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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At what point does learned technique comes into the process?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Links and Resources

How refreshing, then, to read a novel like Jo Ann Beard’s In Zanesville, which she describes in interviews as written for a younger audience, but whose broad appeal transcends both gender and age. Indeed, short of Beard’s interviews, nothing about this book suggests it isn’t marketed for adults. Like the rare kid in school who is popular with all the cliques, In Zanesville can hang comfortably with anybody: the story perfectly captures the tenor of early high school without ever condescending to its characters or isolating its readers.

For one thing, the unnamed narrator is hilarious. Never cutesy or precocious, her dry wit and off-hand observations compliment a lyrical and authentic vulnerability. Her best friend Felicia (Flea) is – to borrow a term from Charles Baxter – an ideal counterpoint character. Their friendship is a reminder why everyone needs a war buddy in the trenches of high school. Whether negotiating the politics of a cheerleader sleepover, deserting marching band mid-parade, or cutting deals with God in order to effectively sneak out of her house, the plucky protagonist’s voice is sharp as a tack. And though the material is beautifully age-specific (the bananas-and-mayo diner orders, the atrocity of Mom bras), the implications of time and place are significant and far-reaching.

Set in a small Illinois factory town—perched between the rural obscurity of corn fields and the glittering architecture of Chicago, the landscape mirrors that in-between feeling the narrator experiences so acutely.

In addition, the tightness of Beard’s prose undercuts any potential sentimentality of her subject matter. The opening and closing sentences of this novel struck me as the best opening and closing lines I’ve read in recent memory (the first and last scenes both take place around fire, a lovely symmetry). Each chapter starts and ends with killer one-liners. The same is true before and after the white space within chapters. This book, on top of everything else, is a craft lesson in precise, elegant compactness.

Beard, whose gorgeous and heartbreaking The Boys of My Youth also bridged a literary canyon—that between short stories and memoir—clearly understands that good writing tells the truth through whatever medium the narrative demands. And like a good friend, her work stays with you as you age, taking on new meaning and reminding you of earlier selves with each new stage of life.

Further Links and Resources

George Saunders by jrmyst, on Flickr

George Saunders is dangerous. A friend once said, “Whenever I read him, I can’t stop writing like him.” I’d go further: I can’t stop thinking like him. Every bizarre object I encounter starts to resemble a Saunders dystopic landscape, terrifying and hilarious.  The Game Bus: a seatless, windowless vehicle filled with videogame equipment, where teenage boys enjoy the absence of all human and environmental contact. The Make-Over Playdate: a day spa for little girls with cucumber facials and pretend Botox. The list is endless.

The last book I read that made the world over in its image was The Bus Driver Who Thought He Was God by Etgar Keret. I couldn’t get on a plane without recounting the plot of one of the stories to my unsuspecting seatmate—flight attendant claims love at first sight, jet nose-dives toward doom. Wells Tower made me see everyone as anti-hero. But Saunders’s ability to leave a dent, to filter not only what I read and write next, but what I see, is all his own.

It helps that I live in Virginia. This is Civilwarland–driving distance to a dozen battlefields, walking distance to statues of Confederate generals. Of course the theme park in “Civilwarland in Bad Decline,” the title story of Saunders’s first collection, doesn’t exist. Can you imagine? An employee/actor in full military garb pretending to be a soldier in the Civil War, trying to convince tourists it is still 1863? (OK, I’ve seen it, too, at Appomatox.)

The Civilwarland story is so goofily and scarily realistic that Saunders’s supernatural addition—the ghostly McKinnon family—feels like a wink to assure us it’s not real. He wants readers to be absolutely sure this is fiction, not Nostradamus for the 21^st century.

Saunders writes satire, but he does it with heart. His characters commit awful deeds, they hack off a boy’s candy-stealing arm, stuff “a Baggie full of human ears,” pose as conservations and fill mass graves of raccoons, and slice a boy to bits in a wave machine. But they are also capable of atonement and even self-sacrifice.

The narrator of “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz” erases forty years of his memory to care for an aging stranger. Characters feel “sick in [their] guts as the guiltless stars wheel by.” In “The Wavemaker Falters” the dismembered boy, Clive, reassembles all his minced body parts to visit his murderer. A“400 pound CEO” concludes: “At least I’m not cruel to the point of being satanic.”

Thank you, George Saunders, for giving me this mantra. Because I’m so entrenched in your really weird and weirdly real world—of Verisimilitude Directors and personal interactive holography and Centers for Wayward Nuns—I’m starting to lose all perspective.

I told you this guy is dangerous.

Further Links & Resources

• Read “George Saunders’s Wild Ride.” In this December 2010 conversation with Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman on the New Yorker blog, Saunders says, “I think the writer’s main job is to provide a wild ride for the reader. So most of what I’m doing on a given day is just trying to ensure that the wild ride happens, trusting and hopeful that the thematics will take care of themselves.”
• For all things Saunders, visit his website: Saunders!Saunders!Saunders!
• On The Colbert Report, Saunders explains the concept behind his latest book, The Braindead Megaphone: Essays in terms of a cocktail party. Enjoy.

Jonathan Evison (West of Here, All About Lulu) praised the book, noting that “[w]ith the velocity and conviction and frenetic pace of a punk anthem, McMahon has captured perfectly the life cycle of a rock and roll band in all its exhilarating and destructive glory. How the Mistakes Were Made is fast, furious, and un-put-downable.”

Born and raised in the Washington, DC area, Tyler McMahon studied at the University of Virginia and Boise State University. Before writing his first novel, he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, a surf instructor in California, and waiter in Montana. He co-edited the anthologies Surfing’s Greatest Misadventures and Fishing’s Greatest Misadventures for Casagrande Press. He lives in Honolulu with his wife, food writer Dabney Gough, and teaches in the English Department at Hawaii Pacific University. His short stories have been published in the Sycamore Review, the Antioch Review, and the Minnesota Review, among others.

I met Tyler in 2003 while attending Boise State University. In this interview, conducted via email over a span of a few months, we discuss the paranoia of Cold War America, what it’s like going on tour, and how writing can be like church.

Interview

J. Caleb Winters: The 1980s Cold War mentality serves as a backdrop for the flashback chapters in How the Mistakes Were Made.  In one chapter you write, “All holidays are haunted by threat…some older kid always asks out loud if this will be the last year in history.”  Could you describe how the Cold War shaped Laura, Punk Rock, and the themes of the novel?

Tyler McMahon: It’s interesting that you bring that up. I often feel like I avoid early childhood more than the average fiction writer. But that element is one thing that I definitely mined from my own youth.

All my earliest memories involve being terrified by some sort of nuclear apocalypse. I would have nightmares about it all the time. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and cry about it. So many childhood sleepovers ended with somebody’s older brother or sister whispering about how the bombs worked—if they used keys or buttons, if the president could launch them from his limo, how big they were and what shape they had. There was something on television back then, maybe one of those Amazing Stories bits, in which all the nukes were fired and a little boy runs outside and screams “Stop!” and the missiles all froze in midair. I remember identifying with that at a young age.

For many years, I thought I was just paranoid or a coward. Then one day when I was in my twenties, my father told me a story about a college lecture he attended. I believe they were talking about the Cuban missile crisis. The professor was absolutely certain there would be a nuclear war between the US and the USSR in the next few years. My dad talked about how unsettling that was. After that, I realized it was a symptom of an age, not just my own psychological flaw.

I definitely think the nuclear threat was a significant factor in punk rock’s genesis, and in American hardcore especially. That’s a position I argued for often when I taught my rock history class to undergrads. I’ll concede that it might be too neat of a thesis, as a lot of bad stuff happened to the US in the 80s. But in the case of punk, it rings true.

When I began writing in Laura’s voice, she immediately had this tough, two-fisted, tomboy exterior. It became doubly important to give her some kind of soft underbelly, an inner frailty. The fear of nuclear weapons felt like a good fit. It helped place those flashbacks, both in a specific time and in D.C.

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Source: National Archives (208-N-43888)

I’ve always felt that adolescence during the Cold War was like adolescence on steroids. It’s hard enough to be a teenager and deal with the difficult realization that the grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing; but when the grown-ups have nuclear weapons aimed at each other…then it’s a whole different ball game.

I try to remind myself that every human generation has feared that it will be the last. I guess there’s always been religious eschatology, but then you usually get an afterlife or something to look forward to. And those sorts of apocalypses are considered inevitable, written into history from creation. With the Cold War, it was all due to human error.

It’s fascinating to talk about this stuff with college freshman nowadays. They’ve grown up in the shadow of 9/11; that’s the Fear Narrative that’s been thrust upon them. A part of me thinks that it’s worse, as it actually happened; it’s not as nebulous as what I grew up with. Another part of me realizes that we survived 9/11, that we could survive another one if we had to. Thermonuclear war was supposed to vaporize all human life in an instant.

I suppose it’s more likely that some sort of fear vacuum is built into our brains, and demands to be filled with four horsemen or bombs or terrorists. Or perhaps that vacuum is drilled into us by whoever profits most from those fears. Whatever the cause, I do think it’s real, and that it affects young people most severely.

How the Mistakes Were Made is getting some excellent reviews from music industry insiders.  Could you explain how you researched your novel?

The seeds got planted when I was a Teaching Assistant in graduate school. I designed a first-year writing and research course themed around the history of rock and roll. At the time, I didn’t see this course as having anything to do with my fiction writing. But as I got deeper into the material, and inundated myself with music history and documentary footage, it blossomed into a minor obsession. This all happened to coincide with a time in which I was struggling to understand the novel as a form, so I may have brought a kind of tunnel vision to the subject matter.

I was blown away by Michael Azerrad’s incredible nonfiction books: Come as You Are, and Our Band Could Be Your Life. The lines that he draws between hardcore punk and Seattle grunge were, in many ways, the impetus for Laura’s character, and my novel as a whole. How the Mistakes Were Made might not exist without Azerrad’s work.

Once I knew the story in a big picture sense, I found myself taking on a whole second wave of research aimed at making the details convincing. Many scenes take place in cities that I’m only vaguely familiar with, so I spent hours pouring over online maps and bus schedules. I also had to include a lot of technical jargon about recording and the music business. (I don’t know how fiction writers did it before the Internet.) Finally, I ended up tagging along with a San Francisco band called Poor Man’s Whiskey on several tours of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. For weeks, I slept on a bus with five dirty musicians soaking up the lingo and the lifestyle—all in the name of research.

I have to admit: sending the book to actual music figures and industry people still scares the hell out of me. It’s something I never considered while writing it. I feel so fortunate that the feedback has been positive thus far, and that most of those who lived through these scenes find some resonance with their own experiences.

You write so wonderfully about the experience of performing music, you must be an accomplished musician.  Did you play any shows with Poor Man’s Whiskey?

My live show experience with Poor Man’s Whiskey is limited to a single keg party in Hood River, Oregon, in which I sat in on the Green Suitcase—PMW’s satellite percussion section. And that wasn’t the actual band, but rather a one-night side project known as Like a Sturgeon. It was one of the best nights of my life, but didn’t lead to a permanent position in the lineup.

Unfortunately, I’m not much of an accomplished musician. I could play the drums passably well in high school, jammed for many hours in the basement, and played some shows at community centers. That’s where I get most of my first-hand knowledge—the nerves and the exhilaration, the sweating armpits and ringing ears. George, the drummer from PMW, sometimes had me bang on his drums during sound-check. The last time I did that I couldn’t even play a proper beat. It was thoroughly depressing.

With a guitar, I can fake my way through a dozen campfire songs, but I don’t seem to have any real aptitude for that instrument. I’m kind of a musical dabbler, a hobbyist. I don’t know any theory, and I suspect I might be tone-deaf. As a teenager, I was handy with equipment, and used to fix amps and guitars for my friends. I liked to make crude PA systems out of old stereos, that sort of thing. I think I developed an odd fascination with the analog electronics associated with music that helped me write this novel.

I’ve come to believe that my less-than-expert musicianship was actually an asset. The example I often look to is Hunter S. Thompson’s book about the Hell’s Angels. He has one foot in and one foot out of that subculture. He rides motorcycles with the Angels, and speaks the lingo, but he isn’t quite one of the gang. A bit of awe and curiosity can fuel a writer’s interest, and offer a better perspective.

Is there any difference in writing short stories vs. writing a novel?  Do you enjoy one form more than another?

Well, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in either form, but they’ve definitely been different, in my experience. Learning about novels—from a craft perspective—was an amazing educational experience for me. I’ve been trying to write fiction since I was 18 or 19, and didn’t get serious about novels until my early thirties. So I stumbled upon novel writing as this incredible space for artistic growth, which built on skills I’d been trying to acquire for years beforehand. It was invigorating, like a musician suddenly learning three new chords.

I’ve found it suits my personality better than shorter pieces. I’m a slow, grinding kind of writer. Having a narrator and a premise that I can wake up to and spend time with over the course of years functions like an escape for me. There’s less pressure for innovation or completion. And I seem to be prone to these fleeting obsessions that last about sixteen months—which jives nicely with novel writing.

But I certainly don’t believe that short stories are somehow a primer or first-step for writing novels. Being a short-story writer is a prospect I find terrifying, to be honest. Short fiction is very difficult to master, or even to be competent at. With novels, I feel like I can hide behind the story a little more. The pressure seems to be more on the book than the talent.

I think about this a lot, now that I teach fiction to undergraduates. It saddens me that some students dismiss short stories as obsolete or irrelevant. Almost everything I know about writing comes from short stories—reading them and writing them. I feel very lucky to have been educated in that form, even if I haven’t written one in a while.

You mention you’re a “slow, grinding kind of writer.”  Could you elaborate more on your writing process?

If I had to sum up my process in two words, it would be “not spontaneous.” I like to write in the same time and place everyday, usually not for more than two or three hours at a stretch. I’m easily disheartened, so I try to keep the blank-page process and the self-editing process as separate as possible. I write everything out longhand first, mainly because I find I’m less inhibited on paper than on screen—less inclined to second-guess whatever I put down. I also think there’s an illusion of linear progress with pen and paper that’s harder to maintain with a word processor.

I read an interview with Nick Cave in which he said something along the lines of “I don’t rely on inspiration; it is unreliable. I wake up every morning and I work.” That describes me pretty well. I might scribble down the odd phrase or idea during the rest of the day, but generally I prefer my writing time to be like church: sacred, highly ritualistic, and not too long.

Lately, it’s become important to me to try and enjoy the novels as I’m working on them. Even when it’s difficult, I try to think of the work as a respite or indulgence, a place where I’m not touched by other daily tribulations. That’s harder to do once the writing gets into the hands of others. When I’m responding to feedback from editors or whoever, then it’s different. I work all day, worry a lot, don’t have as much fun. That part feels more like a job.

But I don’t mean to advocate for any particular approach. The more I read about how writers work, the more I realize that everyone writes in a different way. I’m very interested in process, and I always try to make my students conscious of the nuts and bolts of how and when they write.

In one of my favorite passages Laura poses an important question. She asks: “What is it that makes somebody a bad person?  Is it your desires, these feelings that we can barely control? Or is it your actions, which urges you obey or deny?” Could you elaborate more on this idea? Is this something Laura truly believes? Is this something you truly believe?

Certainly, part of the concept of the book is that Laura is an object of public hatred—a Yoko Ono or Courtney Love figure. The novel functions mostly as her defense, but I also wanted her to internalize some of those accusations, and to be introspective about her successes and failures as a human being. She earnestly looks back on the history of The Mistakes, and tries to understand what she might have done differently.

In that passage, I suppose she’s asking whether it’s enough to have a good heart, or if good is as good does. I’m sure the philosophers have more exact terms to describe this conflict.

I don’t think Laura ever completely buys the black-and-white moral compass that the fans hold her to. But she does believe in the effects of acting or not acting. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that what Laura comes to realize in that scene is that all the desires she acted upon were real and powerful. Her only other option was repression.

I was heavily under the influence of Lolita when I started The Mistakes. Though never as much of a monster as Humbert Humbert, Laura was originally much older than Sean and Nathan. She had terms for boys like them, the way Humbert has ‘nymphets.’ Almost all of that came out in the editorial wash, but those asides she has to the fans and press (of which that passage is one), are completely ripped off from Humbert’s “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…” lines. (If I remember correctly, many of the names of the fake venues that The Mistakes play are adapted from the hotel names and other things in Lolita.)

I could never pull off a narrator like Humbert. But in a small, watered-down way, I like to think that Laura’s dilemma is somewhat akin to his: the inhibition or expression of a forbidden desire.

Who has influenced you as a writer?

By the far the most enduring influence on me—from the time I first started writing stories—is Denis Johnson. His work is something I still return to often, and have never gotten over. Mark Richard’s fiction was extremely important to me as a young writer, especially Fishboy, and Ice at the Bottom of the World. He’s still one of the most original and unique writers I can think of.

Before I got serious about writing, Hemingway and Steinbeck particularly moved me. I’ve always had a fondness for expat novels, for some reason.

A strange and wonderful novel called Straight Through the Night by Edward Allen came into my life at a very formative stage. The scene in The Mistakes when Laura burns a one-dollar bill is my homage to that amazing book.

More recently—especially since I started focusing on writing novels—I’ve felt a strong affinity for Russell Banks. In a weird way, I feel like I’ve spent the last few years working in a style that emulates his. The verisimilitude and the timbre of the prose in The Mistakes seem to aspire towards his style, more than anyone else’s—at least to my mind. I say it’s weird because I don’t remember ever making that decision. It’s more like a space that I happened to be comfortable working in.

Lately there has been a lot of press about M.F.A. programs and much of it is negative.  How would you describe your experience at Boise State University’s M.F.A program?  Do you think any of the criticisms about M.F.A. programs are valid?  Do they just crank out “cookie cutter” writers?

My experience at BSU was somewhat typical and somewhat unique. Certainly, the classes, the demographic of students, the teaching load, the readings and parties and stuff—were all industry standard. But BSU was a small, young program then. We certainly never had access to agents or people in publishing or whatnot—beyond the level of the small press or literary journal. Maybe that’s not so unusual, but I bring it up to emphasize that it was a craft-based environment. I learned a lot as a graduate student, more than I expected to. I don’t believe I could’ve written The Mistakes without the skills I got there. Frankly, even if I was independently wealthy and could spend ten years reading and writing in a cabin by myself—I still don’t believe I’d have learned as much.

I’ve largely stayed on the sidelines during the recent kerfuffle over MFA programs. I haven’t read The Program Era, though I did read some interviews with the author and found his insights to be interesting and balanced. I thought the NYC/MFA article also was full of good points and several brilliant observations. In general, I think Creative Writing programs have become old enough and big enough that they should expect to be questioned in a serious way.

But I don’t have much patience for critics who condemn MFA programs based on a few books they didn’t enjoy. That’s a practice I find deeply flawed. Anyone who’s thinking about the author’s grad program while reading a novel should reconsider his or her approach to reading fiction. With all their assistantships and fellowships, writing programs form perhaps the most effective patronage system that we have for emerging literature in this country. So I think it’s misleading to frame it as a purely aesthetic issue.

Frankly, I’m not sure the cookie-cutter accusation holds up against any real scrutiny. The last two books by graduates of my program are Alan Heathcock’s and my own. His story collection, VOLT, is an incredible book that’s had a tremendous reception, but I don’t think anybody would say that it’s similar to The Mistakes. He finished grad school just as I started, but we had basically the exact same teachers and the exact same classes. We were subject to the same cutter; so why are our cookies so different? If you really want to see some homogenous, risk-averse literature, then let the market take over completely.

It’s hard to be an outspoken champion of such programs, because they do have their issues. And I was no MFA darling; I barely got into grad school at all. But we live in a culture with a long tradition of gutting public support for artists and the arts; that’s a bandwagon I simply can’t get behind. I tend to agree with what David Berman said, when asked a similar question: “Let the kids write; some of them will blow your mind.” Even if most of their books suck, that’s still a price I’m willing to pay to have my mind blown once in a while.

You’re a male writer, yet The Mistakes is written from a female perspective.  Do you think it’s risky writing from a point of view that is different from one’s own?

Risky is a good word for it. At least it felt that way at the start. I’d worked with female protagonists before, but never in first person. I remember thinking that if I made Laura enough of a tomboy, I might get away with it—an idea that sounds utterly ridiculous to me now.

From very early on, it was obvious that the narrator of this book had to be a woman. Still, I don’t see how the story could function without Laura telling it. So I took it on as a necessary challenge. And I really enjoyed the voice she has: short, simple sentences spiked with sarcasm. It was refreshing and fun. But once I did start showing it to people, I was mortified that I might not have gotten Laura right. I’m lucky that my early readers were all kind and constructive. I was so sensitive about the female-narrator thing; if they’d been dismissive or told me I didn’t understand how women think, I might’ve scrapped the whole project.

Looking back, writing this way was an incredibly important lesson for me. Above all else, the pressure I felt was to make Laura convincing. In literary fiction circles, we emphasize characterization—for good reason. But I think we can sometimes erroneously interpret that emphasis as meaning we must invent highly original or unique characters. Working in Laura’s voice, I learned it was more important that she be believable than original.

When I was in the early stages of The Mistakes, I read Elise Blackwell’s Grub—which is a brilliant satire of publishing and fiction writers. It includes a gifted young writer character that spends years on his opus—narrated by a woman. In a hilarious scene, a bunch of readers grumble about his novel.

One of their chief complaints is that it’s full of these long asides about menstruation. I remember reading that and thinking to myself: “I’m not going to mention menstruation in my novel.” It sounds silly, but it was actually this major moment of enlightenment. Like: it’s my book, I don’t have to go there if I don’t want to. More importantly: this is Laura’s story, not a showcase of my ability to write from a woman’s perspective.

Further Links and Resources

It was a special workshop because all twelve students in the class felt like we were part of Rash’s success. Here was this soft-spoken, kind teacher who read our stories with great interest, listened intently to our fumbling opinions about short fiction, and treated us like his writing equal, and all the while he was about to republish his first novel with a major publisher and finish writing his second novel, Saints at the River (2004). We all felt like if this could happen to our teacher, then it could—with hard work and dedication—happen to us.

We caught fire as writers that semester.

I, in particular, burned bright because Rash was the first writer I’d met from my home state of North Carolina. I said as much one afternoon while following him across campus to the faculty parking deck (my earnestness may have bordered on menacing in the early days of my writing life). Rash nodded like he understood what our shared statehood might mean to me and then reached into his car and pulled out his copy of My People’s Waltz, a collection of short stories by his good friend Dale Ray Phillips.

Haw River, NC via Flickr - ishmh_

Phillips grew up in Haw River, North Carolina and, like me, had attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the mid-nineties, not long after completing his MFA at the University of Arkansas, he started working as an instructor at Clemson University where he met Rash and George Singleton. Years later, I would interview Rash for the Southeast Review about their friendship. Rash said he’d never taken a creative writing class in college or graduate school and that his time with Phillips and Singleton was like a writing group, one where they would encourage each other to keep writing and do the best they could:

George was living about twenty miles away, but he would come over a lot. Dale, George, and I on Friday afternoons would go out together and talk literature… just being around each other made us all want to write more and better… They’re just great friendships. I think that’s the best thing. It was just kind of a nice dynamic. We all write differently. We would talk about what we were reading, more than what we were writing. We’d teach each other. Dale would mention maybe a short story I hadn’t read. George might the next time. I might mention something to them. It was a good time.¹

That afternoon in the parking deck Rash said if reading writers from North Carolina made me want to work harder then I ought to read one of our state’s best.

My People’s Waltz, published in 1999, is Dale Ray Phillips’s first and only book. The collection, a novel-in-stories, opens with an eight-year old boy, Richard, who stops speaking the summer his mother is institutionalized for a nervous breakdown. The remaining nine stories, narrated by Richard and spanning thirty-plus years, follow the events of his youth in North Carolina. The strained relationship between his traveling salesman father and his fragile mother shape the book—as do the birth of Richard’s son in Arkansas, his stint as a conman in Texas, and the withering of his marriage in a variety of Southern states. The collection culminates with its title story, “My People’s Waltz.” Richard visits his mother’s home in Chapel Hill. Now a middle-aged man with his son and estranged wife in tow, he comes to understand that “[he hails] from a stock of people who dance in their kitchens” and he does his “best cakewalk toward [his] loved ones in that room where [their] voices echoed, and then were gone.”

I’ve heard rumors from other writers—whenever I meet a writer who may have crossed paths with Dale Ray Phillips, I ask—that he owes a novel to his publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, based on the same characters featured in his story collection. Rash says he isn’t sure why his friend hasn’t published. Singleton, who taught my last fiction workshop at USC, mentioned offhand in class one afternoon when talking about writing five-hundred word sentences as a way to free yourself up to write that he had a friend, Dale Ray, who was paralyzed by perfectionism. He said he would write a sentence like, “The woman lay on the couch.” Then, he would quit writing until he was certain it was “lay” not “lie” instead of writing “reclined” and moving on. Singleton was quick to point out that his method, while difficult and slow, had resulted in his stories being published in the Atlantic, Harper’s, and GQ as well as being anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South.

I tend to believe Singleton is right about the perfectionism. A sampling of the collection’s opening sentences demonstrates the writer’s ambition as well as the care and attention paid to the language:

My grandfather kept his floozy in a silver Airstream above the bend in
the river where the dead crossed over.

All our domesticity has a perimeter of wildness, and when I was fourteen, mine was the woods which began where our neighborhood ended.

How do you begin to judge your father?

When I was thirty-five and freshly separated and still a stouthearted pilgrim to myself, I took a job on the Gulf Coast swindling people.

I first heard about the types of love in junior high school, when purse-lipped teachers herded the girls into the library and corralled the boys in the gymnasium so that experts could explain sex.

The stories themselves are no less highly-stylized, vibrant, and intense than his opening sentences. Yet there’s vulnerability in the storytelling that’s more endearing than the flash of language.

In the story, “Why I’m Talking,” the eight-year old Richard moves into his grandfather’s home along the Haw River while his mother recuperates from a nervous breakdown at an oceanside hospital. The river house isn’t the grandfather’s “real” residence—he’s a retired circuit judge who lives across from the courthouse in “a columned stone residence listed in the historical register”—but his hideaway, “a place not listed on any of the municipal maps” where he keeps his black mistress, Miss Minnie, and their interracial child, Sudie. Richard’s father convinces the grandfather that the boy can be trusted with the family secret because he’s recently quit talking. His muteness alarms Miss Minnie who “[administers] spells and potions to cure [him]” such as “necklaces of garlic, an impromptu exorcism in which [he] stared at a crucifix so long [he] feared [his] eyes had permanently crossed, several smelly poultices strapped snugly to [his] chest like life jackets, and baptism in everything from mail-order holy water to motor oil.”

Richard, though, has his own secret: his muteness is voluntary. He decided to quit speaking the day his “mother wore her bridal gown and talked nonstop to her reflection in the mirror” and while running the oven gas “instructed [him] to sit on her lap as she made hand shadows, the shapes in turn as fierce and friendly and unnamable as her craziness.” Richard believes his reasons for not talking “sound enough: whatever had abducted my mother might steal me if I let out too many words.” To prevent his silence from hindering his mother’s recovery, he writes her postcards and it’s in this way that “deception and protection would be forever linked for [him].”

The extent of that deception backfires when his mother escapes from the hospital and unearths her son’s whereabouts. Through a series of events too complicated to explain here, but prompted by the boy’s unwillingness to speak on the telephone, the grandfather becomes so agitated that his daughter is on the verge of discovering his secret second family that he succumbs to a heart attack in front of his grandson. The moments after the death are some of the most beautiful and horrific I’ve ever read:

As the last convulsions struck, he bit off a portion of his tongue. His eyes became as wide as things held under a magnifying glass, and I searched for my image in them as they clouded. Then I shut my grandfather’s eyes, because I didn’t want to see what they saw.

What do you do with your forefather’s tongue? I put that tip of tongue to my lips, stood in front of the living-room mirror, and made it waggle. When pulled away, it left a little moustache of blood. Here was a thing that had lived and loved and pronounced judgments—and it was mine. Then I weighted it with rocks fetched from my river-bottoming and bound the whole affair with cheesecloth meant to wrap fish heads and seasonings for catfish stew. I hurried it to the Haw and heaved in this strange offering, because I feared becoming fluent in the language it now spoke.

Phillips has the rare ability to place beautiful and haunting images in the most desperate and ugly of situations. The story, “The Woods at the Back of Our Houses,” ends after a party Richard’s father throws to celebrate the 1969 moon landing. Three boys—Richard, “an orphaned boy named William who had three testicles,” and “a stutterer [they] called Ba Ba Bobby”—gather around a drunken reveler in the woods named Mrs. Hans. All summer long, the boys have been climbing trees to watch her “waltz naked around her living room and stop to examine her beauty in the mantel mirror.” They take advantage of her drunkenness and “grope her and fondle her breasts” until she surprises them by saying, “We will now screw like dogs.” The boys take turns “grappling with love and other newfound feelings under a fat moon where men were walking. It’s strange, the way you learn to wear the weight of such moments.”

Phillips sets “At the Edge of the New World” in a neighborhood where “wife beating and noisy front-yard battles [are] part of [the characters’] world.” A man named Lamar strikes his wife so hard she loses an incisor. Afterwards, still in a rage, he finds his dog, Lucky, who “had a perpetual spot of mange on its flanks” and dunks him repeatedly in a barrel of old motor oil which “was thought to be a home remedy for the disease.” Upon release, the howling dog “as if in need of regaining its master’s good graces… [brings] a stick to Lamar, and they [play] fetch at first light, while down by the Haw River you [can] hear the mill generator’s high-pitched whine as it [struggles] to convert water into a substance as ethereal as electricity.” A teenaged Richard watching from his bedroom window convinces himself that “their sorrow would never be my own. Like most people, I actually believed I could escape where I came from.”

Sorrow catches up to Richard in the story, “When Love Gets Worn.” Back with his wife after “a bit of sordid business on the Gulf Coast” selling “fake trailer lot deeds to investors with souls more crooked than [his] own” in the story “What It Costs Travelers,” Richard finds himself living a “tattered lifestyle… in Texas.” His wife, Lisa, “has been petitioning him for an uncontested divorce” while he “[fattens his] adjunct lecturer’s wages by painting over the heel marks left by previous tenants” in the apartment complex she manages. Heartbroken and desperate, he finds himself spending evenings before class, “though [he has] sworn not to” in La Club Mexicana for “fortification before teaching.” In the type of place “a sensible person would avoid,” he buys a ten-dollar dance with a prostitute, “We slow dance, and she eases me into a darkened corner. When she massages my stiffness, I bury my face in her cleavage… I suckle greedily at the difference between this breast and Lisa’s… Of all the times that I have drunk here, I never thought I would become one of these men in this room.” In the shortest of waltzes, Richard transforms into the kind of man he loathes.

Not all of the stories’ images are devoid of hope and good feeling, though. In fact, Phillips’s writing is often at its finest when it transcends the sorrow and reaches for a moment of grace. This happens most often when characters are on the verge of trouble or the unknown and find themselves in need of trusting one another. In the story, “Corporal Love,” Richard dances around this feeling of risk by recounting all of his past relationships starting with his “first love [who] knocked out [his] front incisor so [he] could buy her a charm bracelet with the tooth fairy money” and ending with the woman he “would marry, Lisa, after she waltzed into [his] life.”
In one of the funnier moments of the collection, he claims he learned everything he needed to know about love and women from a local army recruiter hired to “[terrorize] adolescent audiences with the consequences of Onan’s sin (hairy palms and a deterioration of the thought process) and premarital sex (venereal diseases and Eternal Damnation).” Richard admits, “The diseases didn’t scare anyone; penicillin could cure anything, and besides, it took twenty or so years for the spirochetes to crawl up the urinary tract and infect the brain or spinal column… At age thirteen, a bed in a room where you were crazy seemed a fair price to pay for twenty years of unmitigated fornication.”

“Everything Quiet Like Church” finds Richard waiting outside his Arkansas cabin, unsure of what to do with himself, and having to trust a midwife and her blind sister to deliver his son. He recounts how in the months leading up to the delivery he’d confide to complete strangers that he was about to become a father, “Once [at a pizza place], a man thought I’d said that I had just become a father, and rounds were stood for all. That day, there seemed no better smell on earth than spicy sauces simmering and the odor of baking bread.” The story, “What We Are Up Against,” opens with, “My Father died obsessed with being remembered. His tombstone was a granite reproduction of Winged Victory engraved with Think of me as you pass by / As I am, soon will you lie.” Richard offers a eulogy of sorts for his father by recounting the last camping trip they took together with his son, Fisher.

It’s a boozy weekend spent camping on a lake with two floozies the father picked up in an airport bar that somehow finds its ending with the men acting irresponsibly. The father sits drunk at the helm of a rented motorboat with his grandson acting as skipper as they pull an even drunker Richard naked on water-skis across Crater Lake. Before turning in for the night, settling into the tent in “the warm spot between [two] sleeping generations, Richard finds himself wondering how his own son will remember him, “I felt humbled by that ache which even pharaohs knelt down before when they saw the capstone set into place, and they yielded to how we would remember them.” It’s in these moments—moments of uncertainty and misunderstanding—where we watch with great sorrow as the story’s characters fall again and again into bad decisions with the most elegant of intentions.

For me, the best moment in the story collection—the most full of grace—is the moment when all of the bad things to come are brewing on the horizon but haven’t yet managed to fully snag the family. Twelve-year old Richard in “What Men Love For” finds himself caring for his mother on the verge of another mental collapse while his dad is away selling medical equipment throughout North Carolina and Virginia. His father hopes for a promotion that will keep him “home two days a week, plus weekends.” The promotion inevitably falls through, pushing the mother over the edge, and his parents’ marriage into uncertainty. Father and son take a head-clearing motorcycle ride up into the mountains. After they have “gone as far it [is] possible to go and still turn back,” Richard clings to his father on the back of the motorcycle and puts all of his trust into him that he’ll somehow pull everybody out of this mess:

I thought of how the road leading down from the mountainside was steep and dangerous. Around one bend or another would lie a blind curve whose far side held secret what might or might not be. As we approached that curve there would arise in us a steady drumming. Our chests would swell and throb until our pulse beat in the quicks of our fingertips. We were blood-full of the moment wherein, against all probabilities, you lean into the curve and take your chances of making it. You feel earthbound, not by the motorcycle but by your urge to round that bend. Oil slick or happy ending, complete with a hero’s welcome, you ease into that snake of road whose other side holds your future hidden. This moment is what men love for. You are father and son, caught in homeward motion.

“Hold on,” my father said, and we went at that curve with all the speed and hope that we could muster.

The chances of making it—oil slick or happy ending—are what I put all my speed and hope in as I continue to work hard and do the best I can as a writer. It’s the same kind of hopefulness that keeps me patient for Dale Ray Phillips’s second book.

Citation:

“Twisting the Radio Dial: An Interview with Ron Rash,” The Southeast Review, 25.2 (2007):
p. 104-117.

Further Links & Resources:

“Whatever happens,” he grins, “let’s make it an early night. I’ve been out with friends every night this week, and I don’t think my body can handle another bender.”

“No problem,” I assure him. Evison’s rigorous tour has had him at twenty-three signing events in twenty-six days. Mornings have been reserved for print media and radio talk show interviews.

“Whatever you do, don’t even ask, because I don’t have any willpower, and I’ll do it. I’ll go,” he says. Immediately delighted by the subtextual invitation, I take the bait: “There’s a great little Irish-style pub downtown that has Tetley’s English Ale on tap and a locally produced rye that can’t be beat.”

“Oh, you sonofabitch,” he smiles. “Here we go again.”

Over dinner, Evison pores over his book, trying to decide which pieces to read. This is no easy task. At five hundred pages, West of Here appears no different than any other novel—at first glance. What readers find, however, are two full casts of characters separated by over one hundred years of time: a nineteenth-cenury group of Washington state settlers and the modern-day population of precisely the same place. The former—a team of explorers, a journalist, an entrepreneur, an innkeeper, a prostitute—all dream of their individual and mutual futures as they strive to develop their rustic settlement, Port Bonita. The latter cast lives in the Port Bonita of 2006, and, mostly comprised of descendants of the nineteenth-century characters, can’t help but see, all around them, the decline of the community their ancestors struggled to establish.

“It’s very sinewy,” Evison explains. “It’s been really hard for me to choose selections of the novel to read. Because everything’s so interconnected, I end up having to explain important contextual details. The problem is that, in doing so, I end up giving away things about the book that I don’t want to—things the reader should discover on his or her own.”

Charles Dickens

It’s easy to understand the challenge Evison faces. West of Here is populated by more than fifty characters, some of whom appear for the first time as the book comes to its close. Evison has read and enjoyed Dickens since he was very young, and although the Victorian author’s influence on the crafting of the characters and the scope of the events in the story is clear to the reader, the novel does not have the tidy resolution common to work of the period. This is not to say, however, that West of Here is by any means unkempt. Evison handles his robust cast with the steady hand of a master conductor, and the valley of time that lies between his nineteenth-century characters and their modern-day parallels creates just enough distance between them to accentuate the yearning that each has for the lifestyle of the other.

Emerson wrote that “there is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time,” and elaborated, writing of man that “each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done.” But he cautions his readers of what he calls “the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves.” Evison’s nineteenth-century characters are interested in “triumphs of will or of genius.” Their notion of self is contextualized by the vast ocean of history. The place that is West of Here might be the creation of a dam or the writing of an important exposé. It might be the mapping of the wilderness around Mount Olympus or the creation of an opera house. They all have their eyes on a future that is bigger, better, and brighter than their present.

Unfortunately, Evison suggests, we may have arrived at a point where we are experiencing this “too great nearness to ourselves.” His contemporary cast all find themselves more or less adrift. They are battered, broken, and bereft of any real notion of agency in the context of history. The place that lies West of Here, that numinous and attractive dream, has been replaced by a vague sense of insatiate hunger. Notions of greatness and fame have become indistinguishable, and the wide open space that was the future has become cluttered. The good news is that if Emerson is right, and man is “explicable by nothing less than all his history,” [emphasis mine] what we find in Jonathan Evison’s West of Here—expansive as it is—is only a few chapters of this history, and the dialogue that Evison is eager to open up, in this light, seems more important than ever.

Courtesy of the author

Evison and I spoke about the book on and off that day, and into the evening, and have corresponded a little since then, finishing up our discussion. Try as I might, I wasn’t able to talk him out of drinks that evening, but we did manage to stay away from the rye.

Interview

Aaron Cance: A book this—you’ve called it sinewy—must take an extraordinary amount of focus to orchestrate. I imagine it was a real challenge to keep everything in hand.

Jonathan Evison: It’s almost maddening. It takes a great deal of “preproduction” thought. Then, when I finally do get to my work, I go in deep—really deep. It can be hours before I come up for air.

Do you work primarily from an outline, or do you let your characters drive the story?

I create characterizations and circumstances for those characterizations, but I let them make their own decisions. I try to stay as invisible as possible and let my characters do their work. I create a scaffolding that I can work from.

Port Angeles harbor

Port Bonita is a fictional place.

Right, but the history of Port Bonita in the novel is all based on the actual history of Port Angeles. I researched Port Angeles because it was such a perfect and interesting microcosm to work within. I actually found so much interesting historical information about this place, I had to leave a lot of it out. Then I fictionalized it and changed the name. I think they’re warming up the tar for me in Port Angeles right now. I have an upcoming tour date there.

When do you feel you’ve done enough research about a place to write about it? How much historical information is enough?

I asked my friend David Liss—an incredible writer, if you haven’t read him, author of The Conspiracy of Paper, The Coffee Trader, and others—I asked him this very question. I said, “Dave, when do I stop researching and start writing?” He told me to stop when the research started to get in the way of the story.

This is actually the second novel that I’ve read in the last couple months that has had an unusually manipulated timeline (although all narrative timelines are manipulated to some extent). In West of Here, the reader finds a generation of characters settling Port Bonita during the late nineteenth century. One hundred or so pages later, you introduce a second cast of characters, all descendants of the first, living in the same geographical space in 2006. Why did you decide to structure the novel in this way?

I wanted to do everything I could do to get away from the wide-angle lens, and linear form, by which history is most often represented, in which stories are embedded. I like the idea of history as a conversation between the past and the present.

This is why you try to steer away from the term “historical novel?”

I conceptualized West of Here, and continue to think of it, as less of a historical novel and more of a novel about history itself.

Close to the beginning of the book, one of your main characters, James Mather, the explorer, tells Eva Lambert that he explores because he is interested in how the natural world humbles him. Are you also saying, through the unusually broad arc of the timeline, that people can also be humbled by time?

Yup. That’s pretty much the idea from page one.

The accomplishments that we can be so proud of are washed away by passing years.

Exactly. The place where this idea is most clear is when Krig makes his way back across the muddy fairgrounds and notices that the falling rain has already washed away his footprints.

Is there also the implication, here, that we are, perhaps, proud of the wrong type of accomplishments? That we pay little heed to the things that could make life really meaningful to us, and focus rather on things that seem to matter only in the present?

Yes. It’s definitely fair to say that implication is there. But then, all of history seems to be a great big tug-of-war between the past and the future, and it’s really hard to blame anybody for taking their eyes off the present, because so much of the present seems to deal with reconciling our past with our future. It’s sort of a cruel riddle.

Ethan Thornburgh defines his life by the dam that he orchestrates—it even distracts him from the child that he really never gets to know well—yet the reader sees that, only a couple generations later, the dam is going to be taken apart. Ethan’s descendant, Jared, is defined by his grandfather and father, and seems relatively unhappy on account of his inability to define himself.

Certainly. It has become harder and harder for people to define themselves in the modern world, as there seem to be fewer opportunities to do so. Also, those of us living in the modern world don’t have the luxury of short-sightedness, lest we all charge head-on to our own extinction.

The stakes are higher now than they’ve ever been before.

Absolutely.

Courtesy of the author

Tell me about the place that’s West of Here. It seems to me to represent far more than a geographical area. I read it as the wide open space of possibility, a place generated by, but not necessarily limited to, the imagination.

That’s the big fat question that sits in front of us. Where do we go from here? What modern idealism might lead us there? How do we avoid repeating mistakes we’ve made in the past?

These are the questions you’re bringing up with the book, through this dialogue between the past and the present.

Right. This is a search for a modern idealism—some parallel to the nineteenth-century Emersonian idealism found in the early portions of the novel. The book is meant to open that dialogue up. Every writing project should lead into dialogues that can be productive.

You mentioned during dinner that the discussion portion of your readings are what you most look forward to when you’re on the road.

This is the whole point: to get people to think—to talk about—the questions the novel raises.

Your characters are all seeking something. Some of them know exactly what they’re looking for and others don’t. The ones who don’t, mostly the contemporary characters, can only experience a vague, indefinable sense of longing that seems to be even harder for them to come to terms with.

Again, it’s really hard for modern folks to be imbued with a sense of personal destiny when so many opportunities have evaporated. Sadly, some vague idea of fame seems to have filled this gap.

It also seems to me that you’ve used the wide chronological arc to imply that we aren’t as well equipped today to venture “west” as people were in the nineteenth century. Some of the characters are emotionally stunted—Rita and Curtis come to mind. Timmon Tillman and Franklin Bell have been so softened by modern living that neither of them is prepared for the utter indifference of the natural world when they attempt to live in it.

Unfortunately, much of our physical and emotional stoicism seems to have evaporated with our opportunities.

Writing is a type of exploration, a journey that takes us into uncharted territory, allowing us a glimpse of what we might wish we were or showing us a life that can be more dramatic or exciting that our own. Are there any characters that you particularly identify with? Where is the place that’s West of Here for you?

Writing this book felt a lot to me like James Mather’s expedition—I locked myself in a room to work, I didn’t take phone calls, I wrote on the walls. The arc of the overall endeavor was a lot like James Mather’s expedition—tortuous during its execution until, like Mather, I found myself on the divide, the landscape rolling out ahead of me as far as I could see. At that point, it was exhilarating because I could see everything before me.

Was the most difficult thing about West of Here the transition from conceptualization to execution, then?

I love books that are ambitious. My very favorite books are the ones that can hardly contain their own invention.

Further Links and Resources

Jonathan Evison | WEST OF HERE from markmcknight on Vimeo.

Jess Row was named one of the 20 “Best Young American Novelists” by Granta, and is also the author of the story collection The Train to Lo Wu. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Review, and The PEN/O. Henry Awards. Charlotte Boulay spoke with Jess Row in his office at The College of New Jersey.

Interview:

Charlotte Boulay: When did you become interested in fundamentalism?

Jess Row: Well, September 11th had something to do with it. Until then I don’t think I had really thought about fundamentalism, and certainly not as an aspect of my own work or something I would want to write about until September 11th. I was still really wrapped up in a more optimistic view of globalization and of intercultural relationships and in a sense fundamentalism wasn’t really on my radar. For one thing, I had been living in Hong Kong, which is the last place on earth to locate any kind of fundamentalism except in a very sort of sub-stratum way because it’s such a mixture of cultures. My first book was about Hong Kong. It’s very commercial, it’s very mercenary, and in some ways there are many darknesses associated with it, but religious fundamentalism is not one of them. Also, I was very immersed in Chinese culture, and in some ways Chinese culture has fundamentalist elements, like in any culture, but religious fundamentalism is very foreign although not entirely unknown. Chinese culture syncretizes three different traditions. In contemporary China there are some aspects of fundamentalism such as Falun Gong, but it really wasn’t on my radar until 9/11, and then I started thinking about it very intensely. The first story I wrote in the book was “The World in Flames,” which is not a story that has anything specifically to do with 9/11, but it was my first attempt to work out my ideas about what a fundamentalist world view feels like. It was the first bubbling up of an interest in religious violence. And it’s set in Thailand, because I still had an attachment to narrating stories set in Asia, so it was trying to bring those two things together.

What were you doing in Hong Kong?

I was teaching English at Chinese University in Hong Kong.

I think “The World in Flames” is such an interesting story because for so much of the story the character of Samantha seems so unsympathetic. She’s lying to the man she’s staying with, she’s there under false pretences, and then there’s a sudden turn at the end of the story when she becomes completely sympathetic. When you were living abroad, did you ever find yourself in those situations where what you thought was happening was not at all what was actually going on?

All the time. And I could never have written that story without having had those experiences. I had experiences like that in Hong Kong, but even more so when I traveled, of being in a situation and not really understanding what the situation was, and I got into some very dangerous situations because of my own naïveté or my own lack of understanding of what was going on around me.

I was reading on your web site about your fascinating conversation with Claudia Rankine. I was wondering if you could talk about other authors you see dealing with the issue of race in interesting ways. Obviously your book is very much about racial identity, and how we deal with those different identities. Who else are you reading who is dealing with those kinds of issues?

In some ways the reason I wrote that piece is that frankly I wish there were more writers [dealing with race], and especially more writers who come from a normative or a majority experience (and in the case of the United States that’s obviously the white experience) and I wish there were more writers from that background writing about race. It’s a longstanding concern for me, but in terms of the writers I’m reading these days who are doing interesting things, I think Chimamanda Adichie’s book of stories called The Thing Around Your Neck, that I reviewed for the New York Times is a really interesting example because she’s from Nigeria and her first two books were these long and not entirely conventional novels about Nigeria’s recent history, and in some ways they touched on very familiar developing world themes of the victimization of women, and other not uncommon themes. Her book of stories is much more about the experience of being an immigrant writer and being in the US under the guise of various identities, and it’s about being a woman writer in Africa and in the context of world literature. And her attitude toward these things is very sharp and satirical and a little bit throwing the naïveté and the presumptions of the world around her back in its face. I really like that about her. I really admired that the collection was sharp and sarcastic in that way. There’s one story in the collection about a woman at a writer’s colony in South Africa, and the head of the colony is this very arrogant, complacent, older, white South African man, and the way this young woman experiences that environment of condescension and tokenism, and then the way she walks away from it is very powerful, and it’s not something that’s talked about very often.

One reason I really liked what Claudia Rankine wrote and what she did at AWP is that I think there are a lot of racial politics in the world literary community that’s not being talked about publicly, and that needs to be discussed more publicly.

Especially the issue of who gets to write about race.

Who gets to write about race, and from the point of view of the critics, who makes decisions about prizes, and conferences, and best-of lists. There’s a kind of ferment right now in literary culture about the exclusion of women, and the fact that statistically speaking it’s still true that fewer women are being published. I think you could extend that to considerations of non-white writers and find similar issues. And the astonishing thing is that we live in a literary culture that seems to be incredibly diverse, and to have voices coming from all directions. It seems to be a very unbiased and cosmopolitan space, but I think we need to check ourselves, and ask whether that is a superficial appearance or whether that’s really true on a deeper level.

Through loosely linked stories about the spouses and families of men attached to the First Cavalry division, Fallon’s debut lends insight into the stages of deployment and reunion and the unavoidable repercussions these situations can cause. One of the many strengths of the collection is Fallon’s exploration of both soldier and spouse points of view, the stories shifting from homefront to battlefield, loyalty to infidelity, where the distinction from one to the other is often difficult to make.

In the first and title story, “You Know When the Men Are Gone,” Meg Brady illuminates the lonely and worrisome world of the faithful wife who tries not to see similarities between the raw animal flesh in the meat aisle at the commissary and the soldiers who’ve been mutilated in the war, knowing it could be her husband any minute.

[Meg] wanted to worry about ordinary things like whether her husband forgot his lunch or got a bonus, not that he might get shot or that he’d be crossing a street in Baghdad and never get to the other side. She carried her worry night and day.

When Meg becomes obsessed with the unorthodox “milspouse” lifestyle of her glamorous Serbian neighbor, Natalya, it’s a welcome distraction from her fear and the “interminable waiting, waiting, waiting for her life to continue – such a long gray nothingness between departure and return.”

There are other wives dealing with other pain. Kailani Rodriguez can’t ignore an email that could prove her deployed husband is having an affair. Ellen Roddy, struggles to keep her breast cancer in remission while facing guilt over the fact that her husband was “allowed” to avoid deployment because of her condition. “There was something unseemly about John being home when all the other husbands were not,” Fallon writes, “in this world of camouflage and guns and absent but heroic fathers, despite his Ranger tab, Combat Infantry patch, and Bronze Star, [being home indicated he] was not man enough to go to war.” What makes the demands of military life bearable for the families is the shared experience, and without the common “deployed family member” status to connect them to the other families of her husband’s company, Ellen and her children are left feeling isolated and ashamed.

In “You Survived the War, Now Survive the Homecoming,” Carla Wolenski finds that her husband’s return and learning to live with him post-war is the real challenge. She wonders,

Who was this man in her living room? This stranger who put [her] through the roughest year of her life while he was in another country, then continued to tear everything apart when he returned? She didn’t want a man with memories that made him shout at a television set, flinch in his sleep, kick strollers.

Her husband’s anger and harsh behavior may not be clinical Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but they threatens the quiet, uneventful world Carla has shared with their baby daughter while he has been gone, and makes her question what she’s willing to tolerate courtesy of the United States Army.

Fallon also offers a glimpse of every milspouse’s greatest fear in the final story, “Gold Star”. Josie Schaeffer is not yet out of her twenties and is a widow; her husband killed by an IED that also injured Kit Murphy, another of Fallon’s main characters. In an achingly poignant moment while Kit, whose life was saved by Josie’s husband, is visiting her, she sits down in his lap, like she used to with her husband.

Josie held on, the camouflage material swimming in front of her eyes…knowing this man was not her husband, that her husband was never coming back, but for now she was as close to him as she could get and she would not let him go.

Neither of them will easily, if ever, get past what has brought them together or what the war has taken from them. The resounding theme of Fallon’s collection is that war takes something from everyone involved, even those who don’t make the ultimate sacrifice.

In lyrical prose that lends beauty to even the bleakest situations, Fallon lets readers into a secret world of perfectly manicured lawns, tight-knit Family Readiness Groups, and the daily observance of the retreat playing on loudspeakers throughout the base. Within this waiting community of families reigns quiet desperation and a determination to endure. Fallon’s stories illustrate the fear and grief, heroism and bitter disappointment, all happening just outside the city limits of those other American homes, the ones untouched by the tragedies and hardships of a decade-long war.

As a fellow military wife, I hope You Know When the Men Are Gone will pave the way for more literature from family members who’ve lived through modern war in its unprecedented form. Outside the armed services, the general population has little understanding of the stress of repeated deployments, caring for severely wounded service members, the ravages that PTSD can take on a family, or the financial strain. In You Know When the Men Are Gone, Siobhan Fallon not only gives a voice to the largely unheard military spouse, but also invites the uninitiated to the table to consider the impact of war, and to share, even if just for the time it takes to read the book, the burden of these families.

Further Links and Resources

Siobhan Fallon, via author site

Edith Pearlman’s first story in her new collection, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (Lookout Books, 2011), begins, “On the subway Sophie recited the list of stations like a poem.” Reading this, I knew I was in for a treat. That opening line of “Inbound” strikes the perfect balance between setting the stage and teasing with the yet unknown: Pearlman establishes the setting as a city through the word subway, and she gives us Sophie, a character who is whimsical, literary and thoughtful. As the story unfolds, we quickly learn that Sophie is a child, dragged along by her parents to visit Harvard, their alma mater and, they hope, her future alma mater as well. “Inbound” is a quiet story of a family, of a father willing the best for his child and struggling with disappointed expectations; it is the story of a mother doing her best to care for her family while at the same time being human and angry and tired; and it is the story of two sisters—Sophie, the main character and the bearer of all her parents’ hopes, and Lily, the younger sister with Down’s syndrome, who only speaks a couple of words of dialogue, but around whom the family revolves. Pearlman captures this family dynamic with the same sort of intelligent, humor-lightened introspection with which she begins the story. She writes that Sophie remembers her father telling friends that “Lily clarifies life,” but:

Sophie didn’t agree. Clarity you could get by putting on glasses; or you could skim foam off warm butter—her mother had shown her how—leaving a thin yellow liquid that couldn’t even hold crackers together. Lily didn’t clarify; she softened things and made them sticky. Sophie and each parent had been separate individuals before Lily came. Now all four melted together like gumdrops left on a windowsill.

In this description, Pearlman has the child of the story deliver the thematic trope of stickiness, but keeps Sophie believably a child through the use of characterizing details like “her mother had shown her how,” and “gumdrops left on a windowsill.” Sophie is precocious, but also very much a child; Pearlman sets this tone in the story’s opening line, and because of that opening, the story is able to continue forward, portraying a child both lost and found.

Image Credit: Flickr-Chiot

While “Inbound” is the story of a white, non-religious academic family, Pearlman’s next story, “Day of Awe,” begins, “He was the last Jew in the cursed land,” and the difference between these two openings hints at one of the truly great things about Pearlman’s writing: its diversity of story and setting. This story focuses on Robert, a Jewish patriarch visiting his son, Lex, and Jaime, his soon-to-be grandson, in an unnamed Latin American country. The epic tone of aloneness and heroism in the first line sets up the story of a man trying to get his bearings in a changing world, in which his gay son is adopting a boy who barely speaks Spanish, let alone English or Hebrew, and in which Robert will be forced to celebrate Yom Kippur as the lone Jew amongst “a gaggle of gentiles,” rather than the being able to “pray for forgiveness with nine others.” What is striking in reading these stories side-by-side is not just how they they differ with regard to characters, place, and tone, but also how these stories are united by the theme of searching for belonging and understanding. This theme pervades every one of Pearlman’s stories.

Binocular Vision is a book of new and collected works, with thirty-four stories in all—twenty-one older stories and thirteen new. While not delineated as such in the Table of Contents, the stories are grouped according to their original books, beginning with five stories from Pearlman’s first collection, Vaquita and Other Stories, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1996. After the Vaquita stories, the next five stories are from Love Amongst The Greats, and the next eight are from How to Fall, originally published in 2005. Beyond some minor polishing and the changing of a couple of titles (“Day of Awe” used to be, “To Reach This Season”), the stories are unchanged. The final three stories in the “Collected Works” section do not seem to have been previously collected in any other book, but they seem to have been written in the same eras as the others.

While the stories themselves are generally unchanged, they have been rearranged somewhat within their unofficial book groupings, allowing them to inform each other in a new way, and the effect of having them all gathered together is the creation of a broader, more cohesive universe.

All stories in a good collection talk to one another, but some talk more than others. Pearlman returns to the same unnamed Central American country several times, while other stories take place in Maine, Massachusetts, Israel, and Europe.

Rearranging the stories highlights their binding threads. For instance, placing “Vaquita” as the last story from Pearlman’s first book, and then “Allog” as the first story from Love Amongst the Greats allows us to read these stories one after the other—and we can see that the soprano mentioned in “Vaquita” is living in the apartment building in Jerusalem in “Allog.” The latter story opens: “There were five apartments in the house on Deronda Street. There were five mailboxes in the vestibule: little wooden doors in embarrassing proximity, like privies.” In both stories, the soprano is one of those vital connections we all share—the connections of friendship and of proximity—bonds not validated by marriage or family, but as much a part of the fabric of life as any official relationship. Too often we ignore or belittle these proximal relationships, we think nothing of the other mailboxes in the apartment lobby and try to ignore our embarrassing human commonalities and frailties as we pound on the floor to get the downstairs neighbors to quiet their quarrel. Pearlman takes these connections and builds her fictional worlds around them, and in doing so, shows us what it is to be human.

Other stories are even more closely related, for instance the trilogy “If Love Were All,” “Purim Night,” and “The Coat,” each of which follows two characters, Sonya and Roland, during their time as relief workers during World War II and in the rebuilding years afterward. These connected stories work exactly as they should—each one standing apart with its own arc, climax, and resolution, each its own picture postcard of a life; and when read together, they reveal not only the panoramic of the relationship, but also the significance of previously unnoticed details.

Image Credit: Flickr-TailspinT

Beyond these connections, the most unifying element of Pearlman’s stories is the invented town of Godolphin, a suburb of Boston. In a 2005 interview with Sarabande Books (the publisher of How To Fall), Pearlman said of Godolphin that:

I dreamed of a place where odd people could be themselves . . . [Godolphin] has the human scale of a small town and provides the rich opportunities of a big city. It welcomes immigrants. It is home to austere Yankees and skeptical Jews and believing Catholics, to straights and gays, to families and solitaries. It is tolerant and inefficient and modest.

In this, her description of her dream place, Pearlman describes the world, because for all of humanity’s failures, ultimately our world does have room for each element that she names. While we may push and yell, some demanding individuality and others striving for homogeneity in which no one is the Other, we are, despite all of our efforts, endlessly different and the same. That is what literature shows us—great stories explore how our seemingly unique experiences are commonplace, while at the same time showing how people we thought we knew, could, in fact, be thinking, feeling and experiencing things that we never before imagined.

Image Credit: Flickr-Cia de Foto

Pearlman’s invention of Godolphin demonstrates that just as even the most casual of relationships marks people, they are likewise influenced, and influence, place. Characters fall in and out of love, they make mistakes, they yearn for belonging, they yearn for solitude, and they do this all somewhere, someplace—and most often, for Pearlman, that place is Godolphin.

While all of her stories are character and plot driven, one of her Godolphin stories is also expressly about both place and impermanence. The story “Mates” opens as “Keith and Mitsuko Maguire drifted into town like hobos, though the rails they rode were only the trolley tracks from Boston, and they paid their fare like everyone else.” Again, with the opening line, Pearlman sets the tone, character, setting, and tension of the story. We understand that Godolphin is just outside of Boston; we know the characters’ names; and we know a bit about them because of these names. We understand that somehow the story will explore their difference, their way of seeming like hobos, unbounded by the constraints of obligation and place.

The story is told by a peripheral narrator, who describes in the course of a few pages how the Maguires came to town, lived there for twenty-five years while raising three sons, and then (in the week their youngest went to Medical School) decamped in the same manner with which they arrived, never to be seen again. The story is filled with the details of the town as the narrator expresses her wonder that the Maguires could have left so little an impression, and could have likewise been so little marked by the town. Of course, even while doing so, the narrator demonstrates the paradoxical opposite of impermanence as she explores all ways the Maguires resisted labels and connections and yet couldn’t help but be tied into the fabric of the community. She says:

The Maguires attended no church. They registered Independent. They belonged to no club. But every year they helped organize the spring block party and the fall park cleanup. Mitsuko made filigreed cookies for school bake sales and Keith served on the search committee when the principal retired.

As the narrator tells it, this becoming integrated into a community is inevitable. She comments later that “[m]any townspeople knew the Maguires. How could they not, with the boys going to school and making friends and playing sports? Their household had the usual needs – shots and checkups, medications, vegetables, hardware.” Pearlman argues through her story that whatever makes up our daily routine is what defines our life; we are the sum of our daily existence, and thus, for a large part, we are where we live.

Image Credit: Flickr-Ed Yourdon

Descriptions of Godolphin are interwoven with details about the Maguires. Recalling the family’s arrival day, the narrator comments, “They were seen sharing a loaf and a couple of beers on a bench in Logowitz Park. Afterward they relaxed under a beech tree with their paperbacks.” Later they spent the night in the Godolphin Inn. Through small details like this—a place name here, a tree there—a town emerges. It does not take elaborate descriptions or flowery words to evoke a place; rather it requires an eye for the small, often domestic details of where we live. Writing place requires noticing qualities of shadow and light, as Pearlman does in “Vailles” when she writes of the nanny who seeks solitude in her Godolphin basement apartment: “meager sunlight slipped like an envelope into one after another of her high windows and then lay on the floor as if waiting to be picked up.” Through that sentence and through the story, the character of the nanny is revealed as one who seeks humble comforts, and who shapes a life in which she knows herself, rather than the self others impose on her. And we understand this, in part, because we have seen her apartment. Home is the most intimate of landscapes, and the setting that speaks most to our character—we are both from, and are the creators of, the places we call home.

This reminder that we are all from somewhere makes it all the more appropriate that Binocular Vision is published by Lookout Books, the new press from the University of North Carolina—Wilmington’s Creative Writing Department, which also publishes Ecotone, a journal dedicated to “Reimagining Place.” It seems fitting that Lookout Books would assert in their publishing philosophy the goal “to publish a vibrant rather than docile literature of place.” That sums up Pearlman’s approach rather precisely.

Since the book launched in January, glowing reviews have appeared in places like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Both of these reviews began in the same way, with the reviewers admitting how they had never before heard of Edith Pearlman, and I admit now that I was also among their number. However, just as Ann Patchett predicted in her Introduction to Binocular Vision, this book seems to be the vehicle “with which Edith Pearlman casts off her secret-handshake status and takes up her rightful position as a national treasure.” Binocular Vision is, in many ways, Edith Pearlman’s opening line, broadcasting her character, her tone, and her ability to the larger world. She is setting a firm stake in the literary landscape that she is a writer to be reckoned with, and even more importantly, that she is a teller of stories that delight, challenge and inspire the reader.

Further Links and Resources

Edith Pearlman © Jonathan Sachs

As Peter Mountford’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Mariner, 2011), revs up, Gabriel gets himself into a series of pickles. The character’s front as a freelance reporter begins to crumble. He breaks off an affair with a cunning Wall Street Journal correspondent. His hedge-fund employers demand details of the impending natural resource nationalizations. Gabriel falls in love with Evo’s beautiful press liaison. He gets too close to the action during one of the daily strikes. A foursome of women, all stronger and smarter than him—his mother, his boss, his girlfriend, and his ex—draw and quarter Gabriel’s psyche as he weighs good lies against bad ones, victimless crimes against prosecutable ones.

This is not your grandfather’s expat novel. It feels like part of a new wave in that old tradition, along with Michael Fitzgerald’s Radiant Days and Clay Morgan’s Santiago and the Drinking Party. You won’t find young loners driven by the vague forces of alienation or boredom, in search of exotic meaning. Gabriel is instead driven by a brand of greed as nuanced as it is misinformed. He doesn’t see making the world a better place and making a shitload of money as mutually exclusive; he thinks they could happen in the same day, with the same opportunistic half-truth.

The novel never navel-gazes but instead drops the protagonist right into the crucible of our life and times. Among other things, the book is a crash course on Latin American history, contemporary economics, and international politics—with a page-turning plot. Its characters treat their careers with all the gravity they would in real life; Mountford is capable of the kind of sublime insights about work and human nature that we’ve stopped expecting from our novelists.

A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism does a better job than Forbes at covering the whims of high finance, and the novel does so without a trace of easy morality. You won’t find any heartless Gordon Geckos in here, swinging moneybags or fat cigars.

Gabriel does not always act honorably. At times, he’ll make you cringe—but his flaws are the flaws of his age. He is an imperfect man-boy who understands that, for his generation, jobs and bank accounts often outlast relationships.

It’s amazing how astutely Mountford renders the nature of money. He shows its most surreal qualities: its ability to expand or contract based on obscure tidbits of information that need not be true so much as believable. But he also captures its cold realism: the fact that unfortunately—perhaps tragically—it can be a force greater than love, greater even than family.

This is quite simply one of the smartest and most readable debuts I’ve come across in years. Mountford is a writer who rolls up his sleeves and digs into the zeitgeist all the way up to his elbows. He’s fearless in his depiction of world leaders, global events, and the oft-ignored gray areas between morality and success.

Further Links and Resources