is that influence consistent across your novels, or did it differ for The Grief of Others?

I’ve done some research and reporting for all of my books, not just the nonfiction ones. I had an important mentor in Journalism School, Sam Freedman, who taught a wonderful class called “Reading, Writing and Thinking,” and in this class he assigned novels as well as works of nonfiction (which seemed sort of daring and almost seditious within the context of J-school). He was instrumental in helping me think of all storytelling as occupying a similar plane and answering a similar call.

Do you feel any general movements in your career as an “amphibious” writer working in fiction and in nonfiction, and can you describe how you work along that cusp? Are there realms of inquiry that you focus on that travel across the genres? How do you know when you’re best off stepping away from one genre into another?

All of my books, as I look back on them, seem to engage the idea of “other,” whether in the form of marginalized cultures or the private “otherness” we all sometimes feel in moments of loneliness or isolation. And I see all of them as part of a larger effort to reach out beyond that isolation, to fathom the unfathomable.

Lately I have drawn more to fiction than nonfiction, which I think has to do with my interest in exploring people’s inner lives. In nonfiction, one cannot report on someone’s psyche except in a speculative mood. Even when a subject reports on his or her own feeling state, that assessment is likely to be partial or imperfectly understood. Lately, I am liking the way fiction allows more unfettered access into complex emotional and spiritual terrain.

You use the word unfathomable in the answer above, the very same word around which you centered a faculty seminar at Holy Cross—“Fathoming the Unfathomable,” which I much enjoyed taking. What particular unfathomable emotional and spiritual terrain piques your interest right now, and are you currently researching another book?

Yes, over the past few years I’ve found myself increasingly interested in the question of whether fiction has a moral imperative or moral purpose. My own highly personal and idiosyncratic response to this question is that it does, or can, or ought. That purpose, I believe, has to do with expanding our capacity, as humans, to feel, to empathize with others, and to grow.

I’m about halfway through writing a new novel, about a sister and a brother. The brother is, to put it in simple terms, a person who is hard for the world to love. He may be on the autism spectrum —he’s never been diagnosed, and to remain true to the characters and ideas in the book, it’s important that I, as author, don’t diagnose or label him either. But his way of being in the world is atypical in a way that makes it difficult both for him to get along and for other people to comprehend and accept him. His “otherness” leads to a terrible event, for which he is held on criminal charges, and which his sister becomes desperate to fathom from his perspective so that she can explain to the world—and to herself—that her brother is not monstrous.

Further Links & Resources

• Leah Hager Cohen’s excellent blog with musings on life, literature, lunar phase calendars and why one must fight indifference: Love As Found Object
• Cohen recommends physical labor as balm for the soul in Poets & Writers‘ “Writers Recommend” series.

In The Little Bride, Anna Solomon’s debut novel, 16-year-old Minna Losk travels from Odessa to America as a Jewish mail-order bride. Her motivation is born in from both fantasy and necessity. The journey represents a move toward a more prosperous life, safe from grueling housework and pogroms, a world in stark contrast to the one she has experienced so far—devoid of family, comfort, or a true childhood. She is disappointed to find that her new home isn’t a grand house in a city but a sod hut in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota. And her new husband, Max, is a poor match for the desolate land he has chosen to farm. Old enough to be her father and rigidly Orthodox, Max is kind but perilously stubborn. In addition to grappling with new depths of loneliness, precarious weather conditions, and finger-numbing work, Minna finds herself the stepmother of two teenage sons, one of whom she grows increasingly attracted to over the course of a year.

Anna Solomon’s short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, and Shenandoah, among others. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Slate’s “Double X,” and Kveller. Before receiving her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, she was a journalist for National Public Radio’s Living on Earth.

In this conversation with Sara Schaff, Anna Solomon considers the nature of short stories versus novels, the process of writing and researching a first novel that is also historical fiction, and the unexpectedly encompassing nature of publicity and self-promotion.

Interview

Sara Schaff: In a recent interview with Erica Dreifus on her blog, you said you once thought that if you could learn to write short stories well, then you could learn to do anything, even write a novel.

Anna Solomon: It’s weird to say this, but I actually feel like a really masterful short story is harder than a good novel because it’s such a demanding form. It feels much more particular, and if things are not perfect, it’s much more obvious. I mean, I think there are perfect novels, but I think it’s less important that a novel is perfect.

There’s more room to breathe in a novel.

Yeah. I think some novels achieve that feeling of unity that you can get with a story, that sense of singularity where you can see it all in one piece. I often think of two different categories of novels—in one category are books like Housekeeping or So Long, See You Tomorrow. I think of books like that as being perfect in what they are, and I feel that part of that is because they’re on the short side and they’re quiet and kind of domestic books. Private books. And then there are books like the The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Updike’s Rabbit books that I think of as great novels, but I don’t think of them as perfect novels. And part of what’s great about them is that they’re not perfect; they let so much in, they’re much less precious and fussy in a way. But books like Housekeeping and So Long, See You Tomorrow, I’ve read six times, and I feel like they’re these bibles.

How do you feel about your novel now, compared to your stories? Did writing it feel very different?

It did! You know, I’ve talked to friends who also were writing short stories before they began novels, and they said to me, “I felt like writing each chapter of the novel was like writing a short story, and I was just writing short story after short story.” For me the form felt so obviously different—the pacing, the structure, that part felt very natural to me. I don’t know if it’s partly that my short stories have always been on the long side and kind of begging to be expanded; I also wonder to what degree the subject matter is just so different than anything I’d written. I had never written a historical anything, and I had never thought I would, nor do I really read much historical fiction, but this was the story I wound up wanting to tell.

People who’ve read my stories and read the novel will say to me, oh, it’s totally you; it feels like your writing, which is a great comfort to me when I hear that because in some ways they feel so different.

The fine sentences, the well-drawn characters—that all feels like you. But yes, The Little Bride does feel very different. It’s an epic journey whereas your stories are more contained.

It’s funny because my goal while writing this book felt sort of small. It felt sort of like, okay, all I want to do here is try to write a novel. I just have to see if I can do it, you know? I wasn’t trying to be overly ambitious—when I say that it sounds funny now because I took on a part of history, and I’d never done that before, but in the way I was talking before about the small and large books, it felt to me like a small, quiet book. I know there’s all this epic-ness and sweeping history, but it felt like a book that was very close to its characters, and in that way, kind of contained.

You’re following Minna’s story.

Right, it’s very close to her, and it stays close to her. In the new book that I’ve started writing, the thing I know I want to do this time is open that out. There are many more points of view it’s allowed to go into. It feels much bigger and messier and that’s really exciting, too, but I definitely had to do this first.

I’m starting to research material for a historical novel, and it feels so daunting. What was your process in writing historical fiction—did you research first and develop a sense of the place, or did you start writing the story and then fill in gaps from there?

I definitely did them at the same time. And I think it’s totally daunting, too. Now that I’m facing this other novel, I’m still asking, how are you supposed to do this? And how do you do it as a fiction writer? What’s the obligation to history?

I was fortunate that I came across Rachel Bella Calof, this Russian mail-order bride whose story inspired the book. I was at a residency when I read her amazing memoir, and I was in this place where I was working on a book that was going nowhere, and I was in despair. I started reading Calof’s story, and I got to this line in the first section where she’s undergoing her “Look,” [the physical examination one had to have before being approved as a mail-order bride] and she says, “They inspected me like a horse.” It was one of those lines that said so much while saying so little. And the whole first chapter of the book just kind of came into being. And then I was like, “Oh, I need to learn more.”

But even then I was always writing. I didn’t really take much time off to just research. I felt like it was really important for me to just keep moving, and have the research grow out of what the story needed me to know. When I was writing the sections in Odessa and needed certain details, like the names of streets she might have run through, I would put X’s, and later I would go and look up names. There’s this great history of Odessa written by a Brown professor, and I would look through it, look through the maps. It didn’t feel to me like those names were essentials, that they were affecting the story, I guess. I certainly think that they can. Seemingly unimportant details can have a huge impact, obviously. But I tried to use the research as inspiration, as much as information that would hold me to something.

So you don’t get bogged down by trying to make everything accurate before you get the story.

Exactly. Because the characters, the actual story, felt a lot more important to me. I think that’s partly because of how I read. When I do read historical fiction, which is not that often, I tend not to be reading for the “Oh, I want to know what it was like to live during this time.” But a lot of people do read it in that way. So at other points, I would get this anxiety, like, “Oh my gosh, this isn’t accurate enough.” I think the book actually wound up being accurate in most ways, but if people wanted to go through it and pick it apart, either from a farming perspective or an Odessa perspective, they could say this or that isn’t exactly right.

But that could happen with any book. You set a story in contemporary times, in a place you know, and someone will find inaccuracies.

Well, exactly. And that’s one of the interesting things about historical fiction. If you open yourself up, the artifice of writing it all is much more pronounced. Writing contemporary fiction, there could be the illusion that it is “truth” in a way, but there’s no such illusion with historical fiction. Any attempt to recreate the past is going to have plenty of falsehoods. Can we even attempt to understand what someone 120 years ago might have been thinking or feeling? I think we can. Do I claim that it’s accurate? I don’t think I’m as interested in that accuracy as I’m interested in the truth of it, on a human level.

While writing this book, I was ignorant about a lot of things, and I think that was good. There were a lot of things I didn’t think to worry about, and that part of what just let me do it. My sense is that with each book I write, the book will be better, but I will also be more aware of these important questions, and that awareness is going to make the process, not necessarily more difficult, but more fraught. There’s something very freeing about ignorance.

I’ve heard other writers say that the second novel was actually harder. Because of the expectations attached to a second book.

Yes, and now I can understand my process and understand what worked and didn’t work and therefore expect myself to fix all of it, but I might not have all the tools yet.

The novel is both a page-turner and a character-driven story. In literary circles the term “plot-driven” can be pejorative, as if a good plot precludes good writing or good characters. But Minna’s character really drives the forward momentum of The Little Bride. What she does and how she reacts feel very real and organic. How did you write and develop her character and the story?

This question is the hardest for me to answer because I was not that conscious of how it happened. I know what I don’t do. It is organic in that I didn’t go through and make decisions about her character before I started writing her. She came to be who she was through the writing.

On a story level and on a plot level, I did know where the story was going. I really wanted to have a story-driven, plot-driven book when I launched into the longer form of the novel because I didn’t want to be wondering the whole time what it was about. On a thematic level I’m still learning what it’s about, but on a level of what’s happening, I always knew: this is a story about a mail-order bride who goes to America. It was nice to have that basic piece there.

I didn’t know exactly where it would end, and certainly lots of things changed, but I had a sense that this is this journey story, and these are some of the things that are going to happen. It’s certainly not going to be just stuck in her head the whole time. Minna became who she is because of what the story needed her to be. The story also became shaped around who she was. Especially in revision, where I started realizing wait, no, this isn’t really what would happen here. She really wants this, or she needs that. When I went back, she started driving the story more, whereas, in the beginning, she was becoming herself in relation to the story.

Minna, though quite young, is so aware of and unapologetic about her desires. She even describes herself as being selfish.

In one sense she’s unapologetic about her desires and openly selfish, and then in another she’s constantly trying to want something else, or to change her desires: “Maybe I could think about it in this way and then I would want what I have. Maybe I could squint my eyes in this way and the room would be different.” But then her actual desire rears up and she’s never able to actually quash it.

Since she was a young girl, she’s had this innate sense of difference toward others—other kids being more religious and other kids being less self-aware. She’s always felt like an outsider, and her self-awareness grows from that. She’s gotten so used to her position as an outsider that she has less need to fit in and please. Some part of her wants to join that world; she looks at the character Ruth and thinks, “If I could just be a good housewife, and I could want that then that would be satisfying and I could just be normal.” But she’s just not. She’s never satisfied with that. She’s also not really satisfied with being unsatisfied, and you could say that’s a particularly modern feeling. But there are certainly lots of characters who were written in much earlier times about very strong, dissatisfied women. Jane Eyre, for instance. Becky Sharp.

Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country.

You know, I’ve never read that.

People don’t necessarily like the character of Spragg.

Well, people don’t necessarily like Minna either. [laughs]

I was wondering about the “likability” factor. How have readers reacted to Minna?

People either feel that she’s complex and real and they love that she’s not perfect and that she’s not always virtuous or giving. Those people love that she can be all these things. Or they feel, “She is mean and selfish and bad.” I had a friend who leads book clubs, and her book club read it and everyone loved it except one woman who just hated Minna. That’s going to happen.

I certainly want the characters I read to be complex and flawed. It’s important to me, because otherwise I would feel so lacking in my own character if I didn’t get to read other people who were struggling. But some people don’t read for that, and they want a sense of pure escape.

In terms of writing this book, looking back at your short stories, and thinking about the novel you’re writing now, do you see any similarities between your characters? What patterns are you noticing in your own writing?

On a purely external level, [the theme of] coming of age. There are a lot of 16ish-year-old girls – I’m pretty fascinated by that time – I think I always will be. I’m sure that it will change, too, as I get older, but it’s such a ripe moment for characters because there is so much change. That time in my life still feels so vivid, in ways that are not entirely pleasurable. [laughs] The complexity is certainly there.

There are themes that run through a lot of [the work]. One theme would be outsiders versus insiders. Place is also very important in almost all my short stories as well as the book; it becomes its own character. And it’s very important to my writing process.

Sex, too. Not just sex, but there’s a lot of complex sex going on. Part of it is power issues around sex.

And women and young women exploring their sexuality—matter-of-factly, unapologetically. Their exploration often feels like part of their longing for something else.

Yeah, that’s interesting.

In your story “What is Alaska Like?” the narrator’s relationship with Randolph Cunningham boils down to wanting to leave town and her job as a chambermaid. In “The Long Net,” June and her friend encounter a frightening pedophile at a campsite but the story turns on June’s longing for connection with her mom, wanting to be noticed.

It’s funny with “The Long Net” – that was a story where my growing awareness of my themes almost stopped me from writing it altogether. As I was writing I thought, wait, I’m writing “What is Alaska Like?” again. And then I thought, you know what, that’s what writers do. That’s okay. In many ways it felt like a maturing from “What is Alaska Like?” although I still love that story, too.

But those echos can help make a collection work.

Oh, I love that you called it a collection. I hope it will be a collection. It’s cool that you’ve read my stories more recently than I have. It’s such a gift to be read closely and have things be thought about in relationship to each other.

On some level, I write because I want other writers to read what I write and to appreciate it, so it’s been a change getting used to caring about sales. I sold my novel to Riverhead, and it turns out I’ve written a historical novel, and a Jewish novel, and a women’s novel. I’ve done all these things that turn out to be marketable, which of course my agent is thrilled about. The idea that it might actually sell well and catch on in book clubs is awesome. At the same time, I’d like my short stories to be taken seriously, too, despite the fact that stories tend to be tougher on a commercial level.

How do you feel about the self-promotion aspect of being a novelist today?

It was definitely a hard transition this past spring when I decided I had to get myself on Twitter. Well, I didn’t have to, but it’s turned out to be a really good thing. I actually wound up liking it, finding this amazing community of women writers, but also writers of all sorts, and feeling connected through it. I’m not the most natural at social media at all, but I do feel like I’ve been able embrace it.

I’ve also been finding the events totally great. I’m loving readings, I’m loving doing Q & A’s. I’ve been doing a musical and literary performance with my friend, Clare Burson, and that’s been going really well. That part of it I enjoy; it feels really gratifying. Part of me likes to perform, so that’s been great.

The harder fact of self-promotion is how encompassing and full time it is. I remember thinking last year, “When my book comes out, I’m probably going to have to give a good hour or two a week to publicity.” I really thought I would just be able to keep on keeping on with the writing. That [shift] has been hard for me, because I thrive on discipline and routine. It’s the first time in my serious writing life that I’ve taken this kind of break from fiction. I’m writing some essays, which I take seriously, but it’s not the same. And I’m not even doing those in a regular, every-day-sit-down-at-the-same-time fashion. The hardest part of promotion is not the idea of going out there and speaking on behalf of my book, but just the sheer amount of time and distraction. I could see why I would have been a better author fifty years ago, when you just went out, did a few readings, and then went back to your desk.

Further Links & Resources

Nadelson is the Hallie Ford Chair in Writing at Willamette University. He also teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. He lives in Salem, Oregon. A former student of Scott’s, I took his short story workshop as an undergraduate at Willamette. This interview took place over e-mail in September and October 2011.

SCOTT NADELSON: I think what happened when I started listening to Dylan was that I heard language—carefully constructed language—in a context I couldn’t easily categorize or contain. I was one of those high school kids who didn’t care much about anything, or didn’t know that you could care about anything; I went to school, did my homework some of the time, watched a lot of TV, and listened to music as loud as I could. Until then, any kind of written language I didn’t understand I’d quickly find frustrating and abandon; if I understood it too easily, then I’d dismiss it as not worth my time. When I listened to music, I hardly paid attention to the lyrics; if anything they were a way of following the melody and singing along to the beat. But Dylan put language forward in a way I couldn’t ignore even if I wanted to. In the best of his songs, his lyrics were mysterious and evocative but also precise, playful, full of emotion, unsentimental. Plus there was an energy in the progression of words, in their rhythm, in the layers of imagery they unfolded that seemed to contain more meaning than the words or images themselves. I was surprised to find so much pleasure and tension in the way language could be approachable one moment and then move just out of reach the next.

I’d listen to, say, “Chimes of Freedom,” and I’d feel like I was getting a pretty good handle on it—the speaker hears in peals of thunder bells tolling freedom for the downtrodden masses—and then out would come these lines that were so gorgeous and baffling that my head would empty of all rational and simplistic thought: “Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail / the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder.” I’m sure it’s because I already was drawn to music that I was open to lines like this, that I was willing to let them seep into me, even if I couldn’t quite grasp them; if I’d read them on the page, I probably would have turned away. But once Dylan’s voice got into my head, along with the possibility that language could make me feel something even if I didn’t know why, I was soon more open to other forms of writing as well.

At that point, of course, I still mostly wanted to be a rock star with really cool hair. But now I also wanted to be one who could write a song that made you forget to breathe.

You’re not the first writer to list Dylan as an early influence. I think it speaks to that community’s ethos as not only poets, but storytellers. I’d argue that many of Dylan’s songs – “Tangled Up In Blue” comes to mind – are condensed stories. Do you agree? (As a side note, speaking of influences, when I looked up “Chimes of Freedom,” realizing I didn’t know much about its origins, I learned that Dylan himself wrote the song after reading Rimbaud.)

Absolutely. In those early years Dylan owed a lot to Rimbaud and the beat poets, but he was also a terrific storyteller. He had a gift for pacing and distilling narrative down to its essence. Some of his best stuff is narrative: “Tangled Up in Blue,” for sure, and pretty much everything else on Blood on the Tracks; “Ballad in Plain D”; most stuff on John Wesley Harding and especially on The Basement Tapes.

I once read an interview with Dylan, or maybe I heard another songwriter talking about it—or, who knows, maybe I made it up—in which he claimed that he hated nothing worse than story-songs. In response, the interviewer, somewhat in shock, listed off a number of those songs with narrative impulses, and Dylan snapped, in near rage, “Those aren’t story-songs! They’re ballads!”

What I love about that anecdote is that it suggests Dylan saw himself working in a particular narrative tradition; the idea wasn’t to stuff a story arc into a five minute song, but to use and update the ballad form to explore contemporary narratives. I think it’s because he understood the form so deeply, had listened to and sung old ballads so many times that he absorbed their narrative rhythms, their pacing, their compression and mystery, that his narrative songs don’t feel dated like those of a lot of his contemporaries.

I’m curious whether your experience as a reluctant reader influenced your teaching methodology? Did that perspective give you any insight into how to reach students who don’t think literature is relevant to their lives?

That’s a great question. It may be an exaggeration, but I’ve often believed that literature saved my life; I was heading down a fairly self-destructive path when I got serious about reading and writing, and discovering something that meant so much to me allowed me to refocus my energy in positive directions. And that has definitely affected the way I approach teaching and the way I think about education generally. The reason I never cared about literature when I was young was that no one made me understand that I should or could care; teachers just told me I had to learn that a simile uses “like” or “as” and that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. They didn’t tell me why those things mattered. The problem, I think, was that by the time I started school the study of literature had become divorced from the physical, emotional, and intellectual experience that literature is meant to create. No one talked about how Hamlet had moved them, or how Huckleberry Finn had made them laugh; they just talked about whether Hamlet really went crazy and about the symbolism of the Mississippi River. Above all, no one talked about loving literature, and if you don’t love something, what’s the point of spending hours reading and talking about it?

So in my teaching life, I try to express this love as much as possible. The work I choose to share with my students is work that moves me, that haunts me, that mystifies me, and I try to always return our conversations to the students’ actual experience reading a story or poem: where and how it made them nearly cry, where and how it sped up their pulse, where and how it suggested connections that made their heads spin. I try to remind writing students that they should find joy in the process, and if they can’t, then writing might not be the best pursuit for them. I think people should devote their lives to things that matter so much to them that they can’t imagine doing anything else. And education should be a means to discovering and deepening those passions; it should help people find the things that are going to make them want to get out of bed on difficult mornings. The most successful writing class I can imagine is one in which I help beginning writers find a reason to face a blank page when the words aren’t coming easily.

That sounds like a worthy outcome for more experienced writers as well. It isn’t a coincidence that writing is often described with religious terminology—i.e. Joyce Carol Oates’ The Faith of a Writer. So much of writing is facing that blank page or disconnected jottings, and, to quote Lorrie Moore, “trudg[ing] ahead in the rain, regardless.”

In a recent interview on The Nervous Breakdown you revealed (to yourself) that you’re a “floundering” writer. You said, “Most of the time I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, no idea where my ideas are leading me, but I’m stubborn about following them through, and eventually, if I’m lucky, the effort leads me somewhere interesting.” Can you share how you keep yourself motivated even when you are “floundering”? I love the image of a struggling Eudora Welty cutting apart her drafts, re-arranging them, and then piecing them back together with straight pins. Do you have any rituals or tricks to share?

I guess the thing that keeps me going, even during the most frustrating periods, is that I love process more than product. Whenever I’m stuck, or confused about where a story is heading, I try to return to those things in writing that bring me the most joy: odd perceptions, tense dialogue, obsessive thought. I try to have fun riffing on a little scene or quiet conflict and not worry about whether anything will come of it. And small, unexpected discoveries spur me on to search for more discoveries. Even if an idea finally crumbles to dust—which happens all too often—I usually have other little scenes or conflicts in mind, and the promise of those small discoveries gets me to sit down and work every chance I get.

I wish I could say I had useful tricks or rituals. I love that image of Welty with her cut-up drafts, too. My process is much less delicate, more bludgeon than straight pin. I often just keep going back to the beginning of a story or essay I’m struggling with, trying to find the right angle in. I write forward until I get stuck, then start again, from a slightly different angle. I often end up with as many as fifty false starts before I find my way to the end of a first draft. I used to resist this process, and I still sometimes find it maddening, but now I think it’s mostly productive: what happens is that in writing these false starts I’m working to find the right storytelling voice, the one that can carry the material, that can access the characters and conflicts in the most effective way for the story. It’s rare that I find this voice on the first few tries, in part because I don’t know the characters well enough yet to understand their most crucial concerns. There’s probably a more efficient way of going about it, but I just keep beating my head against a piece until something opens up or it gives me such a headache that I have to set it aside.

The other thing I do when I’m having trouble finding my way is to look for models, especially in old favorites. If I’ve just had a terrible writing morning, I’ll pull down a Leonard Michaels story, for instance, and within a few minutes I’m in such awe, experiencing such pleasure in his voice, in the movement of his prose, that I’m already wanting to get back to work. It’s not that I then try to write a Leonard Michaels story; but that a Leonard Michaels story is even possible, that such a thing can exist, makes me so grateful and excited that whatever setback I’ve just experienced, even if it’s a significant one, soon feels diminished in comparison.

You have an impressive publication history. This September saw the release of your third story collection, and a book of autobiographical essays is forthcoming in March 2013. Considering that you balance teaching in addition to your writing, to what do you credit your prolificacy?

If I can credit anything it’s mostly stubbornness and obsession. Teaching and writing take a lot of energy, and often the same kind of energy, and doing both at the same time means putting in long hours and feeling stretched thin. I sometimes wish I could give myself a break during the school year, and not try to write while I’m teaching, as some writers I know do, but I’ve come to find I really need the work as part of my daily life. I’m not a terribly religious person, but writing has become something of a spiritual practice for me, like meditation, or maybe more like mental yoga, and without it I feel ungrounded. A few days without it, and I’m pretty quickly at loose ends. A week, and I’m miserable, and my wife starts begging me to get back to work.

Do you have a specific schedule or just grab the time when you can?

Until my daughter was born, I had a pretty regular writing schedule; I’ve managed to keep my mornings free to write for a couple of hours before having to turn to other things. With a now one-year-old, that has changed quite drastically. I almost never have more than an hour of unbroken time, and I’ve had to adjust the way I work. Now I’ll write for half an hour, forty-five minutes at a stretch, but I still try to do it every day if I can. What I’ve found is that I used to waste an enormous amount of time. I’d putter around for half an hour, looking at books on my shelves, staring out the window, before I’d get down to serious work. If I do that for thirty seconds now, I know quickly I’m going to lose whatever time I’ve got. I’m sure that puttering was useful to get me in a certain mindset, but now it seems like a luxury I’ve had to leave behind. Right mindset or not, I’ve got to get typing.

Because I work in short(ish) form, I never write an entire draft of a book at once. In fact, I usually don’t even know I’m working on a book until well into the process. I just work on stories or essays, usually a couple at a time in different draft stages, until I have a number of them that start to speak to each other, and then I start thinking about the whole. So by the time I’m working on something I’m calling a book, much of it is already in late draft stage, and some of it might even be close to finished. Then it becomes a matter of filling in gaps, smoothing rough edges between pieces, thinking about a larger arc.

You’re known for placing your stories in your native New Jersey, even though you’ve lived in Oregon since 1996. Beyond writing what you know, to what do you owe this fascination with your birthplace? What is it about writing in absentia that appeals to you?

When I started writing, I never thought New Jersey would become such a central part of my fiction, but now I write very few stories that aren’t set there. And hardly any of my stories have characters who haven’t come from the place where I grew up. I do think part of this is familiarity, or at least that’s the way it started. But more important is how the setting has evolved in my imagination over the past fifteen years. New Jersey has become less an actual place in my fiction than a state of being, a kind of limbo between the great city and the vast continent, where people are caught between retreat and full engagement with life and all its uncertainty. What the place offers me is a setting ripe with quiet tension and internal conflict, as well as a metaphor for the illusion of safety and security amidst the chaos of human intimacy and connection.

I sometimes send my New Jerseyans off into foreign lands, and a different kind of tension arises when they bring their baggage of fear and repressed desire into places where they can no longer contain the contents. In the new book, for example, I’ve got a kid with his grandparents in Jerusalem, and there all hell can break loose when his family conflict plays out against the backdrop of a much wilder setting than the one he’s left behind. But the conflict is still one that evolves in and out of his New Jersey state of being—I can’t imagine him coming from anywhere else.

Do you ever research places you’re writing about, or do you write from your memory and imagination?

The research I do is almost always a result of necessity. I need to know the name of a certain street, or remember where a lake is located in relation to a mountain, or look at a picture of a church in Zurich, and then I do the most cursory possible Internet searching to find the crucial piece of information or something that’s a close approximation. In other words, I let my imagination lead me and use research only to fill in gaps; but as soon as a gap is filled, I go as quickly as possible back to the imagination. Being a writer has meant never being an expert on anything, but having the barest trivial knowledge and surface understanding of a whole bunch of different things.

How does a story benefit from being set in a specific place as opposed to an anonymous city?

It really depends, I think. There can be something very freeing about using a landscape that’s open, that doesn’t restrict you to a particular set of geographic and cultural markers. Think how much more exciting Kafka’s vision of America is than if he’d actually known what New York City looked like. But using a real place can offer all kinds of opportunities for texture, for tensions that arise out of a character’s relationship to that place and to a reader’s associations with it. I do think it takes a certain kind of imagination to create a place out of nothing and to make it specific and real enough that a story can inhabit it. For me, having an actual place to work off of allows my imagination to focus on the things that concern me more—a character’s internal struggle, for example, or a failed communication between characters. I’d much rather spend my time imagining what a character thinks or does than what street he needs to take to get to the center of town.

That said, I do use some made up New Jersey towns in my stories, in order to give myself leeway to move buildings around, or make a place grittier than it might be in real life, or add some quirky details. But readers are more ready to accept them as real because I’ve put them in a geographic location that has certain set features and associations.

Aftermath’s epigraph features selections from the work of two poets (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Stephen Dunn). The selections are apt and closely mirror the collection’s eponymous theme. Were you reading Longfellow and Dunn while completing the collection, or did the relevance strike you later?

Both the Longfellow and Dunn quotes came after the book was finished, pretty much accidentally. I discovered the Longfellow poem when I was getting ready to send the manuscript out—I wanted to make sure there weren’t any other books called Aftermath, and when I searched the title, up came Longfellow. And I almost fell out of my chair when I read it and saw how beautifully it evoked the feeling I was trying to capture in the stories. The Dunn came soon after and was even more random; an acquaintance posted a link to it on Facebook, and once again I couldn’t believe how perfect it was, how it went straight to the heart of loss and acceptance and a begrudging carrying on—in fact, it did in a few lines so succinctly what I’d tried to do in nearly three hundred pages, that I nearly despaired and considered sticking the manuscript in a drawer. But like all good writers, I decided that if I couldn’t beat them, I’d steal from them, and I went from having no epigraph to having two.

Do have a habit of reading poetry? If so, do you think it affects your prose in any way?

Poetry was my first literary love—after Dylan—and I do read a lot of it, though not in as deliberate a way as I do fiction or nonfiction. Usually I let friends recommend something, or I pick up something at random in a bookstore, and devour a poem or two while I’m pacing my office before class starts. I have a lot of admiration for and envy of what some poets are able to do—the distillation, the direct line to emotion and depth of engagement with the sensual world, the associative leaps and structural experimentation. And I know the more poetry I read, the more closely I pay attention to the rhythm of my sentences, the interplay of sound and syntax and breath.

What advice would you give your younger self?

I think it would be the same advice I give myself now, whenever I feel frustrated or lost, whenever I worry that I’ll never write another decent book or story or sentence: Don’t take yourself too seriously.

I once had a teacher who told me a story about a conversation he had with Grace Paley. He was working with her while at Stanford, complaining to her about how badly the writing was going, how tortured he was by the process. And she turned to him and said, “You don’t have to do it, you know. No one’s sitting around waiting for your next story.”

It may be devastating to realize that no one but you is going to care if you stop writing. But it’s also wonderfully freeing. All pressures and expectations drop away. You don’t have to worry about shaping the future of literature or saving the world. You can just put one word after another for the simple pleasure of making something out of nothing.

Further Links & Resources

Note

[1] “Angle of Vision: A Conversation With Scott Nadelson.” Trachodon Magazine. January 2011.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

We have barely sat down at Smooch Café in Fort Greene, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Swedish author and playwright, preempts my opening line: Should we do the interview in English?

The question seems inevitable coming from an author whose work has centered around language in one way or another since his debut novel One Eye Red took Swedish critics and readers by storm in 2003. A master of words who has created his very own language: Khemirish – a playful mix of Swedish, Arabic, French, English – has now been carefully translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles in Montecore, his first novel to be published in the US. So specific is his language that he doesn’t think his first novel can even be translated for the American market.

Now, however, we decide on English, despite our common nationality and the fact that Jonas Hassen Khemiri isn’t so fond of his English self. As he put it at a reading in Dumbo earlier this year: “I always feel a little bit like a nerd when I speak English.”

Nerd or not, since then he has received not only a write-up in the New York Times for Montecore, but also an Obie Award, the prestigious off-Broadway prize, this May for his play Invasion!, which had its U.S. debut in February. (It has also premiered in South Korea.) Directed by Erica Schmidt of The Play Company, Invasion! had an early fall revival in New York at The Flea Theater in Tribeca. We spoke in September, during this run of the play.

Invasion! The Play Company production, Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

Interview

via Folkteatern Göteborg

Katarina Matsson: Since your name is new to most Americans, let’s start from the beginning. Who is Jonas Hassen Khemiri?

Jonas Hassen Khemiri: I’m a 32-year-old granola-eating, theater-thinking Swedish writer who’s here because Invasion! re-opened at The Flea Theater – and to do some talks after the show, to sit in the audience and be very nervous, and to meet with people like you to do interviews. Then I’m going back home to Stockholm for the premiere of my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare (“Apathetics for beginners”).

It sounds like your attention is a bit divided?

It feels like my brain is in Sweden and my body is here. Hopefully I’ll make it through the day brainless! But I like to be reminded that there’s always this phase of nervousness before an opening. I remember when I had that with Invasion! – even though it was quite a long time ago.

Invasion!, your first play, premiered in Sweden in 2006. It deals with identity and the power of words. At the center is this elusive, almost magical name – Abulkasem – that takes on different meanings throughout the play. Is Abulkasem a playwright, a contradictory fundamentalist, a dorky guy in a bar, a hiding refugee – or all of the above? How do you think the piece has translated to English and specifically to an American context?

It’s difficult for me to say, because I’m not American enough to be the judge of that. According to the reactions of some of my American friends it seems like it has translated quite well, or very well, into an American context. We had some doubt whether or not to move [the play’s setting] from Sweden to the States. Now it’s set in the States. We felt that we had to do that in order to make the play immediate. This is a play that moves very fast. We did readings trying to keep it in Sweden, and it’s interesting because people had a much easier time to just laugh off the questions of fear and inequality that the play deals with, and not realize that it’s actually a play about their country also.

But when you won the Obie Award in May, the award committee said your play had “help[ed] us see ourselves, as Americans, more clearly.”

That sounds very nice. I’m happy, because it is a play mainly about fear and about how identities, individual and collective, are being constructed through vague senses of threat. [It’s also] about language and how language is used to manipulate people. That is a subject that has kept coming back in my writing in different forms.

Where and when did your interest in language start?

I think it comes from my background. Growing up in a multilingual family, and being around people who’ve been discriminated against because of their lack of language, you realize the power that a language gives you. I’ve always been in a luxurious position. My Swedish is perfect; I’ve always been able to choose between different levels of Swedish. I think that’s why these themes interest me.

What I’m doing now is quite different from what’s going on in Invasion! – or from anything I’ve done before. It’s difficult to talk about, because I don’t really know what it is. But in my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare, these themes of language and manipulation also play a big part. It begins with a national trauma in Sweden. I guess it’s even more related to the construction of a national identity. It’s actually a comedy about these apathetic refugee kids, a dark comedy. It deals a lot less with the kids than with how a national identity is constructed through the use of external elements.

One similarity between Invasion!, the new play, and a lot of things I’ve written is that they’re all trying to investigate the speed of words; how words can be transmitted very fast and how words can change meaning.

There’s a recent example that I find very interesting. Qaddafi in Libya used to call his opponents “rats,” and Assad in Syria called them “germs.” When the rebels gained power there was a tweet from Syria saying: “We the germs of Syria, salute the rats of Libya.” That tweet got a huge spread in a matter of minutes. But I also thought it was interesting that “rats” and “germs” were the terms being used to de-humanize, because they’re also something that’s extremely difficult to stop. They can spread anywhere and they will definitely outlive us. That sense, that we live in a contemporary time where words are being spread and manipulated so quickly, is something that I find a lot of inspiration in.

Yes, linguistic change is a very big part of our society. Speaking of national trauma, the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 recently passed. The consequences of the attacks are apparent in Invasion!

Yes, in some ways. But I think that reading is more defined in the American version than in the French or German ones. I was never thinking explicitly of 9/11 when I wrote it. But that’s also what’s cool about writing theater, that my words can be amputated from me and put in a new setting. I’m not even in control of the actual translation, these are Rachel’s words, the translator’s, my words have been transmitted through her. And all of a sudden they start meaning something that I can’t pick up on. I’m very happy that people seem to like them, but I’m not sure I understand the reasons why people like them.

Sometimes the audience laughs at very peculiar places and I don’t understand what that means, especially politically. It wasn’t until I was here the first time that I realized it was literally performed in the shadow of the World Trade Center. And that added something to the play. The loss of that power I, as a playwright, have is actually something I really like. The feeling that “wow, I’m not in control of my words anymore, they can just mean anything,” that’s what the play is about. How a magical name is just being amputated and moved, almost like a relay baton.

These themes of language and names are also very present in Montecore, your second novel, published by Knopf in the US this spring. You constructed the story like an e-mail correspondence between a son and a man claiming to be his missing father’s best friend. Together they try to write the father’s life story, which becomes as much a clash between realities as between languages. The result is both humorous and heartbreaking.

That work is a lot more personal. It’s about the trials of writing the story of a missing father. And that story is quite, well, reminiscent of my life, to say the least. It’s a book that plays around a lot with the biographical facts of my life and then tries to show the fictionality – and the impossibility – of summarizing a life in a book.

There are definitely links between Montecore and Invasion! because both projects end in a situation where the real, authentic person – be it Abulkasem in Invasion! or Kadir in Montecore – is very hard to capture. There’s something very fleeting and impossible in the ambition to capture a life. Another similarity between the two is that the emphasis [placed] on the way that people fantasize about the missing person actually tells the story. The fantasies that they use in order to conjure an image of this missing person tell the story of who they are. So we’re never in a position where we get to know their real selves, but through their fantasies we get the contours of who they are or who they would like to be.

A lot of your work also centers on racism and a sense of in-between-ness. Growing up in Stockholm, with a Tunisian dad and a Swedish mom, did you feel any prejudice?

It’s one of those things that is difficult to talk about, because it easily becomes very victimizing. But I think that Sweden, despite a lot of Swedes’ feelings, is a country like all other countries. We have problems with discrimination and racism and homophobia and whatever. Growing up, it was much easier for me to try to put myself in an eternal underdog position. But things didn’t get interesting until I realized the [number] of situations where I was in a power position, where I was in fact in line with the power structure. Be it reading feminist thinkers, or my perfect Swedish, or growing up in Hornstull in Södermalm in Stockholm, an area that is typically middle class. The realization that I, in many settings, am enjoying privileges that I hadn’t seen before. I think my writing changed a lot when I realized that it wasn’t the underdog position that made me a writer; it was the interest in what these structures make of people.

Then came questions on how to deal with that power, what to do with it. The feeling of being powerless is something a lot of my work centers on. How can we use language to manipulate ourselves out of a world where we feel powerless? I think that’s one of the red threads through all my work. The way a lot of my characters use language to block out the real world is very similar to what I’ve been doing my whole life. Words have been my comfort zone. But there’s also a kind of sadness to that. It has always been easier for me to write about life and politics for example, than to actually take part in a more practical way.

Yes, you’re very good at standing on the outside, looking in. But writing about life is also a way of taking part.

Yes, I’m hoping to show the complexities of life. I like a lot of writing that’s completely different from mine too, but this is my way of attacking things. I’ve never been very Brechtian, you know, it’s not my style to try to inspire class struggle or give an easy answer.

How did you find your language, your voice?

I’m not sure I have. I keep wanting to find new voices. I think that at one point it would be lovely to feel like I found a voice that felt like mine. But that’s based on the idea that I would have this authentic voice inside me, and I don’t believe that’s true. I think I consist of the sum of the multiple voices I’ve invented so far, and hopefully I will be able to invent more voices as I go along.

When you started writing Montecore, you heard the voice of Kadir, the missing father’s friend who employs a very special language, a mix of French and Arabic directly translated into Swedish (with a lot of laughs as a consequence!). Is that often how your writing project starts, with you hearing a voice?

Yeah, it’s quite audio-related. It feels like I hear voices. Which also sounds like I’m crazy. I remember when I was a kid and I heard writers say, “you have to listen to the voices.” I thought they were crazy and bullshitting me. But everything that I’ve written, that I’m remotely happy with, is something where the voices have taken over and made it work. With the new play, too, the voices took over. For me, the most enjoyable phase of writing has always been to just lean back and listen to what the voices are telling me.

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that you’re a very good playwright and that you would find playwriting easier than writing a novel.

Definitely. I didn’t think about it until recently, but a lot of writers that I find inspiring are often writers who change back-and-forth between writing prose and plays. Cortázar for example and P.O. Enquist, they are both very voice-driven. One can argue that all writers are voice-driven, but I think that the writers that I really like are more concerned with trying to find rhythm or an internal order to a certain voice, rather than to transmit a certain story.

Someone asked me if a good memory is important to becoming a good writer. I think a lot of writers that I like tend to be more focused on having a good rhythm than on having a good memory. I’ve never been very impressed by writers who try to impress me with their good memory. You know what I mean?

You’ve told me before that you’re sort of face-blind. Do you think that has made you more audio-centered?

What I’ve heard is that a lot of people who have a really bad sense of faces are really good readers. I don’t know if I’m just saying this to comfort myself and if my source for this is Fox News or something … Maybe it’s just a feeling that if you’re bad with faces you need to read a lot of words for things to make sense. Or maybe it’s the fact that you read so many words that you become obnoxious and uninterested in people’s faces, haha. I don’t know what it means.

But I’ve always been very audio-focused. I dare you to one day meet me without these (he lifts the headphones that hang casually over his shoulders). You will never have seen me without my headphones since I was maybe 12. I literally don’t think I’ve stepped out of my apartment without them; I always, always have them.

Why?

Because I constantly feel the need to add something to boring, everyday life. It’s not enough to just walk down DeKalb Avenue and enjoy the sunshine. I need to have that perfect “enjoy the sunshine”-song to make it, you know, extra. It’s very internal. It’s my feeling of being in the very right position, of being where I’m supposed to be.

But it’s also a way of putting a filter, a distance, between yourself and the world.

Exactly. In a way it’s making the outside world count less. You can say that you add something to life by adding a soundtrack, but at the same time you’re also blocking a lot of things out. Maybe that’s what I’m kind of doing in writing. You have to block out certain things in order to be able to continue with this strange job.

I understand that your writing process is also very intense and solitary?

In periods, yes, but they’re also the phases I enjoy most in life. Every time I enter a phase where I know that “Wow, I’m going to be just writing the next couple of months,” that’s one of my happiest moments. I’m very happy now too, but I think those moments are the reason why I keep doing it. Like at the beginning of the summer when I realized that I had four months of just entering into my brain and trying different weird stuff out.

You also distance yourself geographically. You write a lot about Stockholm and Sweden, but you travel to all these big cities – Paris, Berlin, New York – to do it. How come?

I see myself as a very provincial writer. I’m not the kind of writer who has social, anthropological ambitions to go somewhere else. My memories and my background are extremely important for my writing. I think I was reminded of that when I came home from Berlin after spending two years there. I realized the amount of inspiration that I always get from memories. I used to have this strange idea that I could go anywhere and just make stuff up, but I don’t think I’m that kind of writer.

Further Links & Resources

credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

• Visit Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s website – Khemiri.se – for more information on his plays, fiction, lectures, links to what inspired the work, and more.
• Interested in exploring Khemiri’s writing further, but your Swedish is a bit rusty? Consider picking up a copy of the English translation of Montecore from your local indie bookseller.
• Watch a short video about the original English debut of Invasion! at The Play Company in New York, here.
• Read the New York Times profile of Jonas Hassen Khemiri from September, which describes the Obie-winning play in these terms:

If Caryl Churchill, Franz Kafka and Ali G were to goof around one night and play their music too loud until the Department of Homeland Security came knocking on their door, they might emerge (eventually) the next morning holding something like the script to Invasion!

Jonathan Lethem is one of a very small number of contemporary writers who can be considered household names, even in houses not inhabited by novelists. And for good reason. Lethem has written eight novels, three collections of stories, two books of essays, and has contributed to dozens of edited anthologies, journals and magazines, garnering as many awards along the way. But you knew that already, from your household.

In March, 2011, Lethem was the Zell Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Michigan, and I had the opportunity to interview him over breakfast one morning. Now here’s the rub: Jonathan Lethem has talked about everything. A quick Google search will reveal his patient and thoughtful responses to such varied interview questions as “…is relativism your philosophical stance?” and “Do you find incessant rain, like that which at the moment has us hiding and scurrying, defeating or oddly comforting?”

Despairing of finding an incisive question about his work that he has not already addressed somewhere online, I decided instead to follow up on tidbits he’d mentioned during his visit to our program, especially those I found of particular interest to us MFA-types. And also, as a displaced Brooklynite, I indulged in some banter about my favorite city in the world with the writer who captures it like no one else can. (Read on to find out how New York is akin to a “giant Ponzi scheme.”) Lethem is, after all, New York’s most notable exile.

Interview

Roohi Choudhry: I wanted to start by talking about your “Promiscuous Stories” project and the related Harper’s essay that seems to be at the core of the upcoming collection of essays you’ve mentioned, The Ecstasy of Influence.

Jonathan Lethem: Yes, although it’s maybe deceptive. That essay is at the center of this new book, it gives it its title. And the spirit of that essay from the perspective of the writer who collaged it together—this sort of magpie approach to culture—pervades the whole book. But the subject of what you might say “copy-left” gestures, including my own copy-left gesture of creating that “Promiscuous Materials” project, really doesn’t come up, except in one very brief section about the writing of that essay itself.

The “Promiscuous Materials” are funny. I keep wanting to point out to people that, along with the many things I’ve done that are not original—that’s another one of them! Writers give things away all the time. A painter or playwright friend might take inspiration or directly adapt something that their writer friend does and say, “Do you mind?” And the writer says, “No.” I didn’t invent giving things away. All I did was point to it; I put a name on the gesture and bragged about it a lot and created the website.

On the whole, my experience with having written that essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” and having made those gestures—I ended up for a little while being one of these copy-left advocates who goes around talking about this all the time. It was interesting for a little while and then I felt that the people who were convinced got it. I admire people who can devote themselves to advocacy—it’s a teaching role, to reorganize people’s thinking or open up people’s access to information again and again along the same few lines. I do it in teaching, but there I do it about the aesthetics of fiction. Making stories. That I could talk about forever. The fact that I believe that copyright laws are dumb, is something I find I’m not actually interested in talking about forever.

The thing that interested me about this project is also about the aesthetics of fiction, though. I’m interested in how it connects with what we were talking about earlier this week: the idea of a kind of pre-professionalism becoming more rampant with MFA culture. We’re in an MFA program, but we’re also aware of the limitations and problems with that. And so, even though this collaborative impulse is not an original thing, even if it’s been done for all time, I wonder if some of that is now changing because of this pre-professionalism, becoming professionals [as writers] earlier, as we all in this community compete with each other for the same goals.

This, I would say, points to something that is much wider than the sphere of writing, per se, or even the arts. And that is the business paradigm, the capitalist vocabulary where everything is a zero-sum, competitive, Darwinian struggle for bottom-line success. It’s this disease in our culture in every way. It affects the way people think about things like the education of little children, or their own participation in the social arena, or even in family life. The business model pervades everything. When I was growing up, it wasn’t obligatory that every news story, every situation be followed by the “marketplace” equivalent—“Okay, now what will this mean for the stock market?” The fact that the New Yorker has a page of market analysis trivia every week. Or a writer like Malcom Gladwell, who basically writes about how social and aesthetic and interpersonal experience can be quantified and commodified. His specialty is showing you the business paradigm underlying all sorts of apparently non-commodifiable situations.

[Malcolm Gladwell, on spaghetti sauce]

The dominant nonfiction writer at the New Yorker when I was a kid was John McPhee, who wrote about rocks.

This ideology—and it is an ideology—is really, really potent. It overwrites all other ways of looking at experience. And it has to be assiduously battled, rolled back, from areas that are precious to you, in order that you can even see them clearly and dwell in them in good faith. So when you talk about pre-professionalism in MFA programs, or competition, I don’t think, “Oh gosh, MFA programs are so corrupt.” I think, “How tragic to hear of another description, which is basically the same larger description of things being looked at only through that lens.” It’s the only language that the culture validates for evaluating things. It’s as though anything else would be like magical thinking. Ideals like the commons, that’s not esoteric or religious or magical. That’s another framework being squeezed out by the ideals of privatization and commodity.

But to look at the truth of an arts culture—it’s the realm of participation in a commons, where only some gestures can be successfully commoditized. And even then in a very scattershot and unsystematic way. The irony of talking about pre-professionalism, of course, is that it’s so peculiar to even talk about the life of a very successful writer, critically or commercial, as though they were a professional: credentialized, with a systematic approach to their success that really mimics the professions. Because it’s not a professional realm. It’s a kooky, eccentric, individual realm of different kinds of stances and attitudes and results utterly inconsistent even within the experience of a single writer. Let alone something you can take: “Oh, I’ll model how that writer is doing it and do it precisely that way.”

There’s this Writer’s Digest world where you’re supposed to professionalize and learn how to stuff the envelopes just the right way and make sure you always have seven stories out in the mail at any given time. It’s very poignant and not evil in any way. It’s quite charming and human: the urge to find some kind of industrious beaver-ish approach to becoming a published writer or managing your career once you’ve broken in with some articles. But that Protestant work ethic aspect of it is very silly in a lot of ways, too.

I like that you mention the Protestant work ethic. It feels particularly relevant because the MFA is such an American phenomenon to begin with. There are a few programs elsewhere now, but the idea is still so uniquely American, in some ways.

I’m a funny case in that I’m a grotesque workaholic. I do have my kind of practical side. I approach my own work with a constant attitude of demystification: this is a set of tasks, let’s just do this and break it down. So, in one sense, I happen to reflect an apparent devotion to the idea of writing as industry. But in my belief system, as opposed to my behavior, I think it’s a misunderstanding that what I’m doing, or what any of us are doing, is worth doing because it’s productive or redemptive or will be remunerative or edifying for others. It’s an area of deliciously useless—it’s a cultural realm. It’s a conversation. It’s a game and it’s joyous and it’s diverting and can be unexpectedly rich. It’s bottomless for me; I’ve fallen into it as if plummeting through a bottomless chasm of fascination and experience.

It’s taught me everything I know – caring about books, writing them, talking about them, has become a life. But I’m not working in an assembly line manufacturing cars, nor am I a doctor curing cancer. Which is not to devalue what I do but to say, it simply has some different aspects. Art-making, cultural participation exist outside of the realm of the utilitarian world, and have to be looked at differently and talked about differently.

I think that’s a really useful way to frame it, especially for those of us at a program.

And also, writers as apprentices, and afterward as well, have to remember this aspect of play, mischief, freedom, that detaches from the idea of responsibility or usefulness. If, at some point the results [are like] “last night a DJ saved my life;” if at some point, I talked someone back from a ledge, or made someone treat another human being more sensitively. I’m not renouncing a potential received-use value in my work, although it would be a difficult kind to predict or quantify. But to work as though the reason it’s okay to spend your time locked in a room alone making up stories about imaginary people is because you’re helping humanity—you’re going to make crappy, crappy art and probably be miserable, too. Because the suspicion that you couldn’t have picked a less direct way to help humanity will be creeping up over you and making you feel guilty all the time. That remorse will destroy your confidence. You have to disenchant that nonsense. The problem is that, in a culture that is so Protestant-work-ethic, people have a great deal of trouble accepting that they’ve chosen a path of less contribution than putting their shoulder to raising the barn.

In some ways, it’s an immigrant work ethic, belonging to the new world. Because–you’re forming a new society, what are you doing for this new society? That pressure seems constant.

I think that’s true. Absolutely. It’s the American story, and it’s a very interesting one, very entrancing, which is why everyone reflects it. Not only naïve people; everyone feels this. It’s intense. Even I, growing up inside a hippie, bohemian, outsider perspective; my parents were also engaged with the Protestant work ethic in their different ways. Even if they sometimes seemed to be engaged by flying in the teeth of it. They were both, in different ways, dropouts in the mainstream. It was still a narrative that was hugely a part of their lives.

So, this goes together with busting up the present corporate, business paradigm, which is an even newer and more pernicious thing.

But underneath, it is this older story that provides its foundation. And that’s this utilitarian conceit: that art is okay to do because it can be somehow framed as a very productive or helpful human activity.

Because it’s enriching!

Yes, and people have misunderstood me in the past, and thought I was making a cry for a decadent perspective—very rarified and elitist art-for-art’s sake—that somehow seems an insult to the democratization of art, or an insult to the people who feel they have received use-value [from art]. I believe in the received use-value of art all the time. It’s saved my life a hundred times over. But not because the person who made it was thinking: “I’ve got to save that young man’s life!” That’s not how that happens.

And that can cause really un-complex decisions in making one’s art.

Or unnecessarily complex ones. Pretentious ones. Both. All sorts of bad art can come out of that.

What you say about art saving your life speaks to my next question. Because we were talking about the idea of subcultures earlier this week. I don’t want to cannibalize your lecture [“What I Learned at the Science Fiction Convention”] tomorrow too much. So less about conventions. But in that general context, I wanted to talk about the idea of finding subcultures as a refuge from alienation, and relating that to writing. Something you said in another interview made me think about this. You said that, most of the time, in your books, “language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone.”  Which made me think of Essrog [the Tourette’s-afflicted protagonist of Motherless Brooklyn] and how he’s always touching people, kissing people, reaching constantly for something to fill that void. His language overflow seems to make up for an alienation, something missing. And I wonder how language and writing, and characters, have provided a mode of contact for you, in terms of finding, touching a subculture or community?

Ironically, you couldn’t know this, but you are cannibalizing my lecture, because that’s where I end up in that sequence I’ll read. For tomorrow night, I’ve put together some different parts of the essay book into one confessional essay about this yearning to connect that underlies the writing act. You just completely paraphrased a big chunk of it, in a way.

In that case, we can move on!

No, no, it’s great to talk about. There’s a peculiarity of the writer both feeling special or different from other people in some inchoate way, not always in a grandiose way, maybe feeling very inferior or alienated, but—apart. And, choosing then to deepen this situation, in a way, by the life procedure of writing, which is very isolating. To go away and to do this. We’re fundamentally social creatures, we’re born into families, we’re in a social context instantly. We’re not solitary selves to begin with. And that continues, we’re mostly creatures that understand ourselves in our tribes and in our families and in environments of others. It’s a pretty big strain on that experience to go away from the tribe as often as you need to, to begin to write and continue to write. It’s really uncomfortable.

In some ways, the MFA has become our tribe.

Sure, it’s another version of that. So again, you’re anticipating me because then the fact is, what do you do when you go off to this place? You think about the people you’ve taken yourself apart from and you make up stories about imaginary versions of people. You’re participating in a secret tribalism. And the world of books is a strange kind of surrogate social reality. I experienced it that way: as an enormous engine of loneliness-destruction, these lives that were speaking to me through the voices of novels and stories. The authors and the characters were this incredible reality of a social conversation that I was entranced by. That simultaneously took me out of daily life—my immediate physical opportunities of social connection—and replaced it with this vast, historical, exalted, strange, other conversation. But it was and it wasn’t simultaneously a replacement for what was being sacrificed.

And my own writing becomes another door back into the world. I wanted to speak back to those books. I wanted to have commerce with them. That was my strongest impulse: not to impress myself or others or to save lives, but to join the company, in a sense, of these voices. And just be among them. Gain a voice in a realm where a child struggles to acquire speech, and then the writer struggles to be audible to the world of books that he adores. It’s like your parents—a vast library of parents and you want to be heard by them. So I’ve always seen it in a social context.

But I’ve also always seen it as: this is my special chance, as a kid born into subcultures, very specifically. The fact that I had more than one made me really see, early on, the power and the function, and understand my attraction to them, and also my diffidence about them. Because I was simultaneously but never completely: a hippie, a Jew, a Quaker, an artist, and a New Yorker. And I was a weird kind of New Yorker, because Brooklyn is a subcultural identity in relation to the mainstream of New York City—to Manhattan.

And then there’s the Star Wars watched-twenty-one-times subculture.

Oh, that’s the subculture of one—fool. But actually, it’s quite relevant because, when I bumped into the fact that there was a science fiction subculture which I was completely unaware of, it was really like Columbus bumping into Puerto Rico. I was nineteen when I first gathered that there were people who organized themselves socially according to reading those books. I was just reading the books. I read a lot of science fiction, but I didn’t know there was a behavior.

Was that at college?

Yeah. I’d gone to one comic book convention as a teenager. So I’d glimpsed that there was a fan culture around comic books. But it was actually when I was 21 or 22 that I went to a science fiction convention. The fact is that I found it absurd and totally delightful at the same time because I found so many people interested in things I was interested in, and so persistently thought they were interested in the wrong ways. But good enough. Nobody’s subcultures are perfect.

And it was only many, many years later that I [understood] so much of my attraction to it, and so much of my distressing way of behaving in that situation to myself and others. I wasn’t being mean or drinking a lot—I mean I was always talking about how we should dissolve the subculture. Which isn’t actually what subcultures want to do! I thought that was the goal. I was like: “I want to make science fiction more normal.” And they were all actually horrified by that.

But it had to do with my own attraction and responsiveness to subcultures in general which was: to want to show them how they’re really just part of the human tribe. Or have their ideals disseminate. You know, the way the hippies were supposed to change everything and hadn’t managed to. I had found my new hippies! So I have a very strange fascination with and incompetent use of subcultures. I’m very drawn to them, and I’m very perplexed by the tribal reinforcements that they impose. The resistance to transmissions in or out from the outside world.

Interesting. As writers, we feel alienated and isolated, so are drawn to subcultures. But then we want them to be more like what we were running away from in the first place.

Yeah I think these conflicts are built in. I think it has a lot to do with American identity, which is this giant incoherent idea or set of ideals that can’t be resolved in a unified way. It can only be resolved sub-culturally. That’s why I include New York as one of the subcultures that I’ve experienced. People are understandably very fixated on New York’s arrogance and myopia. And these things are true. But also, growing up inside that world, I know how vulnerable and naïve and fearful of “elsewhere” you can be as a New Yorker. That it is a self-reinforcing sub-cultural identity of a certain sense. You know, that famous New Yorker cover image of Manhattan, where you see Tenth Avenue and Eleventh Avenue and Twelfth Avenue, and then the Hudson River, and then the vast plain with a few specks of light on it. One very familiar interpretation of that, and the dominant one, is that this shows the solipsism and narcissism of New York. But it also describes a helplessness and naïvete: “what IS out there?” It’s terror. New Yorkers can’t drive and they have to be proud of that, because there’s no other option but to act as though it’s a wonderful thing. But that’s helplessness and dysfunction.

So this is another version of sub-cultural brandishing your difference and even your weakness as your badge, your emblem. And I think a lot of American life resolves into certain versions of subculture. The people I know in rural Maine will say to me, “Not only have I never been to New York but I would never wish to go.” It’s just an inconceivable world. Well, Mainers don’t go to conventions where they wear nametags that say “I’m from Maine and my name is such-and-such.” But they are also participants in a sub-cultural identity as Mainer—specifically, this flinty, caustic, sea-salty, coastal Maine identity is a subculture. It may not have as many love beads as being a hippie, and it wouldn’t be very willing to see itself in the framework I’m proposing as analogous to MFA programs. But it’s another kind of sub-cultural choice that’s been made.

There are only subcultures, in a way, is what I’m saying, and then an idea of a whole or outside. Even “mainstream” literary authority—let’s just say, to be able to isolate more or less what we mean—the people who are routinely asked to write reviews for the New York Times Book Review and therefore, and let’s please understand that it is therefore, guaranteed that their own books will be reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, among whom I will now number myself. As hegemonic and oppressive as the assumptions that go with that, the degree to which that subculture has the privilege and utilizes the privilege of pretending there are no other literary cultures besides itself, it’s also still a subculture, where social reinforcements and tribal ritual prevail. And where a limited number of people are executing maneuvers amongst one another as though it is a whole world, but it’s not.

But then, the “weakness worn as a badge” idea is a less relevant sub-cultural idea there. Or maybe then, it’s a weakness as compared to Wall Street, or something.

Well, this is a very interesting question. What you then have is a ritual hand-wringing over the death of the novel, or the death of publishing. Which is a kind of a bogus victim-identity to substitute for or to basically blur the power assumptions of their privilege—or our privilege. Which is why I think those narratives are such fetishes. You know, that the novel has always just suddenly died, and publishing has always just suddenly extinguished itself. Because then you can mourn your loss of power, status, value, relevance, and that becomes your version of stigma or crisis. It’s crisis as identity politics. If you’re not, let’s say, Black or Asian or Transgendered, you can be a hurt, deposed king. I mean, that’s why I hate all the movies about the poor little royalty, because it’s this fetish.

Poor little royalty?

The King’s Speech. Our culture’s willingness to play certain games about exalting privilege and power by always finding ways to fill it with sympathy. It’s like the novel is equivalent to British royalty. Or, like we all have to clap our hands to keep Tinkerbell alive, because it would be so sad to see the mighty fall. And I just think, if the only good thing about the novel any more is that we remember how great it was, and we would be sorry and feel bad for it if it didn’t still feel great, then let it die. Let Tinkerbell die. That’s not why I cherish it.

So, I wanted to track back a bit to the idea of New York as a subculture. I find interesting this idea of “different New Yorks,” the many subcultures within it. There’s that E.B. White passage about the three kinds of New Yorkers—the native, the commuter, and the settler. I think it was up in the subway for a while. I’m curious about how you see yourself and your work fitting into that kind of system; the different ways those identities maybe interact in your work.

I don’t have a lot of useful observations about how the culture of New York works as a whole because I have experienced it in such a miniaturist’s perspective, and so subjectively, and it’s been so different for me at different times in my life. I found myself writing about the idea, the projections of Manhattan, in Chronic City. But it still doesn’t equate to an E.B White-style diagnosis of the functions of that great city over time. It was more, for me, like trying to freeze a single impression basically of Manhattan in 2004, on the edge of the re-election of George Bush, and with the trauma of 9/11 settling very uneasily into the background, as the financial engine of the city revived. Of course, we now know that it was only reviving to crash precipitously.

In fact, my freeze-frame image of 2004 in retrospect becomes an image of a city in a delusory lull between the two traumas of 9/11 and the coming financial collapse. And that was enough: to try to think about: what I felt and saw in the life of Manhattan and some Manhattanites, and the city’s idea of itself. Or its avoidance of an idea of itself. Its will to be amnesiac, its will to erase reality in favor of a dream of privilege and glamour and decadence. That was enough to try to contend with. That was easily a 700-page novel. To try to think about very much more than that little freeze-frame is too much for me. I don’t have the capacity. That’s what I’ll say about my writing about Brooklyn, the most serious attempt obviously being The Fortress of Solitude: that I basically just took one grainy photograph of a certain block in Brooklyn on a certain summer day in 1973, and blew it up and blew it up, and looked harder and harder at it to try and fathom what I felt. And what it meant and what its implications were and how it got that way. And what about it could be sustained, and what about it was unsustainable. But it doesn’t mean that I understood Brooklyn historically. Even Brooklyn is much too big, much too conflicted, much too various.

Right, and I ask that question, even though it’s sort of unanswerable, because I’m coming from a completely settler perspective to New York, such a different New York from your books, which is partly why I was initially drawn to your work.

Well, the paradox of New York is captured in an interesting way in this conversation. Because, of course, there’s the yearning for a notion of authenticity and provenance. And I end up walking around with that credential, having accidentally printed out that credential, as having “street-cred” in some way; deep, inside knowledge. But my parents were arrivers in Brooklyn. Contrary to the widely-disseminated lie, I wasn’t even born in Brooklyn. I was born in Manhattan, then lived in Kansas City for a while. The fact is, New York is defined in many ways by the newer arrivals. The “natives” are often bystanders as New York is being enacted or reenacted or redefined by very new immigrants. Whether at the level of the desperate and hungry immigrant looking for a foothold in the new world. Or the “Euro-trash,” the privileged occupants from afar who come to make this fantasy place their fantasy place. And also, in the middle between those two extremes, the arriving artist class. The ultimate New Yorker is someone like Dawn Powell or Andy Warhol or Truman Capote. Who comes from the provinces, seizes this place, makes it their own, defines it. Because they recognize themselves in it, and could never imagine living anywhere else.

I’m the inversion of that. I grew up there, and I often can’t imagine living in New York. I run away from it compulsively. I don’t think that I’m as true a New Yorker in a funny sense as Andy Warhol, or my wife, who came there from St. Louis and fell in love with it and felt that this is the only place where the world was the way she’d grown up hoping it might be. That’s New York. It belongs to the arrivers. We sort-of natives, we children of New York, are more often its perplexed bystanders.

That’s essentially what E.B. White is saying in the passage. It’s interesting, and I suppose it’s what I want to believe, but aesthetically it seems definitely to belong to you.

Oh, I’m very much of the place, and I think about it all the time. But it belongs to whomever seizes it at the instant. It’s a place that’s not about provenance. It’s about the present and the future. This is probably something of an oversimplification and historians could pick it apart, but I feel that if you want to look at real historical meaning, New York is the first secular city. It’s the first city built by enterprise and ideas and deal-making, as opposed to by some national or religious or authoritarian settlement. The defining moment in the founding of New York City as a place was the Dutch letting the Jews get in. And they didn’t do that because they liked the Jews. They did that because New York wasn’t sacred to them and the Jews were going to make useful deals. They were going to amp up the commerce.

That decision is characteristic of New York. It’s replenished by avaricious, opportunistic growth-models. So now—here I am ending up with business language, which is just what I said [at the start] we had to overthrow; that we have to defeat business language. But New York, for better and worse—and I think for both—is a business place. And also, an illusion place. A fantasy-of-business place. It’s the center of Wall Street and of Madison Avenue. The literal core of the idea of the dream factory, of selling the sizzle not the steak. It’s virtual reality before virtual reality. It’s a place of projections. But not the projections of religious authority, or the power of kings, or the purity of nations. It’s a place of: “Come here if you can make the projection bigger. We’ll let you in, you weird people.” Because the deal is going to get bigger. It’s a Ponzi scheme, you know: “Keep ‘em coming in, we need more punters, we need more buyers, we need more sellers.”

New York is a huge Ponzi scheme?

Yeah.

That’s great. What are you working on now?

I’m writing about Queens, that’s my novel in the background. Soon as I finish the neatening-up work on this big, crazy essay book, I’m going to get back to it. I’ve got 150 pages, I’m just underway, of a book that’s another New York book. I guess, in some ways, if I was going to make a very crass blurb for it, I’d say it’s like a girl’s Fortress of Solitude. It’s my mother’s world in Queens and Greenwich Village in the fifties and sixties. But then, it will stumble forward all the way to the present.

There are a lot of historical moments in the book. And some are the first time I’ve ever written something that tries to convey a mimetic authority, the classic naturalist authority over time periods I didn’t live through myself. That’s different for me. I had to do a lot of research to write about the seventies in The Fortress of Solitude, but I was researching stuff that my own senses had apprehended. I was just fleshing it out, confirming stuff, intuitions, reminding myself of what I already knew, really.

Can you talk about your process of doing that historical research?

You know, it’s weird. I was joking [earlier in the interview] about how silly it is to accuse of any writer of professionalism. I end up buying a lot of books that I don’t read. My research is often talismanic. I just surround myself with the possibility of knowing things, and then I guess about them instead. So I spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on very difficult-to-find books about the political and social dichotomy of New York City and the outer boroughs specifically. Communists in Queens and labor unions in Canarsie. And then, they’re way too boring to read.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who does that.

What I often find—I guess this is a very Ecstasy of Influence thing to say—is that the best way into the mind of another American era for me, to really just make myself believe that I could feel and think like a character at the time, is to read a lot of novels from that time. Tremendous number of contemporary novels. Sometimes the same couple over and over again.

What are you reading for this project?

Well, I’m reading Norman Mailer. He’s very important to this book. I’m reading memoirs by radicals from that era, the waning days of New York communism. So, Vivan Gornick. I found an assortment of mostly out-of-print novels that capture some part of that milieu. Not famous books. And not always the kind of books that you think are unjustly out of print. You can understand why they’re not in print.

Are you someone who likes those processes to be simultaneous? The creating and the research?

Yes, because it’s too anxious and pedantic-feeling to just sit and read books and hold off the writing. You don’t know what you need to know anyway until you’re working. Somebody said: build the car out of the parts you have. Start going at it. You might have to stop and grab another part at some point, but start driving the car. Start driving the car.

Spend more time with Jonathan Lethem:

It was almost exactly a year ago that I first read Bruce Machart’s novel, The Wake of Forgiveness. Two colleagues of mine had returned from the Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller’s Conference in Denver, Colorado, abuzz about a young new author who had appeared on the literary scene, as if out of thin air. His debut, they claimed, was remarkable. Advanced reading copies appeared and were passed around, but I initially kept a safe distance on account of an innate resistance to all books praised lavishly. When I did get around to reading The Wake of Forgiveness, which I felt compelled to do because its author was visiting Salt Lake City, I was thunderstruck (and I use this expression without any possible sense of guilt over the use of hyperbole).  Machart’s prose was hard, economic, and had a razor-fine edge. The first six pages, alone, were crushing, and left me feeling run through, utterly bereft. The brutal physicality of the book confidently rivals anything written by Cormac McCarthy but, miraculously, just beneath its unyielding exterior, like a whisper in an empty room, lies a numinous spirituality, the subtle luminescence of the human condition, and it is the balance between these two elements that makes The Wake of Forgiveness such an exquisite book.

There is a good deal of anticipation for Machart’s forthcoming collection of short stories, Men in the Making, out on October 25^th. Although comparing short stories to a novel is something akin to comparing peas to carrots, it was a relief to see some of the same hard prose in the shorter pieces. The stories, like the novel, seem to deal with the navigation of a large indifferent world by a soul in a body. The tension between the physical body, with all its hungers and desires, and the ghost in the machine, the internal voice that has been molded by everything it has seen and done, is still, ever, an integral part of this work. In the novel, which follows two families in Dalton, Texas, one father, Villaseñor, is hungry for a long lasting family dynasty, while another, Vaclav Skala, is hungry for land, the Skala boys are starving for affection, and Karel, his youngest son, longs for absolution.

In Machart’s short story, “What You’re Walking Around Without,” the character Dean Covin is always hungry for something that he can’t quite articulate. By the end of the tale, he comes to accept “that to be a man, a whole man, is to remain forever in need,” but what the reader finds in this story is a more clearly pronounced distinction between the physical and the spiritual, and the lack that the characters feel seems to stem from a disconnection between the two. Covin, it turns out, transports human organs and tissue, and even the occasional stillborn infant, but he most frequently carries female organs because “their bodies more often betray them.” These bodies have no voice. Covin, in fact, says prayers for them because they cannot speak for themselves. By way of contrast, one of the other drivers who works with Covin, a character known only as Driver eighty-two, is the precise opposite:  a voice without a body. In “Among the Living Amidst the Trees,” the body’s betrayal of the soul is most strongly manifested, particularly through the character of Glenda’s father, Tricky, who is bald from chemotherapy. His body is, quite literally, killing him.

The stories that make up Men in the Making, of course, have more to offer than an exploration of this one tension. They are, in fact, a much more complex examination of what it is to be a man in the twenty-first century, while, all the while, navigating the space between the two aforementioned poles. Machart crafts a careful meditation on our desire to protect those whom we love: our wives, our parents, our children and, were this his final conclusion, this collection would only be traversing an already well worn path. What makes these stories provocative, what gives them additional depth, is his determination that men are, ultimately, unable to save, or even protect, the people they care most deeply about, and his incisive study of the ways in which the twenty-first century male reconciles himself to this inability, while struggling to retain a sense of his own masculinity.

The Wake of Forgiveness introduced readers, last year, to a lean, highly intelligent prose artist of the first order. Men in the Making shows us that Machart is equally adept working with the short story form which, by his own admission, is both his point of departure and first love. I’m always hesitant, though, to oversell a book. Much can go wrong. In this case, I have little fear of readers building unrealistic expectations, particularly where The Wake of Forgiveness is concerned. The short stories, striking as they are, had little chance of equaling Machart’s startling debut novel but are, all the same, worth the reader’s investment. My real fear in lavishing praise is that the author will think that I’d either like to borrow his car or that I’m full of shit. I was able to dispel both suspicions, and to talk candidly with Machart about his work the night of his visit to Salt Lake City and, on and off, afterward.

Interview

Aaron Cance: I think a good point of departure in our discussion of your work would be the keen interest demonstrated in both the novel and in your short stories in exploring our bifurcated existence.  You seem very much drawn to explore the tenuous balance that we all must maintain between our physical existence and the beings that seem to exist within, and yet somehow beyond, our physicality.

Bruce Machart: That seems fair to me. Eudora Welty called place the “lesser angel” of fiction, by which she meant, I must assume, that character is the arc-angel. For me, it seems that you can’t really have one without the other.

And as your characters grow and change, as they evolve, they all seem to find themselves navigating, as they are best capable, the uncharted space between these two aspects of being.

Feelings, reactions to conflicts, thoughts – all of them are intertwined vitally in the two places each of us inhabits at once: where we are now and where we are from.

Which is what gives your character Karel Skala such extraordinary depth. Your choice to stage the narrative in three distinct periods of Karel’s life allows your readers to follow his development with a keener understanding of important past events that have shaped him than might have been possible with a single, continuous fictional timeline.

I hope that’s true. I think the structure of the novel has given some readers fits, but it came to me rather instinctively (unlike so much of what I do), and with very few exceptions, the reader discovers the characters’ dramatic present and history in much the same way I did.

So Karel became more and more fully realized in the three different time periods of the book simultaneously, developing, in each of these periods, uniquely, with fidelity to who he was at that point in his life.

Once I realized how and why I’d structured the book that way I had, I went back [to each piece] to ensure a kind of three-part narrative arc. I hope that it works to instill, in the novel, the kind of time-bound conflict that Karel experiences.

A friend and mentor of yours, Melanie Rae Thon, at the University of Utah, in a description of character development process, once explained to me that she thought of her characters as very real people, that as a work progressed she became better and better acquainted with them. She was able to discover them as she worked. You seem to have created three variations of Karel simultaneously, which sounds inordinately more difficult than simply fleshing out a character, simply creating someone.

Steinbeck once wrote that “a good writer always works toward the impossible.” To me, the evocation of the complex and instrumental and numerous intersections of our exterior and interior landscapes is one of those “impossibilities” that we must try, knowing we will likely fail, to render faithfully.

In a great many places in the novel, you seem to have emphasized a brutal and inescapable physicality in your characters. In some places it manifests itself through circumstances in which they take on the roles of animals, such as the scene where the Skala boys are actually strapped to the plow, as beasts of burden, while their father digs along behind them. In other places, simple parallels are created. Sophie, for example, is described as “a good woman [who] . . . endured the indiscretions the way a good horse will endure shoeing and hard harness work.” Are these narrative devices used as counterweights to the book’s more spiritual underpinnings?

You know, I don’t really know. This seems to me to be more the kind of detail-oriented inquiry that I think is better left to readers to make. Who was it that said that we should trust the art, not the artist? That always seemed like good advice to me.

I have heard that expression, although I couldn’t tell you who coined it. I guess you would lean more, then, toward Roland Barthes’ notion that the author/artist ceases to give meaning to the work when it leaves his or her hands, and lands in the hands of the reader?

I do, but that sounds as if there is some finality to the author’s role. There is, I think, but only after the reader has turned the final page. I have made some mistakes, undoubtedly, negligence of research, and the like.

Well sure, at some point, your involvement in the work, as a piece of art, comes to a complete end.

Right. Once the book becomes a product, and someone pays for that product and takes it home, my opportunity to shape it has passed. And that’s exactly as it should be. If the book works, one would hope that it works on numerous levels, that it “contains multitudes,” but I have to accept the probability that, for some, there may be impediments, entirely of my making, to the suspension of disbelief that may prevent even the first reading.

It really must be a bit disconcerting, as a published writer, to trust that you’ve “stoked the coals” of the book enough that readers will find what you’d like them to.

It worries me to some extent, this notion that I may have failed. I certainly may have on some level. I think that it’s all but unavoidable because of the nature of the form.

But what is important is that some arc of narrative transmission has taken place, some direct transmission has taken place between you and your readers. You have created a strong, energetic piece of art that you can set free in the world.

If you don’t mind, I’d really like unpack the notion of physicality in your work a little further. I think that the places in both your novel and your collection of short stories where your characters are behaving most like animals, these places really hold a mirror up to that part of our nature.

I think that’s right. What I really do believe is that we have too much of a sense of our own superiority in the world of beasts, in the physical world, in a world that is far greater than our ability to understand it.

These characters remind us that, at the end of the day, we are not as refined as we might think we are.

But that is what we are. We are highly evolved animals. But, that being said, I do believe that these [experiential] moments are a function of what I said earlier: a farm boy, a farmer, a rural woman—all of these will likely see the world around them, and the worlds within them, vis-à-vis the landscape in which they live.

The men in the novel seem to rear their children the same way they would train a horse. An untrained horse must be broken, then nurtured.

In regard to this, I really appreciate what one reader has said, that the Skala boys are literally tethered to the earth. This is the kind of metaphorical nuance that comes when I write, largely, from the subconscious . . . which seems to me the well from which I draw most of my better scenes and sentences.

In more than one place in The Wake of Forgiveness, the relationship between fathers and sons pivots on the whip. Karel and his brothers are strapped into the plow harness and are actually lashed to work, and to the land. For Karel, the whip is “the closest he ever gets to his father’s touch.” Shortly after the Skala/Dalton race is over, Patrick Dalton, infuriated at his loss, borrows Skala’s whip to use on his own son. This Father/Son relationship that is realized through the whip, and the sense of sacrifice that lies beneath the surface seems, to me, to have religious underpinnings. You spoke to that when we were out, after your reading.

I was raised a Catholic, and I am still a practicing, if sometimes failed and hesitant, Catholic. Some of that conflicted appreciation for things sacramental and ritualistic have found their way, probably unconsciously, into the work.

So there is an interconnectedness between the subconscious well that you draw from and your own conscious beliefs.

There always has been, for me. My stories, too, find these thematic gasses bubbling to the surface from the submerged bedrock of my faith and my own questions about faith. The whips in the story aren’t conscious symbols of flagellation or the Passion, but I wouldn’t guess that that particular reading is anything other than valid, nonetheless.

Some of the short stories in Men in the Making are also about fathers and sons. In “What You’re Walking around Without,” Dean Covin and John Dalton have a tenuous father/son relationship and “We Don’t Talk That Way in Texas” explores some of the more difficult aspects of the father/son relationship through three generations. In “The Last One Left in Arkansas,” the story revolves around Tom’s relationship with his wife and two boys, and, returning to the notion of animal parallels, the Labradors, Bo and Luke, are shadow images of Tom’s boys in the story, Mattie and Nate, and the two dogs share as close a bond as the boys.

We’re all raised on stories of fathers and sons, and some of the universally resonant stories of the Bible feature the dissolution and/or conflicts made manifest by these filial relationships. We are asked by our fathers, at some point, to suffer. It pains them to ask it of us, to surrender us to it, to resign themselves to witnessing it, but there’s not a reasonably self-aware person on earth who doesn’t recognize, at some point, the necessity of human suffering.

But it’s not always without its own purpose.
Certainly not. Whether it acts as the relief against which we can experience joy, or simply as the means by which we gain the humility that spawns empathy, or as the common experience that renders human experience “knowable.” As Sonny says in [James] Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” “No, there’s no way not to suffer.”

It’s an unavoidable part of the human condition. Let me ask you this: what influence do you think your own relationship with your father or with your son has had on your writing?

Father/son relationships are fraught with tension. And this does not, to my mind, preclude love or affection or strong bonds. But when I look back at my childhood, I remember how BIG my father seemed. He was physically big and capacious and omniscient and omnipresent . . . and how does a boy ever grow up to equal that? Now that I’m a father, I am struck by the way my son puts his hand palm to palm with my own, taking these measurements, and I know at least part of what he is thinking, what he’s feeling. I’m a better writer for my experiences as a father, but being a son is all you really need. Feeling small, feeling desires without any ability to satisfy them, being dependent, being egocentric in an expansive and indifferent world—this is all you need to experience to know where good stories come from. They come from longing and self-doubt. I sometimes wonder what would happen if we could protect our sons and daughters from their own desires. Would we save them or destroy them?

It’s really interesting, to me, that you’ve couched it that way. The stories in Men in the Making seem to meditate heavily on notions of what it is to be a man in today’s world. The most painful part of this meditation seems to be the realization of your male protagonists that they are unable, ultimately, to protect the ones they love from the “expansive and indifferent world” that you’ve spoken of, and their painful reconciliation with that inability.

Absolutely.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing some of the more metaphysical aspects of your writing, and of writing in general. I think what I’d really like to wrap up our time together with is a few questions about the physical mechanics of the craft. You mentioned to me, at one point, that when you signed on with Houghton Mifflin for your novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, that the deal also included your short story collection, Men in the Making, which will be released October 25. In your formative years, as a writer, did you visualize yourself as a novelist or were you primarily at work on short stories? Were the stories a form that you consider your starting point, or were the seeds of the novel already slowly germinating?

Short stories are my first love. I started fumbling around with stories because I read Eudora Welty’s story “Powerhouse,” and I wanted to know how and why it worked such magic on me. Most of the stories in Men in the Making were written before I went to work on the novel, and I’ve always found myself incapable of working on more than one project at a time. I don’t know which parts, if any, of The Wake of Forgiveness were there all along. I don’t know if I really even believe in latent stories, stories lying in wait for us to become big enough or experienced enough or insightful enough to find them. I suppose that I find self-awareness vital to personal and social development, but it’s crippling for me as a writer. If I know why the hell I’m writing a story while I’m writing it, then I can’t imagine spending the time to get it on the page. There would be no point.

Could you describe your process? Some writers work extremely methodically, and with a great deal of discipline (which no one in his or her right mind would dismiss as unimportant) reserving the same two or three hours (or more) a day for nothing but writing. Some writers are struck by periodic bursts of inspiration, and write in streaks. Most, I think, lie somewhere between these two poles. How would you describe how it works for you?

I’ve recently moved to New England, where they have these wonderful and damp and dark things called basements (no such thing in Houston), and I have a great metaphor for this: I am a sump pump. I wait while my understanding of the lives of the characters fills the unlit basement of my imagination, and then I pump it out in a few loud, violent surges. I suspect that I give my editor and agent fits when they call or email after a month has gone by, asking how a story is coming, and I tell them that I’ve made no progress. But the truth is, I’m still there . . .the pump is still plugged in the electricity is connected.  I’m down there in the dark where I belong. It’s just that there’s not yet enough water to worry about. When I was at work on The Wake of Forgiveness, I often went weeks at a time without writing even a sentence . . . but then wrote the last seventy-five pages in a little over a week’s time.

I’ll close with the question that you’ve probably heard more than any other, particularly out on the road touring for the novel. Who would you say your two or three biggest influences were? What singular gift did you receive from each of them?

Faulkner and Welty for the unapologetic lyricism and the attention to the way place inhabits character just as surely as character inhabits place; Richard Yates and Andre Dubus for their unwavering empathy for their characters . . . and my financée, Marya, who is at work on her first novel. When I come down the stairs at 5:30 am, she’s already there with the story working its way out of her and onto the page. It’s humbling. I know that I’ve done it, and know that I will do it again, but I still come down the stairs thinking, God, I wish I could do that. She teaches me, reminds me, how to want the story, how to lose oneself in it, how to surrender to it.

Are you working on a new book now?

Yes, a new novel called Until Daylight Delivers Me. There’s water in the basement. Not enough yet, but it’s rising steadily.

Further Links and Resources

>> Mary Stewart Atwell interviews Kevin Brockmeier

>> Steven Wingate interviews Andrew Krivak, whose novel has just been nominated for the National Book Award.

>> Carolyn Gan interviews Edwidge Danticat

>> Or, consider Joshua Bodwell’s essay on the problem of autobiography in Andre Dubus, one of Machart’s influences.

Watch an interview with Bruce Machart with Joe Viglione on Visual Radio: