Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Links and Resources

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.

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Links and Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Links and Resources

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

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

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

Interview

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

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

There’s more room to breathe in a novel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re following Minna’s story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country.

You know, I’ve never read that.

People don’t necessarily like the character of Spragg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, that’s interesting.

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

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

But those echos can help make a collection work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Links & Resources

“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”¹

For nearly a year, Flaubert—“M’sieu Gustave,” to his valet Narcisse, napping under that bell-pull in Croisset—had been hard at work on a novel that would, upon its serial publication in the autumn of 1856 in the journal La Revue de Paris, ignite a firestorm of moral indignation, eventually landing Flaubert (and editor Laurent-Pichat, along with the journal’s printer, Auguste Pillet) in a Paris courtroom, charged with endangering public morality. That novel, Madame Bovary (this essay refers to the Lydia Davis translation, Viking 2010), would become the first masterpiece of so-called “realist” fiction—a label Flaubert himself resisted—in which the author essentially disappears behind what Flaubert called a smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose.

Emma Bovary, the novel’s putative heroine—or anti-heroine, depending upon one’s sympathies—seduced as much by her own romantic illusions as she is by the callow, calculating Rodolphe Boulanger, strolls arm-in-arm with the reader to the very edge of the abyss, and then over that abyss. Without authorial judgment, without moralizing, in meticulously, beautifully turned prose, Flaubert vividly describes her fall.  “Novelists,” writes the critic James Wood, “should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him.” But in 1857, few were thanking Flaubert, least of all Ernest Pinard, the imperial prosecutor who sought to have Madame Bovary banned:

“Who in this book can condemn this woman?” Pinard argued, readily answering himself: “No one.” Admirable though the book was, at least in terms of Flaubert’s considerable artistic talent, Pinard pronounced the author’s apparent lack of morality “execrable,” declaring: “Monsieur Flaubert can embellish his paintings with all the resources of art but with none of its caution; there is in this work no gauze, no veils—it shows nature in the raw.”

And how exactly did Flaubert go about his dangerous art in Madame Bovary? What does “nature in the raw” even look like, as far as fiction is concerned? Take this passage, fairly early in the novel, in which Emma and her husband Charles are invited to a ball at the opulent château of the Marquis d’Andervilliers, in La Vaubyessard:

It was very lofty, paved with marble flagstones, and the sounds of footsteps and voices echoed through it as in a church. Opposite rose a straight staircase, and to the left a gallery that looked out on the garden led to the billiards room, from which one could hear, at the door, the caroming of the ivory balls. As she was passing through it on her way to the drawing room, Emma saw men with serious faces standing around the game, their chins resting on their high cravats, all of them decorated, smiling silently as they made their shots. Against the dark woodwork of the wainscoting, large gilded frames bore, along their lower edges, names written in black letters. She read: “Jean-Antoine d’Andervilliers d’Yverbonville, Comte de La Vaubyessard and Baron de La Fresnaye, killed at the Battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587.” And on another : “Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d’Andervilliers de La Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Knight of the Order of Saint Michael, wounded in combat at La Hougue-Saint-Vaast, May 29, 1692, died at La Vaubyessard, January 23, 1693.” Then one could barely make out those that came after, because the light from the lamps, directed down onto the green cloth of the billiards table, left the room floating in shadow. Burnishing the horizontal canvases, it broke over them in fine crests, following the cracks in the varnish; and from all those great black squares bordered in gold there would emerge, here and there, some lighter part of the paint, a pale forehead, a pair of eyes looking at you, wigs uncoiling over the powdery shoulders of red coats, or the buckle of a garter high on a plump calf.

Here we have the subtlest of seductions, without gauze or veils. To Emma, through whose eyes we witness this scene, and into whom Flaubert has all but vanished, it is all so romantic, so beguiling. The lofty entrance hall, echoing like a church, and those serious, smiling, “decorated” men standing around the green-clothed billiards table, making their shots. And of course the decorated men hanging on the wall, the noble dead, burnished in their martial (and one suspects amorous) triumphs by the light from the lamps hanging over the billiards table. This is Flaubert at his soft-pedaled best, “present everywhere and visible nowhere,” as he famously put it in a letter in 1852, allowing each deliberately chosen detail to speak for itself, without comment. Where once these decorated men might have hacked at each other with swords, thus earning themselves some measure of glory (an attenuated, rather silly glory, we can almost hear Flaubert murmuring), now they can only knock little ivory balls around a billiards table. Later, as dawn approaches, with the music of the dance “still humming in her ears,” Emma stands looking up at the windows of the château, imagining the guests in their rooms. “She would have liked to know what their lives were like, to enter into them, to become part of them.” Windows, one soon finds, are a returning motif in Madame Bovary; and no wonder, since the novel is itself a window, clear as glass, into Emma Bovary’s soul.

It was this very idea of fiction as a crystal clear window that Pinard was railing against. By what moral compass was the reader to navigate the world illuminated by this novel and its “execrable” creator? Up until the publication of Madame Bovary, authors were more than happy to be that compass. But not Flaubert, apparently. Pinard was not only arguing against this one novel but against the extraordinary vanishing act Flaubert had performed. This is the spring Flaubert in no small way ushered in. This is his gift to us.

*

But had Flaubert really disappeared? How exactly can an author be both, as Flaubert himself put it, present everywhere and visible nowhere in fiction?

In How Fiction Works, James Wood counters the occasionally heard criticism that realism, as form, is not really so realistic after all, contriving as it does to compose what is and always has been a rather messy world into a daisy-chain of scenes which invariably (one hopes) build, through conflict and rising action, to a moment of epiphany or change. “Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.” In other words, the author hasn’t simply become a camera, mindlessly clicking on one image after another.  The author is still and always with us, quietly, deliberately pointing the way. It’s helpful to remember that Flaubert was wary of being labeled a realist, and rightfully so. Perhaps it is better to imagine him at Croisset, at the window of his second-floor study with its big white bearskin rug and green-clothed writing table and gilded Buddha, and yes, even that little porcelain frog inkwell, looking out past the tulip tree and yew hedges to the Seine. “I have sketched, botched, slogged, groped,” Flaubert had written with no small amount of frustration in 1852. “Oh, what a rascally thing style is. I don’t believe you have any idea what kind of book this one is. I’m trying to be as buttoned-up in it as I was unbuttoned in the others and to follow a geometrically straight line. No lyricism, no reflections, the personality of the author absent.” Absent but nonetheless present everywhere, like God and the Devil, in the details.

And this is precisely how Flaubert could be both present and nowhere at once in that billiards room with Emma Bovary—in the very details he’s given us. Again, these details aren’t merely photographic; they’re not a simple accretion of seemingly random props present only to fill a scene: footsteps and voices in a marble-flagged entrance hall, a billiards table, the light-burnished portraits fading into shadow. I’m talking about fiction at its best now, fiction which is artistically capable of keeping any number of plates spinning in the air. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and in much of the finest literature that has followed, from Chekhov to Babel, Welty to Bellows to Munro, those details we encounter in scene are details the author has scrupulously and deliberately chosen (or instinctively, blessedly stumbled upon) that go beyond the mere surface of things. Yes, they paint a vivid scene, often beautifully, but look a little closer and you’ll discover that the solid ground you’re standing on is in fact ice. And under that ice, in the dim green light, another story is being told.

Take this marvelous passage from John Banville’s novel, The Infinities, in which young Adam Godley is waiting for a train to deliver a somewhat unwelcomed guest:

He stands on the platform in the shade. Why is it, he wonders, that railway tracks always give off a smell of kitchen gas? He looks about. Nothing has changed here since he was a child, so far as he can see. The metal canopy overhead is painted yellow and edged with a wrought-iron filigree and must have been put up a century ago or more. The station is lovingly kept. There are pots of geraniums on the window-sills of the waiting room, the benches set at intervals along the platform are freshly varnished, and on the wall a stylised hand pointing the way to the lavatories is painted in bright-red lacquer with a shiny, thick black outline. But where is the station master, where is the cross-eyed porter with the black hoop thing that porters carry on their shoulders, who used to be a fixture of the place? The emptiness is eerie. He paces for a while, then sits down on one of the benches; the new varnish with the sun on it is hot and gummy to the touch. Beyond the tracks the grass is sere and ticks faintly in the heat. Beyond that again the broad reach of the river is a whitish-blue drift throwing off fish-scales of platinum light. The silence buzzes. Down on the track a ragged grey crow hops jerkily from sleeper to sleeper, looking for something, does not find it, gives a disgruntled croak and flaps away. The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlit surface of the day, like a clumsy gardener putting his foot through a vegetable frame to the humid tangle of things beneath. He gets up from the bench and paces anew, more agitatedly this time.

Notice how quietly Banville introduces a note of unease into this sunlit idyll with that rotten-egg “smell of kitchen gas.” It’s a lovely detail, unexpected and strange, and delicately rich with menace. Immediately Adam looks around, as if knocked slightly off balance, and sees everything is as it should be, as it’s always been, “so far as he can see.” In other words, the visible surface of the morning is still intact. The old iron-edged roof, the pots of geraniums and varnished benches, that painted hand pointing to the bathrooms. But where is everyone? Unnerved, Adam paces, then sits on one of the sticky benches to wait. The dead grass “ticks in the heat”—another marvelous, sly tightening of the screw of disquiet, as is the ragged crow down on the tracks, “looking for something” it does not find. A shift has occurred, as surely as if a cloud had crossed over the sun. “The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlight surface of the day…” and abruptly gets up to pace again, “more agitatedly this time.”

With its rigorous, poetic attention to rhythm and sound, it’s a passage one could well imagine James Joyce or even Flaubert writing, and yet Banville’s book was published in 2010. Call it what you will—realism or lifeness, or simply the artist quietly, attentively at work, whispering in our ear: we are there with Adam, waiting uneasily on that hot, sun-beaten platform, with the faint smell of kitchen gas in the shimmering air and the dry grass ticking beyond the tracks.

Another example of this attentiveness to telling detail is Pat Barker’s deeply affecting 1995 novel, The Ghost Road, in which we witness the death of the British poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in the final months of the First World War while trying to cross a canal under machine gun fire. Here, only moments after the battle, we come upon the terrible scene:

On the edge of the canal the Manchesters lie, eyes still open, limbs not yet decently arranged, for the stretcher-bearers have departed with the last of the wounded, and the dead are left alone. The battle has withdrawn from them; the bridge they succeeded in building was destroyed by a single shell. Further down the canal another and more successful crossing is being attempted, but the cries and shouts come faintly here.

The sun has risen. The first shaft strikes the water and creeps toward them along the bank, discovering here the back of a hand, there the side of a neck, lending a rosy glow to skin from which the blood has fled, and then, finding nothing here that can respond to it, the shaft of light passes over them and begins to probe the distant fields.

It is a scene Barker renders with both pathos and restraint, with this image of the dead sprawled along the canal after the storm has passed, their “limbs not yet decently arranged.” These young men have quite literally been left behind, not only by the battle still raging in the distance but by time itself. Already, one senses, the world is moving on. The rising sun, creeping near, discovers them, just as we have discovered them. Briefly, in that rosy glow that rises on the hands and necks and faces of these young men who in death have suddenly ceased to be themselves and are now simply the scattered, anonymous dead—in this glow we see the last flickering echo of life. The shaft of sunlight lingers on them, just as our eye might for a moment linger over a black-and-white war photograph in a book, before turning to the next page. It is not only Wilfred Owen then who has been effaced here by this Flaubertian-smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose. Barker too has vanished, or at least faded, right before our eyes.

*

Within a year of Flaubert’s death in 1879, Croisset was gone. The white-walled villa where he had written Madame Bovary, which for decades had served Flaubert so well as an island of domestic tranquility and peace, was sold to a consortium of investors and promptly gutted to the rafters. In its place they erected an enormous red-brick distillery, to which barges regularly delivered loads of coal and grain, docking down by the water’s edge. Where once eel fisherman had cast their nets, now a huge factory pipe poured an endless stream of reeking white foamy runoff into the river, while tall brick stacks, lit by the ugly light of softly hissing gas lanterns, spewed smoke into the air round the clock. Gone was the garden with its flower beds and yew hedges and glorious tulip tree, where M’sieu Gustave, when he was not laboring away at his desk upstairs, was often seen by the neighborhood children lounging on sunny afternoons, contentedly smoking his pipe. Years later, one of those children, now grown to adulthood, remembered that time at Croisset:

For me, he was a being like no other, exotic and fantastic, a mysterious personality whom I regarded in a confusion of wonder and respect. I never believed he was Norman. He was Persian or Turkish, Chinese or Hindu, I couldn’t decide which, but for sure he came from some distant place and had a distinctive nature. The fabulous accoutrements made me think he might well be a prince… When my nanny wanted to treat me, she’d walk me past his front gate, where I’d gaze at him smoking his pipe, slouched in a large armchair. I’ll always remember with tender emotion his pink and white striped culottes and his house robes, the floral design of which were pure poetry.

In life and in fiction, detail is everything.

*

From his study earlier, Flaubert had watched his greyhound Julio swim out to greet the boatman paddling past. A glittering golden-silver thread sketched itself on the brown river behind the dog as the slow current carried them along, and where the boatman’s oars dashed the water’s calm surface, the sunlight seemed to shatter like little glass globes. Standing there in his flowered Bokharan robe, a gift from his good friend Turgenev, with the mess of his great, unruly manuscript behind him on the green-clothed table—Bouvard et Pécuchet, on which he had labored now for three long years and saw no end to—Flaubert had felt the bones in his right hand throbbing, a deep smoldering ache that, along with the rheumatism in his knees and the pain in his swollen feet, rarely went away these days. Along with the pills Flaubert took for epilepsy and gout and his wretched, rotting teeth, his physician Fortin had prescribed a daily walk, but it was the garden with its weedy flower beds that had finally drawn him away from his writing this afternoon. Crouching painfully now, he pulled clump after clump of spiky dandelion. If only old Narcisse were here to help. But Narcisse, half blind with age, had returned to the bosom of his family years ago. Gone too was Flaubert’s mother, buried in Rouen, and Uncle Parain, and dear Liline, along with her English governess. A bumble bee, emerging from the soft purple throat of a lily, its black legs furred with pollen, lit for a second on the long sleeve of his robe, circled the bright red embroidered flower there, then buzzed away. Asleep on the warm flagstones, Julio’s paws twitched, a little ripple flowing up and down the muscles of his slender legs. The greyhound was dreaming, but of what? That boatman perhaps, his round red face, the oars creaking on the gunnels. What a little fool you are! Go back! Swim home before you drown! The long sun-emblazoned thread unfurling behind Julio as he swam toward shore. His beating heart.

Further Links & Resources

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

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

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

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

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you working on a new book now?

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

Further Links and Resources

>> Mary Stewart Atwell interviews Kevin Brockmeier

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

>> Carolyn Gan interviews Edwidge Danticat

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

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

I’ve always loved the connotations of the word workshop. There’s refinement in a seminar and hierarchy in a master-class, but a workshop brings to mind sawdust and power tools. A bunch of unshaven people in greasy jumpsuits. To call a class a workshop implies that we’ll replace or reinforce theoretical lessons with the practical work of making and fixing tangible objects: the machines that texts are.

At advanced levels especially, workshop courses tend to proceed manuscript by manuscript, like a fix-it shop where we poke around under the hood, trying to understand how this particular engine works and what can be done to make it run better.

For people who love workshops, like me, this problem-solving methodology is not just instructive, it’s fun. Stimulating. In fact, part of what made me sure I wanted to be a writer—and a writing teacher—was the pleasure I experienced in workshop, helping my peers and students solve those problems.

But a funny thing happened after I spent a few years loving life in writing workshops. With each semester my work grew more careful, more conventional, more narrowly proscribed. My weirdest, most experimental work came and went before I’d finished my first semester of grad school. Back then I would have said my writing was becoming more refined, and that’s certainly true. But in retrospect I also think that my fears were setting in, eroding the courage borne of naïveté that I had enjoyed as a younger writer.

I had genuinely masterful teachers, and they ran their workshops with respect, imagination, generosity, and vast expertise. I honestly don’t think they could have done a better job. And yet by the time I graduated, whenever I sat down to write a sentence, my head was instantly flooded with the voices of my workshop peers and teachers. The biggest thing I learned in grad school, it seemed, was a powerful, paralyzing sense of all the mistakes I was about to make in my next paragraph. Ideas for stories kept coming and coming, but when I tried to put them on paper I didn’t just dry up—I experienced genuine panic. This lasted for years.

The worst part was, I could hardly admit it to anyone. The very notion of writer’s block is often treated, in serious academic workshops, as a weakness or lack of discipline experienced only by hacks and amateurs. And maybe it is. But something tells me it strikes the best and worst of us. And if writers don’t learn to overcome the anxieties that stop them from writing, then every other skill we teach them will be for naught.

**

Conversations about process, self-motivation, and confidence sometimes crop up in private student-teacher conversations, but they rarely find an official place in the curriculum of advanced academic workshops. A lot of us—students included—consider those touchy-feely, self-expression, free-your-imagination conversations and exercises to be well beneath us. We relegate them to the domain of adult-education workshops and Write Your Novel in 30 Days! books, and to the self-help land of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way franchise.

In college I took a one-day workshop with a National Book Award-winning visiting writer who asked if we could take a moment at the beginning of class to meditate. She rang a bell. After she closed her eyes, we all shot hysterical glances at one another and tried to keep straight faces. And, I’m ashamed to say, we pretty much wrote off everything she said for the next hour as the rantings of a weird hippie.

Some of my peers later studied with a wonderful writer and teacher who asked them, on the first night of workshop, to map out their story ideas in crayon on big sheets of paper. They left the classroom incensed. “I didn’t go to grad school,” one student said, “to draw pictures.” Perhaps she’d been trying to release them from their normal approach to story creating. Who knows. But that professor spent the rest of the semester trying, and never quite succeeding, to rebuild her credibility, her authority.

In “serious” academic workshops, the actual act of writing occurs at home, in secret—or it doesn’t occur at all. Everyone jokingly acknowledges that “Of course you’ll spend the first few days after workshop or the first several months after grad school feeling overwhelmed, defeated, reluctant to write. That’s just how it goes.” The tough ones will find a way back to their computers and notebooks, and the rest, well… who knows what happens to them? The rare student who works up the nerve to actually ask how to overcome writer’s block risks shame, risks being written off. And anyway, the usual response boils down to little more than, “Sit at your desk and just do it.”

Despite all our declarations to students that masterful texts result from rigorous revision and don’t just fall from the sky, academic workshops imply that first drafts, at least, fall from the sky. Beyond the stage of “Intro to Creative Writing,” we spend very little time helping students develop the skills to generate those first drafts.

I suspect this is partly because the pedagogy associated with overcoming doubt and generating raw material is tainted by its associations with self-help, therapy, nurturing, self-expression, and spirituality. I sense, too, that each of these areas is tinged with connotations of femininity. I know part of what makes me afraid to engage with those topics in workshop is my reluctance to play the nurturing female role. To teach these psychological, or yes, even spiritual skills is to risk losing our credibility as serious writers and professors. But if we continue to cede this territory to “unserious” workshops and, out of fear, convention, or prejudice, avoid teaching the psychological strategies required of life-long writers, I think our students miss out on some skills that are essential to the success, survival and sanity of any writer.

**

During my painful, frightened, depressed years as a blocked writer, I ended up spending quite a bit of time watching TV. The Tennis Channel, to be specific. Watching the two to five hours of a tennis match, you can actually see and hear (as you can’t in most sports) the tremendous physical and emotional highs and lows that players go through. They are unhidden by helmets or pads, and the downtime between points and games allows for intense close-ups of each player as she strategizes, scolds herself, or simply melts down. Most importantly: each player is alone. Coaching of any kind during a match is prohibited in most pro tournaments. Whatever strategy, motivation, support, or composure a coach in any other sport might offer has to come, in tennis, from within the player herself.

In other words, the coach’s job involves teaching players to develop the inner resources to overcome fear and frustration, to maintain confidence, and to keep a clear, focused mind under extraordinarily challenging circumstances.

When a player fails at this, when a wildly talented, well-trained player loses his confidence or the rhythm of his serve, everyone watching can see it, plain as day. The coach grits his teeth in impossible frustration, and spectators scream advice and encouragement, but the player has already lost, in his head, and hears none of this. Players who truly lose their confidence, for good, stumble from loss to loss, all their talent and training and a lifetime of grueling work made meaningless because their brains have gotten in the way. Head cases, people call them. Every sport has them, every fan mourns them. Sportscasters whistle under their breath and suggest sports psychologists, a change of coaches, a change of racquets, a change of anything.

Sometimes when I watch a player I love lose a tough, pivotal match I think, “Thank God as writers the game never ends; there is always the chance to revise something and get it right.” The story will wait until we get our heads on straight—or so we like to think.

Other times, in periods of frustration or boredom with my writing, I think, “What a great thing it would be to have the game just be over and done with. Take a shower, go to bed, start over the next day with a clean slate. No manuscript hanging over your head, unfinished, unfinished, unfinished.”

A player might review a lost match on game tape or in her bad dreams for years to come, but she cannot actually revise it. The psychological make-up of the successful athlete has to include the ability to put the last match behind her. To learn from it and drop it and move forward.

In the academic, manuscript-based workshop, we tend to train students in a different psychology: revise, revise, and then revise some more. As the writer and pedagogy theorist Anna Leahy writes in a description of her teaching methods, “Most importantly, I treat everyone’s work as unfinished, always.”¹ The typical methodology of the academic workshop puts the manuscript before the writer; people talk about “what the text is trying to do” and sometimes don’t even look at the writer when they offer their feedback. Sometimes it seems that the serious workshop serves to perfect texts, not develop writers. Or, it serves texts directly, and writers only indirectly. We tend to disregard the fact that some manuscripts aren’t worth perfecting and should perhaps be chalked up as a loss so the writer can freely move on to the next match.

If the primary focus of academic workshops is to highlight what isn’t working in the manuscript, and through constant emphasis on revision imply that the work is never done, may never be done, after a few years of taking workshops students must end up feeling that they’ve been on one interminable losing streak. No wonder they walk through the halls in despair; no wonder they lose their confidence and retreat, relying on skill sets they’ve been told they are good at, rather than expanding the limits of their art. Who wouldn’t?

I’m not saying that revision—and the endurance needed for multiple revisions—isn’t important. Of course it is. My point is merely that there are psychological components to teaching and learning to write, whether we acknowledge them openly in our classrooms or not. And if we focus mainly on fixing the fleeting problems of each manuscript, we may overlook the more enduring problems of each student. And that’s dangerous and inefficient, because the problems in each student of course create—and recreate—the flaws and limitations in their manuscripts, or sometimes prevent them from producing a text in the first place. We acknowledge that athletes need psychological strength and skills as much as physical ones. Why would writers—those “athletes of perception,” to quote Robert Stone—be any different?

_{Leahy, Anna. Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005, p. 14.}

Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared, in slightly different form, as part of the AWP 2011 Panel “Beyond the Workshop: Revising, Revamping, Rejecting the Workshop Model.” The panel also included fellow writers and teachers, Margaret Lazarus Dean, Charles Baxter, Liam Callanan, and Patrick O’Keeffe. Please check back this Friday, September 23, when FWR will publish Liam Callanan’s talk from that same panel.

Further Links & Resources

• Interested in pedagogy? C’mon, we won’t rat you out. FWR published an extensive round-table discussion on teaching creative writing in the 21st Century with Cathy Day, Anna Leahy and Stephanie Vanderslice. Here are links to Part I and Part II.
• Read Kate Kostelnik’s review of Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?, which takes a look not only at the current workshop model, but the potential for change – nay, revolution – of the system.



• Valerie Laken is the author of the novel, Dream House, and the 2010 story collection Separate Kingdoms. Read a 2009 interview with Valerie here on FWR, and check out additional interviews, reviews, and more at valerielaken.com.

Steven Wingate: Let’s start with the “title question.” What does writing from your own chair mean to you, and how do you get that point across to your students? How can you tell whether they are absorbing what you say?

Bret Lott: This idea—writing from your own chair—comes from my being sometimes a little too exasperated with students who want to be Writers but who don’t yet understand that they already have something To Write. I was in class one day and simply trying to explain yet again that, as Flannery O’Connor wrote, anyone who has lived through his childhood has enough material to last the rest of his life, and seeing the students each sitting in his and her own chairs seemed an apt way to get them to understand that each of them owned a particular point of view and set of experiences, and that those were both held together right that very second in the seat each student was sitting in. That is, you already have a point of view and a story. But so very many writers want to leave that point of view and story—to walk away from themselves—in light of what looks like a better story and point of view held by a writer whose work they admire. They end up wanting to write like somebody else and about somebody else—they want to leave their own chair and go sit in someone else’s chair, a chair that looks oh-so-much-more attractive than their own. The problem with this is that the chair they wish to move into is already occupied, whether by Hemingway, or O’Connor, or Carver, or, or, or—that chair is filled. To sit in that chair would be impossible, because that chair only holds one person—it’s not a love seat. The second idea entailed in this whole analogy or metaphor or whatever the heck it is—hey, I just came up with it one day in class!—is that what made Hemingway’s and O’Connor’s and Carver’s writing important and meaningful and real is that they wrote from their own chair. They didn’t walk away from themselves in order to go sit in someone else’s chair—so what does that say about your own chair? This: It is always and only your chair—no one else’s, just as the chair from which the great writers wrote was their own too. Lesson: Don’t leave you to go find your point of view and your story. You are all you have been given. There is going to be no out-of-chair experience coming your way. This is who you are, and from where you ought and need to write. Whether they’re absorbing it or not? No clue. The proof is in the writing. And undoubtedly the most genuine and real and moving stories I read as a teacher are those that come from real experiences and from the unique point of view through which that experience is rendered. Does this mean one should always and only write about what one has experienced? No. But this whole idea serves as a good starting point for writers.

Writers always get asked about their literary influences, not so much about their teaching influences. You talk in Before We Get Started about John Gardner, whose On Becoming a Novelist is a touchstone for you. Who were some of your other teaching influences, and how have your relationships with them changed over time?

Jay Neugeboren. Image via author site

As regards teachers, Jay Neugeboren was my mentor at UMass Amherst when I was there in the early eighties. He was a very traditional workshop instructor, let everyone say what they thought about the story, guided the conversation, wound things up with his own perceptions—and then let the author walk away and write what he or she had to write. This was exactly what I needed, and how I try to teach to this day. Another influence on me as a teacher was James Baldwin, with whom I had the honor of working at the same time at UMass. I was in a workshop of fifteen students, three from each of the five colleges—UMass, Smith, Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, and Hampshire—that ended up being a very unconventional workshop but important for me all the same: we spent most of the semester talking about literature and art rather than critiquing work.

James Baldwin. Image via Miami Dade College Archives.

I try to incorporate this into my teaching as well, a readiness NOT to be talking always about the work at hand, but about writing at large, and literature, and art. My undergraduate creative writing teacher was John Hermann at Cal State Long Beach, who led off every class by reading a quote about writing from a different important writer, then asking us what we thought. There were many long silences after he asked us, and because he was willing to wait through them for responses, I learned to wait for students to do the same in my own classrooms. Not to mention the importance of quotes from other writers—a cornerstone for the way I teach.

Every creative writing teacher relies on the metaphors, monikers, and catch-phrases that they come up with over the years—the title of this interview being one of your own. At what point did you begin “codifying” some of these? When did you know you were ready to write Before We Get Started?

I taught in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College for nine years, from 1994 to 2003. Part of our responsibilities were to give lectures to our students —bona fide, real-live lectures. I cannot speak off the cuff very well, and so I always wrote mine out, first word to last. After a few years of this—and publishing a few of them too—I decided to put them together into a book of their own. I’m not a big fan of how-to books, which always seem to offer those willing to pony up the dough a secret way through the genuine hard work writing really is, as though there were a secret tunnel that went through the mountain everyone has to climb in order to learn how to write. Before We Get Started isn’t that sort of book—I think of it more as a who book than a how to. For instance, we faculty at Vermont once got a request from several students to give more lectures on technique—so I wrote and presented at that next residency a lecture called “Against Technique,” this because I think when people begin to ask about technique what they’re really asking is, Can you give me a map to that tunnel through the mountain so I don’t have to spend so much energy climbing this stupid mountain?

You talked, in our workshop at The Glen, about “reading with a pencil in your hand” and about the side effects of reading so much student work that is either (a) early in the creative process, or (b) significantly misfiring. What’s your relationship to reading, and do you have any advice for younger writer/teachers on how to keep our reading lives vibrant?

I have said on more than a few occasions that when I die, 98% of what I will have read over the course of my life will have been prose that needed work. That’s what I do as a teacher: read stuff in draft for people trying to make it better. As a consequence I end up feeling at a loss when I don’t have a pen in my hand—it’s just a kind of job hazard that the pen is part of the reading life. I read nonfiction now. So far this summer I’ve read Eric Metaxas’s superior biography of Bonhoeffer, Linda Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, and am right now in the middle of Richard Rhodes’s terrific history The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I like facts; I want to know what really happened, this after spending my life writing tales of things that never did. When I’m reading fiction, I’m rereading Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey-Stephen Maturin volumes—I have read the entire twenty-volume series and am reading them all again. I’m almost through with volume 15 as we speak. But to the question: I keep my reading life as vibrant as I can by reading about what really happened, as I said. And the O’Brian volumes simply and elegantly and convincingly transport me to a different time and place, one light years away from the prose I encounter day in and day out in my fiction workshops. I hope I’m not sounding disdainful about my students’ works: I don’t mean this at all, as I delight in seeing in a student’s work that moment when he or she understands deeply the world the writer is authoring, and seeing in that authenticity a world that delivers back to its author truths that hold water, and that matter, and that the author hadn’t known he or she would encounter to begin with. That’s pure joy, being a part of that.

Another one of your phrases that stuck with me was “surrendering the self to the work”—serving the art rather than asking the art to serve the writer. You also talk about this in Before We Get Started, particularly the essay “Against Technique.” How can you tell if your students are making that surrender, and how do you guide them into it? What do you do with students who don’t take that bait?

Generally I can tell when the story is surprising me with the connections it’s making. Am I reading something that releases within a string of plausible, believable, well-crafted sentences and scenes (the easy part) a series of surprises that connect themselves deeply to the story it is trying to create (the hard—and rewarding—part)? When I feel, while I am reading a story, that story’s connection to itself and the attendant surprises I the reader am encountering—this increasing series of recognitions I didn’t know was there but which are now happening—I’m pretty certain the writer has stumbled into some truth he or she wasn’t aware of but which is being discovered as the author is going along. If a story, however, isn’t releasing any of these surprises—no matter how plausible, believable, and well-crafted the sentences and scenes are—if it’s predictable, even if surprising in the plot sense, then the author isn’t moving into that unknown territory of himself. Guiding a student along is always, it seems to me, an absolutely boots-on-the-ground time that happens within the workshop—there is no real way to guide someone into understanding these things without there being something concrete he or she has created upon which or with which to play out this whole dynamic between the author and what he has created. I hope I’m making sense here. Students who don’t take the bait (not sure I really like that term, as though the bait—this idea of self-discovery—were false) don’t take the bait. You can lead a horse to water, but if the horse believes he knows better than you do, then, well . . .

After many years teaching at the College of Charleston, you moved to Louisiana State University and became editor of The Southern Review, which is regarded as a peach of a job. Why did you go back to teaching, and are you still glad you made the transition?

I don’t like rejecting the work of writers. Teaching is all about hope—about possibility, about what can be. It’s definitely NOT about Yes, You Too Can Be A Writer! But it is about possibility. An editor’s job—that of selecting what will be included and what won’t—is, finally, all about No. I don’t want to live there.

You’ve been teaching creative writing since 1986. How has its pedagogy changed, what are its big influences now, and where do you see it going?

I really can’t see that anything has changed. A student writes something, puts it up for public criticism, and gets it criticized. Same as when O’Connor and Carver put their work up in workshops. Same as I did, too, and same as my students do to this day. O’Connor wrote that all criticism is inherently negative—and that’s what this whole workshop thing is about. I don’t think that’s going to change. What matters is the care and tact and respect with which one approaches this truth.

Imagine you have three bits of advice to give a writer who is just about to embark on a career of teaching creative writing. What would they be?

1. Make and observe your own time to write your own work.
2. Compartmentalize your time—This is my writing time, and now this is my teaching time.
3. Make sure your students understand there is no secret to this at all. That writing is something you are practicing right alongside them, that your issues are their issues, that there are no secrets, there have been no major breakthroughs of esoteric information regarding the telling of stories, that “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” And they need to understand the liberating fact this can be: what makes the story they are telling different is that it is their story to tell, and no one else’s.

Further Links and Resources:

• Read Lott’s creative non-fiction essay “Genesis,” from Before We Get Started, in Brevity
• Read Lott’s essay “Against Technique“
• See Bret Lott read from his novel Ancient Highways:

In April, Mary Stewart Atwell met Kevin Brockmeier at his first reading at his alma mater, Missouri State University.  In this interview, conducted via e-mail correspondence over the following few months, they speak about metaphor, the line between realist and fantasy fiction, and the pleasures of not living in New York.

Brockmeier is the author of three adult novels, two collections of short stories, and two novels for children.  He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Mary Stewart Atwell: This winter, the writer Jacob Appel published an article in The Writer’s Chronicle titled “The Quest for the World’s Saddest Metaphor: The Heartrending Genius of Kevin Brockmeier.” He describes your work as distinguished by what he calls “grand metaphor,” defined as “both so extraordinary that it pushes the limits of human imagination, and so persistent as to encroach into nearly every aspect of the underlying story.” In the process of writing, do you feel that you’re engaged in building a grand metaphor? If so, is that the element of a story that usually comes to you first?

I don’t know that you’ll find a single overarching metaphor that operates as a bridge between my books, if that’s what you mean, but, yes, many of my best stories are founded in metaphor, though I would hazard to say that very few of them are actually in open dialogue with metaphor. In other words, I’ll often find myself envisioning a story out of some symbol whose potency seems immediately apparent to me—and will seem equally apparent, I hope, to my readers: a ceiling that flattens an entire community, a coat that reproduces people’s prayers on slips of paper, a city of the dead but not yet forgotten, a change in the operation of the world that invests people’s injuries with light. But when I actually sit down to write, I’ll treat that symbol as a real phenomenon. I’ll establish a metaphor as the root principle of a story and then ignore its metaphorical qualities in favor of its physical qualities. I try to let my readers do most of the symbol-work themselves, so that whenever some symbol begins to perform a little dance of light on the surface of the story, it will be because they have brought it there rather than me.

You’re in the enviable position of being a full-time fiction writer. What are your days like? Do you ever feel that you’re not being as productive as you should be?

I can’t deny there are days—months, even, particularly these last few—when I get shamefully little work done. But I try. When I’m home, presuming I’m healthy, I devote as much of the day to writing as I can. I typically work from nine-thirty or ten in the morning to at least dinnertime, but I’m often more productive during my supposed post-work evening tinkering time than I am during my proper working day. The truth is that, hour by hour, I get very little done, but there are an awful lot of hours wrapped up in every story I write. The only thing I can say I’ve learned for certain is that the more time I’m able to spend writing, the more I’ll eventually, slowly, painstakingly, accomplish. I’ve spoken elsewhere about my working methods—how I broach my sentences one tiny piece at a time, termiting away at them until I’m satisfied that they present the right effect. I’m fairly certain that, as a reader, I can tell when a writer is investigating words for their insinuations, their dim traces of other times and places, trying to fit each unusual shape properly to the next, and I spend my days trying to do the same.

One of your point of view characters in The Illumination is a novelist and short story writer, and other characters in other work also comment on the act of writing.  In this context, I’d like to ask you about a moment from The Brief History of the Dead.  After the journalist Luka Sims has decided that he’s the only person left in the city of the dead, he thinks about what working on the newspaper that covers the city has meant to him: “When he was working on a story, he felt as though he were a paleontologist uncovering a set of bones, chipping away at the world until he had enucleated some small, hard object he could catalogue and carry away in his hands: a skull, say, or a breastbone.” Did you see this as a comment on the writing process? Is writing a story like uncovering an artifact?

I think that writing a sentence is like uncovering an artifact—at least if you’re writing it well. Nina Poggione, the writer in The Illumination, talks about “the thrill she got, the feeling of wondrous correctness, when a handful of words she had been organizing and reorganizing suddenly fastened themselves together, forming a chain that seemed to tug at the page from some distant, less provisional place, as if through an accidental pattern of sounds, rhythms, and insinuations she had linked herself to the beginning of the world, a time when words were inseparable from what they named and you could not mention a thing without establishing it in front of your eyes.” That’s the metaphor that comes the closest to how I’ve been thinking about writing lately, along with something I read in an interview with Barry Lopez: “Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language. In Japanese this word we use, kotodama, means that each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that.”

You live in Little Rock, Arkansas, fairly distant from literary and publishing centers. How has living there affected your career?

Well, there are literary centers and then there are publishing centers, and it’s important to distinguish between the two. New York is unquestionably the publishing center of the United States, and I’m sure there are certain social opportunities that aren’t available to me because I happen not to live there. But the literary center? I would suggest that the literary center of the United States is anywhere you can read the best books that have been published and find a quiet place to write. Which is to say, anywhere at all. That’s one of the advantages that writing has over, say, performing: you don’t have to live in a beehive of public activity to participate in the strongest currents of your art form. When it comes to literature, there’s no such thing as the provinces. The thing to emphasize is that I like Little Rock and I’m living where I want to live.

Do you think that young writers are in an unnecessary hurry to move to New York?

Who can say? I think that if you want to live in New York and can afford it, then by all means you should, but it would be a mistake to imagine that living in New York is your obligation as either a writer or a participant in the greater literary culture. You should live wherever you believe you can construct the most satisfying life for yourself. Beyond that, I would suggest that any town will reveal its riches to you when you treat it as your home, as where you would rather be, instead of as a place to bide your time.

You served as the guest editor for Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy Volume 3. In the preface, the series editor, Matthew Cheney, describes you as “one of the writers who reveals the complexities (and absurdities!) of…a dichotomy” between genre fiction and literary fiction. Do you agree with this characterization? In a story like “The View from the Seventh Layer,” was the switching back and forth between realism and science fiction elements part of your project from the beginning?

I agree with Matthew that good genre fiction offers the same pleasures and ambitions as any good fiction does and that it would probably make more sense and inspire a better and more resilient literary discourse if we could fold the two categories together and simply begin distinguishing between books according to their vitality and their degree of accomplishment rather than their genre affiliations. Take a science fiction and fantasy writer like Walter Tevis or Peter S. Beagle and compare him to a literary fiction writer like Steven Millhauser or Jose Saramago, and you’ll see the similarities—namely, that they’re authors of tremendous vision, great craft, and a complex and absorbing sense of what it means to be alive who happen to be interested in exploring the otherworldly or the impossible or the ten-thousand ways the familiar encases the strange—long before you’ll see the differences. In the case of “The View from the Seventh Layer,” Olivia, the story’s heroine, fails to recognize that there is a border between the real and the fantastic, and I tried my best to adopt her perspective while I was writing it.

Many people who have seen you read know that you’re an inveterate keeper of lists—of favorite movies, books, music. In the introduction to Real Unreal, you provide a list of your top ten fantasy stories, including some, like James Salter’s “Akhnilo,” which many readers wouldn’t consider fantasy. As a reader, do you often find yourself sniffing out fantasy elements that seem to slip by others?

I would have thought that the James Salter story was quite self-evidently fantasy. How else would you categorize a story about a man to whom the universe quite literally speaks its mysteries? Of course, if that man is drunk or crazy, then you’ve simply got a realistic story whose body is wobbling on the legs of a broken consciousness. In the absence of firm evidence to the contrary, though, I’ll favor the fantastic reading of a story over the lunatic reading every time. What this means, I suppose, is (1) that I find fantasy more interesting than either madness or inebriation and (2) that the answer to your question is “yes.”

I have another question about that list. Describing the writers, you reveal that one of the ten is the “writer whose work I treasure above all others.” I’d like to venture a guess at who it might be. Italo Calvino?

Ding, ding! Let’s say that an author should be judged by his five best books and his five best books alone. In Calvino’s case, in my opinion, those would be The Baron in the Trees, The Complete Cosmicomics, The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount, Invisible Cities, and Marcovaldo. By that standard, it seems to me that he’s pretty hard to top, though William Maxwell and Leo Tolstoy are also strong contenders.

In your recent talk at Missouri State University, you commented that you like physical books better than screens, and that the Kindle didn’t hold much of an attraction for you. You also mentioned—and I have to admit that I didn’t pick up on this—that your “The Human Soul as Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story” has a hidden page that will only be noticed if you read the story from back to front. As you’re writing, or when you’ve finished a book, do you think about the physical properties of the text? Are you inspired by work that plays with the physical possibilities of the book form?

I think that the book itself is often a very appealing aesthetic object—in its texture, size, appearance, heft, and aroma; in the islands of black text it places in seas of white space; in the crispness and contours of its type—and that right now, as we speak, we’re living in a golden age of book design. That said, when I’m reading fiction, it’s the words themselves that matter most to me. In all my happiest reading experiences, I’ve felt unmoored from the physical elements of the book, wholly engaged by the rhythms and melodies of the language and adrift in the continuous waking dream of the story. That’s what I’m hoping for whenever I start reading a book, and in that context, I usually find experiments that call attention to the  concrete properties of the text an exasperation. As for my own work, I tend to think in metaphors of shape. I might not know exactly how a book or a story will look in its final published form, but I know the configuration by which I want it to function. The Illumination, for instance, I conceived of as something like a set of six transparencies, each nearly the same size and containing its own seemingly abstract fragments of line and color, which finally, when layered one on top of the other, would reveal a single complete image.

In that talk, you also revealed that the Chuck Carter section in The Illumination is based on a constraint: ten words to each sentence. It made me think of Oulipean writers like Harry Mathews, who have used similar constraints in their published fiction. Are the writers of Oulipo an influence on your work?

The only Oulipo writers I’ve read with much diligence are Calvino, Harry Mathews, and Georges Perec, but I appreciate all three of them, and I think that the Oulipo project itself—as I understand it, to prod the imagination out of its usual habits by applying certain artificial pressures to it—is a valuable one. The ten-word sentence rule in Chuck’s section of The Illumination is the most demanding constraint I’ve ever imposed on myself, but I doubt I’ve ever written a story that didn’t construct and attempt to abide by (and occasionally very deliberately to violate) its own set of rules. All those questions you answer for yourself in a story’s opening paragraph—every point-of-view decision, every vocal mannerism, every distillation of tone and rhythm—they’re all constraints of one kind or another, aren’t they? At least that’s how I see them. But I usually begin a story with other constraints, too, or at least methods of operation, that are firmly in place before I write so much as the first sentence. Three examples: (1) in the second section of The Truth About Celia, “Faces, and How They Look from Behind,” I decided to hand the narrative off to a new point-of-view character at each paragraph, allowing the consciousness behind the story to float from person to person along the current of their physical proximity; (2) in Nina Poggione’s section of The Illumination, I planned to (and did) resume the story after every space break in a new bookstore, in a new city, with a run-on sentence that would become longer at every interval, until it was filling whole pages; and (3) in “The View from the Seventh Layer”—the story, not the collection—I set out to craft every sentence as carefully as possible, but to treat each one as a solitary object, allowing the reader to forge the connections between them without my assistance, so that the story might seem to have a continually darting gaze inside it.

When placing these constraints on your work, how do you balance the story with the artifice?  You mentioned “breaking your rules” a moment ago.  When do you allow yourself to break the rules?

Usually I treat the rules as benevolent dictators, trusting that if I approach a story with enough care, it will take shape within its own constraints. Again, some of those constraints are pretty daunting, but often they’re just minor features I hope will lend a certain aesthetic polish to my writing and keep it turning inward toward its own energy. When I break the rules, it’s because I want a story to be perceived by its readers as violating its own terms of being. For instance, one of my stories, “A Fable Beginning with an Ice Slick and a Concrete Embankment”—which is uncollected; I wrote it for Esquire Magazine’s napkin project—consists of a single, nearly 2,300-word sentence tracing the observations of a man dying in a car accident. I tried to make the sentence both balanced and grammatically correct, which is to say diagrammable, rather than a long series of independent clauses merely spliced together with commas. It’s followed by a second, concluding, four-word sentence, “He was somewhere else,” a shift I hoped would be understood as a change in the narrative strategy commensurate with the change in the man’s situation.

In the Writer’s Chronicle article, Jacob Appel comments that you’re the only writer who he wants to influence his writing. How do you feel about writers looking up to you as an inspiration?

I suppose I should say here that I haven’t read the Writer’s Chronicle article, for the same reason that I avoid reading anything at all, good or bad, about myself: who is that guy, and why does he have my name? That said, I’m happy to think that other writers might take something of mine and absorb it into their imaginations. That’s how the interplay between reading and writing is supposed to work, isn’t it? You find a book that feels intimate to you, and it changes how you address the world. I know beyond question that my own writing has been shaped by the same maneuver, that I’ve been inspired by the writers whose books I admire, many of whom are older than me, of course, but some of whom began publishing around the same time I did (Kelly Link, Peter Orner, Kate Bernheimer, Thomas Glave, Goncalo Tavares) and some of whom a little later (Rebecca Makkai, Alejandro Zambra, Nick Harkaway, Karen Russell, Theodora Goss).

I’ve always found the children in your fiction—Caroline in “These Hands,” Robin in “Things That Fall from the Sky,” Chuck Carter in The Illumination—to be very convincing and moving. Apropos of writing about childhood, I’d like to ask you about a moment in your short story “The Ceiling.” The adult narrator is remembering a dream he had as a child about finding a door that led from his cellar into a drugstore: “For several days after, I felt a quickening of possibility, like the touch of some other geography, whenever I passed by the cellar door. It was as if I’d opened my eyes to the true inward map of the world, projected according to our own beliefs and understandings.” It struck me that children in general have the sense of such a world, just beyond the reach of our everyday experience, and that an awareness of that world is one of the things that makes for good fantasy writing.  Do you find it easy to remember being a child, and if so, how does the ability to remember that time inform your writing?

I’m thinking of something Virginia Woolf wrote about Lewis Carroll: “For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.” For a long time—certainly through my twenties—that’s how I felt about myself, as if my childhood occupied nearly all the space inside me and my adulthood was merely encapsulating it, cushioning it from the forces of my life like a layer of intracranial fluid. I found myself telling stories about children again and again because my own childhood was right there at the center of my mind. The Brief History of the Dead was an exception; I felt that I had been writing too relentlessly about childhood in my earlier books and so made a deliberate effort to restrict my focus to adults in that one. Then something changed, which is, frankly, that I went through a long period of ill health, one that spun me sideways and sent thirty-some years pouring down over my shoulders. Now, afterward—I hope afterward—I feel like a different person. Maybe my childhood is still whole and entire inside me, but it’s no longer the whole and entirety of me. (For what it’s worth, I think the book of mine, children’s novels aside, that casts its gaze most directly on childhood—a book that is, in many ways, about the effort to travel back through time along that gaze and see what you’ll find at the other end—is one you don’t mention: The Truth About Celia.)

Religion, or, perhaps more accurately, theology, is a theme that pervades your work. In your collection Things That Fall from the Sky, one story follows students at a Christian school, while another describes a society where people tell and retell the story of Jesus as part of their cultural mythology. Then there’s The Illumination, where the light that shines out of people’s wounds seems to have a spiritual or mystical connotation. Would you say that religion is a productive theme for you—perhaps even a preoccupation—or is it something that just happens to come up?

I can’t deny that religion fascinates me, though I tend to think of most theology—and most philosophy, too—as a particularly healthy root ancestor of the literature of the fantastic. Ryan Shifrin, one of the characters in The Illumination, comments that “he had—or seemed to have—the religious instinct but not the religious mindset: his intuition told him that everything mattered, everything was significant, and yet nothing was so clear to him as that life presented a riddle to which no one knew the answer.” Well, me too. If there’s an arc to the way that religion has informed my writing, I would say that it’s this: in my earlier books, my interest in some facet of religious thinking or religious narrative often gave birth to my stories, but more recently other interests altogether have given birth to my stories, and I’ve simply allowed some of my characters to impose elements of religious thinking or religious narrative on their experiences. In other words, I used to take religion and build stories out of it, but lately I’ve been building stories and then applying religion to them.

So would you say that this has had a greater effect on your process or on the stories themselves?

I would say that it’s had an effect on the kind of stories I conceive of writing in the first place—which is to say, I guess, on the stories themselves.

When I told my students at Missouri State that I was doing this interview with you, I offered them the chance to submit questions to be included. I’ll end with two of them:

1) Do you ever find that you dislike a story you’re working on but keep working on it because you feel committed to it?

I do. I feel the same obligation to stories that I do to sentences: I have to finish each one before I can comfortably move on to the next. This isn’t necessarily a wise practice, and it might even be a ludicrous one, but I haven’t been able to shake it.

2) Do you watch television, and if so, what are your favorite shows?

I’ve only ever had broadcast reception, and a couple of years ago, after the digital transition, the TV I own ceased collecting a signal, but I’m gradually exploring some of the more interesting currents and byways of the last few years, series by series, on DVD. I doubt I can offer too many surprises here, but my favorite shows—the ones I love without qualification—are Freaks and Geeks, The Wire, Once and Again, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Right now some friends and I are watching Battlestar Galactica at the rate of an episode a week, and I’m also watching half an episode of The Sopranos a day while I exercise. The first show I remember truly investing with the whole of my imagination, though, was the Adam West version of Batman, and particularly Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl, a character with whom I was madly in love from the age of four to the age of seven.

Further Links and Resources: