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.

National Geographic recently released a list of the “Top 10 Literary Cities.” But it seems a bit controversial to me. Here’s the ranking:

1. Edinburgh, Scotland
2. Dublin, Ireland
3. London, England
4. Paris, France
5. St. Petersburg, Russia
6. Stockholm, Sweden
7. Portland, Oregon, USA
8. Washington, D.C., USA
9. Melbourne, Australia
10. Santiago, Chile

You read that right: Portland, Oregon, is in the top 10, but New York City is not. It’s hard to argue with some of the choices on the list—London, Paris, St. Petersburg—but New Yorkers, what gives?

The woman is Marina Singh, a researcher in a Minnesota pharmaceutical lab who embarks on a mission to the Amazon. She is dispatched there to recover the details of her coworker’s recent death, and to evaluate the research of a field team deep in the jungle, a team headed up by her former mentor, Dr. Swenson. The checkered relationship between mentor and mentee, between student and teacher, is at the fulcrum of the novel’s central tension.

Deposited in the South American city of Manaus, Marina sets out to track down Dr. Swenson, whose work on developing a controversial new fertility drug suggests a  scientific quest for progress, and the invasion and potential exploitation of the Lakashi, a fictional population indigenous to the Amazon.

As in all odysseys, what particularize Marina’s journey are the hurdles, and how she reacts to them. Speed bumps along the way are also what give a story literary traction, and, as in Bel Canto, Patchett is a master of creating extraordinary circumstances for seemingly ordinary characters.  Marina loses her suitcases, her clothes, reading materials, cell phone, and ties to the outside. Once in Manaus, she must endure numerous tests of will in order to find Dr. Swenson’s whereabouts, including scorching heat and a debilitating fever. Divested of her creature comforts, we see her at a vulnerable state and one that is ripe for transformation.

Throughout, Marina is plagued with nightmares—a reaction to the anti-malaria drug Lariam—and these nightly rebellions of the psyche provide a recurring connotative trope:

Even if she went home tomorrow she would have to take it for another four weeks. It was the drug’s way of reminding the patient that the trip isn’t over. The trip would be in the blood stream, in the tissues.  All the potential disasters of the place would continue to linger inside.

The persistence of the drug’s nightmarish side effects raises questions about what exactly medicine does, if the supposed “therapy” spawns new, harder-to-cure maladies (in this case, nightmares). Conversely, Marina ingests a shaman’s cup of river liquid to bring down a near-fatal fever, and after a delirious, death-like trance, is pretty much healed. This paradox of modernization versus preservation recurs throughout the novel.

The Lariam also acts as a metaphoric stand-in for how journeys linger in your blood, even after the trip is over, as a psychological breeding ground for illness or health. The idea that a place could live inside you, ripe with disaster or amelioration, internalizes the external arc of the story, layering conflict upon conflict. Good stories, too, are likely to linger, as this one does, even after the act of reading them has ended.

In the tradition of Heart of Darkness, State of Wonder proves the delineation between civilization and jungle is a murky one. Once among the Lakashi, Marina and Dr. Swenson face medical challenges and ethical choices about the boundaries of science and its rippling implications. As Dr. Swanson sums up, their work is a slippery slope between progress and dependency:

What happens to the girl whose brother cuts her after I’ve gone? Does the tribe still have faith in the man who sewed up heads before me? Has he kept up his own skills or was he too busy watching mine? I don’t intend to be here forever…

Through the formidable Dr. Swenson, Patchett challenges the assumption that progress be defined through academic or capitalistic objectives: Is a hot pharmaceutical commodity worth the human price exacted for its potential distribution? Is scientific innovation worth taking down an entire self-sustaining society? In posing questions such as these, State of Wonder cautions against easy answers.

One explanation offered between the jungle and civilization is the existence of art. Before trekking to the jungle, Marina comes to see the Manaus opera house as a kind of sacred space:

There was no real explanation for how such a building was conceived for such a place. Marina thought of it as the line of civilization that held the jungle back. Surely without the opera house the vines would have crept up over the city and swallowed it whole.

One would hope after having lived with the Lakashi, Marina’s definition of civilization and the jungle’s menacing reach of influence would surely be more measured and less imperialistic. However, the idea that art is what creates a society or separates civilization from savagery is notable:

In these past few days of fever, Marina had forgotten herself. The city was breaking her down along with the Lariam, her sense of failure, her nearly mad desire to be home in time to see the lilacs. But then the orchestra struck a note that brought her back to herself. Every pass of the cellists’ bows across the cellos’ strings scraped away a bit of her confusion, and the woodwinds returned her to strength. While she sat in the dark, Marina started to think that this opera house, and indeed this opera, were meant to save her.

Words and sentences, then, like bows and strings, can bring us back to ourselves. The act of reading is an act of salvation; narrative and expression are lifeboats on a meandering river.

Patchett’s magic is in weaving these details so effortlessly that they never register as constructed. Her use of language and voice; the development of a wide range of characters who differ in race, age, and gender; and the elements of mystery and suspense all contribute to a bona fide page turner, an adventure story that still rests comfortably on the shelf of Literary Fiction.

Her gift for capturing emotional nuance registers throughout, as in these two (of many possible!) examples:

At that moment she understood why people say You may want to sit down. There was inside her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips wee all being brought together at closer angles.

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.

The character’s modest physical collapse and the thousand small pin-pricks of loss both register with instant clarity—the universality of the feeling is rendered in such a concise, precise way, that you wonder why nobody thought to express it as such before.

Great authors can infuse a physical setting with the emotional undercurrents of their story. State of Wonder, drawing from its “exotic” locale, capitalizes on this notion that the perception of our surroundings is inflected by our emotional state. A figure undergoing transformation, then, sees the strange as familiar, the familiar as strange:

Beyond the spectrum of darkness she saw the bright stars scattered across the table of the night sky and felt as if she had never seen such things as stars before. She did not know enough numbers to count them, and even if she did, the stars could not be separated one from the other, the whole was so much greater than the sum of its parts. She saw the textbook of constellations, the heroes of mythology posing on fields of ink. She could see the milkiness in everything now, the way the sky was spread over with light.

This de-familiarization is crucial to convey the change necessary for all protagonists – the idea that a truly powerful experience upends the very definition of what we think we know. Everything, down to “such things as stars” must be redefined. Old expectations are washed clean, and we’re left with something new and dangerous and beautiful.

The title is never fully explained, but we can infer that this state of wonder is in part a reference to the magical qualities of the jungle and its inhabitants. In addition, the concrete noun “state/statehood” mixed with the dreamy uncertainty of “wonder” offers a useful dichotomy for Marina’s predicament. She is a doctor, a scientist, but, inserted into the jungle, she possesses a child’s capacity for awe and terror:

She had had a good imagination as a child, though it had been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids. These days Marina put her faith in data, the world she trusted was one that she could measure. But even with a truly magnificent imagination she could not have put herself in the jungle. She felt something slip across her rib cage—an insect? A bead of sweat? She kept still, looking out through the top of the hammock at the bright split of daylight in front of her… she excelled not through bright bursts of imagination but by the hard labor of a field horse pulling a plow.

Reading (or writing) a book is itself a kind of odyssey. Most writers would tell you the bulk of their work is not all bright bursts of inspiration and light, but something closer to excavation. You go down to find something, to suss something out, and you come back changed, different than you were before. It is more plow pulling and less harvest. But what is lovely about this particular paragraph, and, indeed, Patchett’s latest novel, is that, in a different setting, the everyday mechanics of charting lipids and a putting your faith in data take on a larger significance, their own poetic magnitude. A lab in the Amazon is not the same as a lab in Minnesota. The charts and studies come to carry their own sacred connotations, so much so, that even when you yourself have returned to the original state, the journey is still with you.  Perhaps by being dropped down into an entirely new environment, some of our chipped-away astonishment can be restored.

As readers, we allow ourselves to be transformed by the spell a good book casts, and, if we’re lucky, that spell puts us in a state of—yes—wonder.

Further Links and Resources

I live in the 02138 zip code, popularly known around here as “the nation’s most opinionated zip code,” thanks to the hordes of Harvard and MIT students. I’m not sure about that title–94720 could probably give it some competition–but I like the idea that a zip code, which is really just an arbitrary zone, can have its own personality.

That’s the idea behind WBUR’s Zip Code Stories. A joint project by Boston’s NPR station and audio lit mag The Drum, the series asks writers to develop stories based on a given local zip code:

Each month, we’ll pick four ZIP codes and ask you to write a short story — 500 words — that takes place in one of them. Together, Radio Boston and The Drum will pick the best story from each ZIP code. We’ll then ask one of the authors to come into our studios to read an excerpt and tell us the story behind the story.

Winning stories so far include works like Jennifer Haigh’s “Bent,” set in Provincetown (02657) on Cape Cod, and “Smedley’s Secret Guide to World Literature,” by Askold Melnyczuk, founding editor of the literary magazine AGNI and an associate professor of English at UMass Boston. (Come on–how can you NOT want to read a story with that title?)

Are you inspired now to write a story about a zip code dear to you? I must admit I’m thinking about the 44122, the 48108, and the 15236–all zones that mean much more to me than five digits.

Further reading:

• MFA programs prove it: even the “less writerly” places can provide inspiration.
• Google Lit Trips provides lit-inspired maps, which may spark some map-inspired lit for you.

Orientation, his long-anticipated story collection recently out from Faber and Faber, shows off this unique set of nimble narrative chops, so it’s no surprise that pieces from the collection have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Writing, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. In addition, he’s been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award in fiction. Via phone from his home in Moscow, Idaho, where he is on the fiction faculty at the University of Idaho, Daniel and I talked about craft, teaching, and MFA haters.

Interview

Michael Shilling: Among other writers, you’ve been one of these “best kept secrets” whose collection is deeply anticipated. How does it feel for Orientation to finally be out?

Daniel Orozco: It’s nice. [Laughs.] I never thought I’d get this collection published.

Considering that you’re a short story writer, and how little publishers want to publish short story collections, it’s quite an achievement. Was finding a publisher an arduous process?

For a long time, publishing people told [writers], “Hey, these stories are great, but do you have a novel? Because nobody wants a short story collection.” So yeah, I pretty much gave up on the idea that I’d get the collection published, and that was the reason I started a novel, out of a kind of career necessity. But then I finally found an agent who told me she could sell the collection, but we had to wait until, as she said, the stars lined up. And they did. So it’s just fantastic.

Your stories really run the structural gamut, and those structural choices create different emotional tones and narrative priorities. Taking “Officers Weep” as an example, how do you think those choices affected the way those stories ended up?

Every story that I write feels like a kind of experiment. The challenge in crafting a story is how to engage a reader emotionally, intellectually, experientially. I’m always looking for some kind of challenge, some kind of structural or narrative constraint to try and figure out. For “Officers Weep,” it was, Can I tell a story that is written in the form of a police blotter? And in a way the structure determines how the story’s gonna go. So yes, I begin with form and then fill in with character and engagement. Jerome Stern talks about the “shapes of fiction,” and I think that’s a good analogy, because I need a shape for the story and then I start figuring out what’s going to happen in it.

That approach is refreshing. I think a lot of writers are afraid of playing with structure because of self-consciousness, these false distinctions between the “realistic” and the “experimental,” and if they play around with structure it’ll be seen as a gimmick. As if a gimmick is always bad.

Right! I mean, the story “Orientation” is a gimmick. You can only do it once for a limited amount of pages, and the same goes for “Officers Weep” because I can’t do a series of stories structured as police blotters. But so what? All that matters is that a story, whatever the structure, must be grounded in the humane.

Agreed. Other stories in the collection also have specific structural choices. Like, in “Somoza’s Dream,” we jump around in time somewhat, but it still manages to have a pretty tense momentum. How did that story come together?

The first drafts of “Somoza’s Dream” were much more expansive. There were flashbacks to Somoza’s childhood, for example, so I was going to move back and forth in time more. But it read more as a biographical story, and I decided to abandon that thematic approach because I figured out that I was trying to make this man who wasn’t very interesting more interesting that he was. So once I gave up this autobiographical framing, I started populating the story with people around him. I knew that I wanted to begin with the assassination and then return to it, but that was pretty much the structural demand I made upon the story. Once I had that in place, other elements of the writing started coming together.

So why Somoza? Did you have a particular interest in the Nicaraguan revolution?

The story came from a couple of places. To start, it came out of an exercise at Bread Loaf, in a class taught by Reginald McKnight about telling lies convincingly, which I decided to do through historicality. I did a three-page scene about G. Gordon Liddy.

I have a Liddy story too!

Really? Yeah, he’s a fascinating character to take on. So I had him meeting Somoza, and then over the years the story shifted focus solely to Somoza. Also, my family is from Nicaragua, and I thought it would be interesting to engage with something from my political and cultural past, and really put the screws to this guy, really run him down because he really was a bad guy, and I had a lot of fun just “writing” him.

The agreed history is just one story, right?

Yeah. I mean, E.L. Doctorow says that history is a story, between the historian and his facts. So in writing a story based on historical figure, it’s interesting, the line between when you stick to the facts and render it with a certain verisimilitude and when you veer away.

Writers such as Jim Shepard have gone a long way in getting people to de-snobify about this false difference, or at least acknowledge the much more porous relationship between fiction and history.

Absolutely, and of course, nobody ever nails him for anything because he does his research, and [from a storytelling angle] his work is so imbued with the specificity and personal experience of the characters, who more often than not are on the periphery of historical events–which is a very smart approach.

Let’s talk about “Shakers,” which I thought was a really subtle use of the earthquake described in the story as a metaphor for “shakings,” be they personal or geological.

Yeah! [Laughs.] You know, an earthquake that huge would never happen, so it immediately becomes a metaphorical thing. It was a way of bringing all these individual and solitary lives together. So though you have these separate stories of individuals in solitude, you have them all gathered in one place, reacting to this one event, and touching on what we talked about before, that structural component was what drew me to whether I could write it or not.

Was the story ever longer? I ask because it reads like you had ten characters, and you closed your eyes and pointed at four and worked with them. Like there could have been six other people that you could have equally expanded upon and connected.

That’s great to hear that it reads like it could have gone on and on, because I’m not one of those writers who sits down and writes seventy pages and then gets it down to twenty. Me, I write two pages and get it up to twenty, and that’s how “Shakers” went, though I wrote it in five weeks, which is the fastest I’ve ever written a story.

That’s interesting, because it reads like it took a extraordinary effort of discipline to bring it down to the length it is—it could have been a novella.

I did want it to read that way, fluid in a sense, like it could have gone anywhere. I probably had one or two narrative lines that I cut out, but yes, there was something unusual about the writing of “Shakers,” organic and intuitive, different than any other story I’d written. It felt like a gift.

Which is nice, because they usually feel more like births. [Both laugh.] Another thing about the story I loved was that it felt, through this confluence of the personal and natural, like you were telling a geographic history of California, an accounting of the really different landscapes that make up California. It reminded me of that Pavement song off Crooked Rain, “Unfair,” which takes on this same confluence.

Cool! They must have read John McPhee.

Doubtless. And both the song and your story end up being celebrations of California.

Yeah, I mean one of the reasons I enjoyed writing “Shakers” so much was in rendering these landscapes. I’ve lived in Idaho for eight years and I miss California – its vastness – and so in the story I really wanted to revel in that vastness.

It reads like a love letter.

It is, very much so. And what better way to write a love letter to California than via an earthquake?

You couldn’t get much more integral to California than an earthquake. Even the ending, with the guy in the desert who’s probably going to die, [he] has this surge of love for the natural beauty around him as he wastes away with his broken leg. It’s weirdly funny, a demented commercial for the California tourist board, like, “California, right on!”

Yes! The ending is ironic but it’s also true. You know, I like combining the absurd and the profound, and I like that the story accomplishes that.

“Shakers” isn’t the only story that speaks to matters of place and geography. For example, “Only Connect,” which is so infused with the essence of Seattle, however abstract that sounds. Living here, I can tell you that you captured something on the page that encapsulates this temperate rain forest so well, and so mysteriously.

Yeah, and that story is the love letter to Washington.

Not surprising that it was published in Ecotone, considering the magazine’s focus on “place” in fiction, where setting is more the foundation of the story more than, say, character or humor or plot. “Only Connect” could only happen in Seattle and the surrounding areas it touches on, like Bellingham and Astoria.

It reminds me of what Flannery O’Connor said, which is that you can do whatever you want on the level of theme, but that the world of the story has to be real. You know, I tell my students that a story doesn’t work unless you ground it in a physical world that is concrete, that we can really imagine.

What are your thoughts on teaching?

You know, my goal on both the undergraduate and graduate level is not primarily to select the best writers and nurture them and bring them into the world. My goal is not to baptize the ones with the gift and tell the others, I’m sorry, my son, you must go to vocational school. That’s not the job. Ultimately teaching writing is the flip-side of teaching reading, by which I mean creating readers who are able to critically and thoughtfully respond to texts.  On the undergraduate level especially, I try to dispel that, number one, your opinion about a story matters. No. I don’t care if you like it or not–how does it work? This is about learning craft. Number two, students think, well, I can write whatever I want. No, you can’t. The short story is a very demanding, exacting form – once you understand what went into crafting that story, then you understand where your response comes from, and that makes you a smart reader.

That echoes what Robert Coover said, that his job as a writing teacher is to make better readers.

And if better writers are the result, that’s great too. Of course, that’s particular to the graduate level, where you’re aiming to find people capable of mastering the craft. On the graduate level, it can be very gratifying because the level of discussion and engagement is deeper.

More specifically, what about the arguments for and against MFAs?

I guess my rather benign defense of MFA programs in response to that question stems from my . . . um, irritation with writing programs being singled out as needing defending.  So: Can you really teach writing?  Well, it depends on whom you’re teaching it to.  You can’t teach writing to anybody, but you can—just as in the teaching of medicine or engineering—teach it to somebody who has the drive to learn it and the knack to get better at it.  The difference is that if you don’t show evidence of the drive and the knack, you get drummed out of medicine and engineering.  We in writing aren’t quick to do that, because writing isn’t just a thing you learn, it’s a thing you do.  It takes two or three years to get an MFA, and within that time the drive and the knack may be either fully present or they may be submerged, hidden, yet to surface.  I’m not going to shut somebody down just because they’re not at the top of their game.  (If somebody did that to me years ago, I wouldn’t be a writer, and you wouldn’t be interviewing me.)

I’m not saying that everybody who gets an MFA eventually becomes a writer; most don’t.  But laying the groundwork in craft and technique, mentoring everybody—rather than separating wheat from chaff—can certainly help the ones who stick with it.  To paraphrase the character Joe Gideon in Bob Fosse’s great allegory of writing programs, All That Jazz: I may not make you a good dancer, but I can make you a better dancer.

People like to have a strong opinion on MFAs in one direction or the other. With the haters, I often feel like, Really? People trying to become better humans in this tiny, unrenumerative way? That upsets you?

There are worse things to do than graduate someone with an MFA and send a bad writer out into the world. You know, you send out a bad engineer or a bad doctor and then you’ve got problems.

That’s why you don’t get an MFA in being a doctor. Really, MFA stands for Victimless Crime. [Both laugh.]

If I have a truly gifted undergrad, I will mention the MFA to them as something they might consider. But for other students who want to keep writing, I’m reminded of what a teacher told me, which is “Find your metaphor.” You know, find something else you’re good at to do while you write.

So you’ve got the collection out in the stores—unless you’re superstitious about talking about works in progress, would you mind talking about what you are working on now?

I won’t go into too much detail, but I am working on a novel, and am soon going out to UCross in Sheridan, Wyoming, where I’ll spend four weeks there focusing on it.

Sweet Sheridan. I was in a pretty epic snowstorm there once.

That’s why I’m going in August. [Laughs.] I’ve been working on it for about five years, then had to leave it for six months or so while we were getting the collection out, but now I’m full-bore on it, with due date looming. I started it grudgingly, out of necessity, but I have enjoyed figuring out the structure of the long form.

Jesus, novels are tough to write, huh?

They really are.

It’s like, musicians call it “running on blues power.” It’s just such an act of faith and love and inspiration, but you’re not sure if you’re actually running on, you know, quality [both laugh]. Considering that before this project you’ve always written short stories, has writing a novel made you appreciate them equally? Do you have a preference?

At this point I do prefer short stories to novels, both writing them and reading them. Not to take away from the novel, but like I said, the short story is a very precise, exacting form that’s also very artificial. I think the novel is more organic—it’s longer and baggier—and so for me it’s much harder to write a novel. I have had a hard time being engaged with it for five years, sustaining this interest, but I’m genuinely excited about this novel and eager to get back to work on it.

Further Links & Resources

Daniel Orozco / image from the University of Idaho's website

• Read J.T. Bushnell’s review of Orozco’s debut collection. In it, he writes: “Orientation is, without question and without hyperbole, one of the best books I’ve ever read. I can’t find words emphatic enough that aren’t already printed on its dust jacket, but I can assure you that all the words there are true.”
• You can also check out our most current features on other debut collections right here.
• Or check out some of our favorites from Story Month.
• For more on this author’s work, visit Professor Orozco’s University of Idaho page.
• Read some vintage Orozco: his story “I Run Every Day” published a decade ago in the fall 2001 issue of Zoetrope (Vol 5, No 3).
• I’ll take some Chemical Brothers and a side of zither with that, thanks: Largehearted Boy features Orozco’s sonic selections for his stories in their fabulous Book Notes series.
• And be sure to pick up a copy of Orientation: And Other Stories at your local indie bookstore.

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

Via author's website

One of the things I like most about Keith Scribner’s new novel, The Oregon Experiment, is that it gets the weather right. It’s true that western Oregon is often as rainy and overcast as it is rendered, but stories set here largely ignore our bright, hot summers, the shocking color and gilded light in our springs and autumns. Not Scribner. “No sun like Oregon sun,” one character explains to another in the novel’s opening pages, even as thick fog—“Dickensian fog”—envelops them. “Warm honey in a deep blue sky.”

It’s an accurate description the afternoon I visit Scribner’s office in the Autzen House, a historic brick building that sits among small, well-maintained properties in the heart of Corvallis. The street is lined with trees, more varieties than I can identify—here a few maples and a towering elm, there a row of ginkgos and an apple, the spring air brisk on my bare arms when I pass through their shadows.

The neighborhood is quiet and peaceful, not the type of place you would imagine as a hub for anarchists and hooligans and secessionists, riots and terrorism and police brutality—not until you’ve read Scribner’s book. The Oregon Experiment takes place in a small college town like this one. The title comes from both a promise between a husband and wife and a radical movement for the secession of the Pacific Northwest, each resulting in its own kind of civil war, which turns streets like this one into battlegrounds. The result is a fascinating political thriller and beautifully imagined literary work, which is not an easy combination to pull off.

When I arrive at his office, Scribner greets me warmly and sets me up in a cushioned armchair, insisting on my comfort, then leaves to retrieve a glass of water for me, tea for himself. The room is on the second floor, filled with natural light, the walls white and the furniture blond. He received the space as part of a fellowship he received from the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities, which has also awarded him a stipend to provide a short release from teaching, allowing him to finish The Oregon Experiment and continue work on his next novel. Above his computer he has tacked a panel-work of his daughter’s watercolors, their designs abstract and dominated by red. Beside the armchair, leaning against the wall, is a bulletin board covered with scraps of paper, and a thrill runs through me when I realize they describe the scenes of the novel I’m holding.

When Scribner returns, I ask him about the bulletin board, and he explains the process of organizing multiple perspectives and dozens of scenes, intriguing stuff for someone like me, groping through my own novel’s first draft. His manner is warm and easy, and several minutes pass before I remember my responsibility to all of you.

Interview:

J.T. Bushnell: Your third novel, The Oregon Experiment, is in bookstores, but I’d like to start at the beginning of your career. How did you get started as a writer?

Keith Scribner: I was an economics major in college, and I had no thought of becoming a writer. I was going to do something like go to law school, or work for an investment bank. My senior year I took an expository writing class—what we’d now call a creative nonfiction class—and it was almost exclusively Joan Didion who got me excited about writing. I read “Goodbye to All That,” “On Self-Respect,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “On Going Home,” “On the Morning after the Sixties,” The White Album. I had never read anything like it. I didn’t even know it was something people did in writing—writing that, to quote John Gardner, helps us know what we believe and leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations. That was an enterprise I wanted to be part of.

I had a similar career path. I thought I was going to be a reporter, so I never took any creative writing classes in college. For me there was a lot of conflict in the decision to pursue something as impossible as writing fiction seemed. Did you experience some level of conflict?

I was pretty sure it was what I wanted to do, and I didn’t question why. I questioned it later. [Laughter.] I questioned it after five years, when I was hanging sheetrock, and after seven years, when I was cutting grass. But at the time, no. I had a twenty-two-year-old’s confidence—the feeling that life was just beginning, the sense when college ended that I could step into whatever I wanted to do. And also, honestly, a kind of naiveté about how difficult it was. I’d read Hemingway’s stuff about “it’s the hardest thing I know,” and I would repeat those things, but it felt like, “Yeah, okay, it’s hard, but if I keep at it, it will work out.” Which of course is true. If you give up, you’re never going to know if it could have worked out. It’s rare to find someone, in my experience, who’s been writing every day for twenty-five years, or even ten, and hasn’t had some success.

Also, I wanted to add—I got so caught up in Didion—the other essays in that class that I found inspiring were George Orwell’s “Marrakech” and “Shooting an Elephant,” E.B. White’s “Death of a Pig.” Those were all essays that completely consumed me.

White

Orwell

And yet you decided to write fiction. Was that because of your personal proclivities, or because nonfiction as a form didn’t have the foothold it does now?

Probably both. And my wonderful teacher, Karen Robertson, was really encouraging me to try fiction. Then I went to Japan after college to teach English, and I was reading fiction there, and reading Hemingway, who did his journalism and then wrote his fiction, and I thought maybe I’d do that. But, ultimately, fiction felt like the form in which I could do the most. I felt like it gave me the most freedom. And the novel always seemed a place where I could be comfortable, compared to short stories. Most fiction writers start with short stories, and I think there are a lot of short-story writers who feel like they’ve got to write a novel because of publishing demands. But for me, the larger canvas of the novel, those more extended stories and narrative arcs, that wide open space, that’s where my imagination is most inspired. Writing short stories, for me, can feel a little constraining.

You do have a few stories out there. You’ve been published in TriQuarterly, The North Atlantic Review, American Short Fiction, Quarterly West. Do you see the two forms drawing writers of different sensibilities, for the same reason poetry might draw a certain type of writer and prose another?

I do think that’s certainly the case with poetry. With my most recent story, “Paradise in a Cup,” I happened to have an idea and some material that really worked for a story. It was about a conflict, a situation, a fear, a recognition that I didn’t need fifty or sixty scenes to evoke. The idea that you have—the creative impulse and the creative spark—often screams out for a particular form, and my ideas about conflict and character and motivation tend to demand a longer form. I need the space.

You wrote two unpublished novels before you finally sold your third, The GoodLife. Through those years, how did you keep the faith and continue on and avoid feeling discouraged even though things weren’t working out immediately?

A lot of things helped me. One was that I knew how to work as a carpenter, and I was able to make an okay living doing that. I also got sick of being a carpenter. I would either injure myself or get sick of it. [Laughter.] Then I would go abroad to teach for a time, as I did in Japan and Turkey and France. I wasn’t married. I didn’t have children. I was in no hurry to settle down, buy a house, any of those things. Grace Paley advises writers to keep overhead low and surround yourself with people who believe in what you do. I think I did that. I had friends who had some level of respect for what I was pursuing, and I always kept overhead very low. I had apartments and things, but I also often lived out of a car or a backpack. I was reading constantly, and also reading interviews, being inspired by other writers, going to readings, finding a literary community. Grad school came at a good time. I was out writing on my own for four years, and then after grad school I was writing on my own a little more, and then I got the Stegner Fellowship, and obviously that was a tremendous boost. If I had doubts leading up to that, then for at least a few months those doubts were squashed, because I felt like the world had yet again told me, “You’re not completely out of your mind.” It was just after the Stegner Fellowship ended that I sold The GoodLife.

What was it about that project that made it successful in a way the others weren’t?

I think it was just better. I’m so glad I didn’t have those first two novels published. I haven’t looked at them in years and years, but I’m sure they just weren’t good enough yet. I wasn’t good enough yet.

And what allowed you to progress past that, to go from writing two novels you’re glad are locked away somewhere to writing this novel that receives critical acclaim?

It’s hard to say what allowed it, except that, as you know, the longer you write, the better you get. In every single way. The characters were probably sharper, and more compelling, and more clearly defined. The plot I’m sure was more satisfying and surprising. The structure was probably more solid. The first two novels had more innovative and complicated structures, which in my case might have been a tactic to distract the reader from weak writing. In fact, I had very different ideas about structure for The GoodLife when I got to Stanford, and it was John L’Heureux, one of my teachers, who really hit me over the head with a hammer and said, “You cannot use this structure. You’ve just got to tell the thing straight.” And I was older, I was more mature, I had read more, so I had more models to draw from. But finally, it comes down to time spent writing pages.

The GoodLife is about a kidnapping, the skeleton of which you took from a real-life news story. You follow the characters through the enactment of the crime and all the ways it goes awry, and many of the themes that emerge are social critiques and commentary about materialism and the way it drives American society. Many of the same themes emerge in your other novels, Miracle Girl and now The Oregon Experiment. What is it about this subject matter that keeps drawing you back?

I’m not the first writer to say that we all keep writing the same novel over and over. My novels are pretty different from each other; however, early on, certain thematic things grab hold of us. I think you explore them and develop them and see them through the characters in one novel, and then you start another novel, and you’re sitting there writing morning after morning, for months and years, and living with these characters, which are of course creations of ourselves, and then suddenly, through the characters, these themes—surprise, surprise—here they are again. I don’t think we exhaust certain interests. Most writers do end up returning to familiar territory, and I don’t think that’s something to worry about or apologize for.

I agree. It sounds like what you’re saying is that you keep discovering the same obsession as it emerges from each story.

Yes. Exactly.

Do you have any ideas about why this obsession keeps recurring?

It’s surely my own childhood, and my examination of my history, and the weird, uncomfortable, shifting place our family occupied in terms of social class, the place where we precariously stood. My experience with education, with friends, with living in gritty cities like Troy, New York, where Miracle Girl is set—I call it Hudson City in the novel—and out in the country in New England, and going to a fancy college. All of those experiences formed me, formed my interests, my fears, dreams, doubts. The simplest answer is that I’m still hashing those things out.

Old Troy, NY

So even though you’ve pursued fiction, you’re investigating some of the same elements you might have investigated if you’d decided to write nonfiction.

Absolutely. And boy, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know any fiction writers who would claim otherwise.

I’d like to ask a little more about The Oregon Experiment. The circumstances of this novel are very provocative. You have a modern secessionist movement in the Pacific Northwest. The people you have as figureheads for the movement are a free-spirited neo-hippie and a young anarchist who might be a real political player and might simply be a hooligan. You have these wonderfully interesting professions for the two main characters—one, Naomi, is a professional nose, a scent designer, and the other, Scanlon, is a professor of mass movements and radical action. Where did these ideas come from?

The novel started for me even before I came to Oregon, when I was living in Palo Alto. It was during the WTO demonstrations in Seattle, and we had just had our first child. Seattle was a place I’d lived, and it felt very familiar. It didn’t seem far off. It wasn’t like watching demonstrations in, say, Egypt. So here I am, a new father, and I think of a character who in some ways is drawn toward the safety and security that parents want for their kids, and at the same time is sort of radicalized. And what was interesting about those demonstrations was that the plumbers, these union pipe-fitters, were walking arm-in-arm with the lesbian avengers, and teachers, and anarchists who weren’t there to break windows, and secessionists. It seemed to be a meeting of a lot of different subcultures that typically would not have any overlap at all. So I was inspired by that collision of subcultures, and I thought of a character who supports the demonstrators but might not think they were so cool if they were on his own street while his baby was sleeping in the crib.

Secessionism made sense to me for a lot of reasons, but one is that the novel, I hope, is successful at merging the political, social, and personal. All of the characters are separating themselves from something or someone, and that separation ended up working on all three levels.

As for Naomi as a nose, I came on that late. She was actually a completely different character for a long time. The novel is pretty sensuous, and smell is our most primal sense. When I came to Oregon, I was so aware of the wonderful smells here. I wanted Naomi to be someone who could help bring out an evocative connection to the place and to our primal instincts.

I especially love Naomi’s career, because it allows you an angle on the world that is, like you mentioned, very sensuous. It’s interesting to experience the world from the point of view of someone who experiences the world as smells. I’d like to ask where the real ends and the imagined begins in all this, but that doesn’t seem like a fair question for a fiction writer, so what I’ll ask instead is what sort of research you did for the novel.

Like most fiction writers, I start with Google. [Laughter.] Oddly enough, if you Google “anarchy” or “secession,” more than a few sites pop up. I read books. I met with some anarchists here, local anarchists, and talked to them about their stories, how they think, what different levels of anarchists there are, the broad definition of “anarchist” among anarchists. Some of them have some pretty organizational interests. They’re actually more anti–U.S. government than they are anarchist. They have some similarities with the secessionists in that they think the major problem is that the U.S. and its government are just too big.

Image via nosy girl

The smell research was really fun. Again, I did a lot of reading. I also met with Yosh Han in San Francisco. She designs perfumes using natural essences—most of the stuff now is synthetic—and I spent a whole day with her actually creating the perfume that Naomi makes in the book. I don’t think I’m giving away too much by saying Naomi gets a new base note, which is the often unpleasant-smelling bottom note of a perfume, like musk, and she gets it from the gland of a Northwest frog. And so Yosh Han sets up her organ—hundreds of essences—and we created that base note from mosses and roots and mushrooms, a mixture of real Northwest essences. That was amazing.

So there are actually some very ugly scents in perfume?

Oh, yeah. Always the base note. Musk, you know, is a very . . . [gesturing at groin]. It’s funky stuff. Civet cat—it’s kind of like what cats spray.

My goodness. There’s got to be some metaphor here about writing.

Right? [Laughter.] Ambergris, which I mention in the book, is whale regurgitation that’s been floating on the ocean surface and baking in the sun for ten years. There’s your metaphor about writing. Patchouli is one of the more pleasant base notes, and a lot of people don’t like that by itself, but patchouli is in a lot of perfumes. You wouldn’t recognize it in the perfume, though. An average nose wouldn’t.

I suspect that one of the primary reasons this book takes place in Oregon is because you live in Oregon, but it also seems that this book has to take place in Oregon. Is that true, and if it is, why? More generally, how crucial is place to the narrative?

I think that in the popular American imagination, Oregon has always had a special place. We’re a little bit libertarian, sort of way right and way left at the same time, and I don’t mean we have right-wing people and left-wing people but that a lot of Oregon attitudes actually contain both, in a way that they don’t on the East Coast. There’s a tolerance and open-mindedness here that allow for some of the things that have become Oregon types, a kind of free-spiritedness and easiness that foster many of the social attitudes I wanted to explore.

And the story had to take place far from New York and Washington. This story couldn’t happen in Delaware. It’s not remote enough. The story in some ways operates on the colonial model, where the educated Northeast elite come out to the provinces, and they take. Just to imagine a town where these things could happen—it’s pretty damn plausible in Oregon. It’s not plausible back east, even in, say, Northampton, Massachusetts, where I’ve lived and is probably the most plausible place in all of Massachusetts for something like this to happen. In fully unified fiction, characters arise out of place, and this is the place that would produce these characters.

Oregon

So you’re five novels deep. Your third novel has just been published. Does it get any easier? Or is the old saying true, that you don’t learn how to write, you just learn how to write each book?

It doesn’t get any easier. The fact that this one took me seven years, longer than any of the others, is perhaps testament to that. And I discovered something else with this one. In The GoodLife and Miracle Girl, the point-of-view characters are insiders in the places they live, places I knew something about, although I had to do a lot of research to feel that I got it right. The Oregon Experiment was originally in Scanlon’s point of view exclusively—it wasn’t until a few years into it that I expanded to multiple points of view—and I had thought that writing from Scanlon’s point of view as an outsider, I wouldn’t have to fully understand the place. I could understand Oregon as someone like myself, an outsider who comes from the East Coast. And I quickly discovered that wasn’t true, that even though Scanlon’s perceptions would often be skewed, wrong, naïve, and miss the point of the place, as the author and creator of all this, I had to understand the place, the culture of the place, the many subcultures of the place, its history, as fully as any insider.

Even if Scanlon’s wrong or naïve about something, you have to know how he’s wrong and naïve.

Yeah. Which is one of the things I’m always telling students. When I ask, “Well, how old is this character in your story?” and they say, “I don’t really know, twenty-five or thirty,” it’s not good enough. You need to know. It’s a simple little factual detail, but it’s something you need to know.

What other advice would you give to emerging writers?

Certainly write every day. Even those days when you don’t feel like writing. Perhaps those are the most important days to write. I defy anyone to actually sit there and type words and tell me that at the end of two hours you don’t have one sentence worth keeping. I think you always do. And read, read, read. You can’t refill your own creative source without reading, without reading challenging stuff, perhaps pushing the boundaries of the kind of fiction or the kind of literature in general that you’re interested in. And again, to repeat Grace Paley’s advice, keep your overhead low and surround yourself with people who believe in you. Believe in yourself. And believe that the pursuit of literature, the pursuit of art, is a great way to live a life. There are certainly things you give up for that life, but you get a lot more back.

Further Links and Resources

In her first novel, Swamplandia! (Knopf, 2011), acclaimed twenty-nine year old short story writer Karen Russell (Featured 20 under 40 and Five Under 35, author of the collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves) has created a highly specific shoebox world of wonder and mystery. Set in the Florida swamps, largely within a fictional alligator theme park called Swamplandia! the sun rises and sets with her lush yet economical descriptions and poignant characterizations of the 14-year old protagonist, Ava, and her rapidly dissolving family.

When Ava’s mother, the park’s glamorous main attraction, dies of cancer, the family is thrown into financial hot waters. Ava’s quest, then, is to save her park, and, by extension, her family:

The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn’t see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!’s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, middle, and an ending. If you’re short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.

Russell slowly acclimates the reader to the layout of the land: the park’s Café where the family takes their meals, a museum with personal artifacts and relics, the Gator Pit for wrestling and swimming with alligators (gators idiosyncratically called “Seths” throughout), a ferry to deposit and retrieve the tourists, an abandoned library boat where they borrow books, a lurking underworld, and far away from everything, the mainland with its threat of eternal boringness and evil rival theme park, ready to overtake it all.

Karen Russell / photo credit: Michael Lionstar

The Bigtree family is an eccentric bunch: Ava’s father is called The Chief even though he has no Native American lineage, and he refers to his family as a tribe. Their names, Hilola, Ossie, Kiwi, reflect their insulated grandeur—the mainland thinks they’re freaks, the kids don’t go to school, but, growing up onstage, they understand the glory of the limelight and the specialness of public adulation.

As a result, each tries unsuccessfully to restore the park’s former eminence. Kiwi defects to the rival park, cleverly named The World of Darkness (their customers referred to as Lost Souls), and Osceola succumbs with more and more frequency to séances with ghosts summoned through a book of spells called The Spiritualist’s Telegraph. The Chief takes off on a business trip for the majority of the novel, and his absence, quick on the heels of his wife’s death, is strongly felt.

The book owes tremendous debt to George Saunders, who is thanked in the acknowledgements, and it shares the Saunders-esque trademarks of theme-park particularity, absurdist-tragic events, a touch of the supernatural, and razor-sharp, satirical wit.

The novel succeeds as a highly executed piece of craftwork—scenes and flashbacks perfectly structured and woven into the present action, chapters that alternate point of view with Ava’s brother Kiwi, on-pitch dialogue, and fresh, creative language; a web of metaphors spun with a spider’s silky touch:

I could taste the old Bigtree victory. Suddenly I remembered: I am an alligator wrestler. This Bird Man’s eyes were like new lamps for an old performance. He kept smiling and smiling at me, and when his gaze rolled over my skinny legs, the pins of my knees became twin suns.

The chapters build and peak with the narrative arc we all model in Intro classes. Ample descriptions of local fauna, geographical history, folk-lore and alligator minutiae are all convincingly researched and rendered. Indeed, the world depicted in the wilds of the swamp, its lures and traps, the swampy thickness of its pervasive reach, is spell-binding:

Like black silk, the water bunched and wrinkled. Her arms rowed hard; you could hear her breaststrokes ripping at the water, her gasps for air. Now and then a pair of coal-red eyes snagged at the white net of spotlight as the Chief rolled it over the Pit. Three long minutes passed, then four, and at last she gasped mightily and grasped the ladder rails on the eastern side of the stage.

Still, there’s something missing. The book reads a bit slow in the beginning, the narrative ripe with tension but not necessarily suspense or urgency. The pacing at points seems to lag, the beginning too much like the middle. The supporting characters are fully developed and nicely flawed but not exactly irresistible. Kiwi’s chapters lack the shimmering sadness, the romantic decline of the park and the dangerous allure of the underworld. As a result of being off the island, they feel somewhat lackluster.

It wasn’t until the final third of the novel, when things really begin to unravel (and unravel they do) that I formed a real emotional attachment to what was happening in the story. I think this is the downfall of otherwise flawless technique, a book conceived and executed so correctly that any workshop could find no fault with it—it can sometimes edit out that ineffable quality that stirs deeper passions in the reader.

The final third, however, explodes with heartbreak. Ava’s story takes a devastating turn, and in a particularly affecting series of passages, we see her decline expressed through the lens of a wildlife gone mad, an underworld of foliage once homey, now haunted:

Now I didn’t always recognize the cries of animals; whatever adhesion in my brain connected sounds and light to the names of species was breaking down. The leaves that I had easily identified as bay or gumbo-limbo or pop ash gave way to a muted palette of foliage, a glowing russet of gray, most of it alien to me. Fewer and fewer of the plants that I tripped over or pushed through in curling curtains of vines uprooted a name in my mind. I was seeing new geometries of petals and trees, white saplings that pushed through the peat like fantailing spires of coral, big oaky trunks that went wide-arming into the woods (no melaleucas anywhere). A large egretlike bird with true fuchsia eyes and citrusy plumage went screeching through the canopy. For some reason all the life gurgling in the anonymous hammock made me want to cry. Some underworld this turned out to be, Ossie.

The conclusion does not wrap everything up to full satisfaction, perhaps suggesting that some resolutions are not as easily packaged as we’d like. It leaves us with just enough of what we need to take away, albeit less than we want.

As a whole, Swamplandia! offers many pleasures, and there’s much to admire about this indisputably talented writer whose career is just taking off. We’ll look forward to the many future dioramas she has in store, awaiting construction.

Further Links and Resources

At Knopf’s website, read the first chapter from Swamplandia! Shopping for a copy of the novel? Pick one up from a local indie bookseller.

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

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

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

Image Credit: Flickr-Chiot

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image Credit: Flickr-TailspinT

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

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

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

Image Credit: Flickr-Cia de Foto

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

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

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

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

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

Image Credit: Flickr-Ed Yourdon

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

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

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

Further Links and Resources

Edith Pearlman © Jonathan Sachs

The story starts with an ending of sorts, the narrator Stephen Boucher has returned to Sawgamet, a small mill town, after more than a decade away, to tend to his dying mother. Stephen, an Angelican priest, grew up steeped in Sawgamet lore and knows the stories of its monsters from a child’s intimate vantage. On the eve of his mother’s passing, Stephen recalls the history of his grandfather’s and father’s lives and deaths. Through these memories, a tale of tragedy slowly unfolds.

Zentner delves into the past through the characters of Stephen’s childhood – his grandfather, Jeannot, his father, Pierre, and Father Earl, his stepfather. Indeed, Father Earl’s retirement as priest at the Anglican Church in Sawgamet also plays a role in Stephen’s return. The gold rush/mill town of Sawgamet, founded by Jeannot Boucher, comes alive with vivid detail: paths cut through ancient woods, riverbanks bear town lore downstream, and the small town’s residents take shape. They start as men looking for gold, and later become masters of the mill and store owners. Zentner shows how river and woods comprise Sawgamet’s livelihood and define the residents.

The river froze inward, flat and even near the banks at first, but by November even the fast-moving water at the center of the river, the dangerous meeting of the Sawgamet and the Bear Rivers, had iced over. Daylight fading, we skated on the river after school while shoreline bonfires raged, giving us a place to warm our hands. Girls played crack the whip while the men and boys played hockey on the broad run of ice swept clear of snow.

Through stories, the reader becomes part of Sawgamet’s history, a history passed down for three generations.

Frozen Swallow Falls, via Flickr-zachstern

Zentner’s O’Henry Award-winning short story, also titled “Touch,” is mixed into the first chapter of the novel. Setting a foreboding tone for the rest of the novel, the opening chapter tells the history of the death of both father and sister during Stephen’s tenth year. After the Bouchers fall prey to the icy Sawgamet winter, cold and death become themes in the novel that never waver. Zentner returns to these motifs throughout the novel with different characters, during different winters in Sawgamet, but the results are always the same. Consider this passage where Father Earl experiences the spine-tingling power of the woods:

And even before he took another step, he knew there should only be shape, knew that there was only one boulder encrusted by snow. He knew then, and he would always know, that if he had the courage to look back into the storm he would have found her, would have been able to carry her home, would not have left her to turn into a pillar of salt.

Grief and loss embroider the novel, but Zentner’s careful balancing of the living and the dead gives the reader faith that somewhere amid the tragedy an ember of hope survives. Stephen’s return – despite his family’s afflictions – feeds that hope.

In Touch, Stephen reflects on the hardship of returning Sawgamet, especially as he must watch his mother die. But he questions his memory of the past, wondering why on this of all nights, his mother’s death looming, the sadness that has shrouded the Boucher family for so many years comes flooding back to him.

My whole life is, in some ways, about faith. And I do have faith in these stories about the history of my family. I would not be back here if Father Earl had not asked me to return, but I have faith that there is a greater reason why I am back here in Sawgamet, raising my daughters in a place that has taken so much from my family and me: I have faith that there is something that I can reclaim.

By scrutinizing the past and holding it up to the light, Stephen reclaims his home. He recounts the summer of his tenth year when his grandfather returned to Sawgamet. Jeannot filled the boy with myth and family lore in the months that followed.

Image Credit: Flickr-Yellow Snow Photography

The stories enthrall the reader, just as they do the boy Stephen – a fabulous golden caribou and a mahaha (a creature that tickles you until all your breath is gone), cannibalism, arson, and a vengeful ghost – but it is Zentner’s writing that elevates these chimeras and gives the novel its heft. Zentner writes Stephen as an inquisitive adult, a quiet child, and a confused teenager. As he faces his mother’s coming death, Stephen broods over mortality. It becomes the topic of most of his stories.

An example of Zentner’s ability to capture the wonderment of death comes early in the novel during the story of Jeannot’s founding of the town:

He did not understand the simple signs of tiredness, of having gone beyond the limits of his endurance, and for the first time of many times throughout his life, my grandfather, Jeannot Boucher, thought with absolute certainty that he must be dying.

This passage contains a microcosm of the whole of Touch: the elegant interdependence of past and present, history and myth, loss mingled with a faint but hearty hope. Stephen’s family grows accustomed to death – they must – but never comfortable with its monstrous, unknowable properties.

Image Credit: Flickr - .donata

Zentner brings Touch together through the Boucher family’s recurring bereavement, but connects to the reader through the hope that persists in the characters despite the loss of loved ones, houses, and family. Jeannot returns to Sawgamet to “raise the dead.” Stephen returns to bury his mother and reclaim his home. Father Earl retires after seeing his first and second wives pass away. As Emily Dickinson put it: “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Hope is the real magical beast – the phoenix – of Zentner’s novel. The creatures, the ghosts, the myths – they are real in Sawgamet, and they are real to the enthralled reader. But the ability to get back up and go on despite loss, that is the story Sawgamet, of the Boucher family, and, ultimately, of mankind. Zentner captures it beautifully.

Further Links and Resources

Zentner © Laurie Willick