Image courtesy author's website

For Donald Lystra, the nineteen-fifties wasn’t all Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Instead, it was an era of bubbling change, depicted poignantly in his novel, Season of Water and Ice, through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy named Danny. The year is 1957. Danny’s father has given up a good job with General Motors to become a salesman and moved his family from Grand Rapids to a cabin by a lake in northern Michigan. Danny’s mother, accustomed to a more comfortable lifestyle, has returned to her parents’ home in the suburbs of Chicago because, she tells Danny, “The country’s a wonderful place for men and boys but it’s not a place for a woman.” Danny strikes up a friendship with his seventeen-year-old neighbor Amber, who is pregnant, unmarried, and facing difficult choices. As Danny tries to understand the relationship between his parents and attempts to intervene in Amber’s relationship with her abusive boyfriend, he learns how different love can be from the what standard fifties images have lead him to expect.

Like his protagonist, Donald Lystra grew up in Michigan in the fifties, and he rejects oversimplified portrayals of a decade he experienced as rich in complication. Season of Water and Ice, Lystra’s first novel, offers a wonderfully character-driven corrective. The book won a 2009 Midwest Book Award for fiction and was named a Michigan Notable Book by the Library of Michigan in 2010. While writing it, Lystra received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. His short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Other Voices, The North American Review, Passages North, and The Greensboro Review. A story called “Family Way,” which eventually grew into Season of Water and Ice, appeared in Cimarron Review in 2006, and an excerpt from the novel appeared in Natural Bridge in 2009.

This interview was conducted in August, 2010.

Danielle Lavaque-Manty: You had a career as an engineer before you started writing. Had you always wanted to write?

Donald Lystra: Yes, I did. Or at least for a long, long time I did. As you say, I became an engineer in my workaday life, and I enjoyed it. I had some successful projects over my career. But I always had the idea—like many other people—that some time I would like to try my hand at writing. And I carried that idea around in the back of my mind for a long, long time.

Then, about the mid-nineties, there were some things that opened up some time for me. My kids were off to college right about then for one thing, so I had fewer family demands. I started scribbling, and just doing things on my own. I would give myself an assignment to describe something, trying to find the best words to do it, and then I would look at it the next day and critique it. Or I would try to write a vivid sentence, and then I would look at it a day or two later and compare it to sentences that I saw in books by authors I really admired, trying to find out why mine wasn’t as good as theirs. I did that for two or three years, that sort of self-education. And I wrote some stories that I sort of liked. But I didn’t think they were perfect by any means.

Then, in 1997, I saw a flyer on [The University of Michigan] campus by someone who was conducting a writing workshop—not under the auspices of the university, but as a separate thing he was doing on his own.

Who was that writer?

His name was Josh Henkin. He’d graduated from the Michigan MFA program, and he’s since published two novels [Swimming Across the Hudson (1997) and Matrimony (2007)]. A wonderful writing teacher, just a brilliant writing teacher in terms of the insights he was able to give me about what a story is, and how to control a story to create an effect of some kind.

The other good thing about that was it brought me in contact with other people who were aspiring writers, some of them very good. So I began to have a network of people. In fact, after Josh finally left town—I took two or three workshops from him over a period of a year and a half—a group of his students got together and had our own irregular workshop every week or two. Three of the five have gone on to publish books, and two of them have gone on to their own academic careers in writing: Valerie Laken is in Milwaukee, [teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee], and the other one, Nick Arvin, is out in Denver, [teaching at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop]. They were all much younger than me. That was part of the fun of it too, frankly—to get together with people who are much, much younger than you, and to have them take what you’re doing seriously, to sort of span years that way.

Are you still in touch with any of them?

They’re not in Ann Arbor anymore, but we email and we go to each other for advice. It’s very hard to write in a totally solitary way, I found out. When I started out I was thinking, “Well, it’s a solitary pursuit, and you ought to be able to figure it out all on your own.” That’s somewhat true, but it’s certainly not entirely true. You need to have a certain amount of instruction, and getting feedback from other people is an immense help. So it went from being a solitary pursuit to a slightly more social activity.

The book itself started with a short story.

It did. As I said, I’d written a bunch of short stories, and some of them had been published. Then I got to where I thought, “Well, okay, I want to try a longer project.” I tried to think of what that would be, what would be a big enough subject or theme to warrant two or three hundred pages of treatment. I worked on a project for several months, and it wasn’t going very well and I got frustrated and I said, “Let’s go back to the basics here. Let me go back and look at the short stories I’ve written and see if in one of them maybe there’s a germ of an idea that can be expanded.”

I found one short story in particular that I thought might work. It was a story I had published in the Cimarron Review. I liked the characters I had created, and I liked the situation that I had created. The other thing about it, when I looked at it again—it was a short story that ended with a lot of loose ends still unresolved. There was one thread that ran through it and came to a conclusion, you might say, to make it a short story, but there were a lot of other issues that were not concluded. I thought, “Let’s see what would happen if I tried to move these characters forward through time.”

I already had fifteen pages of text, which was very encouraging—to have a running start that way. And I already had a pretty good grasp of who the characters were, and the setting, and the situation. The first draft went pretty fast. It was a rough first draft, but I think I finished it in only about three months. Then I went back and I spent another four months revising it before I got it to the point where I wanted to show it to anybody—to an agent who would want to represent it.

That is fast.

I keep trying to find that groove again. I think part of the problem of knowing more about writing—maybe even part of the problem of having published a book—is that you always know too much, and you are too quick to critique what you do when you sit down to write, and that inhibits the process. I want to go back to that innocent state that I had when I started that last project, when I had no particular expectations, just doing it more or less for the fun of it. I think that’s the best frame of mind to do it in.

Place is really important in this novel—the northern Michigan setting—and one thing I was wondering about is the move from the city to the really small town. How important do you think the past in the big city is to the rest of the novel? It opens after they’ve moved, but we do hear about the move.

When I was growing up, my family moved several times. We moved to different sorts of places—cites, suburbs, the country, small towns. I wanted the story to unfold in a relatively isolated place, creating that kind of crucible where things were going to happen removed from society or many other people. The idea of a family moving was an easy way to implement that. The young boy, the narrator, is new to the area, so he’s socially isolated. He hasn’t been there long enough to make friends. He’s physically isolated, too, because of the decision his father made of locating them out in the country on the shore of a lake, which he thought would be a good place to be, but turns out not to be so great, at least after the seasons begin to turn.

One thing that really struck me when I was reading your book—and this might be more about my own preoccupations than your intentions—was the gender constraints that the characters operate under. So I was wondering if you were thinking about that as you were writing. Not in the sense that you meant it as a social critique, but were you thinking about gender issues consciously?

I was, yes, I was. Particularly for the women characters in the book. And I’ve thought of this too with respect to my own family and my own mother. My mother was a typical post-war housewife. She didn’t have any kind of a career at any point in her life. She raised a family of four children. But as I grew up and began to understand her a little bit as a person, other than just as my mother, I can see where she—well, she’s passed away now, she’s been dead for fifteen years—I could see where she was an intelligent woman who had some very definite talents. She always said that if she’d had the chance, she would have loved to have gone into architecture. She had an artistic sense combined with a practical builder’s sense, you might say, that drew her that way. And I thought about a woman like that being constrained in this very tight role that was prescribed for many women back then, and how difficult that probably was.

The male characters, too, operated within a pretty narrowly prescribed role—the sense of being the breadwinner and having to shoulder that responsibility. That comes into play a little bit in this book because the father is pretty much failing at this new career that he’s taken for himself, and he feels the weight of that pretty heavily.

I think the relationship between Danny and Amber is really interesting, too, because he’s younger, and yet sometimes there’s this burden of wanting to be the protector, which he’s not really in a position to do.

That relationship turns a lot of things on their heads, in a way. She’s older than he is, more experienced in the world, and certainly more sexually experienced. Yet he, coming from the city, knows things she doesn’t know and sees into certain situations more deeply than she does. Maybe that’s why I liked that relationship; it did confound a lot of the stereotypes about boy meets girl. And because it was different, you couldn’t assume anything—you had to work through the issues one by one, based on this rather unusual situation.

And you’re right, as a boy he does feel this sense of responsibility. It goes towards Amber, and even towards his father. There are a couple of instances where his father shows weakness, so to speak, and Danny feels a sense of responsibility to help him out, to give him a little support, even if it’s just for a moment. So he’s being indoctrinated, you might say, into this sense of responsibility that boys were expected to assume when they grew up and became men. I think that is the reason that a lot of that is in there, that he’s aware of this burden that’s waiting out there for him to assume, and he’s not altogether comfortable about taking it on.

Before the book had found a home—when you had an agent but not yet a publisher—you were encouraged to revise the book to make it a young adult novel, which you resisted. I’m wondering how you thought about your audience when you were writing Season of Water and Ice.

When I was writing, I didn’t really think of an audience. But I guess I thought I was writing for an adult audience. I might not even have known there was such a thing as a young adult category of fiction, at that time. But when I found an agent, he was curious about considering it as a young adult novel because, I’ve since learned, this is a category of fiction that’s quite active and quite profitable.

So in the first round of submissions he sent it out to six editors who were adult fiction editors and six who were young adult editors. None of the six adult editors were willing to take it. They liked the book, many of them, and some of them seemed to like it quite a lot, but it just didn’t fit into their lineup of books or something. But a couple of the young adult editors indicated that they would take it if it was revised and made more clearly a young adult book, which would have required, oh, simplifying some of the language, and trying to make it more of an in-the-moment narrative style. The way I had written it the first time, there was quite a lot of reflection and thoughtfulness on the part of the character. Maybe to a fault. That can be tedious to a reader even in an adult book, but I guess it’s not appropriate for a young adult book, at least not to the degree that I was doing it. So they wanted that taken out, or greatly simplified.

And I tried to do it. I remember spending a good month because I wanted to sell the book. I was a little disappointed that my agent now was talking more about trying to sell it as a young adult book, but I figured, well, that’s all right, I’ll write other books. So I spent a month trying to make the changes, and at some point I just didn’t like the changes I was making, or the way it was turning out. I remember writing my agent an email and probably spending two or three days composing it, because I thought it was probably going to be the end of our relationship. I basically told him that I’d thought about it and I’d concluded that I didn’t want to do it. I gave him the reasons why, and tried to make as good a case as I could. Somewhat to my surprise, he said, “Well, that’s all right. We’ll go ahead and see if we can sell it as an adult work.” We made some changes to it still before we sent it out the second time, but they weren’t for the purpose of turning it into a young adult book.

I’m glad you didn’t lose the richness of Danny’s thoughts. I think that’s one of the real strengths of the book.

I’m glad, too. I was at the McDowell Colony a year and a half ago or so, and one of the other colonists there was a fellow in his thirties or forties, who I think graduated from the MFA program at Iowa. He’d written a novel and had gone through the same experience I had, where the agent, when he looked at it, thought it should be a young adult novel. And he actually did go through and make the changes, and they sold the book as a young adult novel. After he told me the story, I said, “Well, how did you feel about that?” And he looked at me and said, “I felt terrible.” Which is a heartbreaking thing to hear. This person has gone on to publish another book that has had quite a bit of critical success, so his career wasn’t over, and it wasn’t a blow that he wasn’t able to recover from, but that particular experience left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Am I remembering right that when Switchgrass took it, yours was one of the first works of fiction they’d published?

Yes.  Northern Illinois University Press, which is the main press, is a scholarly publisher. They got a new director two or three years ago who had the idea of starting a fiction imprint and having it focus on Midwest themes and writers. The first two books they published in 2009 under the Switchgrass imprint were mine and another novel called Beautiful Piece.

What has it been like working with Switchgrass?

The editorial process was good, in the sense that they gave a lot of suggestions but let me have the final word in each and every case. And some of the things we had fairly sharp differences about. I don’t know if a larger publisher would have done that or not. They might have insisted on calling more of the shots.

The thing about a small press, or a university press—and you know this going into it—is that they don’t have the marketing resources that the New York publishers have. And yet, you sort of wish you could be sent on a round-the-country tour, or have ads taken in different places. But I can’t really fault them. With the constraints they had, they did a good job, and the book is finding its way to an audience.

One thing that is very good about a university press, or small presses in general, I think, is that they do stick with a book. Mine has not had great sales, but it has been steady, and it has been steadily increasing. In fact, just a few days ago, I was talking to the publisher and found out that they’re going to do a second printing. I mean, we’re not talking about huge numbers here, you understand, but still, it’s a nice milestone.

What have they been able to do, publicity-wise?

They introduced the book at a bookseller’s conference, The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. They had me set up to do a signing, which was kind of ridiculous, I thought, because nobody knew me or the book at that point. But still, quite a few booksellers came by and got to know about the novel. And they sent around press releases, and a certain amount of publicity to newspapers and magazines, mostly in the Midwest. The idea was that it would get a foothold in the Midwest and maybe spread farther, but the first emphasis was in the Midwest.

And I threw myself into the marketing to some extent. I found out that that’s not uncommon even for authors who are published by New York houses. The expectation now is that authors will do things to promote their books with their own time and their own resources. Which is kind of crazy, I think, because their time ought to be better spent writing another book. But that’s starting to be the norm. You know, they want an author to have a web site, and if they can have a blog that’s even better. I don’t have a blog. I drew the line there. But I did put together a web site last summer.

Probably the best thing we did, though—and this was a joint decision—is that we submitted the book for award competitions. One was in the state of Michigan, what they call the Michigan Notable Books program, something the Library of Michigan has been doing for twenty or twenty-five years. They designate twenty books as being “notable books” from the standpoint of Michigan and Michigan history. Season of Water and Ice was selected, which was a nice accolade. A few months later we submitted for another program, which was the Midwest Book Awards, a program run by an organization of independent publishers in the Midwest. Season of Water and Ice was selected as the winner in the general fiction category, which was another nice round of publicity and attention.

What has the experience of having the book come out been like? You said it hasn’t been exactly energizing for your current work.

It’s the accomplishment of a long-term goal, and all the satisfaction that comes out of that. It is different in some ways than you expect. And I’ve talked to other writers, other first-time authors, and there’s a degree of anxiety you experience, particularly in the early days, because all of a sudden this thing that has been so private is out there in the big wide world, and anybody who wants to can pick it up and read it. Or, if they don’t want to, they don’t have to pick it up and read it. And if they do read it they’re free to like it or not like it, or think it’s stupid, or find some glaring error that you’ve overlooked. That was the initial fear, in spite of the fact that I’ve been very careful in writing it myself, and have gotten feedback from other writers, as well as the editor who I worked with. Yet I had this gnawing fear that took a while to go away that there was just something terribly wrong with it that had not yet been discovered. It’s crazy, it’s kind of irrational, I guess, because the book had been carefully handled by me and by other readers and by the publisher. But that went away after a month or two, that anxiety.

I think the reason I haven’t been productive with new writing is because of what we were talking about a few minutes ago. I did get caught up in the marketing of it. It’s surprising. It didn’t seem like it was a great effort, but it did seem like every day there were a few emails I had to send out or answer, or I was coordinating going to some event maybe, or maybe just thinking about what I could do to help my book along, what I could do that I hadn’t thought of yet. And all of that ate into my day, and maybe ate into my energy, to the point where I didn’t really have a lot left over to work on new writing.

So you’ve been going to all these readings and having all these people ask you so many questions. Is there a question you wish they would ask you that they haven’t yet?

I don’t know that there is. People ask you all sorts of things: How you work, what time of day you write, whether you use a notepad or a computer, where your ideas come from. At Nicola’s Books, the owner told me ahead of time that there are two things people always want to know about a writer. One is, “Where did you get the idea for this book?” And the other is, “How do you write?” Which are kind of the two extremes. A lot of people want to know whether it’s an autobiographical novel, and it’s not. But there are parts of it that I’ve drawn from things that I know, obviously. I had the experience when I was growing up of living in a lakeside cottage during the fall and winter. I remember that it turns into a fairly forbidding place as the season turns and all the cottagers go home for their winter months. Most of those places are summer-only communities. So that idea probably came out of that experience I had when I was young.

I don’t know. No one has ever asked me, I guess, “What did you think you were going to accomplish?” Or, “What do you want to have accomplished with this book?” And I’m not sure I can answer that. I mean, in the larger sense, why write a book, why put it out there, what do you think is going to happen as a result of it? You hope that people who connect with it will take away some insights they might not otherwise have had. Does an author want them to be better people after they’ve read his or her book? I guess maybe one thing I did hope—this is more mundane than that, and I’ve said this several times already whether I’ve been asked it or not—I did think that the period of the nineteen-fifties has kind of been relegated to a notch, a little place in history, and as someone who lived through it, I saw it as a more interesting period of time. It led to all the things that came ten years later—the big societal changes that broke things apart in the late sixties. The origins of all the things that were going to happen later were starting in the fifties. The conflicts, and the confusions, and the cross currents that people were caught in and trying to work their way through, I think, started in the fifties and people started to try to deal with them then. So I guess one thing—though maybe I thought this afterwards—I was hoping that people would think it was a more interesting time than what you see on Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. That there were families that were caught in difficult situations that they didn’t quite know how to deal with and feeling pressures that were new to them.

I suppose everybody hopes they grew up in a time that was interesting, or significant, but whenever I hear somebody refer to the fifties disdainfully, it makes me react, because I was there and I thought it was more complicated than that.

Is there anything else you want to say?

Gosh, I don’t know. We covered the ground pretty well. You know, one thing we talked about early on—and it’s true—is that transition I made from being a solitary writer to being a more sociable writer, which was an important step. It’s hard to say how much I appreciate that and do it justice—the little things you get, and big things, insights into what you’ve done. I have a sense of gratitude to all the people I’ve worked with.

• Visit Don’s website for more on his work
• Learn more about Switchgrass Books
• Read Lydia Fitzpatrick and Kate Levin’s FWR interview with Donald Ray Pollock, another author who began writing later in life, as a second career
• Read Valerie Laken’s essay, “The Magical, Dreadful First Hundred Pages,” right here on FWR

And speaking of that laptop—I spent a lot of time on it during this funk. It’s amazing how much web-surfing can look and even feel like writing—fingers on the keyboard! typing!—if one’s denial is deep enough. It was during one of these Internet binges that I made my way to the book section of the New York Times, where a debut novelist named Deanna Fei was being reviewed. Her name rang a bell. I typed it into Facebook, only to discover that we had a couple of friends in common—we’d gone to the same college, graduating a few years apart. I checked out Deanna’s author page, which led me to her blog. The first entry I read revisited some quotes on writing—from Sylvia Plath, D.H. Lawrence, and others—that Deanna had compiled in college, when her dream was to “be a writer.” She reflected:

Some of these statements don’t seem quite as profound to me now as they might have back then, and if I redid this exercise today, I’d probably revise the list substantially. But every one of them still speaks to me, very clearly, in at least one way: They’re about writing. Not about “being a writer,” but about writing. And—it’s not always easy to remember—writing is what it’s all about. Nothing else.

I’d been told this before, but I needed to hear it again just then. It helped. I went out and bought Deanna’s novel, A Thread of Sky, and was reminded further of all the wonderful things you can do with words if you let yourself get them down on paper, and give yourself time to rework them and test them against your meaning. There is a moment in A Thread of Sky—the story of six women, family members, who take a package tour of China—in which one of the characters finally confronts her grief over her dead husband, by way of a very mundane act. I’ll resist saying anything more about it; I don’t want to rob other readers of the experience of having their breath taken away by the deep sadness and utter simplicity of the moment. The same passage that knocked the wind out of me also knocked some sense into me. This is what writing is about, I remember thinking: illuminating emotional truths, exploring interesting questions about people and the world—above all, forging a connection with your reader. This is the work that makes those anxieties about “being a writer,” however inevitable, seem beside the point. Nobody ever moved anybody by being a writer. Only by putting words on the page that ring true.

Originally from Queens, New York, Deanna attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and received a Fulbright grant to research A Thread of Sky in China. In the Huffington Post, The Millions, and other venues, she’s written with insight and humor on the writing life, literature, identity, family, and reality TV. She shared her thoughts with me on these and other subjects over email in February.

INTERVIEW

Kate Levin: This may be a strange place to begin, but I was overjoyed to learn recently that you sometimes dive into celebrity gossip sites while warming up to write. As someone with a bad UsWeekly.com habit (the need to know what Lindsay Lohan’s up to always seems to strike just as I’m sitting down to work), I wanted to ask if you’d share some of your favorite pre-writing gossip sites?

Deanna Fei: I don’t think any of these sites need my endorsement, but my usual stops are HuffPost, TMZ, and E!. I like a mix of narrative, eye candy, and plain tawdriness.

You noted in an earlier interview that celebrity gossip sites are rich in stories. You make a similar observation in a piece for the Huffington Post, “Why Every Writer Should Watch Jersey Shore.” Thanks to blogs and Facebook and the million reality shows on TV, it seems like a story-hungry mind has more windows than ever into the lives of other people. It seems, too, that all of these narratives, all this information, could really impinge on the mental quiet needed to write. How do you cultivate the concentration it takes to work on a novel?

It’s true that I honestly believe my gossip habit serves as a little warm-up for writing, a way to step out of my own life and into the lives of others. But you’re right: writing doesn’t happen without that final phase, the whiting-out of everything but the one story before you. And sometimes that takes a lot of tricks. I have two laptops—one that’s so old that it crashes if I do more than word processing and maybe looking up a few references on Wikipedia, and one that I use for everything else. When it’s time to write, I put my other laptop in another room and close the door. I turn my phone to silent mode and put on noise-canceling headphones. And I don’t let anyone interrupt me. Maybe it seems self-indulgent, but writing is creating a whole universe for your characters and your readers, and you have to protect the process.

The idea for A Thread of Sky grew out of a package tour of mainland China that you took with your own sisters, mom, aunt, and grandmother. In your acknowledgments, you write: “…while this book was, in part, inspired by them, it is not about them; it does not depict their histories or their personalities. I offer them my apologies for potential misunderstandings, and my lifelong admiration.” Did it complicate things that the story was rooted in a recognizably real family experience? Or did it feel like the work of creating any fictional characters?

Fei reads at B&N in Park Slope, April 2010 / credit: from author's website

There was a part of me that deeply regretted the fact that my story had a recognizably autobiographical basis, because I couldn’t help worrying about the assumptions readers might make about my family and the ways that my family might feel exposed. In terms of my writing process, the main complication was always making sure that nothing remained in the novel simply because it had happened in real life—one of the worst justifications to write anything.

But in general, I think that whatever the inspiration for fictional characters, the challenge of making them spring to life is much the same. And the truth is that people will assume autobiographical elements in your writing no matter what, especially with a first novel. You can’t let that stop you. You simply have to write what moves you.

You went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and worked on A Thread of Sky while you were there. I imagine it’s very different to put up portions of an embryonic novel for critique than complete short story drafts. What was it like trying to draft a novel while simultaneously receiving feedback from other writers?

For me, one of the hardest parts of writing my first novel was getting up the nerve to start. So that novel workshop was most crucial in making the stakes seem manageable. I could tell myself I was simply drafting sixty pages so that I could get into this class with Elizabeth McCracken, as opposed to starting my first novel.

In terms of the actual workshops, it’s true that my novel was too embryonic back then for the feedback to be very useful in itself, especially when we were so accustomed to thinking of plot and structure and language on the granular scale of the short story. But the encouragement and sense of fellowship were invaluable. So was simply witnessing how the process was terrifying and bewildering for everyone, whether it was their first novel or their third.

Since I left the workshop, I’ve mostly reverted to working in isolation for long periods of time, and recognizing when I need to turn to my trusted readers and editors. But those two years at Iowa were such an intense, immersive experience that hardly a day goes by when I don’t hear some of those voices: Frank Conroy’s exhortations to inspect every sentence for “meaning, sense, and clarity”; Ethan Canin’s edict that you write to explore, not explain; Elizabeth McCracken’s passion for research; and on and on.

This is from your thoughtful and funny essay in The Millions, “A Different Species: A Chinese American Writer in China,” about moving to China on a Fulbright to work on your novel:

One of the things I found so interesting about your essay is that I tend to think of research-for-writing as a way to feel at home in a subject or setting, to “get it”—but it seems like the alienation that you felt in China was really productive for your work. I was wondering if you could talk about that a bit.

The Great Wall / credit: from the author's website

You raise a really interesting question. To me, it’s both: you need to feel at home with your subject, but you also want to let it retain a sense of mystery, a smidgen of unknowability. I think it’s crucial to immerse yourself in the world of your characters through research, imagination, and/or literally moving to the place where their story takes place, as I did. But a writer is most crucially an observer, someone who stands just a little bit apart. You never want to feel too comfortable; you need a little distance to see clearly.

More broadly, the feeling that you have to “get it” completely can be deadening in fiction—and, I think, can even verge on hubris. In the same way that a traveler eventually has to look past that urge to fully digest a foreign country, a writer has to embrace the fact that your subject will always remain just slightly beyond your grasp, in the same way that your characters will never behave exactly how you anticipated and your novel will never be exactly what you set out to write. To me, that’s proof that you’re really writing, when the story is a living thing.

Now, to dig into the novel itself: the point of view rotates by chapter among the six women in the book—three sisters, born and raised in NYC; their mother and aunt, who emigrated from Taiwan to the US as students; and their grandmother, a former Chinese revolutionary now living in LA. The setting shifts, too, as we travel along the “must-sees” offered up by the package tour. How did you know which of your characters’ eyes to lend the reader at any given spot along the tour?

It’s a funny thing: I just knew. I always had a sense of which character had the most at stake in each setting, and that dictated the choice of narrator. Sometimes it was obvious—for example, that the grandmother would narrate the historical capital of Nanjing because the city would evoke her memories of life under the Japanese occupation, as a nationalist activist, as a permanent exile. And sometimes it was more abstract—for instance, that the romantic gardens of Suzhou would force Nora to face the fact of her heartbreak. But there always seemed to be an organic and fundamental relationship between the point of view and the setting.

Suzhou Lingering Garden

All of your characters are given equal voice in the novel, but Irene is the only one who has to play the role of both mother and daughter on the tour, and the story begins and ends with her. Do you see her as the heart of the book?

Yes, though I didn’t fully realize that until I was well into the revision. My original intention was to give equal weight to all six women, but I came to see that Irene’s emotional journey was, in many ways, the heart of all of their journeys. She is the center of this family, in bridging the generations between her mother and her daughters and in providing the impetus for this reunion. While the other characters are, each for her own reasons, deeply ambivalent about embarking on this tour, Irene desperately wants to reconnect with her family and her ancestral home. Her hopes, her sense of deep disillusionment, and her eventual coming to terms helped form the overall arc of the novel.

These six women are all faced with very different (often secret) dilemmas, which is part of what gives this tour its crackle of tension. One thing they all seem to be wrestling with, though, is the complicated and ever-changing nature of home—whether it’s an ancestral home, a physical home, or even a person’s own body. Did “home” become a concern for all of your characters because it was a larger concern of the novel, or did it work the opposite way?

The latter—it was a theme that emerged from the characters, which is how I think themes should almost always originate. Otherwise you run the risk of stilting your story for the sake of an idea. It’s funny: the one line that seems to most explicitly contain the heart of the novel—”Jia—family, house, home. In Chinese, it was all one word”—is one that I wrote on my final pass-through of the manuscript.

Your younger characters, Nora, Kay, and Sophie, are especially aware of other people’s ideas of who they’re supposed to be as Asian American women. Their range of responses to stereotyping—variously ignoring it, making fun of it, confronting it through political activism, defining themselves against it, telling someone to fuck off, not telling someone to fuck off—seems to echo a theme of A Thread of Sky about resisting oversimplification and generalization in favor of complexity, multiple ways of being. I was also thinking about this in light of “I Called Amy Tan A Dirty Word—And Then She Friended Me,” your piece about coming up against other people’ assumptions about what your book is. Could you say a little about the struggle for your book to have its own identity, to be read on its own terms?

Amy Tan, photo by David Sifry

There were times I struggled with how my novel seemed to be instantly categorized in ways that didn’t ring true to me. Of course, that’s just part of how books get packaged and digested—you know, “If you liked this, try that!”—and there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. But for writers of color, it can be particularly disheartening for the work to be categorized sociologically, which takes something away from our individuality and our art. In my case, I got a lot of Amy Tan comparisons, some of which were complimentary and some of which were dismissive. And in terms of the novel being set in China, there were times that I felt like I’d wandered into a preexisting shouting match between “pro-China” and “anti-China” camps. But there’s only so much that a writer can control. I find that anytime I hear from people who’ve actually read the novel, they always seem to have a highly individual sense of my story and my characters on their own terms, and that’s more important to me than anything else.

Now, to shift topics just a bit—to sex scenes. There are a couple of them in the novel, but I’m thinking mostly of the very climactic (sorry) scene in which one of your characters loses her virginity. Do you have any advice for those of us who have trouble writing sex scenes?

Ah, I love that you ask! I think sex scenes are some of the hardest to write—and they can also be the most essential. They should never be obligatory or gratuitous, of course—but too often, writers just let the moment pass in a line break. That seems like such a wasted opportunity to me. A good sex scene is a good action scene, a high point of tension and conflict, a moment when your characters are (in more ways than one) laid bare. As the writer, just try not to lose your nerve. It’s your duty to see your characters through the moment.

In addition to writing, you teach. What drew you to teaching—and specifically, to the kind of work that you do, teaching in public schools in NYC?

Public education has always been my passion, along with writing. I can’t help wondering why more of us writers—along with journalists, musicians, dancers, artists—don’t seem to connect the problems in our schools with the problem we’re always lamenting: the shrinking audience for our art. When we continue to fail so many of our students, where can we expect the next generation of audiences to come from?

On a more personal level, I find teaching nourishes me as a person and as a writer. I rely on my students to challenge my thinking, and very often, I’m inspired by their toughness and their wisdom. I find schools, and adolescent groups in particular, to be such fascinating microcosms of society. Writing requires a lot of isolation and contemplation, and teaching gets me away from my computer and out of my head; it keeps me from slipping into solipsism. You have to write what moves you, but you also have to write stories that matter.

You do other community-oriented, NYC-focused work in the form of your writing for Open City. Could you tell us about that project?

Open City is an interdisciplinary neighborhood blog and community project coordinated by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. I’m one of five writers documenting the rapidly changing neighborhoods of Manhattan’s Chinatown, Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, and Flushing, Queens, through essays, photos, interviews, oral histories, poetry, and anything else that inspires us. I was born and raised in Flushing, where my parents still live, and it’s been fascinating to revisit the neighborhood through this new lens.

Click here to learn more about AAWW and the 2011 Asian American Short Story Contest

As we wrap up, is there anything you know now about novel-writing that you wish you’d known when you were working on A Thread of Sky?

There are so many things I wish I’d known. When I was writing my early drafts of A Thread of Sky, I spent way too much time polishing pages and pages that will never see the light of day. I like to think that it was all part of the process, but part of me knows that a lot of it was a waste of time. More importantly, it led me to get too attached to various lines and scenes; it distracted me from the bigger picture. Writing a novel requires momentum. Especially when you’re transitioning from writing short stories, you might feel like you’re sacrificing beauty and precision—but you have to trust that can come later. Also, the force of a novel depends on huge stakes, overarching questions, a sense of expansion—and I think that, in this way, the craft is more akin to film than short stories. I’ve actually gained some of my most treasured lessons about plot and structure from books on screenwriting.

Finally, I know that you’re a fan of Jersey Shore. Any thoughts about Snooki’s forthcoming novel? Should writers of Serious Literary Fiction roll their eyes and grumble about her giant advance, or is it better to take a more generous, big-tent philosophy?

I have to confess, I didn’t know anything about Snooki’s book deal until now. In my world, writing is art, but books are commodities, and these realities have to coexist. None of us can help grumbling every now and then, but the only thing we can control is our own work. And maybe Snooki’s earnings will enable her publisher to discover an unknown writer or two.

Or maybe Snooki has a great story to tell. You never know.

Further Links and Resources

The hardcover edition

photo credit: Philip Chaon

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

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

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katherine Mansfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading and Links

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

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

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

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

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

Granta 109: Work

Every six to eight weeks Granta highlights new fiction by an emerging writer exclusively on their website. The New Voices Project has featured work by such writers as Jessica Soffer, Laura Fellowes, Soumya Bhattacharya, Hannah Gersen, Erin McMillan, Evan James Roskos, Lana Asfour, Evie Wyld, and P.D. Mallamo. In addition to original work, each feature also includes an interview with the author. For details of how to submit your story, please see Granta’s submissions guidelines.

The most recent writer to be featured as part of this project is Kenyan author Billy Kahora. Below is the opening to his story “The Gorilla’s Apprentice.”

That last Sunday of 2007, just a few days before Jimmy Gikonyo’s eighteenth birthday – when he would become ineligible to use his Nairobi Orphanage family pass – he went to see his old friend, Sebastian the gorilla. Jimmy sat silently on the bench next to the primate’s pit waiting for Sebastian to recognize him. After a few minutes, Sebastian turned his gaze on Jimmy and walked towards the fence. The gorilla’s eyes were rheumy, his movements slow and careful. Their interaction was now defined by that strange sense of inevitable nostalgia that death brings, even when the present has not yet slipped into the past.

from the Granta website

Jimmy removed the tattered pass from his pocket and read the fine print on the back: This lifetime family pass is only for couples and children under eighteen years of age.

There was a sign on the side of Sebastian’s cage: ‘Oldest Gorilla in the World. Captured and Saved from the Near Extinction of His Species After the Genocide in Rwanda. Sebastian, 56. Genus: Gorilla.’

The Sunday Standard beside him said: Nairobi, Kisumu, Kakamega and Coast Province in Post-Election Violence After Presidential Results Announced.

That Sunday morning was strangely cold for late December. When Jimmy looked around, every one of the animals seemed to agree, each exhibiting a unique brand of irritation. 11 a.m. was the best time to visit the orphanage. The church-going crowd that came in droves in the afternoon was still worshipping, so the place was empty.

He had come here first as a toddler. They acquired their family pass in the days when his father was a trustee of the Friends of Nairobi National Park but his father soon found the trips boring, and for some years, Jimmy had come here alone with his mother.

When Jimmy was twelve his father left them, and Jimmy began to come on his own, except for the year he had been in and out of hospital. That year, he borrowed a book called Gorilla Adventure by Willard Price from a school friend. He had read it from cover to cover, in the night, using a torch under the blanket and eventually falling asleep. He woke up to find the book tangled and ruined in urine-stained sheets. He had received a beating from the owner that had only increased his love for the mountain gorilla. For the rest of his primary school years he would take the lonely side in arguments about whether a gorilla could rumble a tiger, or whether a polar bear could kill a mountain gorilla.

To read the rest of Billy Kahora’s story, or to submit to Granta’s New Voices Series, please visit Granta.com.

So you didn’t win the auction for Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter. (Ahem–if you did, we know a great literary site that you could support as well!)

For everyone else without a spare $254,500, we offer this interview with McCarthy in theWall Street Journal, available online for free. In the wide-ranging conversation, McCarthy discusses the film adaptation of his novel The Road, how his relationship with his 11-year-old son influences his work, the violence in his work, and much more:

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different. [...]

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

not only akin to that of all good literary magazines–to showcase some of the most vibrant writers working today–but also to help provide these writers with a vehicle to market their books. This is why we provide links to authors’ websites and sales pages: to help directly connect the writers we love with their audience–TNB’s large, loyal and growing readership.

But don’t worry; you will not be bombarded with sales pitches. There’s plenty of good old-fashioned content here. TNB, as it refers to itself, offers short stories from recent collections (like “Where We Must Be,” from Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us) as well as new stories from emerging writers. For those who prefer the longer form, there are novel excerpts (such as the prologue to Greg Olear’s Totally Killer), and weekly installments of a novel by J. E. Fishman, Cadaver Blues.

In addition to fiction, the site has interviews, essays, opinion pieces, and appreciations on everything from Infinite Summer to the family fridge. Lest “appreciations” seem too positive, there are also plenty of rants. Several columns address writerly concerns: for example, LitPark runs interviews with writers, agents, publicists, and the like, and will feature a “Question of the Month (involving everything from obsessions to rejection letters)” for reader discussion, while Three Guys One Book provides “short reviews of stories and novels, publishing news, photography, and the popular 3G1B group discussion.” Podcasts feature readings and author interviews.

But TNB’s most original offering is author “self-interviews,” in which writers, well, write both questions and answers. So far, there are only three, but I’m excited to read more of this unusual format.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, may I suggest the section of writing on writing, and the essay “It’s Kind of Like Creative Herpes”?

This blog is going to be a hodge-podge of book news, recommendations, links, reviewlets, and discussions. I make no promises about being fair, balanced, consistent, or completist, but I hope to keep things interesting. Here’s to the lovely and fearless Marissa, who made this site possible, and to all FWR contributors for suspending their disbelief.