Richard Bausch, © Mark Weber

Richard Bausch is an exacting writer. With precise language that lends a breathtaking verisimilitude to his fiction, Bausch lays the groundwork in which settings and characters—their smallest actions and passing conversations—seem not only memorable, but inevitable. Immersed in his books, you see with new clarity.

I recently had the privilege of joining him in the Moss Workshop at the University of Memphis, a model he began more than sixteen years ago. Just in time, too. He has recently accepted a position with the faculty at Chapman University in California, a post he assumes in August.

Bausch is colorful, uncensored, and opinionated—unruly, even—like someone who would (and did) leave his car idling by railroad tracks to jump a passing train. He often wears a baseball cap pulled low over his brow, beneath which his eyes have a mischievous gleam.  He’s willing, always, to try his hand at something new: the guitar, say, or stand-up comedy.  He loves theater and film, often tossing out a quick quote or recounting a salient scene. Through eleven published novels and eight collections of short stories, Bausch has proven to be not only prolific but consistently excellent, a writer whose discipline equals his passion.

Bausch’s dexterity with short stories elevates the form. His straightforward, minimalistic style doesn’t pull shazaam endings, or plot pyrotechnics. But a story like the O’Henry-winning “What Feels Like the World” chokes me with emotion every time. Using simple, direct dialogue, Bausch fixes his stories’ terrain in the mind. It’s as if he turns your head and says “There. Now look.”

Interview

Emily Besh: Who ignited your desire to write, and when did you begin to identify yourself as a writer?

Richard Bausch: I had a teacher named Helen Garson when I was in my first year of college, who looked at me after reading something I’d written and said, “You’re a Southern writer by definition with all this family stuff in here, and you’re going to be a great one, I can tell.” I lived on that for a long time—through a lot of bad times. I ended up teaching with her for twenty years, and sending my own students to her. And she got a signed copy of every book as it came out, and with every one she wrote me a lovely letter, appreciating what she found in it. A great teacher.

And there was another, Lorraine Brown, who one day when I said I didn’t think I had it in me to write one more scholarly paper, smiled at me and said, “All right then, write me a verse play, like Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea.”  That was the Yeats we were reading. She was another great one.

As to when I truly began to identify myself as a writer, it must have been when I sold the first novel. I remember going to the door and pushing it wide open and standing in it with my legs slightly apart, like a man expecting a high wind, and cupped my hands to the sides of my mouth and shouted “Listen up everybody! I’m a novelist!”

When I was a lot younger than that, I went around a lot with the suspicion that I might be a writer, afraid to think about it too directly, and feeling presumptuous and pretentious for the thought.

And of course the doubt is always heavy and never goes away, nor does the tentativeness about it ALL.

You give subtle attention to seemingly minor moments in your narratives.  How often do you find yourself saying “too much,” rather than “not enough?”

I seldom question or edit much as I’m writing. During the process of thinking about it all and trying to revise and be sharp, I go back and forth, sometimes feeling it is too much (usually in this case it is more about showing off my own skill, or giving forth the best and most flattering sense of my tender soul and my ‘bag of sorrows,’ as Frederick Busch put it once—than contributing to the reader’s visceral feeling of the events I’m describing)—sometimes feeling it is too much, and sometimes feeling it is not enough, anemic because I’ve gone past it without looking at it coldly and as a stranger might. I want there to be enough for the reader to care what happens; and I want the words to disappear, in a way, so the reader is not so much aware that he is reading. It is indeed a fine line, but when you go through it 75 times, it gets a little clearer. You’re better able to tell the difference between the anemic or slipshod, and the self-indulgent or excessive for its own sake. Everything should be subservient to the story, including all my opinions and all my attitudes and all my ambitions, too.

You hit the literary world running—your first two novels published back-to-back. Could you tell us about that?  With eleven novels and eight collections of short stories, it doesn’t seem like you’ve slowed down much.

It went like this: I sold my first novel, Real Presence, under the title, The Vineyard Keeper in early April of 1979. I was 33 years old, about to turn 34. James Dickey, having read the book, called me and suggested the title Real Presence. I didn’t like it at first, but can see now that it is the only possible title for that book. Later that summer, after experiencing the heady validation of selling the first one, and on the good advise of my pal Susan Richards Shreve, who already had two books out, I began a second novel.

I was calling that one I Don’t Care If I Never Get Back, because it began with a kid obsessed with baseball. I finished that one in early January, under the title Take Me Back. Just as I delivered that novel, news came in that Real Presence would be a Book of The Month Club Alternate Selection. And then in early June, after the book came out, it was reviewed in Time. Take Me Back was sold and in galleys before Real Presence appeared. And when in May a year later Take Me Back came out, Jane Smiley said to a mutual friend, “Maybe he’s dying, and trying to get them all out before it happens.” That’s Jane’s humor, and I laughed when I heard it.

Anyway, because the second one came so quickly, I got it into my head that I had it figured out now, and would be delivering a novel roughly every four months. Take Me Back got nominated for the PEN/Faulkner award, with a citation written by Walker Percy. I got to know him at the awards ceremony. And pretty soon I was walking around trying to write a philosophical novel a la Mr. Percy, and it was my wife, Karen, who finally called me on it, after two years of misery and four different manuscripts that I never let out of the house.

Now I don’t know what the average is, and am not inclined to use the math necessary to figure it. I do know that I have never gone longer than three years without publishing a book since 1980. And if I can finish the present novel and deliver it and have it accepted, I will publish it in 2013, probably, which keeps to the never-more-than three years pattern.

How does the germ of a story begin? Does the process still surprise you?

They come in different ways and with different matters trailing along in them. I carried “What Feels Like The World” around—the floor of it: a man and his overweight daughter, and the sorrow parents feel watching their children go into a building where they can have no immediate effect on what happens to them in there—I carried that around for a year or so, because each day for a long while I’d seen this heavy man with his overweight daughter walking up to the door of my kids’ school. There was a special bond between them. And then carrying that around as I was, that image and that sense of the helpless love I knew he felt in the circumstance, his heavy darling walking up to the door and in, where, children being as they are, she would suffer all that they both knew she would suffer the whole day long, and it was in their faces, too.

Carrying that around as I was, I happened to be at a gymnastics demonstration at that very school, where about nine of the seventy kids ran around the vaulting horse instead of going over it. (I think the heavy girl was in an earlier class, or was absent.) But of course there were other heavy kids and watching them go around the vaulting horse, I had an image of this man, this father of the heavy girl throwing a fit in the hallway of the school about his child, saying “What the hell. Everybody can do SOMETHING, can’t they? Why put her through this humiliation?” I had that picture of him shouting down the hallway of the school, and I knew then that I would write the story. Or, a story. Something to do with that helpless feeling the parent suffers when his child has to go through the badness of that kind of situation.

When I got to the end, I read the last paragraphs to my wife, who said, “You can’t leave it there.”  I read the end to some friends, all of whom said, “No, you can’t leave it there. The reader will want to know.”

So I tried like hell to render the rest of the scene, and I did it both ways. [The first], where I wrote her sailing over the vaulting horse, felt like cheating, like treacley television Hollywood cotton candy reality existing only to pander to the already asleep. The second way, where she failed to get over, felt like cheating it another way, rubbing a smart reader’s nose in it purely for the self-indulgent pleasure I could get out of what I could do with English sentences to make him squirm and hurt past the experience. So I left the end as it was and sold it to The Atlantic a couple of weeks later. And it won an O. Henry Award and I still get people who want to know if she gets over that vaulting horse.

It was after it had been in the magazine, and sometime just before it appeared in my first book of stories, that I was visiting a class my friend the poet Roland Flint was teaching and he pointed out what the story was really about: “It is soaked in grief,” he said. “And of course grief, the thing you can’t get over, is that vaulting horse.” I did not know this in the writing of it and this is why I talk so much about trying to let go of what you think and just feel your way through it like a child making that drawing, seeing it directly and without attitudes or opinions or, really, beliefs, either.

I never sketch out any plot, and will only make a note as to the next minute or so in the life of a character or some idea of where he/she’ll go in the next couple of pages, if I have some sense that I won’t be able to call it up when I sit down again. If the story does not surprise me, I do not trust it, and will usually not let it go until it does surprise me. The surprises are all the fun of it. And if you trust them enough you’ll write a lot of stuff that will please you every time you look at it for the surprises it gave you. Somehow they always stay fresh.

When you return to a scene, how do you go about adding to depth and texture?

There is a simple answer to this one, though it is difficult as hell in practice. In re-writing, along with paying attention to the writing, the sentences line by line, I also try to see if I am involving all the senses, how it feels on the skin, texture, smells, sounds, sight. All of it. And then in looking at what is said I try to make sure that every line of dialogue is doing more than one thing. That is, carrying the story forward, giving character, leaking in history and the matters that are at issue, the what’s-wrong, as it were, but keeping all this artifice from being visible to the reader. Then having worked all that, and gone over and over it, I go over it still again, looking at the writing again, the words and lines. I want all the artifice to disappear; I want everything to disappear except these people in their trouble, whatever it is. And it is always some kind of trouble because that is the province of the human story, and news of the spirit in narrative can only arrive through the abrasions of conflict. Conflict, which scrapes the barnacles from the soul and lays it bare.

What do you grow against? The classics?

Oh, yes, of course the classics—and books, books, books, all the time. Right now I’m reading Tolstoy—War And Peace for the fifth time, Anna Karenina, for the third; Kawabata—Thousand Cranes; Shakespeare—over these last five months, King Lear six or seven times, listening and reading; Romeo and Juliet four times, listening and reading; As You Like It twice, Macbeth three or four times; Hamlet four or five times; Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar; Graham Greene—The Power And The Glory for the third time; Eudora Welty—Delta Wedding; Percival Everett – Assumption; Alix Ohlin—Signs And Wonders; Trollope—The Eustace Diamonds for the first time (and I’ve been reading it for a year); and Philip Roth—Indignation, and I just finished Nemesis and Everyman.

In the workshop you once said it would be a “sin” for us not to write.  Could you elaborate?

We live in a culture that sees trying to write as some sort of indulgence of the ego, when not a plain presumption. But if you have talent for it, you are morally obligated to do it, and all one need do is look at that passage in the Bible about the ten talents: it’s where we get the word. The very word implies responsibility.

I had a dear friend, gone now, the poet Roland Flint, who called me one night crying, because he’d had this thing happen on his way home from school: he saw a little toddler on the island between two lanes of traffic. Stopped to keep him from wandering into the road. Held his hand and walked him across the street, thinking all the while about his son, Ethan, who was run over by a car and killed before his eyes twelve years earlier. The toddler’s parents came running from a house in the opposite direction of where Roland was walking the child, and the father got down on one knee and yelled at the child. “Don’t EVER go out of the house without Mommy and Daddy.” And Roland had to say, “I think he’s very frightened now.” And the parents stood there, the mother holding the child, now, and Roland went on to say, “I must tell you, I lost my son in this way, twelve years ago.” The parents said they were sorry and went on to their house and in, and Roland went, crying, back to his car, got in, drove home, wrote about the event in his journal, then wrote a poem about it, still crying, and finally called me.

He said, “To think that I could cheapen Ethan’s death by writing a goddamned poem about it. To think that I could use it in that way.” And I listened, and told him I loved him and understood, and we hung up. But then I thought about it and I called him back. “Roland, you’re supposed to write the poem. You’re morally obligated to do it. You must do it. For Ethan, and for all those people out there who don’t have the words, who’ve gone through this very thing. It’s what you’re absolutely supposed to do now.”

And he wrote his poem, “Stubborn.” And had it printed in a large picture frame, and inscribed it to me like this: “I wondered who I’d sign this first copy to, but of course should have known all along it would have to go to the Bausch who made me write it.”

It was one of my proudest possessions for all the years I was in that house in Virginia, and as far as I know, it is still on the wall there.

But that’s what it really means: the ten talents and us, who have this talent.

Further Links & Resources

• Follow Richard Bausch’s Ten Commandments for writers.
• Get Baush’s latest book, the collection Something Is Out There. [Amazon. Powell's. Indiebound.]
• Read Roland Flint’s poem “Stubborn” (scroll down to the second poem on the page).

In addition to surviving a plate of “seasoned-for-natives” kung pao chicken during his year in Wisconsin, Lysley Tenorio is also distinguished as having earned perhaps the most fellowships for emerging writers in the country. He has served as a Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy, a McCreight Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a John Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, and a resident at Yaddo and MacDowell colonies. In addition to receiving the Whiting Writers Award and the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Lysley’s work has appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Chicago Times, and Manoa. His long-awaited debut collection, Monstress, has just been released by Ecco.

A reviewer at the Los Angeles Times writes: “Tenorio’s stories, set amid mingling nationalities and generations, prompt comparisons to the works of Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri… but the refreshingly wry stories in Monstress are rangier and less concerned with documenting the specific experience of emigrating. Instead they’re focused on uncanny moments when a character realizes that something essential to his or her life might be as false and frightening as [a] bucket of blood.”

Over the course of several online conversations, Lysley and I spoke about some of his favorite celebrity alter egos (Peter Cetera, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the super powers we longed for, and occasionally, fiction.

Interview

Quan Barry: Okay, let’s get the boring stuff out of the way, i.e.: identity politics and their influence or lack thereof on your writing. As Mike Myers’s character Linda Richman might say, “You are neither white nor straight. Discuss.”

Lysley Tenorio: What about SECRET identity politics? What are the political implications of a caped crusader posing as a millionaire playboy anyway?  We’ll get Christian Bale on the case. Or better yet, Adam West. As for my identity politics? I’d say my first attempt at writing short stories—way back during my senior year in college–was very much politically inspired, full of agendas meant to educate any potential reader on my own views on the American identity in the context of the immigrant experience. As a result, everything came out like an Immigrant-Movie-of-the-Week on the Lifetime network. Flat. Didactic. Labored. That said, I never wrote about my own life, and I think the attempt to imagine the lives of people from different ethnic backgrounds was essential in my committing to writing fiction. While Monstress is full of Filipino and Filipino-American characters, I see them first as individuals caught up in weird, sometimes ridiculous, and always (I hope) emotionally complex circumstances that have nothing to do with my own experience as a Filipino American. That’s the fun of fiction, getting into someone else’s business. So in that sense, I think I’ve set aside identity politics, and instead become more concerned with simply telling a compelling story full of characters with whom readers can hopefully empathize.

I hear what you’re saying, but we live in America where we like us some qualifiers. Ever worry that you’ll be pigeon-holed as “that Filipino writer?”

I do think about that, sure. On one hand, it could be a lucky thing to be known as “that Filipino writer”; it probably beats being completely unknown. At the same time, I would hope my stories—which I think are ultimately about individuals simply trying to make their way through the world—would allow me to simply be viewed as a writer. Or, perhaps more importantly (for reasons personal, political, psychological, etc.) an American writer. My stories, to me, feel quintessentially American. I write American fiction. So in that sense, I don’t want to be pigeon-holed at all.

Speaking of quintessentially American stories, there’s something almost pulp-fiction-esque about your work. I.e.: if your subjects were “ripped from the headlines,” they’d be ripped from the back pages of stuff you find in comic book shops, books with titles like Weird Tales and I Was A Teenage Werewolf. To be specific, you have characters making B-movies, suffering from leprosy, performing psychic surgery, to name just a few. Having said all this, your treatment of these subjects isn’t sensational in the tabloid sense, but fairly realistic. What draws you to these characters, and how do you find the human in the fantastic?

I like the challenge these characters present. How, for example, can you build an emotionally and psychologically complex story around a Filipino psychic surgeon who travels abroad to dupe other Filipinos into falling for his scam? More importantly, how can you render his story with empathy, in ways that might simultaneously indict and redeem him? It’s fun imagining my way into the heads of people in these weird, sometimes ridiculous situations. The key is for me to remember that, as narrow-minded as some of these characters might seem, they’re ultimately full of good intentions, even if they only serve themselves. Selfish as that might be, there’s still something important in that. Maybe it’s self-preservation. Maybe that’s all human beings are really about. If so, that’s what makes the case for these characters, what brings to the surface their humanity, even in the midst of the seemingly unbelievable.

Peter Cetera "Solitude/Solitaire"

You and I have long running jokes on everything from Peter Cetera (I just realized he’s an ET away from etc) to reproductive organs to salads made entirely of hard boiled eggs. Plus, you performed improv when you were an undergraduate. Most people who know you say you’re the funniest person they know. And yet, most of your stories tend more toward heartbreak than they do toward humor. Is it a conscious decision on your part to check your sense of humor at the door when you sit down to write?

Funniest? I’ve gotten hottest, leggiest, bustiest. But funniest? Not so sure. But I appreciate that you’re reading the heartbreak in these stories, because I’m sometimes paranoid that my stories are too (seemingly) whimsical—the making of a horror movie, a group of guys who want to kick the shit out of the Beatles, etc. Certainly, I’m aware of the “lightness” of these scenarios, but I’m interested in contrasting that with their inherent darkness.  So, while I don’t check my sense of humor at the door, I try not to make it a priority, or manipulate plot for the sake of a joke.  Humor, in fiction, isn’t a joke; it’s merely another aspect of the truth. If I can get at that while at the same time exploring some of the darker tones of the piece, then that’s great. And by the way, I contacted Peter (ET)Cetera for a blurb, and the bastard wouldn’t take my call. “Man who will fight for your honor,” my ass.

You should’ve asked. I would’ve legally changed my name to Peter Cetera and written you a blurb (“The next time you fall in love, it’ll be with this book!”), then paid the $220 processing fee assessed in the state of Wisconsin to change my name back.

Now you tell me.

I know Buffy the Vampire Slayer used to be an important part of your life. What do you think TV and movies can teach fiction writers about their craft?

On more obvious levels, they can serve as decent models for structure—linear, non-linear, modular, etc. But I think they can also teach the writer the value of what I call “going for broke.” In other words, those seemingly melodramatic, high-action moments on TV and in the movies that often get the slo-mo treatment, and are scored with blaring trumpets or sorrowful violins, or given the extreme close-up of the emotionally wrenched facial expression. When you’re drafting a piece, it can be helpful to indulge those big moments in the story, so long as you know you’ll (usually) have to reel it in a little more for the next draft, and the draft after.

Because a lot of TV and movies are over the top, it can inspire “overwriting,” which in the earlier stages can be a good thing, because it can provide a sense of dramatic, emotional, or tonal destination: where do you want the reader to arrive in a particular scene or chapter? How can you locate them in just the right emotional plane of response?  I can think of specific moments from Buffy, for example, that had some of these moments (the episodes “Becoming” and “The Gift” are full of them), and while one might say they were overdone, they provided a huge dramatic payoff. In terms of narrative and drama, there’s a lot to be learned from that. Plus, I now know how to protect myself from the forces of darkness, so bonus for me!

And since we’re in Buffy mode, I know you used to claim that if you could have any super power, you would want the power to always be able to choose the shortest line. Like at the bank or on the highway at a toll booth or at the grocery store. If you could instantly master any aspect of writing, what would it be and why?

Right now, I’d be interested in mastering the kind of omniscient POV that can shift character perspectives seamlessly within the same paragraph, seemingly in the same moment. I imagine that’s old hat to many writers, but the ability to access a story from these multiple consciousnesses within such a relatively small narrative frame (I’m thinking short story here) seems to be quite a feat. Now, would I prefer that over the superpower to always choose the shortest line? I can’t really say.

I know you’re in the first stages of writing a novel. What is the most daunting part of it? What have you been surprised by so far?

The most daunting part of writing a novel is the thing that was also—initially—the most liberating: the seemingly endless amount of space in which to work. Obviously, as I revise, I’ll cut and condense and compress, but for a year, as I worked on the first draft, I found myself not needing to worry about the number of pages I’d written, and the publishability (in magazines) of a longer story. The other daunting thing is the idea of commitment, of living with these characters for such a long haul.

If there’s a question you want to be asked, what would it be?

“Do you come from the land down under?” If not that, then how about one of these:

“Why fiction?”

“What do you think is the best sentence in your book?”

“What does your mom think of the book?”

Okay. I’ll give you two out of three. Why fiction? What do you think is the best sentence in your book and why?

Why fiction? Because it lets me immerse myself in the outlandish, daring, foolish, dangerous, mysterious, cruel, and impossible dramas that I wouldn’t have the guts to live out in real life.

Best sentence: Can I pick two? The first: “Even when I was gone, I was here.” That’s my character’s struggle, in a nutshell. Once I got to that line in “L’amour, CA,” I finally understood it. The second: “First my enemies underestimate me, then I smash them.” I love the words “enemies” and “smash,” and if they can exist in the same sentence, then I’m a happy man.

What’s the worst sentence? If you can’t answer that, then what kinds of sentences do you generally hate in fiction and why?

“Get me off this goddamn island!”

I don’t get it. What is that? Gilligan? Survivor?

It’s from my story, “The View From Culion.” One of the more (melo)dramatic lines, at least, out of context. Hopefully, within context, it’s not so bad.

So you didn’t answer the second part of that question. What kind of sentences don’t you like and why?

I have problems with sentences that use the word “gingerly.” I only experience that word when reading, not in real life, so it always feels overtly literary to me. I’m not a fan of sentences that include footnotes. I see the writer at work in those kinds of sentences, and I’m more concerned with narrative than I am with authorial process. Also not a fan of long, long, long, long run-on sentences, for the same aforementioned reasons.

Any final thoughts, theories, comments?

My most immediate final thought right now is that I had way too much Thai food tonight.

My second most immediate final thought/theory/comment is that everything I’ve said here, anything I’ve claimed to understand about my writing, material, and process is subject to change which, when it comes to writing fiction (or any act of creating), is most definitely a good thing.

Interviewer

Quan Barry is the author of the poetry collections Asylum, Controvertibles, and Water Puppets. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (for Asylum).

Further Links and Resources

• Listen to Lysley Tenorio read from his short story “Monstress” for KQED public radio.
• Lysley’s top three book recommendations.
• Read his story, “L’amour, CA,” online at The Atlantic.

The book turned out to be Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Harper/Ecco 2006), and as I read its stories I desperately wished that I’d been the one who wrote them. His characters—ranging from a grad student in ornithology who gets kidnapped in Columbia to a soldier who marries a Haitian voodoo deity—seemed to leap into abysses of their own creation, and Fountain followed them all the way to the bottom before watching them climb painstakingly out. I wasn’t the only one who loved the book, as it earned its author a bevy of decorations, including a PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

Thanks to Che I’ve been on the lookout for Fountain’s debut novel for quite some time, and have occasionally pestered him by email to find out when it would be published. So when I heard about Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, published by Harper/Ecco just this month, I had to be the first kid on my block to read it.

From the first page, I wanted be the one who’d written Halftime even more desperately than I’d wanted to be the one who wrote Che. The novel grabbed me, started running, and didn’t give me a chance to ask where we were going. Halftime unfolds on Thanksgiving day during a Dallas Cowboys (a.k.a. “America’s Team”) football game, when a group of American soldiers on leave from Iraq are celebrated for their bravery in battle. It turns out that an embedded TV news crew caught a fierce battle on tape, which turned the “Bravo Team” into temporary celebrities.

At the center of this is Billy Lynn, a nineteen-year-old Texan who earned a Silver Star in Iraq but must, like the rest of his fellow Bravos, return there after his Thanksgiving reprieve. Fountain drills into Billy’s life and psyche, not relenting until he has brought all of his protagonist’s dreams, fears, contradictions, alliances, and assumptions to light. The pointlessness and release of war, his own virginity, his miserable wheelchair-bound father, the patriotism that he wishes would be simpler than it has become, the sister who wants him to go AWOL from the war.

Along the way Fountain sends us into the lives of Lynn’s comrades and the smorgasbord of people he meets at Texas Stadium. There’s Sergeant Dime, who rides his men non-stop but often appears like a mythological trickster, a Loki or Coyote who sees through the world’s folly. There’s Shroom, poor dead Shroom, who expired in Billy’s arms in Iraq and who still offers him, beyond the grave, an alternative way to make America and human life itself add up to more than the sum of its parts. We meet a movie producer who can’t quite land a deal to get the Bravo Squad’s story on the big screen, Beyoncé Knowles (from a discreet distance), the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and a bunch of angry roadies armed with pipes. Along the way, Billy and his fellow soldiers will gradually learn just how completely they’ve been sucked into the American spectacle-making machine.

It’s as kaleidoscopic and unflinchingly absurd as the novel with which it will most often be compared—Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—or as Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of Night. Fountain’s language, from start to finish, takes brave chance after brave chance as it rages through the book like a storm. I don’t like to throw the “G-word” out casually, but let me say this: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the first great novel of America’s twenty-first century wars.

Interview:

Steven Wingate: May is national short story month, and you’ve made your name thus far as a short story writer. Can you describe your experience of making the transition from one mode to another?

Ben Fountain: The transition started around 1992, and has been painful, slow, and riddled with failure. I’ve got two complete novels in the drawer, along with a big chunk of another, and my only excuse is that I must not be very good at this, and what I’ve managed to figure out about writing novels took me a long time to learn. I think one of the main problems with the defunct novels is that I felt the need to set everything up in logical, painstaking detail—so much backstory before the real story got going, which was maybe my way of being lazy, of avoiding coming to grips with the real story and all the gut-it-out work that would involve.

They say that every project teaches its author how to write it. What was the process like of learning how to write Halftime, and how did that differ from learning how to write Che?

Handling “time” in Billy Lynn was much more of a challenge than I remember it being in any short stories I’ve written. Billy Lynn takes place over the course of one day, but to do what I wanted to do I had to figure out how to slide in significant chunks of past action without, hopefully, slowing down the speed and momentum of the present-tense narrative. There’s one long flashback in the book, but otherwise I found myself going for bits and pieces of flashback, layering those fragments within the present narrative. So maybe I learned a little bit more about how to deal with time in the novel form.

Your relationship to language in Halftime differs from that in Che. It has a load of F-bombs, not only in the mouths of the soldiers but in the narrative voice as well. There’s a go for broke-ness to your language, a verging toward the edge of control. How did you arrive at that?

I arrived at it by the seat of my pants. With pretty much everything I write, the conception of the story seems to arrive with a sound in my head. It’s supposed to sound a certain way, and part of the challenge in writing the story is tuning into that sound, finding the words and rhythms that will get it on the page. It’s always very rough at first, trying to locate that signal, trying to find the right language, and for most of the time you’re flying blind, basically picking your way along.

To write Billy Lynn correctly it seemed I had to find this dense, rude, pummeling, in-your-face sound that maybe–and this is the rationale I arrived at in the course of writing the book—is the sound of the basic insanity of American culture.

From what I can tell of your biography, you don’t seem to have been in the military. But there are soldiers in Che, and Halftime is entirely immersed in the soldier’s world. How do these characters enter your imagination, and how did you inhabit their language and worldview?

You’re right, I was never in the military. So I did what writers always do to appropriate experience that’s not their own—I read everything I could get my hands on, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the soldiers and ex-soldiers who I came across, and generally tried to immerse myself in that world. In other words, research, but that’s just laying the foundation. Ultimately, if you’re to succeed in this type of endeavor, it takes an act—or maybe serial acts would be a better way to put it—of imagination, but you can’t launch unless you’ve done that sort of immersive research. And then you’re also bringing in pieces of your own experience, episodes that might be comparable with the experience you’re trying to imagine your way into. Say, the writing equivalent of method acting? I’m the kind of desperate writer who will use any and every thing that might help me write the story.

After the success of Che, you had a novel called The Texas Itch that never made it off the ground. What happened with that book, and what did you learn from the experience that you could bring to bear in writing Halftime?

The short answer to what happened to that book is that it wasn’t good enough. I’d started that book a long time ago, when I was a much different, and dare I say less able, writer, and despite all my lumbering efforts I couldn’t quite drag it up to whatever level I was operating on once Che was done. Too much backstory, maybe too much labyrinthine plot, and a voice that didn’t quite ring true, or at least fell short too much of the time. I spent a lot of years on that book, many more than I care to admit. The cliche about your greatest strength always being your greatest weakness? That seems to be true in my case—I’m stubborn as hell and find it hard to walk away from anything, but the same hard-headedness that kept me writing long enough that I seem to have arrived at some sort of “career” was also the trait that kept me at The Texas Itch long after I probably should have put it away.

What did I learn that I brought to bear on Billy Lynn? Well, maybe I learned something about compression, about economy of backstory and present narrative. And that I could take a hit like that—having a novel crash and burn in the most spectacular way—and move on to the next thing.

The midpoint sequence of the novel involves the Bravo Squad meeting Dallas Cowboys owner Norm Oglesby, who whips a room full of cheerleaders into a calculated frenzy for media types. You write “The bullshit part of it, isn’t that part of the story too? But not a word, not a murmur, not a peep from the press about how thoroughly they’ve been used this day.” It’s hard not to see this is a critique of American media. I suspect you don’t have a specific “message,” but I’m curious to hear what’s roiling around in your head about media and war.

Right. Well, so much of what passes for “news” in our culture is actually marketing of one form or another, these premeditatively staged public events or PR verbiage that are spoon-fed to and dutifully swallowed by the media, to be in turn shat out into the wider world. I remember something Hunter Thompson wrote about a Super Bowl he was covering, how with all the hundreds or thousands of reporters on hand, with all the tonnage of copy and video stories produced that week, there might be only a couple of stories in which the writer alluded to the actual story that was unfolding, namely, that it was a huge, carefully staged corporate PR event that happened to have a football game attached, and the media were serving as the tacit delivery system for the message that would generate the profits.

My question is, why shouldn’t that be part of the story that’s reported? The experience of the reporting itself, and the varying degrees in which it might be authentic or artificial? Do pay attention to that man behind the curtain.

As for including this line of thought in the book, it wasn’t so much that I have a “message” as that it’s part of the story. To write the story correctly, this needed to be a part of it.

One of your most intriguing characters is Sergeant Dime, who has a complex relationship to the war and to his men. On one hand, he berates his men for representing their country poorly. On the other, he’s an absolute scofflaw who ruins several takes of a publicity video by revealing the true level of violence behind the Iraq war. How did he come to you, and what is he all about?

I don’t think it’s so much that Dime is berating his men for representing the country poorly as it is he stays on their ass because he’s their sergeant, and that’s his job. And, face it, 20-year-old males probably need that kind of constant harassment to stay on task. Dime is part of the machine, but he also has an acute awareness of what the machine is about, and he doesn’t mind sharing that awareness with his men in his own, ah, unique way. I think Dime takes tremendous wicked pleasure in pointing out stupidity—the stupidity of particular individuals, and of the culture at large, and his main method of doing this is speaking the truth. Maybe it’s not so much that he’s on a mission for truth as it is that’s where he gets his pleasure and his energy, by rubbing our faces in it.

Let’s say you can give three bits of advice for short story writers who want to take on the novel. What would they be?

I’m probably the last person who should be giving advice on how to go about writing a novel, but since you asked:

First, and this is obvious but still worth saying, make a close study of the good writers and see how they do it. Read with a pen or pencil in your hand and mark the hell out of the page. Pay attention to the decisions the writers are making, what they decide to leave out just as much as what they put in, and where, and how much, with what degree of directness. Their “technique,” if you will.

Second, don’t wait for that huge block of time to materialize, that chunk of days or weeks or months where you’ll have little or nothing to do besides work on your novel. Those big blocks of free time are hard to come by—harder to come by every year, it seems, the way the culture demands more and more of us. If all you can do is chip away at it for an hour or two a day, well, that’s what you have to do. Maybe it’s the interior equivalent of sailing a small boat by yourself around the world. It’s a long haul, and on any one particular day you aren’t going to make much progress, but if you can string together a bunch of days where you push the book along, after a while you start to see yourself getting somewhere.

Third, don’t make all the mistakes I made.

Further Links and Resources

Since finishing the MFA, he’s been busy. The paperback of Zentner’s debut novel, Touch, just came out. His next novel, The Lobster Kings, will be out in 2013.  Touch was shortlisted for The 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award, The Center for Fiction’s 2011 Flahery-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the 2011 Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Walrus, and many other publications. He is the winner of both the O. Henry Prize (jury favorite) and the Narrative Prize, and has been shortlisted for Best American and the Pushcart Prize. Alexi has taught creative writing at Cornell University, and held teaching fellowships at Bread Loaf and Wesleyan University. Born and raised in Kitchener, Ontario, he now lives in Ithaca with his wife and two daughters.

We recently caught up over the phone about fiction, food, jogging, guilty musical pleasures, and (blame) Canada’s influential writers who inspired him to take up the pen.

Interview:

Jackie Reitzes: It’s almost short story month. Where did the idea for your story “Touch” originate, and what was the writing like?

Alexi Zentner:  When I started “Touch,” I’d only been writing seriously for about a month, and I had an image stuck in my head of a girl trapped under the ice. I had always played at the idea of being a writer, which is different than actually writing. At the time my kids were really young—one and three. That image was really haunting—having someone you love so close to you and being unable to do anything to save them. I knew from the get-go I had something big and it could be something bigger. But I didn’t want to write Touch as a novel before I was ready for fear I would ruin it. Revision is incredibly important, but I also think that in that genesis of a story or a novel, you weave a certain DNA into it, and I was worried that in writing a novel too early in my writing career, with my abilities still unformed, that I would ruin what I had.

How did you transform “Touch” from story to novel?

The thing that’s really difficult is: a story is a finished thing. What you’re trying to do is figure out how to break it open, and how to distill it into its elements so you can make something else. Early on, I tried to just plug it in whole. I had this story, and I didn’t want to change it because I was so in love with the shape of it. But the shape of a short story is not the same as the shape of a novel. The novel came alive when I was really able to use the story as a springboard as opposed to a finished thing I was working toward.

With a perfect or near-perfect first chapter, you must wonder: where do I go next?

Right. In one of the first conceptions of the novel, the story “Touch” was what I worked up to. It was the end of the novel; but I think what’s really interesting in fiction is the way people recover from things, not what leads up to the incident. Because the issue is what happens after. If your entire novel is the prologue, that’s problematic.

Touch, all your writing really, shows an impressive depth of research.  For example, one passage describes a blueberry “stomp” – as it would have been called at the time – and not a blueberry “patch.” You’ve included actual recipes from Bon Appetit in a story. How do you incorporate research so it feels organic?

This question shows my obsession with food. The story you mention with the recipes is a story about a wife and a mistress who are friends, but the obsession is actually with the food and not the sex.  The thing with research is to do as little as possible. The glib answer is: I write fiction, so I make shit up. But I do research, too. I went to the library and pulled back issues of Bon Appetit and used those as signposts. It’s important to get the small details right so the larger world stays whole.

But spending hours researching the vernacular or dates of technological innovations can interrupt the writing process. Does that distract from your fiction?

Absolutely, and I’m pretty careful about that. Most of what I write comes whole cloth. I don’t tend to set things in real towns, which gives you a sort of freedom. If you imagine a town, and it’s a town you created, you don’t have to worry about whether it’s a stop sign or a stop light at an intersection. I’ll often take a town that I’ve seen and then create my own fictionalized version of it, so that I have the freedom to makes the facts as I want them. But I think certain facts are important. If you’re writing about a logging town in the 1870s and you write about the long stick with the hook on it that the loggers used, you can’t call it “the long stick with the hook on it.”

I’m glad you brought up the cuts, because if I didn’t know better, I would assume you grew up logging. Did you read up a lot on that sort of thing?

Growing up in Canada, logging towns have some of the same mythic quality to them as the American cowboy, and there’s a certain amount of osmosis. We forget that in fiction the facts are not as important as the feeling of it being true. When I do a lot research, I end up writing a book report. And there are a lot of authors who get caught in the trap of, Well I’ve done this research. I have to use it. But I think that as a writer it’s important to give yourself the authority to say, This is the way it is.

Does what you’re writing influence what you’re reading, or the other way around?

I deliberately don’t read work similar to what I’m working on because, if I do, I will find myself writing in that voice. There have been a couple books that Touch has been compared to that I’ve read since, but I resisted reading them earlier because I wanted to create something new and different that was mine. I believe in influence. I read widely. Any writer who tells you they don’t read is either lying or not very good.

You listen to music when you write, right?

For years, I used to listen to the same band over and over again as white noise. It’s kind of embarrassing.

Tell me!

Okay, it’s Counting Crows.

(Groans)

Over and over again. I couldn’t listen to music that I liked because it distracted me. Recently, for The Lobster Kings, one of the main characters has a Johnny Cash tape stuck in the cassette player in his truck, so I listened to Johnny Cash.

You can trick yourself with music into writing a slightly different way.

Absolutely. One question I get a lot is something I call “The Magic Pen Question.” What I mean by that is a variant of What type of pen do you use?

And can I have it?

Exactly: If I have that pen then I can write a novel. Everybody’s writing process is different, but I’m a big believer that you write a novel one word at a time. You get your ass in a chair, and you work.  You work everyday. You privilege writing a novel over other things in life. But the things that I do—they’re patterns, they’re rituals, and music is one of them. Having the same music signals to me, Oh this is writing.

Writing day after day, week after week – ass in the chair – do you ever hit a roadblock?

I usually know the beginning, one or two things about the middle, and the end. So it’s like driving from New York to Los Angeles knowing you’re going to stop in Chicago and Denver, but you don’t have a map. When I get stuck, I go back, read through what I have, revise. And I know that I write better when I exercise. Part of that is because I hate running so much that I can’t think about writing, so it forces my brain to shut off, and that’s usually when whatever the solution is comes to me.

Sometimes you can’t focus. I used to be more brutal on myself. Now, if I’m having a bad day, I give myself permission to go see a matinee, or I’ll watch a TV show for an hour. It’s important to be generous and forgive yourself when you have a bad day. The worst thing you can do is insist that everything you write be perfect, because it just doesn’t work like that.

In revision, you need to be a little more disciplined about saying: this can be better. In a first draft, there’s something so important about getting a draft down, and then fixing it. The problem is when you read a novel and think This is what a novel should be. And even if you intellectually know that a writer worked and worked and worked on it, when you’re sitting at home, it’s harder to actually feel that what you’re doing is going to someday be this finished piece.

In a revision stage or in a first draft stage, what is your craft answer for achieving beautiful sentences?

Growing up, I read like crazy. I read two books a day. I still read a ton. It’s like a baseball player taking a swing. When you’re taking batting practice, you think: where do I put my foot, my hand, the bat. But when you’re in the box facing a pitcher, you need to just be able to swing. When I’m writing, it’s the same intuition, and when that’s not the case, it’s like there’s a light shining on that particular word saying that it’s wrong, and I know what it should be.

Has teaching changed the way you write?

Teaching makes you say out loud the things you don’t articulate to yourself. Even as a grad student, the most important thing about workshop was not having my work looked at, but talking about other people’s work. It was important for me to articulate my aesthetic. I love teaching. I could talk about writing all day, every day. I get so much energy out of it. You learn new things, because for me as a teacher, I try to treat every student differently. The dream for most writers is to write full time, and for me, now that I have that, I actually wish I was teaching, too.

You mentioned reading two books a day as a teenager. Which writers made you want to write?

There were three writers I read as a teenager where I thought—Oh, okay, I get literary fiction—where the language was beautiful and the stories still interesting and exciting: Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Michael Ondaatje.

All Canadians…

Which is funny, because I didn’t think of it like that. They’re all Canadians, but they’re also all international. Their reach has certainly exceeded the scope of the country. Those writers opened up the world of literary fiction. Also, typical for a young nerdy boy, I read a lot of science fiction. Because I read widely, I learned the importance of plot and pacing, which is not always one of the strengths of literary fiction.

Writers forget that people read our work. And I like great sentences, but they have to be there for a reason, and everything should be subordinate to the work. It’s hard because we’ve all had sentences or paragraphs or chapters where we thought, I am God’s gift to writing, but they don’t fit the story, and they really should go. We don’t want to get rid of them because we’re thinking about how wonderful we are.

Did your relationship to your novel change after it published? Did it change you as a writer?

When you’re writing a novel, your characters don’t tell you what to do or make you do anything. If your characters make you do stuff, it’s because you’re being lazy as a writer. My characters cross the street because I make them cross the street, and if I don’t want them to cross the street, I’ll rewrite it so they don’t. As an artist you should be in complete control of the world you create.

The problem is, at some point that book goes out in the world, and there are things you can’t control. I try really hard when I’m writing to have it only be about the writing.

Touch flirts with fantasy – mythical realism, it’s been called. I believe your current project, another novel, is genre. How does writing literary and genre fiction differ?

The book I’m working on now is straight genre. It’s fun and, I think, smart and literary, but it probably falls into literary fiction in the same way that Justin Cronin’s The Passage might. I had just finished The Lobster Kings when I started writing this, and I wasn’t ready to embark on literary fiction. Literary fiction is a little bit like having a meal. You get to have dessert, but you also have vegetables and a balanced diet. And what I’m writing now is basically a giant bag of cotton candy.

Best advice you’ve ever been given about writing?

Start your next book the day after you finish your first one. The process of publication, no matter what happens, is disorienting. It’s important to remember that you want to write. And if you can get started on the next project, it gives you something that keeps you grounded and that you can return to.

What comes next?

The funny thing is my goals haven’t changed. They were always to essentially win a Nobel Prize [laughing]. And what I mean by that is, and you can hear me laughing, I’m not going to win a Nobel Prize, and I know that. But I want to write the kind of books that are read for generations, and, whether or not I can do that, what’s important is that I’m trying. Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize and then famously said he was upset because he couldn’t win it again. Nobody’s ever written a perfect book. And I certainly won’t, so there’s never going to be a moment where I think, Oh, I’ve done it! Now, it’s on to pottery.

I’m kind of earnest about this, but I really do believe that art elevates humanity. I say that line a lot, because I think literature is inherently important. What we are doing as writers is important. It changes people’s lives. And the thing you try and do is write a book so that one person reads it and thinks, My God, I wish I’d come across this book earlier. Somebody said that reading teaches us to be alone, and I think that’s wrong. Reading teaches us so that we’re not alone.

Further Links and Resources

The novel is narrated by three distinct first person voices: Adelaide Lyle, a midwife who has welcomed generation after generation into the mountain cloistered world of Marshall, North Carolina; Clem Barefield, a streetwise sheriff who thought he’d seen everything this town had to throw at him, including his own son’s premature death; and Jess Hall, a curious young boy caught up in a clash of beliefs and deceits more complex and sinister than he can comprehend. Together, these characters tell the story of an entire community, as their hopes and fears are prayed upon by the stranger come to town, Carson Chambliss, a fiery and mysterious preacher with his own troubling interpretation of God’s word.

Wiley Cash’s stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review and The Carolina Quarterly. He holds a B.A. in Literature from the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He has received grants and fellowships from the Asheville Area Arts Council, the Thomas Wolfe Society, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. He and his wife currently live in West Virginia where he teaches fiction writing and American literature at Bethany College. He also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing at Southern New Hampshire University.

Clearly a very busy man, Wiley took the time to correspond with me via email, as we discussed his inspiration, his methods, and what it means to him to be a “southern writer.”

Brad Wetherell: What was the initial germ of this novel for you?

Wiley Cash: I got the idea for the story of the novel when I was in graduate school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in the fall of 2003. I was taking a course in African American literature, and one day my professor, Reggie Scott Young, brought in a news story about a young African American boy with autism who was smothered during a church healing service in a storefront church on Chicago’s South Side. Although I was raised in an evangelical Southern Baptist church, I was familiar enough with charismatic belief to understand its power, and I was particularly drawn to the Pentecostal tradition, especially the Holiness movement that takes the Bible as the literal word of God, particularly Mark 16: 17-18:

And these signs will follow those who believe: In my name they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will place their hands on the sick, and they will get well.

The story of the young boy’s smothering was clearly tragic, but given my interest in the Holiness movement, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by it, and given my own memories of growing up in the evangelical church, I couldn’t help but be compelled to write about it.

But when I thought about sitting down at my desk to begin the story, I knew I’d immediately face several insurmountable problems: as interested as I was in this story, I’d never been to Chicago’s South Side, and I knew nothing about the experience of growing up in the city’s African American neighborhoods. It was impossible for me to attempt to speak for a cultural experience that existed so far outside my own.

But then I imagined the same tragedy unfolding in western North Carolina. In my mind, I saw a church sitting on the riverbank in Marshall, a small town in Madison County only a short drive from Asheville, where I’d spent countless days and nights driving back roads, taking photographs, camping, and swimming in the French Broad River. I gave the autistic boy a younger brother named Jess whose doubts about the church only intensify once he loses his brother inside its walls. The more I wrote, the more the community around Jess flourished in my mind: a church matriarch who struggles to protect the children, a local sheriff who must deal with his own tragic past to solve the mystery of the boy’s death, a mother who’s torn between her faith and her loss, and a father whose pain portends only tragedy. In creating these people and the place they live I got to live in both Louisiana and North Carolina, and it was wonderful.

At what point did you know you had a novel worth writing?

I figured I might be onto something when my friends, who were also great writers, began to take an interest in the project. I was incredibly fortunate in Lafayette to have three best friends and fellow students who were dynamic and talented fiction writers; they were also very different writers with very different strengths and interests, and when they read excerpts of the novel-in-progress they brought their diverse strengths and interests with them. Their feedback was invaluable, and so was their support.

There were many nights when I had to go home early because I was usually up and writing by 7 a.m. I got teased a good bit about acting like an old man for going to bed so early, but after my friends saw how serious I was they began to understand those early nights and early mornings. They’re still some of my best friends, and they’re still some of the most talented writers I know.

Can you describe your writing process during the creation of your book? Were there particular stumbling blocks?

One of the most difficult challenges I faced was in writing about North Carolina while living in Louisiana. First of all, I was desperately homesick, and every time I tried to write about North Carolina, especially western North Carolina, the page was colored by my misty-eyed, romantic memories of life there. My exaltation of the place was a serious roadblock in portraying the region realistically. Second, in Louisiana I immersed myself in a culture that was very foreign to me, and being surrounded by such distinct dialect and music sometimes made it difficult to hear the dialect and the music I’d left behind.

I accidentally stumbled upon the solution by rededicating myself to the literature and music of North Carolina. I poured over work by authors like Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Fred Chappell, and Thomas Wolfe, and I listened to music by Malcolm Holcombe, Sons of Ralph, the Biscuit Burners, and David Holt. I began to hear and see North Carolina again.

As I mentioned, I was in graduate school when I began writing the novel, and, like most graduate students, I was teaching two classes and taking three. Making the necessary time to write became a challenge, but I solved it by getting up incredibly early in the morning, sometimes as early as 5 a.m. I liked the feeling that the world was quiet and I was the only person awake at that time; I knew something about the day that no one yet knew. Of course this wasn’t true, but it helped to cut out the noise of life if I thought I was the only one awake in those hours. I maintained this early morning schedule for years; it used to drive my wife crazy when I’d get up at dawn on the weekends.

You say that you maintained the early morning schedule “for years.” How long did it take you to write the novel?

In the spring of 2004, I wrote a short story from the perspective of a grandfather whose autistic grandson is smothered during a healing service one Sunday morning. The grandfather and the autistic boy’s father find out the terrible news after the local sheriff comes out to the farm to tell them. The story was about twenty-five pages, but it wasn’t really a story; it was more of an event. I sat on it for over a year before I went back to it and tried to reimagine the scene. I realized that the story was much larger than one person’s perspective. In 2005, I decided to attempt to write a novel with the autistic boy’s death at the center. I experimented with several different narrators, and, as a result, the grandfather’s narration was cut even though he remained a very important character.

By the fall of 2008 I’d landed a great agent who represents several authors whose style and regional focus are very similar to mine. This agent submitted the manuscript to a few houses, but it was rejected by all of them. We worked on the manuscript for about a year and a half, and, eventually, it seemed like there was nowhere else to go in terms of revising it. We agreed to go our separate ways in January of 2010.

I turned to Nat Sobel of Sobel Weber. He’d contacted me after reading an excerpt of the novel that had been published in Crab Orchard Review in the fall of 2008, right after I’d agreed to work with my former agent. I called Nat’s office late on a Friday afternoon, and I was very surprised that he remembered my story. He agreed to consider the manuscript, but he made clear that I’d follow the same process everyone else followed, from submitting the query letter, to submitting the first fifty pages, to finally submitting the full manuscript. I was ready to give up on the novel at this point, and I probably would have if my wife hadn’t encouraged me to give it one more shot with Nat.

I submitted the full manuscript to him in February 2010. He read it and offered some comments toward revision. At this point, I had to decide whether or not I wanted to go back and revisit a manuscript that I’d thought was complete months and months earlier. Maybe it was hope, or maybe it was desperation, but I sat down at my desk and considered Nat’s comments. I worked on the novel the entire summer of 2010. Nat started submitting the novel in the fall, and the first editor who saw it purchased it in a two-book deal. Roughly five years passed from the time I decided to write the novel until the time it was accepted for publication.

Let’s now talk a bit about the book itself. Why did you choose to tell the story with multiple first person narrators?

I think I relied on a multi-voice narrative for two reasons. One, I come from a place where every member of my family and every good friend I have tells wonderful stories. Over the years, I’ve found that when something happens that involves a number of my family members or several of my friends, everyone has their own perspective of the event and narrates their version of it based on their individual perspective. I suspect this is the same with other people’s family and friends, but hearing that chorus of voices narrate separate stories that coalesce around a single event always stuck with me. Two, this is a pretty popular model with Southern novels and stories; I’m thinking of Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, and Thomas Wolfe’s novella The Lost Boy. Each of these works is focused around a single event, but the authors rely on the community or the family to fully communicate that event’s importance.

What was the biggest challenge of structuring the novel in this way? I can imagine that it might complicate how you manage the narrative time.

The biggest challenge was staying clear on what each narrator knows at each point in the story, a problem amplified by the fact that the novel takes place over six days. This tight schedule didn’t allow for a lot of summary or exposition. Aside from the opening scene, the novel is pretty linear, so that made it a little easier to keep the narrators’ stories and their knowledge of events chronological. Toward the end of the revision process, I actually found myself making calendars to track the development of the story over those six days. I really wish I’d done that earlier. Structuring a novel is a lot like solving an equation, and it helped to see all the values and integers in the visual equation instead of trying to keep them straight in my head.

Authors often say that the beginning and ending of novels are the hardest to write. Was this true for you? Also, why begin and end with Adelaide in particular?

Beginnings and endings are important in just about every process, from writing novels to romantic relationships to basketball games. I don’t know if creating the events that transpired at the beginning and the ending of A Land More Kind Than Home were any more difficult to create than any other section of the novel, but it was difficult to decide who would be responsible for narrating those events and the tone that narration would take.

Originally, Jess narrated both the opening and closing sections of the novel, but something never felt quite right about that, even though I liked the symmetry of it. I kicked around all kinds of ideas about how to grab the reader in the opening scene, but nothing seemed to work. One night, my wife was proofreading some of the manuscript pages when she read the scene of Adelaide and Carson Chambliss in the church. She looked up at me and said, “You should put this at the beginning; it’s a great hook.” I made the revision and it worked; my agent used those opening twenty pages to sell the novel to William Morrow.

With this cast of narrators, I wonder: whose story do you think this is?

If I had to assign ownership of this story to one particular character, I suppose I would say this is Jess’s story. He’s the one who carries the largest burden for the tragedy that befalls the family; he’s the one who sees something he shouldn’t have seen; he’s the one who keeps the secret until the very end when divulging it can only lead to disaster.

But I really feel like this is the community’s story. I tried to make it as rich and all-encompassing as possible. There are a lot of lives wound up in what happens to the Hall family. Only a community can tell this story; because of that it just seems right for a community to own it as well.

Can you speak about the role of place in the novel?

A sense of place is really important to me in general. I’m one of those readers who opens new books in the same manner I enter my dreams at night: I immediately want to know where I am. So much about us—our motivations, reactions, fears, and hopes—emanate from the places we’re from. There’s no escaping the fact that home, as both a physical locale and a remembered idea, are either restrictive or emboldening or sometimes both, and characters who bear the mark of their place are simply more believable to me.

That’s what I loved about living in Lafayette, Louisiana, for five years during graduate school. The language, food, and landscape were different from any other place I’d ever visited, and while I lived there I took every opportunity to immerse myself in it. I think it made me a better writer because it made me more curious about North Carolina, the place I call home.

Speaking of place, how would you define “Southern Literature”?

That’s a difficult question to answer because just as there are many “Souths,” there are also many types of “Southern Literature.” But I think one thing that defines the South broadly and Southern literature in general is the idea of struggle and all the forms it takes. Because of its historically agrarian economy, Southerners have always struggled with the land and tried to figure out the best way to reap the most from it. Unfortunately, that led to centuries of slavery, and there was a long struggle to end that and an even longer, on-going struggle to stamp out the racial prejudice that accompanied it. You can see both the struggles with land and the struggles with racial prejudice in the work of writers like Jean Toomer, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest J. Gaines.

Also, because of the South’s agrarian economy, people tended to live on large swaths of land and relied on their family members for everything from labor to emotional support. I believe this is why family struggle has so long been a hallmark of Southern literature; here I’m thinking of writers like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Alice Walker. On the other hand, the tight cohesiveness of the Southern family can quickly turn those who aren’t related into real outsiders. So much of Southern literature, especially its local color, revolves around the mysterious and sometimes evil outsider who attempts to plunder something from those on the inside. Ron Rash, Flannery O’Connor, and several of Kate Chopin’s stories come to mind.

Do you consider yourself a “southern writer”?

Absolutely, but I can’t really explain why, and I don’t know why it’s so important to me. The first time I visited West Virginia, where my wife and I now live, I asked someone if West Virginia considered itself a northern state or a southern state. The woman thought about my question for a second, and then she said, “I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.” It mattered to me, but I couldn’t explain why; I still can’t. Perhaps it’s something about my wanting to feel at home. That’s why I started writing about the South in the first place—to feel at home.

I know you worked with Ernest J Gaines. Can you speak to his influence on your work? Also, what other authors have influenced your writing the most?

The effect that Ernest J. Gaines has had on my writing life and my life in general are immeasurable. I chose to attend graduate school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette because it gave me the chance to study fiction writing under him. Before I left North Carolina, I didn’t have any idea of what kind of writer I was or what kind writer I wanted to be, and then I got to know Ernest J. Gaines, and I learned his own story of leaving home and becoming a writer.

He was born and raised in the quarters on a plantation just west of Baton Rouge where his ancestors had spent generations working as slaves and later as sharecroppers. In 1948, at the age of fifteen, he’d had to leave Louisiana and join family in California because of the lack of education available to African American children living in Pointe Coupee Parish. But, once he arrived in Vallejo, he realized that he ached for the sugar cane fields and the twisted oak trees he’d left behind. Because he couldn’t afford to return home, he decided to read about it, but after discovering that he couldn’t find any books about the lives of rural, African Americans in the South, he decided to write about them.

This was never clearer to me than the first time I visited Gaines and his wife Dianne where they’d built a new home next door to the land where he was born and raised. It was All Saints Day, and a group of us were working to beautify the old slave cemetery that sits about a half-mile behind the still-standing master’s house. In North Carolina and other parts of the South, these events are known as Decoration Days. Gaines and I had paused in our work, and we were talking about his memories of growing up on the land and the stories of the people buried in the cemetery. At one point, he looked at me and then gestured toward a grave. “Do you know Snookum from A Gathering of Old Men?” he asked. “He’s buried right over there.”

In our workshop back at the university, Gaines had helped me learn to write better stories, but that day, standing in the cemetery with the master’s house barely visible through the trees and the ghostly sound of the wind rustling the sugarcane, he showed me what my stories would be about. Later that evening, while driving home in the fading light through the flat farmland of Louisiana, I saw the clouds sitting low on the horizon, and I realized that if I squinted my eyes I could make them look like mountains. I started A Land More Kind Than Home not long after.

As we wrap up, I wonder if you had any advice for aspiring writers who hope to publish a novel of their own someday.

My advice is simple: write a book. A lot of people want to talk about writing a book, especially when they find out that you’re a writer, but very few people are actually willing to give it a real shot. Writing a book is hard. It requires a lot of time alone, and there will be many times when friends and family won’t understand why you can’t have another beer or watch the game or go out of town for the weekend. There will be a million reasons not to sit down and work, but you have to dedicate yourself to your work to finish a novel.

But don’t simply write a book; write the best book you can. Only then should you be concerned with getting an agent or finding a publisher. Don’t put your book out there before you’re certain it’s ready. Don’t query agents with an unfinished manuscript; don’t pitch ideas about a book you haven’t yet written.

Finally, what a name! Wiley Cash. Tell me it’s real.

It’s a real name, for better or worse. It’s actually a family name: the middle name of my grandfather, Odus Wiley Cash, and my father, Roger Wiley Cash, Sr. I’m Jr., but my parents decided to call me Wiley. As far as my last name goes, I’ve always heard that we’re distantly related to Johnny Cash’s people, but I never received a Christmas present or a birthday card from him or June, so I can’t really vouch for it.

My name used to drive me crazy when I waited tables, a job I’ve held at too many restaurants to name. I’d say, “Hello, my name is Wiley and I’ll be your server.” The people at the table would ask me to repeat my name, and then they’d make the usual Wile E. Coyote joke. I’d smile along, waiting to get their drink orders. Then they’d ask about my last name and make the usual joke about Johnny Cash. I probably would’ve made more tips if I hadn’t been standing around listening to the same jokes every night.

Further Links and Resources

Or watch a conversation with Ernest J. Gaines as part of The Big Read:

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/many-souths-an-interview-with-wiley-cash/feed 2 http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/an-interview-with-luana-monteiro http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/an-interview-with-luana-monteiro#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:00:37 +0000 Melissa Scholes Young http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=34927 I came across Luana Monteiro’s Little Star of Bela Lua by accident: it was hidden away in the International Literature section of the World Bank’s bookstore in Washington D.C. I’d spent a few years early in my career teaching and living in Brazil. But since my Portuguese is only conversational, I wanted to read Brazilian stories written in English as a lens into the contemporary literary scene there. Translations are invaluable, of course, but discovering a book written in English with the authenticity of Bela Lua felt serendipitous. Turned out I had to come home to find my way back to Brazil.

Little Star of Bela Lua is Luana Monteiro’s debut short story collection. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she completed her MFA at the University of Wisconsin, and she is currently at work on a novel. We corresponded via email about writing, nirvana and the evil eye.

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Interview

Melissa Scholes Young: I lived in Brasilia for years, and I rarely came across Brazilian literature in English. You root Little Star of Bela Lua firmly in Brazilian culture. Why write in English, and not Portuguese?

Luana Monteiro: My literary awakening happened in my late teens and early twenties when I was already living in the U.S. I mostly read books written in or translated into English. It was the language of my surroundings, and it was the one that offered itself when I sat down to write my first short story. The English I use, however, is not divorced completely from the influence of Portuguese; my mother tongue asserts itself in the rhythms, the intonations, and the mistakes I repeatedly make.

In the subtitle of your collection — “Stories from Brazil” — I was struck by the “from.” These stories have traveled to get to their audience. Did you consider audience while writing? Did you see the readers as mostly American?

Yes, I did see them as mostly American; well, they were mostly American because many of those stories were written while I was in college, and were read in creative writing classes. The book has been translated into Portuguese and French. So when I visited Brazil in 2011, I was surprised and a little dismayed when my half-sister asked me, “Is that character in that story named Carolina supposed to be me?” [I thought] Uh… no, Carolina, of course not.

Many of your female characters struggle against cultural norms. Valquira, the rhymester, enters an entirely male-dominated music scene and holds her own against the machismo. Cloé wrestles with sexual desires that women are expected to suppress, especially as Christians. What interests you about these struggles?

The influence of religion on a character’s search for authenticity and transcendence is a recurring theme in my writing. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to escape Christianity while growing up in Brazil; it penetrates every aspect of society, from public observances to one’s intimate life. The Christian ideology of the feminine ends up affecting the sexual attitudes of the country, particularly women’s sexuality: on one hand there is the image of the virgin, pure, modest, delicate, on the other, the sexual goddess, carefree and licentious, created by the consumer market. The relationships between the spiritual and the commercial, Sunday Mass and carnaval, prudishness and sensuality; those interest me very much.

This is a more traditional Brazil than I experienced. When most people think of Brazil, a glamorous Carnaval image is evoked, yet Carnaval isn’t even explored until the second half of the book. I taught at the Escola Americana de Brasilia, and Carnaval seemed to dominate more than half of each school year for my students and most conversations. Yet your portrait of Carnaval on the streets of Pernambuco isn’t flattering. You mention the underbelly of the celebration: the excess, the stink, and the vomit. You describe in detail men and women passed out on the streets “like dead cattle.” What led to your decision to write Carnaval so raw?

Well, the glamor of carnaval works better in marketing pamphlets than stories. Yes, carnaval can be glamorous, but it’s not only glamorous.  I could write an entire book on unflattering carnaval images! I love the idea of carnaval: four days of abandon, music, jubilance and friendship, where strict class and gender divides melt and the hierarchies of society are turned upside down. But there is also the underbelly, the grime and violence, the turning away from all that is ugly and sad, a denial of those who are so marginalized that they can’t even participate.

Elizabeth Bishop, who lived in Brazil for fifteen years, beautifully (and painfully) illustrates this intolerance for the destitute in her poem “Pink Dog.”

Ah, “Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!” That poem communicates so much about the dual nature of the celebration. Did you find yourself wrestling with how to write about those marginalized?

You’ve lived in Brazil, I’m sure you’re familiar with the ways domestic maids, for instance, are treated. They raise their employers’ children, cook their meals, clean their houses, wash their clothes, but aren’t welcome at the table with the family, and in many households they’re not even allowed to use the same set of dishes and silverware as their employers.  In light of these hierarchical relationships, it’s tempting to write characters one-dimensionally on both ends of the social spectrum, but I try not to fall into that trap.

I appreciate what you said about the possible melting of gender divides, at least temporarily. In “The Whirling Dove” Mãe Joana tells Cloé “This is a man’s world, my girl. They run the nations and the corporations—but in their shadows, almost always stands a strong woman.” Is that a commentary on Brazilian society in particular, or the status quo more broadly?

The commentary has more to do with how they are recognized in relation to how men’s accomplishments are celebrated. Brazil has particularly rigid expectations tied to gender, despite choosing a woman as president.  This gets highlighted in the media these days. Peruse Brazilian periodicals and you’ll come across an inordinate number of articles devoted not to [President Dilma Vana Rousseff’s] policies and initiatives, but her clothing, the shaping of her eyebrows, her make-up, her weight. By the way, the general opinion is that she will never belong in the ranks of the world’s best-dressed. If only I’d known that before I voted for her.

Exactly! You make political statements throughout the stories. You mock the PT [Lula’s Worker’s Party] in “Antonio de Juvita.” His speeches, which the people applaud, are almost nonsensical. Do you think literature can be an effective path for political change or is it just good fodder for humor?

I didn’t set out to mock the PT. Antonio de Juvita is almost a mythical character in the Brazilian Northeast, the bohemian, unemployed, coddled bon-vivant who takes a shot at local politics out of boredom and a desire for popularity. All he knows about political discourse is to employ the words “honesty” and “work,” and to do it often. The self-aggrandizing in small town politics is the subject of thousands of poems and songs; people have learned to see the humor in it, and to regard the words “work” and “honesty” from the mouth of any politician with suspicion. It was in that spirit that I wrote the character of Antonio de Juvita.

As for political change, yes, I am an optimist and still believe that works of prose and poetry can be an effective path for political change, insofar as it changes the predisposed reader. But I’d say music is a better medium for affecting change, because it’s immediately accessible and can carry a distilled message.

Like Caetano Veloso? Who else?

Chico Buarque. (Did you know he is my real father? I grew up wishing he were.) Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil. I love the traditional music of Pernambuco; maracatu, frevo, côco, ciranda. Lately I’ve been enjoying a lot of the younger female singers, Céu, Cibelle, Renata Rosa, Ana Paula da Silva.

Let’s chat more about Antonio. The story foreshadows Brazil’s evolution into a first world economy. Does the past have to be discarded in the name of progress? During his campaign, Antonio cheers “Out with the old!” Ironically, his family’s fortune comes from liquor recipes from the “Old World.” His mother disapproves of his lack of respect for his elders. How do you see the struggle between growth and tradition?

This is a very complicated issue, but two things stand out to me: economic growth has eased the suffering of many in Brazil, and that has to be applauded. At the same time, the commercialization of a culture brings its own set of problems, including the loss of authenticity of traditions and serious threats to the country’s environmental health.  Traffic in Recife, a byproduct of growth, is an absolute nightmare!

Change seems inevitable. Your stories preserve the culture, while the humor makes the struggle more digestible and accessible. What other writers influence your work?

Lately, I’ve been enjoying the work of J.M. Coetzee. He is fearless in his explorations of the dark, even monstrous, chambers of the self, the “rictus of the imagination,” to borrow one of his phrases from The Master of Petersburg. I admire him immensely for that, even though that very courage causes me to cringe my way through many of his passages.

I loved Coetzee’s Disgrace. His portrait of misery in post-apartheid South Africa was painful and important.

It’s so true. Also, [when I was] an impressionable young writer, Paul Bowles inspired me for many of the same reasons. I love Juan Rulfo’s stories, Clarice Lispector’s. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories were a big influence early on. So was the poetry of Octavio Paz, Florbela Espanca, Elisa Lucinda.

The collection has magic, too. One can see the influence of Marquez. The surreal isn’t even questioned. Of course a fish can miraculously appear in your toilet and then change the course of most of the town. Of course a priest can become smitten with a river spirit.  Was it a leap to write the bizarre in such a real way? Or has the mystery and superstitions of Brazil always infused your stories?

It wasn’t a leap at all. For a huge segment of society, the supernatural is commonly employed in the interpretation of daily occurrences.  Christianity, with its focus on faith and miracles, has played a significant role in this familiarity with the surreal. The nightwatchman of the building in which I lived as a child often told me biblical stories. He was a subversive proselytizer, no doubt, but I didn’t even realize they were biblical stories until much later. It didn’t matter, the man was a natural storyteller, and his unwavering belief in the stories he told, coupled with the deadpan delivery style that did not distinguish the supernatural from the mundane, left little room for doubt or questioning. The stories stuck. His tales of the apocalypse terrified me then.

A lot of what would be considered bizarre in the U.S. is simply accepted by the Brazilian majority. Many routinely blame illnesses on evil looks from a stranger. Here’s a little anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon: recently a close friend, a musician, a college graduate — and I add this because there are those who insist these “superstitions” only exist among the uneducated masses – came down with a cold after a performance. Without hesitation, she blamed it on a particular member of the audience, specifically, his or her olho gordo, fat eye, also known as the evil eye. Fortunately, she knew how to prevent future attacks and was able to purchase the correct amulet (a figa) at any one of a dozen stands in the market that very day.

That reminds me of my students who gave me crystals for every holiday. They were terrified of my vulnerability.

Yes, you need a crystal figa. I’ll get you one next time I visit Recife’s Mercado de São José.

Perfect! We all need protection from the evil eye.

Can we chat about structure? Almost every story is revealed in the first few paragraphs. You seem to subscribe to Vonnegut’s theory that a story should begin as close to the ending as possible. We’re told the fish will change Otalia’s life immediately in “Bela Lua”; Valquira says she’ll never leave music for a man; Padre claims you can’t tempt fate; Antonio will join the National Armed Forces. Yet we don’t know how the conflicts will actually be resolved. And the conflicts still seem fresh as they twist and turn. How do you see the structure of the story contributing to the storytelling?

Many of my stories are structured that way because often all I know at first is the beginning circumstance of a character, the ending circumstance, and how the character is ultimately affected by whatever happens. The path that takes me from one point to another is usually a mystery that reveals itself incrementally in the act of the writing. It takes time to know a character, to separate him or her from the writer. That promise of intimacy through time is what attracts me to the novel form.  But to answer your question, structure allows for an organized telling of a story. Sometimes I think I have the best structure and it’s not until the end that I realize the story would be better told if I move things around.

I’m wondering about process. How far into the writing of each story do you [figure out] what it’s about?

At the outset, I’m aware of at least one dimension of what a story is about, even if it’s the most superficial one – say, a relationship between a mother and daughter. The deeper layers tend to reveal themselves much later, as the characters develop.

Did these stories come out whole or was revision a major factor?

Revision is always a major factor for me. There are infinite ways to write the same story; I would consider myself very fortunate to choose the best one first. Are there writers out there whose stories come out whole?  Who are these creatures?

I don’t know them either. Only rumors. I definitely wouldn’t want to interview them.

It may be awkward and a bit spooky; you may need to employ the services of an exorcist when you’re finished.

I’ll have my crystal figa to keep me safe. And speaking of safety, many of your stories begin with a detailed introduction of the setting. The reader is firmly planted on comfortable ground before the plot begins. Not just the name of the town but the region, its history, its role in modern development, its pride, etc. What role does setting have in the story telling itself?

Immediacy.  If I’m going to write about a place, real or imagined, I have to make it as inhabitable as possible and, for my own sake, do it as early on as possible. Firmness in place helps me find my way through the intricate pathways of a story. The characters demand it; if the setting is not detailed enough, they cross their arms and roll their eyes at me as if to say, “Are you kidding? What are we supposed to do with this?”

You are a hard woman to find on the Internet. Is that intentional? It seems such a race in the literary world these days to “market” and “brand” an author. Are you avoiding the limelight or just focused on the writing?

I find marketing my own writing embarrassing. My natural inclination is to avoid it. For me, ultimate success means having the ability to decline any interviews, readings, public signings, without a second thought to its impact on book sales or career. I’m not intentionally hiding, but I am not making an effort to be found either.

What are you writing now?

I’m working on a novel that explores the enormous universe of the religious and the ritualistic in Brazil. In a sense, it’s a coming-of-age story, where the protagonist is forced to negotiate the influences of Christianity and Candomblé, personified in her paternal and maternal grandmothers.

I can’t wait to read it. I saw a Candomblé ceremony in Salvador and it was intoxicating. Touristy and probably inauthentic but intoxicating nonetheless.

I, too, had the good fortune of witnessing a ceremony in Recife. Luckily for me, I was the closest thing to a tourist in the place. It was beautiful, complex, edifying. I grew up with so many prejudices against Candomblé and its practitioners; it’s been an immense joy to dispel these prejudices and learn about a culture that is so essential to Brazilian identity.

Candomblé ceremony, photo credit Luana Monteiro

A writer balances many roles — you happen to be a mother, too. In the interview at the back of Bela Lua, you said you meditate and write every morning. How do you find your process evolving now?

Funny you should ask! As I’m sure you can imagine, I’ve been too sleep-deprived to keep up my meditation routine. I tend to fall asleep the minute I sit up and close my eyes. My daughter is almost two; it took a year to work out a sustainable writing routine. Meditation will come next.

Um passo de cada vez, sim? [One step at a time, yes?] Muito obrigada, Luana.

Yes, um passo de cada vez. Maybe nirvana will visit me while I sleep, like a thief in the night. Is it too much to ask?

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Further Links and Resources

• Watch a video of “Writers in the Round: Latino Voices,” an event featuring three Wisconsin Latino writers including Luana Monteiro.
• Read about Granta’s selection of “The Best Young Brazilian Novelists” and the issues to be published in Portuguese in July 2012 and in English in Fall 2012.

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/an-interview-with-luana-monteiro/feed 2 http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/surfers-and-cowboys-an-interview-with-robert-garner-mcbrearty http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/surfers-and-cowboys-an-interview-with-robert-garner-mcbrearty#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:00:43 +0000 Steven Wingate http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=34173 Robert Garner McBrearty is a quiet guy. He doesn’t walk into a room glad-handing and trying to work the crowd, and you’re not likely to find him tracking visitors to his website via Google Analytics. He’s more like a person you find on a back porch at a hectic party and sit down with, only to learn that he’s earned quite a few accolades that louder writers would crow about.

I know this because I experienced it firsthand, working with McBrearty at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he has taught fiction, creative nonfiction, and composition for the better part of two decades. I don’t know how many times we ran into each other before I knew that he had a short story collection out (A Night at the Y, originally published by John Daniel & Company , or that he had an MFA in creative writing from the storied Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, or that he had won a Pushcart Prize, or that he had received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Like I said, a quiet guy. Fortunately I got to know him a bit, and heard early on about his second collection (Episode, from Pocol Press), and his selection for the 2007 Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award. Since he doesn’t crow about himself, I’ll refrain from crowing too much more about him. Suffice it to say that he has enviable amounts of perseverance as a fiction writer and a new collection out, Let the Birds Drink in Peace, from Conundrum Press in Denver.

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Interview:

Steven Wingate: You’re one of those writers who seems particularly dedicated to the short story. Have you tried the “dark side”—novels—and if so, can you delineate your feelings toward both mediums?

Robert Garner McBrearty: I have indeed tried the novel and will continue to do so, though I do feel most at home in the short story form.  I think I’m not all that bad at novels—I’ve had three unpublished novels represented by literary agencies, and way back in 1992, I had one novel that passed through several editorial approvals before being turned down by the senior editor at Houghton-Mifflin. That was sort of discouraging. One week I was riding high with anticipation of a nice advance, and the next week I was working in a warehouse. Just a few years ago, I had another close call with another major publisher. I think, though, I’ve never gotten any of my novels completely right. They had some good writing in them—maybe some of my best—and in fact I’ve raided sections over the years and used them in short stories, but I think there’s always been some flaw, perhaps structural, perhaps a need to explore more deeply when I felt like cutting away. The short story provides a fairly clear path, once the idea sets in, so it’s easier to get from start to finish without making too many wrong turns, and if one does make a wrong turn it’s easier to get back on track.

I do have a few other thoughts about it. Raymond Carver was asked once why he wrote the short story and not the novel and he said something along the lines of he wouldn’t mind writing a novel but the short story had fit in more with the rest of his life. I feel like that a bit. I know my own level of hardship was substantially less than Carver’s, but my early years always felt kind of chaotic: bad jobs, moving around, and it was hard to sustain larger works. And then the kids came along and there was a lot of distraction there, so somehow the short story always seemed more doable. Now I’m older and the kids are grown and time seems to be opening up more, so who knows?

I think the short story (I think of Cheever and Hemingway and Carver and Tobias Wolff and Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro and Donald Barthelme and Barry Hannah and Borges and a host of other great writers) is a wonderful part of our literature. I wish we talked about short stories and short story writers more (obviously, as a short story writer I would be inclined to desire this!). People often talk about what great novel they’ve read—no jealousy here—but too infrequently someone says, “Hey, I just read this wonderful short story in…”

I guess I’m drawn to short stories, too, because I can flip from one idea to another fairly quickly.  With novels, a certain level of boredom and confusion and despair always set in. If I screw up a short story, I can move on. Screw up a novel and there goes years of work. Well, not entirely. You learn something from the experience, but it’s rewarding to actually see something in print. If I go through a long period without seeing something of mine in print, the despair sets in. I spend a fair amount of energy warding off despair and the short story gives me more opportunity to ward it off. I couldn’t just write novels and wait years between publication, if they ever got published.

You’re a Western guy through and through—raised in west Texas and a longtime Coloradan—and we did an AWP panel about how writers based in the West deal with the macro-mythos of the West. How is the whole West thing going for you now, especially with the West becoming so homogenous with the rest of the country?

Well, let’s make that south Texas. I grew up in the fifties and sixties as a suburban kid in a large city, San Antonio, so I spent a lot more time riding my bike than riding a horse. In high school, there were “surfers” (who hadn’t quite earned the right to be “hippies”) and “cowboys.” I was a “surfer” by virtue of my longish hair, though I have only been on a surfboard once in my life—a not entirely satisfying experience, though I did have a brief moment of glorious gliding along.

I think, though, that distinction between “surfers” and “cowboys” reflects on the sense of duality I always felt. We were in a new subdivision of modest ranch-style homes, but on the edges of the neighborhood, there was still open land, with cactus and mesquite trees, and outlying houses with sprawling yards where people kept horses. One always knew that rattlesnakes were not far off. I don’t know how frequently it actually happened, but there was always this sense that there were neighborhood fathers cleaving rattlesnakes with hoes.

One had a sense that the frontier was not far off, both in place and time. My mother’s side of the family, especially, came from ranching roots (small ranches, not the Ponderosa), but I grew up with stories of bandits riding through, battles between the settlers and the Comanche, and of course, the Alamo loomed in my consciousness. So in a way, I was a typical suburban kid riding on a bike, but envisioning riding the prairie. And of course so many T.V. shows and movies of that time built onto the western mythos, and maybe one wanted to claim a little piece of that, the way when the home football team wins, “we” win. So, it’s like, hey, I’m in Texas so there’s a little piece of John Wayne in the Alamo in me. And then later in life one realizes how far one is away from living the myth and one plays off that a bit, so there’s some comic potential there, too.

When I write, I don’t particularly set out to be Western or not-Western. But I consider my roots, how I grew up, and those stories of my upbringing and the mythos of the Western frontier float around in my mind so they are part of who I am, and I allow my subconscious to lead me here or there. Here in Boulder County, I can be walking on a beautiful trail within minutes of leaving my house, and one doesn’t have to be a great adventurer to experience the big sky. Had I grown up in the East, in New York, say, I think I would be a very different writer than I am. I allow the “West” to show up as it shows up. I think it’s similar to the way I approach Catholicism in my writing. I don’t set out to be either a Catholic or non-Catholic writer. The background shows up as in “Hello Be Thy Name.”

In Let the Birds Drink in Peace there’s also a strain of micro-mythologizing: people viewing their lives in heroic terms. We see it in “The Helmeted Man,” “Acting Lessons,” and “The Edge He Carries.” What draws you to them?

Well, at the risk of sounding a bit pathological, I think it may stem from my own sense of self-aggrandizement. But, wait, isn’t that what we fiction writers do? Don’t we write fiction instead of memoir because we want to make the experience somewhat different, maybe larger, than it actually was? So I think as a kid, even, I was always sort of playing “hero” in my mind. Later in life, I acted and I also became a terrific liar. Though most of my lies were really more “bullshit” where I wanted people to figure out somewhere along the way that I was making it up. The reality was kind of boring, so why not tell the tall tale? I like the conflicted hero, the one who has doubts about his own heroism. He keeps replaying it in his mind: was he really brave or just lucky? Didn’t he almost not do the brave action that he did? And what about all the times he didn’t do the brave action at all, but took a pass? As they replay it in their minds, they become less and less sure about their own bravery.

I do look for those moments that stand out in one’s life. I’m talking about the regular person who isn’t exposed to danger on a daily basis, unless of course we view all of life as dangerous, which it actually is if you think too hard about it. But soldiers, say, are exposed to danger in a different sort of way, or activists in despotic countries. The average person goes about his or her daily life and there are only so many times those big moments come, when one can act or not act. I’ve had some times when I didn’t act and those times haunt me, and a few times where I did act—and those times haunt me too. At first there is a desire to pat oneself on the back, but then later the self-doubt sets in.

At any rate, though, I think those moments can make for good fiction. I have an eye toward the dramatic. I like something to happen. In “The Acting Class” the big event actually occurs as a lie/story that the narrator is telling, but I hope the story within a story still has some of that transporting effect that drama has.

Many of your characters are what used to be called “ne’er-do-wells”: people who don’t have much of a shot to succeed, and who frequently berate themselves for not having lived the life they might have. I also see lots of menial labor here: dishwashers, janitors, etc. Why is this one of your territories?

In some ways, my most formative years as a writer were in the years after I got out of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I graduated from there in 1981, when I was twenty-six. I had an M.F.A. and no desire whatsoever to teach anything to anybody. I spent about five years just working odd jobs. Dishwashing was a big one. I’d done it in college and I was good at it. I had the best hands in the game. I don’t know if it’s still like this, but back then if you had dishwashing skills and an M.F.A, you were in. You were highly sought after… There was one night at a fancy French restaurant where the owner said to me, “You have a Masters degree and you’re washing dishes? You must really be stupid.” I think I was. I was stupid at making money. Other bad jobs ensued. I’m grateful for that time. It’s given me an affinity for people working the menial jobs. I’m very polite to waiters and waitresses or any kind of service personnel. I’m always an inch from getting up at the table and saying, “Hey, I’d better go see if they need help in the kitchen.” I was batting out my stories, working crappy jobs, married by then. I remember my wife (of almost thirty years now) calling home when we were engaged and how thrilled her parents were to hear her future spouse was a dishwasher!

After about five years of that kind of work, though, I was drained. That work experience was sort of mythical, too. I never really fit it, I was never really one of the guys. I was an outsider there, too. I answered an ad for a small school in Berkeley. By then I had a Pushcart Prize (“The Dishwasher,” what else?) and a few other publications and the director there, the poet Philip Brady who went on to become a good friend, liked me and hired me to teach composition, and it beat washing dishes or working in a warehouse.

For years, though, I would often have some crappy job to accompany my part-time teaching, so I guess there was always a feeling like “success” was something I wasn’t quite experiencing, and I guess that shows up in many of the characters I create…I also have a way, I suppose, where the “boss,” the guy who is more successful, is sort of the bad guy as in “Houston, 1984.” I don’t really mean this as some sort of class warfare statement, but it’s often been my own experience that the guy in charge is something of a prick. So I have a lot more affinity for the underling.

What I hope comes through, though, is that the characters aren’t beaten. Beaten at, certainly, but not beaten.

Colonel William B Travis, commander of the Alamo, appears in “Colonel Travis’ Lament” and in “Alamo Dreams.” He’s not-quite mythic; he’s part of the action, but not central to it. Why are you drawn to him as a character, and is your answer related to your curiosity toward the West, myth-making, and ne’er do wells?

I think that’s one of my more complex stories. First off, it should clearly be read as speculative fiction, even absurdist at times, and is not meant as a reflection on the real-life figures, for whom I have great respect. Still, I could not have written that story without having some obsession with the real life Alamo. I was interested in so many aspects of the story. One was in fact that Travis wrote some very dramatic letters during the siege, calls for help, with the letters increasingly becoming brooding as the calls for help went unanswered. In my story though, one can see that he’s having sort of a great time as he’s writing, really getting into his own mythology about glory and honor and his place in history. So I identified with Travis as a writer, and I thought about what if he was really getting into the writing, that this was the best writing of his life so the writing was kind of really energizing him even though this siege was going on. At the same time, though, the horror draws nearer.

The ne’er-do-wells does fit in here because many of the people of that time came to Texas with past misfortunes weighing on them. Travis’s marriage had fallen apart, Crockett had lost his election in Washington. They were looking for rebirth, new opportunity, redemption. Even in his own time, Crockett was mythologized, his backwoods warrior image blown up way beyond reality.

I show Travis and Crockett as realizing they’ve gotten themselves into a desperate situation, trapped by their own mythology. The situation’s gone too far. What good is being glorified by history if one is about to die? I was also interested in the relationship between leaders and followers, as it applies in many situations, even beyond the military. The little guys, the foot soldiers, get caught up and used by the grandiose ambitions of their leaders. I think of people like Custer here, too, not a whole lot of concern for the men he led to doom.  In this case, Travis does care—but it’s too late.

In “Houston 1984” you play with the detective genre in an interesting way—your character actually is a private investigator, so his search isn’t a metaphor for some broader search. It’s the meat and potatoes of your character’s life, which is in no way mythologized at all. What’s going on for you in this story?

Glad you asked. The “1984” plays off Orwell. The story is set before we had as sophisticated spying devices as we have today, but the Boss has a vision of what’s to come when, “we can tap a button and zoom in on any bedroom we want to.” So part of the story is about the loss of our personal privacy and how destructive that can be. As a detective that’s what one does: invade the privacy of someone. In this case, the detective realizes it’s wrong. He’s sympathetic towards the subject of his investigation, and at the end he suspects his actions, his report, has led to a woman’s death. I also wanted to make the detective sort of a regular person—he’s worried about money, he’s got a brother he needs to take care of, and Houston itself is a brooding, violent place, so again there’s that sense of living in a world of siege. One other part, I think, is important. The Boss is also taking about a coming time when the old moral order will be gone, replaced by something else, “…the real scruples. The ones that come when the old scruples have passed away.” But of course the new scruples are pretty suspect themselves. It’s a world, again sort of Orwellian, where bad is good and good is bad, a world where any action can be justified or maybe not even need to be justified because all is okay. In the end, the detective responds with nausea, literally. Nausea at what’s he’s allowed himself to be drawn into, nausea at the situation, nausea at what he’s done.

You’ve been a small-press guy throughout your career, and Birds has just been published by the small, relatively new Conundrum Press in Denver. How is this going for you, and how has your attitude toward the press/author relationship changed for you over the years?

Well, to be honest, I would have no objections to a nice fat check from a major publisher.

But first off, let me just say what a great experience it’s been working with Conundrum Press. I met my future publisher, Caleb Seeling, at the Writing the Rockies Conference at Western State College in Gunnison. I handed him copies of my first two books, A Night at the Y, and Episode, and didn’t think too much of it after that. I didn’t make any sort of a pitch or anything: I just said, more or less, hey, hope you enjoy these. Then a couple of weeks later, he called and said he really liked my writing and wanted to do a book. At first we talked about doing a reprint of A Night at the Y, which had gone out of print. But as we talked more, we realized we wanted to do something new as well.  So this is sort of a hybrid. It brings back three of my golden oldies from A Night at the Y (hope you don’t mind my calling them “golden oldies,” sort of a little more of my own self-mythologizing), and ten new ones.

But what really comes to mind with this book is personal relationships. I have sat down with Caleb and with senior editor Sonya Unrein and had good conversations about Birds, and also about possible future books. It actually makes me want to write more, as Conundrum is interested in my overall career. It’s a new press, of course, or under new ownership anyway, and I have the first new book out of the blocks, so our fates seem somewhat entwined. I’m certainly rooting for the press, and I know the press is rooting for me.

In terms of small presses, in general, I have to say Hats Off! I never would have survived, emotionally, without them. I was working as a dishwasher when I got the call from Rie Fortenberry from Mississippi Review, speaking some of the most wonderful words I have ever heard: “Robert, this is Rie Fortenberry calling from the Mississippi Review, and I wanted to tell you that your story ‘The Dishwasher’ is going to be reprinted in The Pushcart Prize.” My hearing sort of went out after that, and for a few days I was convinced that someone was playing a joke on me. But being a dishwasher who has a story about being a dishwasher appearing in the Pushcart Prize anthology somehow makes one scrub the dishes with a cheerier attitude. There were other experiences like that, times of gloom, when some acceptance from a literary magazine would come along that kept me going. Those kinds of affirmations were incredibly sustaining. I also appreciate it when an editor takes a second or a third story, as with North American Review , Mississippi Revie w, Missouri Review, and Green Hills Literary Lantern.

So, of course, not much money in small press publishing, usually not much glory, but mostly I just say “thank God” for the small presses. Brave, noble enterprises! I hope to be sending stories to them for many years to come.

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Further Links and Resources

Maybe these friends recognized in my own writing an attempt toward something Tower has already sublimely captured. We are both displaced Southerners writing about the people who stayed in the humid, hard-drinking towns we left. In my stories, people teeter innocently on the verge of hysteria until pushed. In Tower’s stories, people attempt to grow up, get it together, and get home — and then some guy goes and commits a Blood Eagle.

The first Tower story I read was “Retreat,” a gleefully sour battle between two unlikeable brothers, collected in New Stories from the South 2010. The introduction revealed this “Retreat” to be a revision of a story that had appeared in McSweeney’s—twice. There are at least four versions of the story in print: those that McSweeney’s published, the one in New Stories from the South, and the version in his debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

This past fall, in fact, I taught my undergraduate creative writing class at the University of Michigan sentence-level revision through a side-by-side comparison of another one of Tower’s openly-revised stories, “The Brown Coast.” I stood at the hot, humming overhead that was projecting the text on the pull-down screen in front of the blackboard and squinted out at the room. “Why do you think he changed ‘ass’ to ‘buttock crack’?”

After the laughter, I got responses that indicated the Tower revisions were working magic on my students: “It’s more specific”; “It’s funnier”; “It sounds like something a certain person would say”; “It’s, like, less gross, but also more gross.”

So when Wells Tower visited Ann Arbor in the fall of 2011, selected by the University of Michigan MFA Program’s fiction cohort as the Janey Lack Visiting Writer, I was eager to meet the author whose work I had come to late but had increasingly come to admire. And though he was going on only four hours of sleep, he generously agreed to an interview.

At the time of this interview, Tower was a visiting faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2009. His fiction and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Washington Post Magazine. Last year, The New Yorker named him among their “20 under 40” fiction writers. The following conversation took place early one chilly November morning in the lobby of the Bell Tower Hotel.

Interview

Rebecca Scherm: I’ve begun to think of you as this great reviser, because you have openly shown work in various incarnations. When you published the first versions of these stories, did you consider them finished?

Wells Tower: No—it’s weird. When I first started publishing, it was very exciting but utterly mortifying. The first fiction I ever had published I sent to the slush pile at The Paris Review. Kind of an arrogant move. They took both of the stories, and they put me on the phone with George Plimpton, who had always been a hero of mine. I couldn’t believe it. At the same time, the thrill of getting into a fancy journal was definitely shaded by a sense of mortification that the stories were not good, and they were not done.

Had you changed them since you submitted them?

Not really, I just knew that they were doing things that were not … respectable. I was in grad school and I hadn’t read a huge amount of contemporary fiction. My early stories were pretty derivative, banging the Southern tambourine quite gracelessly. I knew they had some cheap tricks, but I took it on the chin.

And the versions that appeared in The Paris Review — did you revisit them before they were published in the magazine?

I tried to. I proposed some very stupid edits, which they fortunately rejected.
The carnival story [“On the Show”] I submitted to my editor at Harper’s and didn’t hear anything. By the time he came back to me and told me the story had been accepted, I’d written a totally different story based on the same thing. So I sent him this other version. The first one was a first-person narrative, and then I rewrote it as a kind of Altman-esque thing, a bunch of teeny windows into different lives, all centered around this MacGuffin-ish thing of the boy getting raped in the porta-john. Ugh.  And he just said, “Okay, either one, they’re both fine.” We spent a few days on the phone, wondering which one. Then we sent it around Harper’s for a vote, and they went with the first one, which I think was not as successful. I put the other one in the book.

How does it feel to labor over revisions — this must be changed, this is unacceptable — only to hear your editor say, “Ehh, either one?”

Right. Is it just that it doesn’t really matter? Even with “Retreat,” I have had some pompous, lofty arguments over why the revised version is better. I sent it to my editor, who said, “Oh, I don’t know. The first one was a little more fun.” We ended up kind of hybridizing the two drafts. I think, in my heart, the second version of “Retreat” is a better story.

It’s subtler, more generous.

Yeah, the first one is just a piñata job on the character. [The revision is] a more complex challenge to enlist not only the reader’s sympathies but my own sympathies on behalf of the less sympathetic character. It was written in better faith. In the first one, I just sort of had an idea for this character: I will make fun of him, and he will be ridiculous, and that will be the pleasure of this story. But I think that’s not enough.

You work on these stories for years, then send them into the void. Is that moment of silent consideration when the urge to revisit the story seizes you? Or do you just revise constantly?

The revisions for my book happened because the book was being published. Some stories, like the carnival story, I hadn’t found a publisher for, and I was just revising, revising, revising. It was this idea that I knew I wanted to do more with — essentially the cutting room floor oddments of a nonfiction piece I did [for The Washington Post Magazine]. I think because it was the first magazine story I’d ever done, I just couldn’t really take editing like a man. I sort of thought, I can’t believe that you’re cutting all this language I came up with! I wrote all that stuff! I had this experience! So that one, I kind of knew I wanted to do more with. I hope to publish another book of short stories at some point, and I’m sure I’ll do the same kind of number.

At some point when you start to write seriously and start to get published, you realize that the goal is to do as good a job as you can, not merely to get your work into print. Starting out, we all think as soon as a story is published in a magazine, it’s done—especially if it’s in a fancy magazine. If they took it, you know it’s good, because they’re so fancy! But you realize no editor is going to be as hard on your work as you have to be. They don’t have the time. They don’t want to put up with you that much.

What you said about finding a home for the bits that were dropped from the non-fiction piece strikes me as a theme for a lot of your characters— trying to get home. From “The Brown Coast” all the way to “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.”

Yeah, it’s been five years since I was back in my own house in North Carolina, and I have friends who are pressuring me to go back to New York. But I’m going to go back and be by myself in North Carolina, and it really does proceed from this deep yearning for quiet, for being in my own space. Before I moved to New York I was living there for about three years, and my mother and father pointed out to me that those were the only three years I lived for an unbroken time under one roof.  But I think the sense of yearning that I’m bringing to this fantasy about going back to live in North Carolina probably proceeds more from the fiction than the fiction proceeds from my own sense of rootlessness. I had a solid, well-grounded upbringing. My parents lived in different houses, but in the same town, and they are both loving, solid, and decent. But that yearning for safe harbor feels like an unending source of poignancy for me.

That really rings true, that you can write about something and then want it, infected by something you made up.

Yeah, and I did a lot of that self-sentimentalizing in my early twenties about life in North Carolina after I finished college and moved home. I lived in a house of low quality and did some bad carpentry projects and things like that. And there was a certain kind of blow-hardism about stage-ily taking up a hammer. I still mess around with carpentry, or just terrible around-the-house manual labor. It just feels so much better than writing. An hour that you spend power-washing your deck will actually bring you one hour closer to its conclusion, which is just not the case with writing. And that’s a rough lesson. It is hard to realize that writing things just for the sake of throwing them away is crucial to the process.

That initial drafting process, when you’re staring at the blank screen—I know writers who say that’s the fun part for them, as opposed to revision.

Those people are insane. It’s all painful. The only part that’s fun, in my opinion, is when you’ve been miserable looking at the blank screen, and you’ve been miserable writing the first draft, and you’ve been miserable through every phase of the revision, and you still think the story sucks, and down the line you look at it, and you see that all that hard work actually yielded a good piece of writing.

It sucks significantly less than it used to.

Yeah, it’s true! It’s nice, to realize a story isn’t something I despise.

In your collection, two strong themes emerge: the longing to get home — wherever that means — and grappling with masculinity. The title story embodies both, a kind of literalized metaphor. How did you make the leap from the contemporary absurd world to the marauders in “Everything Ravaged”?

The Viking story was its own weird little project, and it started out with a very smart-assy genesis.

It’s so big-hearted!

I think that’s why it ends up being so big-hearted — I didn’t want to do anything other than make a couple of jokes. But that somehow freed me to do something much more sentimental in the end. Whereas, if I set out to write a story thinking — now I’m going to say something heartbreaking about family — that would just be impossible. The fact that the story was able to defeat my ambitions, or transcend them, was cool. It’s nice when that happens.

Can you talk more about that — building a whole story around a single line, a single gag?

It’s a good lesson for writing a short story: it’s best to really start small. The Viking story is built around that blood eagle thing—that was real, and that was the kernel for that story. I think the best stories start from something tiny.

The meaner the origins …

Yeah, a short story can easily destroy itself through metastasis. I think if you start a story with more than two scenes in mind, you may be doomed. At least you have a hell of a lot of work ahead of you.  If I start off trying to get at this one little moment, that’s all I want to do. And then I have to build the world that makes that moment happen. We’ve all had that moment where you’re on page 25 of a short story and you’ve only ticked off a third of the scenes you think you have to write. It’s just dreadful. But often in the way we conceive stories, they have a lot of moving parts. You read Flannery O’Connor or Richard Yates, and there are a bunch of different movements to a story. You can see how complex it is, and you think you want to write one of those big complex stories. But you forget that those moving parts came into being as the piece was being written.

When you look back at your collection, can you still find those small origins?

Yeah, the stories with sprawling origins were exhausting. The carnival story went through so many huge rewrites, probably eight months of work, and I had forty pages of notes. That’s just not how you write a short story.  But for “The Brown Coast,” I wanted to write a story about a guy and an aquarium — that was it.

And “Door in Your Eye?”

That story was based on a thing that happened when I was living down in New Orleans. The pretext was true— I was told that the woman across the street was a prostitute. And I didn’t see her for couple years, I just saw these guys coming and going. Then I saw her finally, and she was in her upper sixties, and it turned out she wasn’t a prostitute, she was a drug dealer. That story I initially published [in A Public Space] had a narrator who was kind of like me at the time, a kid in his late twenties. And it just wasn’t that interesting. Who cares? So in revision, I thought, how do I make this matter? Well, what if this narrator was in his mid-eighties? This could be the last erotic encounter of his life. Then, it counts.

That’s such a good way to think of it — you start with some tiny moment, and then make it matter.

Yeah, and I think that is the important thing in revision — looking at the draft and figuring out what is important. If it is the characters, then have you chosen the right program of incident to subject these characters to? Or if you feel like you have a really great plot, have you chosen the right people, the right point of view? What’s really the emotional goal in the story?

Are you able to find those emotional goals yourself, or do you need other people, between drafts, to help you re-steer the boat?

I don’t know if someone else can tell you. When you are revising or looking at that draft, you know where the real wood is behind the fiberboard. You know when you hit something that feels real and true and that needs to be said, and then you go back and try to make everything feel like that, which is hard.

You don’t really know how your fiction operates on other people. You write some stuff, you have some moment, some anecdote to bash out, and you do it. Then people in your workshop tell you how wonderful this is, or how moving this or that was, and you kind of know in your heart — Well, that’s great, but it is not what I was trying to do. Or I didn’t know I was doing that, and that is unsettling. You think, Well, I guess I’m good at writing in some way that I can’t do consciously. And that’s not good. You have to be completely conscious of what you’re doing in your work. Because if you aren’t, you are not really writing, you’re guessing.

And with guessing, you write toward those accidents people want you to have again.

Yeah, and a lot of it is workshop stuff — people want to be nice, or they want to show how smart they are by finding some piece of brilliance unknown to you in your mediocre story. Are the super-pros in control of every single resonance? I would say yes. In Nabokov, you can see it in every word — he understands the twelve different ways the Latinate frills on a piece of language are going to resonate. I don’t think there is any argument for not being in complete control.

Having been in an MFA program, do you have any sort of simulation of the workshop environment in your life now?

No, I don’t. I think workshops are great in that you make a lot of progress very quickly, progress that, if you’re writing on your own, would take you years and years. At the same time, you can’t really listen to that multiplicity of voices. You pick one or two people who you listen to. But also, that is not really the audience I would want. I mean, who is my ideal reader? Someone susceptible to the pleasures of fiction. I read this Kurt Vonnegut interview where somebody asked him what he considered his job as a writer. And he answered very quickly, “to give pleasure.” Which is absolutely right. If you can’t answer the question “What gifts are you bringing to the reader in this piece of writing?” — then you may be asking something unreasonable by suggesting that they read your work.

Instead of writing fiction as some scholarly exploration of an idea —

Right, or that fiction is the practice of the super-sensitive saints and that people should come and read your prose because you’re somehow more alive to human experience than everybody else. That’s complete horseshit.

[There is] a crazy little metaphor about short story writing that George Saunders laid out [in “The Perfect Gerbil”] in his book The Braindead Megaphone. He compares a short story to matchbox car tracks where every couple of feet of track there’s a little gas station, some spinning gizmo, so that when the car rolls over it, it gets shot a few feet down the track. He says every story should have a gas station every page or two, which is absolutely right — you’ve got to have those gas stations. All that sounds very simple, but what’s a gas station? You know when you read them.

I like the idea of setting your work next to George Saunders’s work. You both write about people grappling with very real anguish in absurd situations, but his work is more openly satirical. What do you think?

He’s able to write these stories with fantastic antic energy about them — they’re hilarious, and sometimes the characters are somewhat absurd, but the absurdity always seems to work its way into some big, painful place. It is a wonderfully complex balance. I do believe fiction should be funny. Ideally, you’re making people laugh. But I think in my own work I’m trying to be funny and awful at the same time.

Is being funny something that became important to you when you started writing fiction, or have you always, well, been funny?

I think I started writing only to be funny. You know, I had a little satirical column in my high school newspaper.

What did you write about?

Oh, just whatever. It was called “From the Mouth of a Philistine.” I don’t think I knew what a philistine was back then.

But you knew it was funny!

Yeah, it’s a pretty snappy title for a high school column! And those were just wacky-whacks. But I think those are both ineradicable tendencies of my work — to be funny, but to go toward fairly dark stuff. Humor and darkness are the only technologies that are really available to me. I just don’t have the firepower to write a philosophical novel. I adore The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, but I could never aspire to write a book like that, a contemplative book that still feels very real and true. It’s just not in me.

Walker Percy, Richard Yates — writers, and more specifically, books, that have meant a lot to you as a writer — do you hold them in the back of your mind, or re-read them often?

Some of those I re-read fanatically. I re-read The Moviegoer fanatically. It just makes me happy, which is odd, because I know a lot of people who find it terribly depressing. Really, the books I go back to again and again and again are my chicken soup. Charles Portis I could read forever. True Grit is phenomenally good, but his later books are so great and weird, funny and strange. There’s this arid wit in everything he writes, so deadpan, with no cheap tricks or gross-outs or cuss words.

When you re-read, are you trying to immerse yourself in the feeling you had the first time or picking for craft?

I think with Portis and Percy, it’s just pleasure. There’s nothing labored in the work. Portis, in particular, is one of the rare writers who plunges me back into the experience of reading, the pleasure of reading fiction, that I had before I started writing. Every now and again you’ll come across a book that defies your writerly impulse to anatomize it and see how it works. The Dubious Salvation of Jack V, by Jacques Strauss, this South African writer, is pure oxygen, a really, really lovely book.

Have you ever read Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, by Yasunari Kawabata? They’re not meditative or philosophical puzzles, but they get you into a moment. And he’s able to do this thing that’s really lost to lot of Western writers — and maybe I’m speaking specifically of contemporary American writers. We’re so afraid of beauty or love or these sorts of soppy, gooey themes in our fiction that we tend to really stay away from them. Or if we find a way to deploy them, it’s very strategic, and we sort of think, How much hideousness do I have to robe this one moment of honest decency in? It’s like in the Viking story— there’s just enough slaughter and gruesomeness maybe for me to get away with the kind of heart-swan moment at the end. But for Kawabata, he’s able to acknowledge that love and beauty are almost like elemental forces, part of human experience, just as you have to deal with heat and cold and mornings and evenings and seasons. Somehow he can just bring in a contemplation of beauty into a story and it doesn’t feel sentimental.

He draws a line between beauty and nostalgia?

Right. I think we feel like beauty always has to act as some kind of instrument of salvation or leavening in fiction; you couldn’t just treat beauty the way you would a chunk of asphalt, which is sort of how he does it.

And yet, there are moments when you have your characters confront scenes of beauty. Bob looking at his fish tank, Harald looking at the vista of his life.

But the loveliness of his fish tank — that’s a very calculated maneuver. The beauty there is an instrument of his salvation, and then it becomes jeopardized. A friend actually told me that detail about the fish blowing the sack that it crept into, this fish that blows a diaphanous bag and then glides into it and goes to sleep.  Could that possibly be true? I don’t know.

Do you take a lot of snippets from your friends’ lives?

I guess so—any time I hear something remarkable I try to scoop it up. I wish I were a more scrupulous journal keeper.

That’s a disadvantage of hanging out with other writers—they won’t let you steal from them like your other friends will.

Yeah, I know. That’s another part of my fantasy of life in North Carolina—fewer writers down there.

Really. Between New York and Iowa City, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting another writer.

You really can’t. You can’t even sneeze without it ending up in somebody’s short story.

Further Links & Resources:

• Listen to Wells Tower read “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” on The Guardian Books Podcast.
• Tower reveals his workspaces (really– with pictures!) to The New Yorker.
• Read a free preview to the non-fiction companion to “On the Show” in The Washington Post Magazine archives.

Jim Shepard, Credit: Michael Lionstar

A secret affair on board a zeppelin. Three brothers involved in the Chernobyl incident. A Nazi expedition in search of the Yeti. It’s a rule: any discussion of Jim Shepard’s work must eventually turn toward the range of ground covered. In hyper-condensed story after hyper-condensed story, he pushes through new subject matter that could easily have taken a whole novel to explore, and when you’ve read enough of his stories, you start to wonder if there are boundaries to his empathy. They must be somewhere, because we’ve all got them, but they certainly don’t seem to involve gender, class, nationality, sexual orientation, time, or space. Maybe it’s the human-animal divide? No, he wrote from the point of view of the swamp monster. Maybe it’s the fourth dimension? I can’t remember anything about string theory in his oeuvre. But, then, he’s still going.

Those familiar with Shepard’s past work will recognize this trend in his latest collection, You Think That’s Bad (Knopf, 2011), which could almost be read as an exercise in oneupsmanship—he invokes the voice of a “Black World” ops man embroiled in a touchy conversation with his wife and friend, an engineer made helpless in the face of a crumbling marriage and the rising sea level in the Netherlands, and even a servant of Gilles de Rais, the Breton knight and fellow of Joan of Arc accused of the serial killing of children. His narrators are thrown up against even more dire circumstances than previouisly, and while Shepard continues to take the careful time to feel for their predicaments, he also continues to spare them no sorrow (in a good kind of way).

Like a lot of my fellow MFA students and friends, I came across Jim Shepard’s work only a few years ago. I’d stumbled across a copy of Love and Hydrogen (Vintage, 2004) in the Staff Recommends section at McNally Jackson booksellers in Soho, and was immediately grabbed by the title story regarding two gay men aboard a zeppelin. But Shepard has been at this long before those National Book Award Finalist and Story Prize winner stickers were slapped on the cover of Like You’d Understand Anyway (Knopf, 2008). He’s the author of six novels and four story collections, and the editor of several anthologies. His fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, The New Yorker, and everywhere else, and he was a columnist on film for The Believer. His stories have appeared four times in the Best American Short Stories and once in the Pushcart series. Additionally, he teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA program at Williams College and is a husband, a father, and the caretaker of two beagles.

Despite all that he was kind enough to take time to talk with me, a fan-boy and MFA candidate. Via e-mail and phone we got a chance to discuss his early career, his process, where he might take his narrators next, and how he feels his mustache measures up to Tobias Woolf’s.

Interview

Shawn Andrew Mitchell: In your essay, “An Appreciation of John Hawkes,” up over at The Rumpus, you discussed your mentorship under Hawkes during your time as an MFA candidate at Brown University. Had you done much writing before this? If it existed, what was Jim Shepard juvenilia like?

Jim Shepard: By that point I’d written my whole life, as short as it was. I’d always written, for myself, and occasionally for the nuns at Our Lady of Peace School, when I’d finished all of my English in-class assignments early. I wrote mostly about war and monsters. I remember Sister Justine being bemused at one story of mine entitled “Save That Blood!” I think it involved G.I.’s fighting werewolves. As you can see, I haven’t come very far in terms of subjects.

What sort of things did you read at that time?

Nobody in my family went to college, so I only read what books my parents had in the house, which were almost entirely nonfiction. What that meant was that because nobody had taught them about literature or encouraged them to read literature, they thought “Well, of course you want to read because you want to be an intelligent human being, but if you’re going to read you want to learn stuff, and the way you learn stuff is you read nonfiction.” So I grew up reading all about volcanoes and dinosaurs in little science or history books for kids. Every so often I read a sort of summarized version of Viking myths or Greek Myths. I didn’t really know about the world of children’s books until I got to college and people would say “I love Where the Wild Things Are,” and I would say “What’s that?”

Do you still go back and read about mythology?

Not really, no. I’ve read Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino and stuff like that, but I don’t do that kind of folkloric wandering very often. I wouldn’t pick it up as a kind of curiosity. Normally there are so many other things I’ve got to get to that I don’t think, “You know, I don’t know any South Seas myths, I think I’ll read some of those.”

If the internet is to be trusted, you graduated from Brown in 1980 and your first book, the novel Flights, came out in 1983. What were you up to during those three years, creatively and professionally? I ask partially because I’m about to exit my MFA program, and there seems to be a yawning void ahead.

I got a job right out of Brown, at the last minute, teaching at the University of Michigan. I was finishing the final year of my MFA and facing the void you describe when Michigan asked Brown for the names of two or three students they might invite to apply to teach. I agreed to the interview because it meant a free trip to New York; I never really imagined they’d offer me the job. Then when Michigan did, I accepted, since I had no other prospects. The hubris of what I was doing never really hit me until I arrived in Ann Arbor. I spent the next three years working eighteen hours a day to keep up with what I had agreed to teach. (As in, “Hey: I’m lecturing on Lolita on Thursday. Oh, shit.”) During the summers, I tried to prepare for the upcoming fall semesters, and worked on Flights.

Flights was followed by three more novels: Paper Doll [1987], Lights out in the Reptile House [1990], and Kiss of the Wolf [1994]. Then, in 1996, Knopf published your first collection, Batting Against Castro. Were you working on short stories concurrently with the novels, or did you break from those entirely until you began work on Batting?

I wrote stories as an undergraduate and a graduate student, so a number of stories that are in Batting Against Castro are quite old. Some of them are older than my first novel. There’s a story in there called “Eustace,” which was the first story I published. There’s also a story called “Messiah,” which was probably the first decent story I wrote after a whole lot of bad stories. So Batting Against Castro, unlike a lot of the other story collections, really took about fifteen or twenty years to come together. It’s probably my weakest story collection if I had to judge, mostly because I think I’ve gotten better as a story writer. But whereas You Think That’s Bad took two and a half years, Batting probably took twenty. Mostly because I was writing novels along the way.

Along with the teaching load.

Along with the teaching and having children and bothering the dog and stuff like that.

Do you find it hard to switch between working on short stories and working on a novel? I’m having to work on stories for workshop right now, but I’m focusing on a novel for my thesis. It’s a tough balancing act.

No, I think what the stories were doing was allowing me to write when I didn’t have a novel idea or when the novel idea that I had didn’t seem to be working. So I didn’t really feel like I was switching. I felt like I was saying, “Well, since you don’t have a novel, why don’t you try to do something?” Or I might have come across an idea that I thought was cool but I knew wouldn’t be a novel. So it didn’t feel much like switching. It felt like trying to keep myself working in some capacity.

What sort of ideas do you feel could shape into a novel and which ones do you know are going to be short storyish?

It’s hard to say, really. Certainly some of the longer stories I’ve written lately have had a huge amount of narrative that could have been developed and a huge amount of research that went into them. A lot of my writer friends have said, “You’re crazy for not making this a 500 page novel.” So it’s not exactly inherent in the narrative itself. It has a lot more to do with how long I want to maintain the obsessive intensity of staring into that world. I think as I’ve gotten darker in terms of subject matter, the desire to stay in that world has diminished as well. If you’re writing about the servant of a mass murderer, the energy involved in trying to stay empathetic is such that five months is probably enough and three years might be too much.

Why do you think your subject matter has gotten darker as you’ve gone along?

I don’t know, but I think in general my sense of the world is becoming more apocalyptic. The despairing or angry sense you have that things are going down the toilet, which I suppose is a characteristic of getting old and crotchety, is a little bit exaggerated by a situation whereby you can almost confirm that sense just by empirical standards or even just by watching the news. It was always the case when I was growing up that people would say “America’s not what it used to be; the world’s going to hell.” It seemed back then that it was pretty easy to claim that was a controversial position. Now I don’t think it is. I guess I have a sense of powerlessness in the face of that. Very few people are in any position to stop it, but writing literature is a particularly good way to feel like you have no impact on the culture.

Was there a time when you felt that fiction could influence the culture in a positive way?

I recently visited Notre Dame. And some faculty there told me that on the day that Martin Luther King was shot in 1968, all of the major news services were frantically calling South Bend because apparently Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, and Wright Morris were all there for the literary conference, and the national media urgently needed some American fiction writers’ responses to what had happened. The assumption was—as it still is in Europe—that  literary fiction writers, having engaged with some care the social issues of the day, had something to contribute to the national conversation. Try to imagine something like that today.

That’s uplifting to think about… Maybe we should switch topics to something jollier like “craft.” How about research? At what point in the process does your research begin to coalesce into fiction? Does the research continue into the drafting time, or do you get it done beforehand?

I do a lot of reading of weird shit just because I like to, and some of that never coalesces into anything.  At some point, though, sometimes various human dilemmas I’ve come across in my reading start to haunt me—resonate with some of my own emotional history—and at that point I might start researching more pointedly. Research continues all the way through the writing process, and even the final revisions.

Speaking of, McSweeney’s sent you to the Netherlands for a few weeks to do research for “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” one of the short stories included in You Think That’s Bad. How did your process differ for that story vs. stories where your research typically involves more reading than travel?

It didn’t, really. Being in the Netherlands led me to other sources of information – taught me about other sources of information – the same way books would have. Maybe I developed a more visceral sense of Rotterdam from being there for as long as I was; I don’t know.

Have you done a lot of traveling in your life otherwise?

I never traveled at all until after I got my first decent-paying job, at the aforementioned University of Michigan. Since then I’ve gone to Europe a lot, and around the US. And the Caribbean. That’s about it.

Do those trips spur an interest in writing stories set there at all? Or does that still come mostly via your off-the-wall reading?

With some stories a trip is certainly a help. It would help if you’re writing a story about an executioner in Paris if you had actually been in Paris and wandered the streets. But for the most part these are research and imagination-based stories. I’ve written about Tibet and never been to Tibet. I’ve written about Australia and never been in Australia. I’ve written about Japan and never been in Japan. I don’t feel the impulse to have to be there. There have been times when I thought I should make the trip but the cost and rigmarole were such that I thought “You’re better off writing than going through all that energy.”

Have you ever tried your hand at more straightforward nonfiction or journalism instead of stories?

I’ve done essay writing on politics and film. I haven’t been that interested in journalism because I think other people can do it as well as I can if not better, and nobody’s offering. Nobody’s saying “Jim, do you want go study this or study that?” I also don’t know if there’s that many outlets for it. If I said, “Gee, would you pay me to go on site at Fukushima and report on the reactor breakdown?”, I think most nonfiction or journalism outlets would go, “Well, you’re a fiction writer, what do we get out of that?” So then it becomes a question of if I want to do all of that on spec or put in all of that money up front and write this piece and hope somebody somewhere runs it. And I’m not sure there’s too many things, facing limitations like that, where I think, “If I don’t do it, no one will.” I also understand why, if I were a newspaper or magazine editor, I might say, “I’d rather have a physicist who can write travel to Fukushima rather than send a fiction writer to chat with physicists.”

It seems that a large majority of your stories are in first person. Has it always been that way? What draws you to that point of view more than others?

My first three novels were in the close third person, which seemed to me much more flexible. Lately, though, I’ve been attracted to the perversity of highlighting the chutzpah involved in some of my choices of narrators. Maybe it raises the stakes for me.

Related to that, it’s often struck me while reading your stories that what might be even harder than crafting a story around so much factual research is getting the human tone right for that time and place. Do you think about this while you work? How much do you change your tone and style for each story?

I think about that a lot, because that’s really what’s on the page. In a lot of ways, if I’m writing a story about Tsuburaya, the Japanese special effects wizard, it’s really more important that I get his voice right than if I get the Japanese details right, at least at first. And the two are not very separable. So I’m much more interested in trying to nail that down, especially now that I’m doing more first person stories than third person stories. Although that story is in third person, there’s still a quality where you want to provide the illusion of a very different sensibility, but a sensibility that is still apprehensible to the American reader. So that’s really a matter of very careful moderation of tone. Tone is partly based on concrete details, but also on how that voice presents information.

So a lot of energy goes into that at a very early stage. Do I have what seems to me persuasively strange in the way I want it to be strange? Do these sound like Poles even though I’ve not spent a lot of time around Polish people? Do these sound like Japanese people even though I’ve not spent a lot of time around Japanese people?

It seems like it could become a question of nature vs. nurture, as in how much is specific to a culture and how much you can just assume is a kind of cultural universal in regards to “human nature.”

Right. There’s a slight of hand there because literature is supposed to be universal, but you also believe that you’re learning very specific cultural eccentricities. So you can relate to Tsuburaya because he’s a human being too, but you also feel sometimes reading him “God, that’s so Japanese,” and you’re not even sure what you mean by that in some ways. What you mean is a combination of insight and stereotype and any number of other things.

But stereotype is just a kind of brutish way of gathering together empirical data and insights about a particular group. So you say Italians tend to be warmer than Germans or Germans tend to be more organized than Italians, and of course those are generalities and stereotypes, but the Italians and Germans would also be the first ones to tell you, “Yeah, that’s sort of true.” So you’re trying in some way to interrogate the stereotypes and explode the stereotypes even as you make use of them.

There’s a subtle difference between stereotype and archetype, maybe?

Yeah, that’s a part of it. Archetype I try to avoid because it has so much of a Jungian grandiosity to it. I think of archetype not so much as German as The King or The Son or something like that.

What is it about the chutzpah-filled and somewhat self-deceiving character that attracts you?

I like the tension that comes when somebody who is quite self-conscious and quite smart still doesn’t seem to get it about himself or herself. I like the way that highlights and muddles those issues of responsibility and agency. I think a story where someone simply doesn’t know any better and so he does something wrong is a much simpler story, because that seems to suggest that if you just gave them the right information, that would solve the problem. I don’t think a lot of human behavior that’s very interesting operates that way. I think there’s a lot of examples where the person knows what he or she should be doing, tries to do it, and fails, and that’s very interesting.

You’ve talked in other interviews about how writers need to broaden their empathetic range, aka how deeply they can feel about how broad a swath of the world’s people. Do you have any advice as to how we might go about this? What do you encourage writers to do to develop it?

The usual: read more, and read more widely. Observe more carefully. What’s that great Walker Evans line? “Die knowing something. You’re not here long.”

You’ve also lectured that the writer should provide operating instructions for the reader to be able to navigate the story. What kind of instructions?

Each story creates its own special set of expectations, I think, and I’m always grateful when a design that I thought I’d begun to discern is confirmed, gracefully, by the story itself. What we don’t need is to be told stuff we already know, or have intuited.

What sort of things do you find your students telling the reader over and over again? What do they often leave out that seems essential?

It really depends on the model they’re trying to build. But when you’re trying different things, you want to reassure the reader that the weird thing they’ve started to notice, you meant that to be there. There are all sorts of way to reassure the reader of that kind of thing, but I’ll give you an example. You might have a person wander onto stage and start saying stereotypical things about Chinese people, and the reader reading that goes, “Is that the story’s agenda?” But as soon as a secondary character says, “You realize you sound like an idiot, right?”, the reader has a great sigh of relief and says, “Oh, OK, this story knows that it’s doing that.” That’s a really simple way that operating instructions might work. You basically say, “I know you thought it sounded weird, but in fact, I know that too,” and the reader suddenly feels a lot more confident in the design as you go along.

It’s that moment in Ulysses where you go, “Oh, this isn’t a guy who doesn’t understand punctuation. This is being done for a reason and paying off, and there’s a consistency to it.”

Another element of your teaching is that the writer should control the “rate of revelation” in the story, or how fast how many things are revealed as the story progresses. For the sake of facts and numbers, what’s the ideal rate of revelation in terms of revelations per page (r.p.p.)? How much character, conflict, background, and factual data can the reader digest at a time?

Ha! How do you measure such a thing? I suppose I’d say that everything in a short story should be accomplishing multiple tasks at once, in terms of informing the reader, and that everything should be continually enlarging, as opposed to confirming, our understanding.

Going back to the weird shit you read, what have you gotten into recently?

To give you a sense of how weird my shit can get, lately I’ve been reading about 17th and 18th century farming in America. If you want to talk about a subject where people think, “Why on Earth would you do that?” That’s the kind of weird stuff that I’ll just get into and start nosing around and not even be sure why. I don’t know how long it lasts. I do know that the good news is that if I do it for awhile and think, “Alright, I’ve done enough of that,” I don’t beat myself up over it and go, “What was the point?” Because I do think it’s interesting while I’m doing it and it’s in some way enlarging my concept of the world.

Are you working on another novel now, or do you plan to continue blowing up the short story form? What are we going to see next?

I have only the most tentative plans for a novel at this point, so I’d expect more stories. Bad news for anyone who depends on me in economic terms.

You’ve been at this now for quite some time. What have you noticed in those who keep at it versus those who don’t?

Quite some time? Jeez. Now I’m depressed. If it’s not too circular in terms of reasoning, I think I’d suggest that the main thing those who’ve kept at it have going for them has not been talent but the willingness or the determination to persevere. Not only in the face of rejection from the outside world, but also in the face of their own disappointments with themselves.

Maybe we should end this on a lighter note than our deep, deep disappointment in ourselves. My friend wanted me to ask you about your mustache, specifically how you feel yours measures up to Tobias Woolf’s.

Oh, man: it’s not even close. Toby’s  mustache is epic. He could star in a western series for HBO. I look like the skeevy guy with the unmarked van.

A Western-style mustache that belongs to neither Shepard nor Wolff.

Further Links and Resources:

Interview

Aaron Cance: Hello, Melanie! Thank you so much for agreeing to discuss The Voice of the River with me. Reading it was a beautiful and haunting experience, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget this story. I’d like to start with a few general questions, then perhaps shift into a few, more specific, ones about the new novel. I’m always curious about, and interested in, the formative years of writers whose work I enjoy and respect. Who were some of your earliest influences?

Melanie Rae Thon: By the time I started high school, I was not only reading but memorizing poems by Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda and e. e. cummings, passionate scenes from Wuthering Heights, quirky stories I found in journals. I rewrote sections of Johnny Got His Gun, imagining the speaker not as a soldier, but as girl my own age. I read the King James Bible without the filter of a minister or Sunday School teacher, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and a history of the Holocaust. These encounters jolted me into wakefulness, but also, strangely, miraculously, into love and wonder, a hunger to understand the gloriously diverse, mysteriously transient world around me.

Who are writers who continue to influence and inform your writing today?

My dear and beautiful friend Mark Robbins once told me, “Writing is prayer, the dedicated concentration of your being on that which will help you become the person you know you should be.” This is very close to the teachings of the Desert Fathers who described Lectio Divina, divine reading, as the meditative approach, ”by which the reader seeks to taste and savor the beauty and truth of every phrase and passage.” The writers who inform my writing are the ones who guide me toward a deeper contemplation of how I wish to live, to be, in the world. There are so many, and each is unique and important in his or her influence, but lately I’ve found myself reading or rereading something by Thich Nhat Hanh (the Buddhist monk) and John Berger every few months. James Agee, Tillie Olsen, and John Wideman help me understand the transcendent possibilities of inner speech and multivocal narratives, the importance of listening to everyone. When I enter the smoke and flames of Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, I am transformed and inspired by his commitment to storytelling and research. There’s a gorgeous passage in a letter Dostoevsky wrote to his brother from prison:

Brother, I am not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is Life, Life is in Ourselves and not in the External. There will be people near me, and to be Human among Human Beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter, this is what Life is, herein lies its task. I have come to recognize this. This idea has entered my flesh and blood. . . . Never until now have such rich and healthy stores of Spiritual Life throbbed in me.

The Brothers Karamazov is a gloriously expansive exploration of this vision, and the recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky restores the nuance and complexity of Dostoevsky’s language.

I could go on for days about books that inspire me to live fully, with compassion and curiosity and infinite wonder: the poems of Mary Oliver, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Touching the Rock by John Hull, The Gospel According to Jesus: for Believers and Unbelievers, translation and guide by Stephen Mitchell . . . the more books I list, the more I leave out!

How has your conceptualization of, and personal philosophy about, writing craft evolved and changed over time, from your earliest efforts to your approach to The Voice of the River?

My own writing grows more spare, more elliptical all the time, closer, I hope, to the music of poetry. At seventeen weeks, the ears of the human fetus are open, ready to receive, exquisitely developed. We awaken in a waterworld, immersed in vibration and sound: the unceasing whoosh of blood through the uterine artery, our mother’s heart and breath, the surprising syncopation of our own miraculous heartbeat. We know the exaltation and pitch of voice: anger, fear, love, sorrow. Language to us is a polyphonic murmuration. We speak not only mind to mind, but body to body. Until each sentence sings, my work is unfinished. I read every line aloud—twenty, thirty, a hundred times—seeking not only sense, but tone and timbre and rhythm, hoping that through the fusion of meaning and music my words can touch anyone, fetus or mother.

In your acknowledgments for both The Voice of the River and In This Light, you’ve written that your students have shattered all opinions and challenged all assumptions. Describe a couple of ways that teaching has had a profound impact on your life?

My students constantly remind me how diverse human experience and perception can be, how little I know about anyone or anything! These revelations may be quiet or extreme. Last year my students and I were reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness. One woman described practicing mindful breathing while she was reading to her autistic son. A miracle indeed! Never before had he remained attentive while she read, but when she used her breath to calm her spirit, he too became tranquil. A thousand times a semester my students deliver to me a new understanding of grace.

Several years ago I taught a class called Healing Into Life and Death, exploring the ways people of different cultures understand spiritual and physical healing, the cycle of life and death, and the lives of individuals as they relate to the life of the family, the community, and the natural environment. Every student in that class amazed me! One woman gave bone marrow to her older sister when she was still an infant. Before she could speak, my student had saved a life! We performed poems from The Gift by the Sufi mystic Hafiz. A 200-pound tattooed video game addict read one poem in the voice of Sean Connery, and another in the voice of John Wayne. Hafiz is a holy man with a subversive sense of humor. My brilliant student brought his fourteenth-century work into the present through his wildly perfect interpretation. It’s endless, truly endless, the surprise and gratitude I feel in the community of the classroom.

You’ve been guiding writers in their formative years much longer than I’ve known you. Just since we first met, I’ve seen Jacob Paul’s moving debut, Sara/Sarah, come to fruition and was profoundly impressed to discover that Bruce Machart, author of the astonishing debut The Wake of Forgiveness, was a friend and former pupil of yours. I haven’t met very many people that have a heart as big and as encompassing as yours, and I know that you probably celebrate your students’ successes even more than your own. How has their success fueled your own work? Do your students motivate you just as much as you motivate them?

I always hope my friends and students will survive their “successes.” In  Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says:

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it does so only as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds true for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer—or any artist—who didn’t long for external validation, but these rewards are fleeting at best, and never come close to the rapture one feels in the process of creation. Perhaps this is what fuels the desperate craving: when we abandon a piece of work, when we call it “finished,” we face the sudden loss of this passion.

I couldn’t agree more. I was having lunch with Jacob just a few days ago, and we were speaking to this. We discussed the challenges of producing fiction that has any significant degree of abstraction, how mainstream audiences don’t find it palatable and commercial publishers don’t see it as a viable publishing endeavor. A writer shouldn’t create art with the expectation of an audience, renown, or financial reward. A writer shouldn’t refrain from creating art because these things may never follow. A writer shouldn’t change the art with these things in mind. We agreed that you can only write to make art, to experience the miraculous act of creating, to discover something about yourself through your creation.

My friends and students inspire and motivate me when I see that they are able to stay true to their own visions and hear their inner voices, when they are not swayed by external rewards or dispirited by the stunning silence of absolute incomprehension. In one of the first classes I taught, a research report writing on the history of the Civil Rights Movement in America, many of my older, nontraditional students were learning to do research for the first time. (This was in the late 80s, in the days before students did research on the Internet, so these endeavors were infinitely more challenging!) Their discoveries and accomplishments were as thrilling as any I’ve ever experienced.

Yes, many of them composed impressive essays, but what remains with me even now is the awe we all experienced as we learned more about the movement, the incredible sacrifices, the history of violence and oppression. We were transformed together. Together we found the courage to take a difficult journey. We became a community, bound by shared purpose and dedication. Writing is always about discovery, and exploration allows for the possibility of transfiguration, the dynamic convergence of humility and enlightenment. The classroom is a place where we join hearts and minds and senses to become larger, more open than we are alone, more bold than we ever thought possible.

On a related note, I’ve gotten the sense from my own experiences in your novel workshop that your belief in the interconnectedness of every living thing is not a philosophy that begins when a reader opens The Voice of the River and ends when he or she turns the last page, but is something that you live every day.

Try to live! This is why I have to keep rereading and teaching books by Thich Nhat Hanh. This is why my students and I split our reading between science, spiritual texts, and literature. To be reminded, yes, again and again: we are intimately bound to everything that is, was, and will be. Even our bodies are complex biotic communities. Bacteria outnumber other cells ten to one, and without them we wouldn’t be able to digest our food or defend ourselves against many infections. Remnants of extinct retroviruses remain in our DNA, fossil records of the multitude of beings that influenced the course of our evolution. A fish that pushed itself out of the sea is our distant relative. The embryos of bats, lizards, birds, and humans are astonishingly similar.

There is a beautiful African proverb: I am because you are, and you are because we are. I like to think of this idea in the broadest terms possible: we are all part of the jeweled net: nothing exists except by connection to everything else in the infinitely miraculous universe. We mourn intimate loss, the deaths of ones we love, the extinction of species, but we are exalted by the spiritual belief and scientific understanding that through time and across space everything changes and continues. In The Heart of Understanding, Thich Nhat Hanh illuminates this idea with stunning simplicity. His example is a piece of paper, and he shows how all forms and forces in the universe are here: tree, soil, sun, rain—the logger who cut the tree, the wind that pollinated the wheat that made the bread that sustains him—all his ancestors are here, as are the worms who made the soil fertile. We can begin anywhere, with any being or any entity, and we will discover a web like this that opens forever in every direction.

In the film Planet Earth, Doctor Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury says, “Wilderness always speaks to human beings of Transcendence: in the widest possible sense it says, You as a Human Being are part of a System which is not just about your needs and your concerns. Like it or not, you’re part of something immense and very mysterious.”

I think the single most painful image in The Voice of the River is the hole in the ice. It seems dark and beautiful in its own way as a doorway to some other place, but it is a heartbreaking image because it seems to also represent the hole that Kai Dionne’s disappearance has left in the fabric of the life that he left behind, perhaps we could say that it represents a hole in the jeweled net, an absence felt by all who were close to him. It almost seems to function in the story like a wound in the world that he inhabited.

Thank you, Aaron! This is a beautiful way to express the sense of loss I felt. Kai’s sections (the chapters in second person) are composed as love songs. I wanted to explore the different ways his love is manifested, the unique relationships he has with his cousins Iris and Tulanie Rey, his uncles Griffin and Roy, his half-sisters Juliana and Roxie, his dog Talia. This is what’s lost when a person disappears from our lives, the ongoing action of his physical love in the world. Juliana and Roxie will be forever changed by their love for Kai. His love for his sisters, his spiritual presence in their lives, will continue to transform them as they remember and reinvent shared experiences. But they will never again ride him up and down the stairs pretending he’s their pony. The hole in the ice reminds us of this profound physical absence.

You’ve written, in notes about The Voice of the River, of the way that the search for a missing child “becomes holy: a missing [emphasis mine] child belongs to, and is loved by, a whole community.” Had Kai not bolted out on the ice over the river to save his beloved dog, Talia, the community of searchers in the novel would never have come together, would never have had the shared experience of the search, a shared experience that has been revelatory for some of them. Is this novel also, perhaps, an impassioned plea to its readers to be mindful of the love that is possible all around them? To foster an awareness of a broader human family that we could all have if we would just come out of hiding long enough to embrace it?

A follower asked Jesus, “When will the Kingdom of God come?”And Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there.’ For the Kingdom of God is within you.”

I believe this with my whole heart. During the last thirteen days of my father’s life on earth, I had a profoundly simple revelation: every moment of every day my siblings, my nieces and nephews, my mother and I had nothing to do except come here (to his hospital room) and love him and love one another. Despite the toxins flooding his body, my father gave and received love perfectly. Tolstoy says, “Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.” When we are faced with extreme circumstances, we know this, we live this truth.

I carried my awareness everywhere: to the grocery store, the crowded street, down to the park in early morning. Everything and everyone seemed holy. I remained on the path in the months after my father’s transcendence. But as time passed, I wavered, I failed to love with that clarity. Love one another. It’s so simple to say; so challenging to practice in the frenzy and distraction of our daily lives! This is another reason teaching sustains me: it’s easy to love in the classroom; my generous students lift love lightly out of me.

I have always really been proud of my ability to stop anywhere and at any time I needed to in order to witness the beauty of the world around me reveal itself to me, whether it is by watching a prolonged process or being present mindfully to experience a single, shimmering moment that makes itself manifest to me, and is gone. In the novel workshop, that was reinforced, reinvigorated. The Voice of the River is flush with luminescent, transient moments that the reader witnesses. But the project as a whole was larger than that, wasn’t it? This seems, to me, to be a book about being a witness. Every revelation the reader has about one of its characters seems to encourage seeing with new eyes.

For more than twenty years I’ve been keeping what I call the Book of Wonders. Life begins here, in joy and astonishment. I see deer up to their ears in snow; a pigeon dying on my porch the day after Christmas; reflections of trees in the river, brilliant fish swimming in the treetops. One tanager swoops tree to tree, gold and orange, black-winged, silent: as I watch him fly, I feel my body rise as if I too have wings, a heart as strong as his to lift me.

In the park, a woman drags a drunken man into the grass, feathering his face with kisses from her fingers before she leaves him. The x-ray of my sister’s back shows enormous bolts in her narrow spine, her fragile body transfigured.

I learn of medical miracles: marrow taken from the bone of a small girl, injected into the vein of her brother or sister; titanium ribs perfectly formed for scoliosis patients; a baby who thrives in her mother’s womb after the woman is shot in the belly. My father survives nine coronary bypasses, three heart attacks, five strokes. When all his organs finally fail, we learn his precious pacemaker cannot be transplanted to a human being, so we offer it to a golden Labrador. Now every dog I see fills me with spontaneous delight, my father’s love, a living vision of his resilience.

My work as a writer begins here, with strange and miraculous tales, the daily prayer of attention. I’ve filled more than seventy volumes. Making stories is not the goal: I wish only to be more alive, more mindful, more reverent. Keeping The Book of Wonders restores me to the possibility of grace in every moment.

So yes, you’re right, the project as a whole becomes larger, but it begins with “attention taken to its highest degree.” Simone Weil says this is the same thing as prayer:  “it presupposes faith and love.”

The presence of the lost children in The Voice of the River is tragically fitting. Each of these children, present though they may be in the story, is missing to someone. Missing children appear in your 1997 collection, First, Body, and in the new story, “Heavenly Creatures,” that appears in In This Light, the story collection published by Graywolf Press just a bit earlier this year. Talk about the presence of missing children in your work. Is their presence in the writing a way of giving voice to the voiceless? Of giving presence to the absent or of rediscovering the lost?

I want to go back to your comment on witnessing. I had my first intimate encounter with homeless children when I was sixteen and a friend of mine was sent to a juvenile detention center. (I’ve fictionalized his story in “Iona Moon,” another piece in the collection In This Light.) When he returned a year later, he was irrevocably altered, brain damaged from fights or drugs or beatings—he could never tell me. His parents refused to let him come home, and he lived in sheds he found or made shelters from sticks and garbage bags.

Years later, when I lived in Boston, my “apartment” was an attic room without insulation.  I froze in winter, fried in summer. Still I knew how lucky I was to have shelter, food, a job, a doctor. I walked everywhere, miles and miles every day, through all parts of town, tame and dangerous, in all kinds of weather. I encountered the homeless, the poor, the extravagantly wealthy, the addicted, the recently immigrated, the excessively educated.

One brutal winter, a storm surged up the coast every weekend. I lost power for days at a time. Pigeons flapped at my dark windows. I walked. And there they were: the kids, throwaways and runaways, the unloved and unlucky. The emaciated Haitian refugee shivered in Harvard Square, playing his guitar, trying to earn a few dollars. He was a brilliant musician, but his eyes were yellow where they should have been white. I thought he would die soon. The man with no fingers slept in a doorway and could barely move; as I passed, he opened his bare palm and lurched toward me.

The lives of the people I saw on the street became vivid to me, intensely personal. I began to imagine how those children might survive, who they might love, why they were out there. I began composing “Xmas, Jamaica Plain” (another piece included in In This Light),  dreaming the lives of Nadine and Emile.

In 1998, I worked with a juvenile prosecutor in my hometown (Kalispell, Montana), doing research for my novel  Sweet Hearts. He told me he believed there were 300 homeless kids in the area. These are the children in “Heavenly Creatures.” By the time I started exploring The Voice of the River, I imagined their numbers swelled to 700. But it’s strange: as numbers increase, they become even more abstract, weirdly inconsequential. Stories remind us that each life is precious. Nadine, Emile, Matt Fry, Trace, Peter Fleury, Flint Zimmer: each missing child has a history of love and loss, a passionate story to tell us.

Like you, like all humans and perhaps many other creatures, I have received the gift of mirror neurons, pathways in our brains that allow us to experience “Kinetic Empathy,”  the sense that when you witness something, you “feel” as if it is happening to you. This may be physical (you watch someone fall and scrape skin on gravel and you flinch in pain), or emotional (you see a teacher ridicule a classmate and feel the burn of humiliation). Kinetic empathy may become unbearable: powerless or paralyzed by fear, you watch one person torture another. Years later, the memory continues to haunt you: you see yourself as both victim and perpetrator.

This too must be transformed by love, a willingness to remember, to re-invent and re-imagine. Anna Deavere Smith says she recognizes the gap between herself and the people she represents in her plays. The thrill of the experience for writer or actor, viewer or reader, is to move into that space, to become other than oneself while still acknowledging and respecting the infinite unknowable mystery of every living being.

Rumi says: You become bewildered; then suddenly Love comes saying,  “I will deliver you this instant from yourself.” Love, not art, is the purpose; but for some, witnessing and rendering and imagining stories is the process and the path to understanding.

You’ve been working on The Voice of the River for quite some time. Looking back at the entire process, were there points of its development that stand out to you as particularly profound or important? Were there any points in its development that were revelatory to you?

I loved going to the park in early morning and speaking with the pigeons in their language, trying to imitate their tender voices. When I composed Daniel Sidoti’s sections, I loved the owls and the mountain goats, the ways Daniel taught me to perceive them. Every moment of the experience still feels revelatory to me. I could open the book at random, point to any passage and tell you a story about the ways in which that exploration continues to open my vision and deepen my sense of awe for all the living beings and potent entities I encounter. When I imagined the hibernating bear giving birth to two cubs, I lived inside the den, trying to render every detail from their perspective. I can’t really know what bears sense and think, but I can move outside myself, and this freedom, this joy, is extravagant.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the experience of reading this novel. Will these characters continue to haunt you?

I hope all the living beings, human and more-than-human, will continue to change and open me. I believe they will. I trust them.

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