Earlier this week, I mentioned Heidi Julavits’ novel The Effect of Living Backwards, and how she thanks Track 4 of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in the acknowledgements. She suggests she listened to it over and over while writing the novel—but knowing this, would be interested to read the novel while listening to that track, wouldn’t it?

The concept of a soundtrack to a book isn’t exactly new. For some time, the fabulous book and music blog Largehearted Boy has asked writers to make playlists for their books, and the resulting lists include the author’s notes on how the song relates to the text. Recently, a new company, Booktrack, is creating “synchronized soundtracks for e-books that automatically matches music, sound effects and ambient sound to your reading speed to create an immersive reading experience.”

Booktrack has released several works with soundtracks, including a Salman Rushdie short story with a custom-composed soundtrack performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. In an interview with Morning Media Menu, the founder of Booktrack explains:

We are releasing ‘In the South,’ a beautiful story [Rushdie] wrote about two friends and the tsunami that hit India. For that we had composer John Psathas, an award winning musician and huge fan of Rushdie. So he jumped at the chance to actually read ‘In the South’ and interpret it–as well as compose a score for it. [...] The same way as a movie composer would score for a beautiful film, he composed an entire score for the short story. He was really looking at the sounds of India, especially Hindu music and what you would hear in that particular part of India where the tsunami hit. And he submitted it to Salman to get his approval and then we submitted it to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra to play it live.

As ereaders become increasingly common, soundtracked books and stories might become the norm. Tell us: would you prefer a soundtracked story, or a silent one?

Their escapades start off as relatively good clean fun: late nights, bars, bourbon, drugs, pickup trucks, guns, and lots of music. But things change once JAG is introduced to fallenangels—an online network for singles with extreme desires. What starts off as a tongue-in-cheek diversion quickly blossoms into full-blown obsession, and then a kind of spiritual mission. Operating under a series of screen names, JAG becomes convinced that he can offer some brand of sexual redemption to the women of fallenangels.

Soon, JAG has a hard time keeping track of all his online “friends.” The site crashes; he jeopardizes his church job in order to keep fallenangels alive. His overlapping online identities compete for control of his psyche. Cyrus and other flesh-and-blood friends disappear. The reverend turns attention toward political influence. JAG’s hopes for a life with his son look more and more unlikely. In the book’s final chapters, JAG crosses the line into violence and desperation.

This novel is exceedingly good at what it does. Few writers in García’s peerage could pull so many raunchy sex scenes so artfully. The narrator’s eclectic love of music is palpable and endearing. Much of the novel handles both sides of rural America’s cultural divide—reverend included—with balance and empathy. Cyrus—ostensibly a sidekick and minor character—is a beautifully rendered 21^st century Southerner. In fact, I’d argue that one of this novel’s greater triumphs is its refreshing vision of Dixie: finally, a piece of fiction that frees the South from those same tired, gothic tropes—what Barry Hannah called “the canned dream of the South…a lot of porches and banjos.” While it’s true that the Klan still marches through the streets in badbadbad, it must compete with a Gay Pride Parade across town.

badbadbad is not without its problems. The narrator’s brother and son are both characters whose promise doesn’t fully pay off. And though it’s well executed, there’s a lot of on-screen messaging—which, while it may be true to life, tends to grow tedious on the page. Most unfortunately, the exact nature of JAG’s mission on fallenangels is never fully fleshed out; it never seems to be about salvation so much as getting laid.

Still, this book is fast, fun, irreverent, and unlike anything else in the fiction aisle. García’s prose and imagery are well rendered and perfectly matched to his subject. Many of his scenes would turn zany and cartoonish in the hands of a lesser writer; his gift is the ability to describe excess with craft and heart. Totally fearless in its treatment of religion, race, sex, and rural America, badbadbad breathes fresh air into what sometimes feels like a stuffy literary landscape.

Extras

• Read the first three chapters of badbadbad.
• Here’s an interview with Jesús Ángel García at The Nervous Breakdown, where he was a Featured Author in July 2011.
• Below, watch FEAR, Part I of a five-part badbadbad documentary (also edited by García) featuring interviews with his readers from across the U.S. You can also listen to a six-song sampler from the badbadbad soundtrack, or check out the book’s chapter-by-chapter YouTube playlist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What advice would you give your younger self?

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

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

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

Further Links & Resources

Note

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

At first blush, few people are less like rock stars than writers. Generally speaking, we avoid the spotlight. We don’t have cool outfits, we don’t have groupies, and our tours are waaaay less flashy–and lucrative–than musicians’.

But deep down there’s some connection between writing and rock. Lots of authors have compiled playlists for their books, most noteably on David Gutowski’s Largehearted Boy’s “Book Notes” section. It sounds like a recent trend, but it’s been going on for a while, according to Salon:

Since 2005, in the site’s recurring Book Notes column, authors including Bret Easton Ellis, Sloane Crosley, Karen Russell, Aimee Bender and Meghan O’Rourke have shared soundtracks. Hundreds are archived there; since last month, they’ve been streamable on Spotify.

“Hearing about the music a writer enjoys or envisioned for his characters or book humanizes the author,” Gutowski said. “Writers have often told me that thinking about their book in relation to music recontextualizes the work for them, gives them a fresh vantage into something they wrote years ago.”

Elsewhere, writing inspired a music video when the Decembrists based the video for their song, “Calamity Song,” on David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest:

Colin Meloy of the Decembrists explains on NPR:

I wrote “Calamity Song” shortly after I’d finished reading David Foster Wallace’s epic Infinite Jest. The book didn’t so much inspire the song itself, but Wallace’s irreverent and brilliant humor definitely wound its way into the thing. And I had this funny idea that a good video for the song would be a re-creation of the Enfield Tennis Academy’s round of Eschaton — basically, a global thermonuclear crisis re-created on a tennis court — that’s played about a third of the way into the book. Thankfully, after having a good many people balk at the idea, I found a kindred spirit in Michael Schur, a man with an even greater enthusiasm for Wallace’s work than my own. With much adoration and respect to this seminal, genius book, this is what we’ve come up with. I can only hope DFW would be proud.

In fact, author Chuck Wendig suggests that if writers act more like rock stars, it just might save publishing:

You put rock stars in front of people, fucked up shit starts to happen. They show up late. They break guitars. They set stuff on fire. They huff paint and throw cymbals and bite the heads off winged creatures.

Authors — c’mon. You can do this at your author appearances. Just go nuts! Fucking freak out. Kick over a book display. Throw your boot at that old lady who shows up at all the author signings and asks inane questions. For God’s sake — tell them to put down the book, it’s time to autograph some tee-tas. After you’re done inking a bunch of boobies — or dicks, who am I to judge? — take the rest of your books near to hand, douse them in lighter fluid, scream “Fuck your mother, [insert name of publishing company here]!” and then set fire to those bad-boys just before passing out on the floor in your own vomit.

Wendig has lots more suggestions, including “Intensely Weird Drug Habits,” “Pimp-Ass Writer Cribs,” and “One Word: Hookers.” (Though one reading by author Alex Pardee got at least a little too rock-star when a fan produced a razor blade at the signing table and began to slice up his own arm.)

What say you, writers of the world? Are you ready to smash your laptop on the podium at your next reading? Come on, it could save publishing…

• Composer Eric Moe tells how David Foster Wallace’s “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” inspired a collaboration with the author and led to Tri-Stan, Moe’s a one-woman opera/situation-tragedy musical setting of the story.
• Tyler McMahon discusses his novel How The Mistakes Were Made, in which protagonist Laura Loss comes of age in the 1980s hardcore punk scene.
• Brian Bartels and author-musician Adam Rapp discuss music as character.
• On the blog, Lee Thomas muses on bands and songs inspired by literature; Glass Wave–a band composed of four literary scholars–records songs based on canonical Western literature; and much more in our archives.

"TV Show Daughters" by Suzie Silver, from Tri-Stan

Introduction

Sometimes the muse assumes the unlikeliest forms. When composer Eric Moe began searching for a lyrical inspiration for a new piece, a collection of Hideous Men might have seemed an odd place for lightning to strike. But in the chopped-up, pseudo-classical, post-modern melange of David Foster Wallace’s “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” he found both personal connection and musical possibility. The resulting piece debuted in 2005, and enjoyed a New York revival earlier this year. Here Moe describes his long, strange journey. The interlude quotations come from Wallace’s original short story.

A whole new kind of ritual narrative, neither Old Comic nor New Tragic – the sit-trag.

This spring I had the good fortune to have a New York revival of my one-woman opera/situation-tragedy Tri-Stan, a musical setting of David Foster Wallace’s story “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko.” Also this spring, I had the spectacular good fortune to be awarded a residency fellowship as a composer at the Camargo Foundation in the south of France. The excellent writers in residence at Camargo were very much interested in how a composer collaborates with a writer and deals with setting a text to music. After all, how any composer works with writers and their words is shrouded in mystery to anyone but the composers themselves. (In fact, everything a composer of contemporary art music/concert music does is a well-kept secret in America). But the writers were interested not only in this process in general, but also regarding this particular writer and this particular text. After all, DFW’s work is not exactly simple, not to mention everyone’s fascination at the idea of collaborating with a literary icon.

[Before going any further, it’s a fair question to ask what a musical setting of a literary text offers. I mean, from the composer’s point of view, why bother? Thousands of songs, operas, and whatnot, many of them well-loved and some of them masterpieces even, have texts that can only charitably be described as mediocre. And getting permission to set a published text under copyright—even if the author is enthusiastically in favor—can be excruciatingly difficult, as contemporary publishers seem incapable of drawing a distinction between an individual concert music composer and, say, Disney. For my part, if I’m going to be spending serious time scrutinizing the structure, syntax, phonemes, and, yes, even the meaning of a text, I want to work with something that’s going to be truly rewarding.]

Our discussion at Camargo continued: What’s in it for the writer? A Shakespeare sonnet, for instance, is complex enough without adding a layer of musical structure. I suggested this extra layer would be an asset in my lapidary soliciting abstract to DFW. I explained: “…musical setting can expand, even further, the range of allusions, make the C#-minor aria audible, and in general add another dimension to the (admittedly already incredibly rich) piece.” But music can also focus, heighten, and unify and thus can offer an inviting way into a text, roll out a red carpet by giving the listener a persuasive interpretation, like a masterful actor.

Plus it can sneak a firecracker of smartass irony in with a beautiful tune.

…the dark logic of a genuine entertainment-market inspiration.

I’ve heard that writers often struggle with structure. So do composers. If you want to see some serious structure-struggle, try writing a large-scale piece of music. But composers do have one advantage writers don’t: we can use their texts as a skeleton, or at least scaffolding. I did this in two earlier big vocal pieces, Sonnets to Orpheus and Siren Songs. Both of these resemble the classical song cycle, a genre invented by Beethoven, I believe. Sonnets to Orpheus was a setting of eight of Rilke’s fifty-odd sonnets in Stephen Mitchell’s translation, a selection that preserved the narrative arc of the Orpheus story. Siren Songs took an opposite tack, setting six siren-related texts from all over the geographical and temporal map: Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century translation of Homer (eighth century BCE); my own contemporary translations of Dante (early fourteenth) and Kafka (early twentieth); an explorer’s chronicle (early seventeenth century); and two freshly written works by living American poets, Janet McAdams and Paula McLain.

For the next big piece, I wanted to try something different still. Mary Nessinger, an amazing singer living in New York who could sing anything I could dream up and a lot of things I couldn’t, commissioned me to write a dramatic concert piece for her. After my previous globe-hopping and time-traveling, I was curious to see if I could write a distinctly American piece, a national epic for my generation of ironists, who want nothing more than, as DFW puts it, to “put a happy-face mask on a nation’s terrible shamefaced hunger & need.” A Ring of the Brady Bunch, a Fanfare for the Pop Ironist. Not an easy task, since our national sagas are all computer-generated-imagery fests with recycled plots and our folk music consists of TV-sitcom theme songs and advertising jingles.

…at this point Ovid the O. got the idea to turn the entire affair into this sort of ironically contemporary & self-conscious but still mythically resonant & highly lyrical entertainment-property, a ‘…high-concept miscegenation-of-Romantic-archetypes-type metamyth,’ a kind of hottub-swingers’ incest among Tristan & Narcissus & Echo & Isolde

I was looking for a text that might be suitable for a musical setting. I had already read many, many collections of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and one-act plays. But I’d been having a lot of trouble. Finding the right text is a tricky business. First, there are practical considerations. It has to be short; singing words generally takes a lot longer than speaking them, which in turn takes a lot longer than reading them. Plus it’s helpful if the words are short but with lots of long vowel sounds, and arranged in short sentences. (Long vowels allow a singer to hold a note easily without causing listeners to scratch their heads). Rhyme is also a plus, because it’s hard to understand sung speech. Everyone has their favorite mondegreens—imperfectly perceived lyrics. A classic example from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”: “Excuse me while I [pick one] (1) kiss this guy or (2) kiss the sky.” Professional lyricists specialize in making texts that retain their intelligibility when sung. I didn’t want to write a Broadway musical, though, and I wanted literary quality. I also wanted something profound and funny.

Then I began reading David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It was in the middle of a story called “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” that I slowly began to realize that this was what I had been looking for. I’m not sure exactly where or what triggered it. Was it the passage where the demiurge Erythema appears to the suffering Reggie Ecko, victim of a massive self-esteem displacement, in the mortal guise of Robert Vaughn hosting Hair Loss Update? (I reluctantly admit that I actually do remember this late-night infomercial from UHF TV). Yet there was more to it than nostalgia. For example: “… it was just one of those large-r Romantic love-at-initial-reception things, the stuff of chivalric myth, the Tristian/Lancelotian fuck-it-all plunge, the Sicilian thunderbolt, the Wagnerian Liebestod.” I was also struck by DFW’s empathy for his all-too-mortal and all-too-fallible fame-seeking or substance-abusing characters. Postmodernism with a heart.

The sense of recognition became stronger when I read some of DFW’s essays and discovered that we were about the same age, that he, too, had grown up in downstate Illinois in an academic family, and that he had played a lot of tennis on summer days hot enough to melt asphalt. We had both spent serious time at the Illinois State Fair, sampling corn dogs and viewing the world’s largest hog. Reading Infinite Jest, I discovered that we also shared an interest in addiction issues and popular culture, a fantasy of creating complexly addictive artworks, and a fascination with the troubling nature of competition and celebrity.

…myth, classic & Classical myth: rich, ambiguous, archetypal, cosmological, polyvalent, susceptible of neverending renewal, ever fresh

True, the story was on the long side. And the sentences were long and complex, containing long and complex words. (The first less-than-scrutable sentence begins with the phrase “The fuzzy Hensonian epiclete Ovid the Obtuse…” and rolls on for thirty or forty more words. “Hensonian” refers – I’m pretty sure – to Jim Henson, the muppetteer; you won’t find “epiclete” in the unabridged OED). Words like “thanataphiliacal” and “mithradititic” pose challenges for musical text setting. So much for the practical side of things. I would just have to find some extraordinary solutions.  Making art is a lot more exciting when big risks are being taken.

But I was most excited by the subject matter and its treatment, to see how the text dealt self-referentially with myth, the common stuff of high and low art, of grand opera and Hollywood. Add the timely and timeless themes of obsession and addiction, self-image and self-regard, and late ‘70s TV sit-coms – neither timely nor timeless, but definitely fascinating – and it had me.

"Nymphetitudea" by Suzie Silver, from Tri-Stan

…in a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness, omniscience, immortality, a spark of the vicarious Divine.

The first words of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, one of the first operas ever, are “Io la Musica son,” or “I am Music.” From the start, operas often did not make a distinction between words and music, since words exist, sonically, in the domain of music. Tuneful parts are often segregated from wordier parts, however. In Schönberg’s Moses und Aron, the seductive Aaron sings his lines, while the stammerer Moses speaks.

For Tri-Stan, I decided to use both rhythmic speech and song. Sometimes the use of song is predictable. In the big dreamsong aria, for instance, a vision sent by the goddess Codependae who appears in the dream disguised as a singing three-headed siren (the three heads belonging to the three CEOs of Tri-Stan, each named Stanley). The words needed to be visible as well as audible, both to highlight the text’s literary quality and to aid the assimilation of the baroque complexities of the language. Supertitles in opera productions are now commonplace, but I wanted Ultra-Titles®, wherein the very presentation of the text itself would be artistic. To my delight, I was able to persuade the brilliant video artist Suzie Silver to make a video incorporating the text, which now accompanies live performances of the work, synced by Suzie in real time to the music through various high-tech means.

But there was nothing high-tech about my collaborative relationship with DFW, which was an old-fashioned correspondence. The printed word, via the USPS. A certain delay and distance was built into the arrangement that felt odd in the age of instant communiqués. It didn’t involve sound, aside from the CDs he asked me to send him; my proposal/fan letter and his cheerful agreement kicked off a literary friendship. I was disappointed that I didn’t have closer contact with him—an email address at least—but I was also relieved. I needed to perform some surgery on the text to fashion it into something I could use, and I was glad to have a trusting, hands-off writer to deal with. I was clear on the need to abbreviate the story, and on the strength of a vague promise “to cut as little as possible,” he mercifully allowed me free rein.

Alas, we no longer get to say “alas” with a straight face…

We had only one point of divergence. The Guggenheim Museum was interested in presenting the work on its Works & Process series (the NYC premiere of the Sonnets took place in this series). Works & Process is all about collaboration, and so DFW’s presence was necessary. At this point I found out how phobic he was to public appearances. I’m grateful to Jonathan Franzen, a close friend of DFW’s, for eventually explaining the situation to me. I had trouble understanding it at the time. Music is a performing art and thus ultimately a collaborative venture, even if it requires a vast amount of solitary preparation. Every performer has felt the hot breath of the composer on the back of their neck. And a public audience is generally involved as well. There are plenty of shy composers (myself included), but not many reclusive ones. I wrote the piece in the mountain solitudes of Montana, but I wrote it for New York City musicians – and a New York City audience – to bring to life. Luckily, an alternate and excellent venue was soon found that didn’t require the writer’s presence: Merkin Concert Hall near Lincoln Center.

Long-jaded viewers were rapt, Vanna’s show stolen, critics indulgent, & sponsors all but manic.

So even in the writer’s absence, the piece had great success. Mary Nessinger dazzled, effortlessly switching from Valley Girl-ese to mock-Puccini to pseudo-Wagner to bizarre hip-hop; Paul Hostetter, the conductor, carved out a sizzling interpretation of the piece with great performances from the Sequitur musicians, an orchestra of new music superstars. The audiences loved it. So did the critics, who gave it close-to-rave reviews in the New York Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The piece was a hit, as much as anything in the culturally marginalized world of contemporary classical art music can reasonably hope to be.

But one more test was to come.

I packed up a copy of the fresh-pressed commercial CD recording plus a DVD dub of the video and mailed it off to DFW. I wondered. Time passed. I wondered. I stopped wondering. Then one day I got a card in the mail from him with a funny and warm appreciation. I was greatly relieved and very, very pleased. He was my target audience, after all. There was talk of a special performance of the piece at Pomona College, where DFW was on the faculty and where the story is set, the fluorescent basin of [post-] medieval CA itself.

It’s right around here that Ovid the O. tone-shifts to Lament.

Like so many others, I read the news flash of his death over and over. I was bereft. I went to the gym to distract myself, and, in an eerily Tri-Stanian moment, heard the news again there on TV. A lot of friends and even people I don’t know so well contacted me to express sympathy. A few trawled for inside information or gossip. I was way too sad to say much by way of thanks for the condolences, and I was way too sad to work up much indignation about the voyeurs. I was touched when one friend, a composer, told me he was listening to Tri-Stan as his personal memorial service for Wallace.

When someone I know dies, I find myself thinking about the last communication I had with them, to see if I can draw any comfort from it. This can be painful. I once was very late in answering an extraordinarily nice letter I’d received from a composer whose music I’d programmed. I got my letter back, unopened, with a terse note from the grieving spouse: “Lou died last month.” With DFW, at least, I could skip the self-reproach. I even allow myself, from time to time, a consoling fantasy. More than a few times, I’ve had the exhilaration of hearing a performer give a truly revelatory performance of a composition of mine. And I hoped that my musical setting might have made DFW feel this same sort of exhilaration.

In the last pages of “Tri-Stan,” Sissee Nar sees herself fatally reflected in mirrored sunglasses, and she is “…transfixed & shocked by an image which actually she alone in all the fluorescent basin saw in truth as imperfect nay flawed & inadequately Enhanced & like totally gnarlyly mortal.” In contrast, I like to think I might have given DFW a mirror to see one facet of the beauty and depth of his own story. I like to imagine his pleasant surprised smile, a mirror of my own wild Keatsian surmise upon reading “Tri-Stan” for the first time.

Further Links & Resources

Composer Eric Moe, Cr: Mara Rago

• Visit Eric Moe’s website – ericmoe.net – for more about his work and compositions, visit Suzie Silver’s site – harpsilver.com -  for videos from Tri-Stan and stills from her Ultra-Titles® for the opera.
• Read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review of Eric Moe’s Tri-Stan here.

• Read contributor Scott F. Parker’s essay / homage to David Foster Wallace, “The Real Question” (FWR, 1/7/2010). In it Parker describes the powerful impact of Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon” and the fragile, mysterious connection between writer and reader.

• A New York Times mention of a brand new staging of Moe’s “miniature monodrama” titled, “Jozaphine Freedom,” by the ensemble Sequitor.
• Interested in questions of translation? Jennifer Solheim unearths the inspiration required to convert one art form to another, in her essay, “The Seamless Skin: Translation’s Halting Flow.”

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

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

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who has influenced you as a writer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Links and Resources

For the past six months, I’ve been working on an unusual and exciting collaboration with singer-songwriter Clare Burson: a literary-musical performance interweaving story, song, and projected images inspired by my novel, THE LITTLE BRIDE.

We call it A Little Suite for The Little Bride, and we’ll be performing it at the Tenement Museum on Wednesday, September 7 to celebrate the book’s birthday and kick off a great party.

The (free) performance will start at 6:30 PM at the Tenement Museum in NYC as part of the museum’s Tenement Talks reading series. There will also be an encore performance at the JCC Manhattan on Thursday, September 22.

• Learn more about Solomon and her novel at her author website.
• Watch the video for The Little Bride:

The novel—and the new show—tells the story of the Blood Orphans, a once-great rock band, in Amsterdam on the last day of their final tour.

The musical is a collaboration between Shilling, playwright/composer Andrew Lloyd Baughman, and songwriter/vocalist Talia Segal. It runs July 15th-August 7th at the D.C. Arts Center. And, as befits a show about a rock band, it contains explicit language, graphic adult situations, and nudity—so what are you waiting for?

For more information, including how to get tickets, visit the musical’s homepage. Congratulations, Michael!

Further Resources:

Goldberg, CR Jason Little (via author site)

When I found out last November that Myla Goldberg was going to be a visiting professor at Adelphi University’s MFA program, the first thing I did was buy her new book, The False Friend. It was actually my first digital book, my first purchase on my Kindle. After a semester under the writer’s guidance, I had the opportunity to sit down with Goldberg – author of three novels, the critically acclaimed Bee Season (2000), Wickett’s Remedy (2006) and most recently The False Friend – and get to know her own process and path to writing.

The False Friend offers insight into the formation of early memories and how childhood events can shape the people we become. Goldberg captures the essence of those youthful friendships from the very start of her novel. Listen to how she introduces Djuna Pearson, the protagonist Celia’s best friend:

Djuna Pearson had appeared at the desk in front of Celia on the first day of fifth grade, the new girl’s dark ponytail tied back with ribbon, stray hairs feathering a slender nape like enameled porcelain. Djuna had excellent posture, and for this Celia decided to hate her. By the second week of school they were friends with an intensity that summoned hangers-on.

Goldberg’s witty writing draws the reader into the novel. There’s an intimacy that leaves us always wanting more, never quite able to step away from the story unfolding on the page because of its familiarity.

In the following interview, Goldberg offers insight into her life as a writer, teaching in an MFA program, and the inspiration behind The False Friend.

Interview:

Casey Tolfree: What made you want to write?

Myla Goldberg: Writing is all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was six or so, it’s what I told people I wanted to do, and it’s what I was doing. I remember sitting at my grandparents’ kitchen table writing a story about Edgar Allan Poe in crayon that I was illustrating. Other things got in the way. For a while I wanted to be an archeologist, I wanted to a dinosaur person, then I wanted to be a figure skater, but writer was always in there. The older I got, I was like: “Yeah, writer, I don’t know what else.” I’m really glad it worked out because I’m not sure what would have happened if it didn’t.

Was there ever a point when you turned away from writing?

I have always been extremely single-minded. Every writer is going to have a different story. There are plenty of people who come to writing later in life, or think maybe they want to do it, then change their minds, but it was always unambiguous for me. For a while I thought, if the writing thing doesn’t work out, maybe while I write I can deliver the mail. But it was always something in the service of letting me be a writer instead of another career that was attractive to me.

Growing up, what were some of your favorite books?

Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl starting early. Judy Blume was a biggie. I got into horror really early; I read a bunch of Stephen King. He’s really good at narrative and I’m very glad I learned narrative building blocks by reading [his books]. What else? Bridge to Terabithia – I adored that book. The Cay was another one I read over and over again.

I read a lot of absolute trash; I loved the V.C. Andrews books, Flowers in the Attic. Jean Ahl – Clan of the Cave Bear. I was into all the series. I was really indiscriminate and voracious about what I read when I was little. Though Watership Down I read early on, probably earlier than I should have, and really dug it. I remember reading Les Miserables on a family road trip when I had just finished eighth grade – I loved its mix of high and the low. In high school, J.D. Salinger. Milan Kundera was a big deal when I first read his work because he was the first writer I read who combined philosophy and fiction. He made me realize what you can get away with and all the different things you can use fiction to talk about. That was really exciting to discover. Kurt Vonnegut had a huge impact on me in high school. I liked his wacky ideas. David Foster Wallace was a very big deal. Jeanette Winterson.

How did your reading influence your development as a writer?

The books definitely influenced my writing. Every writer should have this happen, or is already influenced to one extent or another. I can’t even read Donald Barthelme anymore because I read him and then I write like him. He possesses me. I haven’t read him in 15 or 20 years because of this. Actually, David Foster Wallace also does that to me a bit. If there is a voice or a zone that I particularly dig, without even meaning to I find myself copying it. That can be frustrating to a young writer because you think, “This isn’t even me, this is someone else.” But it’s natural to be influenced by other writers and to have the writing sound like someone else. It happens along the way to becoming yourself as a writer. It’s still the case. I’ll still read people and realize that I am now writing under their influence. It doesn’t bother me. You can use it in a sort of prescriptive way. While writing The False Friend, I read a lot of Graham Greene and Ian McEwan because I really liked what they did in their books and I wanted it to seep in. I will actually read writers with the idea that I want them to influence me if I’m working on something.

Did you have mentors or teachers who encouraged you along the way?

No one said, “No, don’t do it.” But I didn’t have an experience like Jonathan Safran Foer. He’d been planning on medical school when a famous writer read his work and said, “Oh, my God. You have a gift,” and wrote to his parents to say “Your child must be a writer.” It’s nothing dramatic. I went to Oberlin College and I was an English major and I took some creative writing classes there, but I didn’t major in it. One teacher there who was wonderful gave me some good advice. I told her I was interested in being a writer and she said, “Well don’t go into publishing.” And I said, “Okay.” I was and still am anti-authoritarian, which gets in the way of a student-teacher relationship, so I missed out on that. I wish I had been less knee-jerk anti-authority when I was going through school, because I probably could have met some very cool people.

If you always knew you wanted to be a writer, why not major in writing?

I didn’t see the point. I wanted to read books. If I wanted to be a writer I figured I needed to be reading and that’s what I interested me. Writing was something I was already doing and already liking, so while I did take some classes, majoring in [writing] didn’t make sense to me.

How did your time in Prague influence your craft?

I went to Prague right after graduating from college. I lived there for a year, and it was the first time I wasn’t a student anymore. It was the first time I was A WRITER. So it was in Prague that I started to figure out what that actually means. I really started a writing discipline of sitting down every day and having a set number of hours that I was going to write no matter what. And it was also in Prague that I formed a sort of ad hoc workshop, as there were a bunch of expats there who were literary types. Outside of college, that was my first workshop environment. I basically think of Prague as my graduate school experience. I had my own workshops and I was writing daily.

Not having attended an MFA program, what has it been like teaching in one?

At first I felt weird about it. I wondered, “Am I even allowed do to this? Is this okay?” But I am enjoying it, and my students seem to be enjoying it and seem to be getting something out of the class. I think that there are things that I can teach people that are helpful. My philosophy towards running a workshop is not that I’m teaching writing so much as I’m teaching critical faculties. There is only so much writing you can actually teach. You can foster it in people, but so much of writing is through the practice of writing. What can be taught is how to edit and critique your own work and the work of others. So I really focus on that aspect, and train students to focus their critical eyes and get perspective on their own work, and to really appreciate what a revision involves, because so much of writing is revision. By taking that philosophy to teaching a workshop, I feel much better about it, because one thing that bothers me about the larger culture of MFA programs – certain schools foster this lie – is that a defined path exists that makes you a writer. That you can take your classes and get your degree and congratulations, you’re a writer. It’s just not true. As with any art – I don’t care if it’s writing prose, poetry, painting, or sculpture – you can take some classes, but they won’t turn you into a writer. I wanted to think about an MFA program in a way that didn’t perpetuate that idea. That was my biggest concern as a teacher.

How do you balance teaching with your own writing?

It depends on the semester. Usually I can do a pretty good job because I’ll only teach one or two classes, which gives me three, or even four, writing days a week. So on a day I’m not teaching, I am writing. On that day it’s a 9-5 job for me. I sit down at my computer at 9 or 10 in the morning and write until I have to pick up the kids, or, if it’s a day my husband is picking up the kids, until it’s dinnertime. So a writing day for me will be anywhere from 5 to 8 hours of writing. Those are my favorite days. There are some semesters where I teach more, and then I have less time for it, but when I do get to do it that’s what I do.

Do you plan a story?

Not really. For me the fun of the writing is finding out what’s going to happen. I usually have my beginning, and often a sense of what the end is going to be, and sometimes a sense of some things that might happen in the middle, so those are my guiding points as I work my way through a story. But I don’t know how I am going to get there per se. Often those things will change in the course of the writing. That’s what makes it fun, but it’s also what makes it take so long. There are some writers who know going in that they will write chapter two on this day and three on this day. I can’t imagine doing it that way, but that means that my past two books have taken me five years to write.

Where do you think you write best?

In my office at home. I am in a little room, and I get to close the door. It’s too small to be a bedroom for anyone other then an infant, which is why I don’t feel bad taking up the space. I have friends who write in cafes, but I need a sense of privacy – that no one is watching me. Part of the reason is I just want quiet. I am very, very sensitive to noise. But I will also act things out. I have talked in class about how writing and acting are allied art forms. For example, I will make facial expressions that my characters are making to see how it feels and how I can describe it. I make gestures, and that’s what a crazy person does, so if I were doing that in a café I would be really self-conscious. Being in a room with the door closed is kind of key.

You are also in a band called The Walking Hellos. I was wondering if your creative process in music overlaps with your fiction writing.

Sometimes they feed each other. Writing is extremely solitary. It is the most solitary creative life you can imagine. The music I make is the opposite because there is no lead person who comes in with all the songs written. It’s a very collaborative process and I love that dynamic. The way they are opposites makes me feel like a fully realized creative person. In fact, The False Friend started as lyrics to a song. I was writing a song and realized there was more to it. That’s never happened before and I don’t know if it will happen again, but it was totally cool.

All three of your novels are in the third person. Is that a preference or did the stories simply require it?

Well, here’s the funny thing: they all started in first. I’ll start in first because that is how I get to know a character best, because I am inside her head. It’s the most comfortable way to get to know a new world and new people. Then, after I’ve been there for a while, I feel restrained by first person. The nice thing about first person is it’s very dynamic and exciting, but the difficulty is that it’s very limiting: you can only see through one set of eyes. Once I have a stronger sense of the story that I want to tell, I want to be able to say more than just one character can say, so I inevitably switch to third. That said, I have a new idea that might keep me in first person – and it might be fun to write in a different voice.

How do you go back and rewrite everything in third person? Do you rewrite from scratch, or line-edit the existing text?

You can’t just go change the “I”s to “he” and “she.” Revision – for me – means basically starting over. I get to a point with revision where, yes, I’m just changing some words or adding small things. But in the early days of a book, revision means I figure something out and I start over with a blank page. When I’m switching from first to third it’s a combination of those elements. In some places I can just switch the “I” to a “he” or” she,” but different voices allow you to do different things. Your text has to change to reflect that you are now using a voice with different powers and different properties.

Your first book, Bee Season, was made into a movie. What was your experience of watching your novel turn into a film? Were you involved in the process?

I was not at all involved, other than thanks for this nice check and good luck to you. It was weird though; at first I was like, “Should I even let them do this? Is it selling out?” I had a couple older, wiser writer friends who advised me, “Take the money. It will let you be a writer for longer.” And I realized that they were absolutely right. The best case scenario: people go to the movie and say, “What a good movie. I want to read the book.” Worst case scenario: people go to the movie and think, “Man, the book was so much better.” Either way sounded pretty good to me.

Did the success of Bee Season affect work on your second novel?

It affected everything. I went from having to have a day job and having to write on the side to being able to be a full-time writer. It was amazing and it gave me the freedom to just write what I wanted to write for a while. In terms of how it affected me artistically, that’s something I’m still figuring out. It’s weird; I was not expecting to be a successful writer. I was expecting to be a struggling writer and now I’m getting back to that. I’m getting that chance to be the thing I always thought I would be. It messes with you, because you ask yourself, “Wait, why did everyone like this, and does that mean I need to do that again? Am I supposed to do that again, or can I just write what I want to write?” But what I try to do when I’m writing is forget about all that and follow my imagination wherever it wants to take me.

What song originally sparked the idea for The False Friend?

There is a particular song called “The Unloved.” It’s a little bit different; it’s about a bunch of girls who throw another girl down a well and then she disappears, so that was the beginning of that story idea.

Did you start writing the protagonist of The False Friend, Celia, as a child or as an adult?

I started with Celia as an adult. In my second book, Wickett’s Remedy, I started with my main character as a child, and then after I’d written 50 or 75 pages, I realized that the story began when she was an adult. That was a drag, but also good, because I needed to know those things about her. But with Celia, one of the first things that I had was the beginning. She is walking down the street, sees a car, and has a memory come back to her. That was always very firmly in my mind as the beginning of the book. Usually I write a linear story in chronological order. False Friend was bizarre in that there were two chapters that occurred much later in the story that I wrote really early on, because they were already fully formed in my head. I didn’t know at what point in the book they were going to come, and they started getting further and further back in the book until I realized, “Oh, these happen at the end.”

I really wondered about the ending. How did you determine what to explain and what to leave hanging in the balance?

To my mind, the most important questions in this book get answered. The reader finds out what actually happened. The only ambiguous thing to my mind is Celia’s future, but, personally, I am optimistic. I like having hanging chads in stories because life is like that. I was comfortable leaving the question of Celia’s future unanswered.

Can you talk a bit about guilt and innocence in the book?

Well, Celia does a horrible thing; it just isn’t the horrible thing she feels guilt over. She was a bully, and a pretty terrible one. It’s a discomforting knowledge that she has to push that aside. Her guilt stems from the fact that when you’re a kid, everything feels like your fault. For me this book was all about exploring memory and how weird memory is and the way we turn our memories on their heads and reshape them.

Jensenville felt important to the novel. Have you actually been up there on Route 17 or spent time there?

Jensenville is made up, but it’s stolen from a combination of Binghamton, New York, and Johnson City, New York, and Endicott, this little area in upstate New York that I am very familiar with because my in-laws live up there. I’ve been visiting Endicott for the past ten years and I’m fascinated by it. I like the area because it really is this place of fallen empire. I love that it clearly used to have glorious days and now those days are so behind it – that contrast between what it was and what it is now is really fascinating.

Endicott, New York, via dougtone

Do you have any advice for emerging writers?

Yeah! Write and read constantly. Aspiring writers who are not reading everything they can get their hands on aren’t going to make it, simple as that. The only way to learn is to read all the time, and also write. If you can’t make a daily practice of writing, you need a regular practice of writing. If you are specifically interested in writing a novel, then you need a daily practice where you get as huge a chunk of writing done as you can. But you can’t just sit down and start by writing 5-8 hours a day. That’s like telling someone who’s never run to go run a marathon. Writing is a muscle; you have to build up your endurance. At first, you write for half an hour every day, and then maybe you can do an hour Monday-Friday, but then on weekends you write for two hours. That’s the way to build it up. Try to cut out as much regular time for your writing as you can. Be stubborn. Be prepared to be rejected. Be prepared to not let that stop you and just keep coming. And find readers who are comfortable being honest with you, and whose honesty you are comfortable hearing. You need people who are smart and honest, but also kind, and constructive with their criticism, not just, “Eh, this didn’t work. I thought this was boring.” That’s useless. That’s just going to make you feel like crap. You need someone who can say, “At this part I don’t really understand this character,” and “I thought this part was moving slowly.” The constructive stuff is what’s really important.

What are you working on right now?

Mostly working on a children’s book, a really early chapter book. I have a very, very embryonic novel idea that is so embryonic I can’t even articulate it yet. The children’s book is about a brother and a sister who are playing in the snow when something very strange happens.

Teaching, writing, music, children – how do you find the time?

It’s a little bit insane. Well, my oldest child is in second grade, and my youngest is in preschool and next year will be going to public school. When they are in school I write. That’s easy enough. The band only practices once a week, at night after the kids are in bed. I don’t work on weekends. Weekends are for family; we all hang out with each other. So that’s how, but I am extremely disciplined. I structure my time very deliberately and carefully and then I stick to those structures. I think that’s another good piece of advice for aspiring writers. You need to have that sort of discipline for yourself and be structured with your time.

Further Links & Resources:

In honor of Bloomsday, the literary project Ulysses Meets Twitter is conducting an online reading of Joyce’s masterpiece today (@11ysses). Says the project’s website:

This is not an attempt to tweet mindlessly the entire contents of Ulysses, word-for-word, 140 characters at a time. That would be dull and impossible. What is proposed here is a recasting or a reimagining of the reading experience of this novel, start to finish, within the confines of a day-long series of tweets from a global volunteer army of Joyce-sodden tweeps.

Can you imagine such a thing? Would it be horrific, a train wreck? Or would it be beatific? Who knows. Hence this experiment.

The experiment will be shaped thusly. The @11ysses Twitter account is the stage for this “tweading” of Ulysses. The Bloomsday tweaders are you, anyone in the world who would like to volunteer to take a section of the novel and condense/congeal/cajole it into a string of 4-6 tweets that will be broadcast as a quick burst on @11ysses. “Bloomsday bursts” will be posted every quarter hour starting at 8 o’clock in the morning (Dublin time) on 16 June and continue for the next 24 hours.

The project has gained some nice attention, including some from the New York Times, and is underway now. Follow along at http://twitter.com/11ysses.

Reading this post after Bloomsday? No worries; you can still enjoy some Joyce thanks to Kate Bush. The eccentric singer has been given permission by the Joyce estate to transform Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy into a song, “Flower of the Mountain.” Here’s a clip: