Richard Bausch, © Mark Weber

Richard Bausch is an exacting writer. With precise language that lends a breathtaking verisimilitude to his fiction, Bausch lays the groundwork in which settings and characters—their smallest actions and passing conversations—seem not only memorable, but inevitable. Immersed in his books, you see with new clarity.

I recently had the privilege of joining him in the Moss Workshop at the University of Memphis, a model he began more than sixteen years ago. Just in time, too. He has recently accepted a position with the faculty at Chapman University in California, a post he assumes in August.

Bausch is colorful, uncensored, and opinionated—unruly, even—like someone who would (and did) leave his car idling by railroad tracks to jump a passing train. He often wears a baseball cap pulled low over his brow, beneath which his eyes have a mischievous gleam.  He’s willing, always, to try his hand at something new: the guitar, say, or stand-up comedy.  He loves theater and film, often tossing out a quick quote or recounting a salient scene. Through eleven published novels and eight collections of short stories, Bausch has proven to be not only prolific but consistently excellent, a writer whose discipline equals his passion.

Bausch’s dexterity with short stories elevates the form. His straightforward, minimalistic style doesn’t pull shazaam endings, or plot pyrotechnics. But a story like the O’Henry-winning “What Feels Like the World” chokes me with emotion every time. Using simple, direct dialogue, Bausch fixes his stories’ terrain in the mind. It’s as if he turns your head and says “There. Now look.”

Interview

Emily Besh: Who ignited your desire to write, and when did you begin to identify yourself as a writer?

Richard Bausch: I had a teacher named Helen Garson when I was in my first year of college, who looked at me after reading something I’d written and said, “You’re a Southern writer by definition with all this family stuff in here, and you’re going to be a great one, I can tell.” I lived on that for a long time—through a lot of bad times. I ended up teaching with her for twenty years, and sending my own students to her. And she got a signed copy of every book as it came out, and with every one she wrote me a lovely letter, appreciating what she found in it. A great teacher.

And there was another, Lorraine Brown, who one day when I said I didn’t think I had it in me to write one more scholarly paper, smiled at me and said, “All right then, write me a verse play, like Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea.”  That was the Yeats we were reading. She was another great one.

As to when I truly began to identify myself as a writer, it must have been when I sold the first novel. I remember going to the door and pushing it wide open and standing in it with my legs slightly apart, like a man expecting a high wind, and cupped my hands to the sides of my mouth and shouted “Listen up everybody! I’m a novelist!”

When I was a lot younger than that, I went around a lot with the suspicion that I might be a writer, afraid to think about it too directly, and feeling presumptuous and pretentious for the thought.

And of course the doubt is always heavy and never goes away, nor does the tentativeness about it ALL.

You give subtle attention to seemingly minor moments in your narratives.  How often do you find yourself saying “too much,” rather than “not enough?”

I seldom question or edit much as I’m writing. During the process of thinking about it all and trying to revise and be sharp, I go back and forth, sometimes feeling it is too much (usually in this case it is more about showing off my own skill, or giving forth the best and most flattering sense of my tender soul and my ‘bag of sorrows,’ as Frederick Busch put it once—than contributing to the reader’s visceral feeling of the events I’m describing)—sometimes feeling it is too much, and sometimes feeling it is not enough, anemic because I’ve gone past it without looking at it coldly and as a stranger might. I want there to be enough for the reader to care what happens; and I want the words to disappear, in a way, so the reader is not so much aware that he is reading. It is indeed a fine line, but when you go through it 75 times, it gets a little clearer. You’re better able to tell the difference between the anemic or slipshod, and the self-indulgent or excessive for its own sake. Everything should be subservient to the story, including all my opinions and all my attitudes and all my ambitions, too.

You hit the literary world running—your first two novels published back-to-back. Could you tell us about that?  With eleven novels and eight collections of short stories, it doesn’t seem like you’ve slowed down much.

It went like this: I sold my first novel, Real Presence, under the title, The Vineyard Keeper in early April of 1979. I was 33 years old, about to turn 34. James Dickey, having read the book, called me and suggested the title Real Presence. I didn’t like it at first, but can see now that it is the only possible title for that book. Later that summer, after experiencing the heady validation of selling the first one, and on the good advise of my pal Susan Richards Shreve, who already had two books out, I began a second novel.

I was calling that one I Don’t Care If I Never Get Back, because it began with a kid obsessed with baseball. I finished that one in early January, under the title Take Me Back. Just as I delivered that novel, news came in that Real Presence would be a Book of The Month Club Alternate Selection. And then in early June, after the book came out, it was reviewed in Time. Take Me Back was sold and in galleys before Real Presence appeared. And when in May a year later Take Me Back came out, Jane Smiley said to a mutual friend, “Maybe he’s dying, and trying to get them all out before it happens.” That’s Jane’s humor, and I laughed when I heard it.

Anyway, because the second one came so quickly, I got it into my head that I had it figured out now, and would be delivering a novel roughly every four months. Take Me Back got nominated for the PEN/Faulkner award, with a citation written by Walker Percy. I got to know him at the awards ceremony. And pretty soon I was walking around trying to write a philosophical novel a la Mr. Percy, and it was my wife, Karen, who finally called me on it, after two years of misery and four different manuscripts that I never let out of the house.

Now I don’t know what the average is, and am not inclined to use the math necessary to figure it. I do know that I have never gone longer than three years without publishing a book since 1980. And if I can finish the present novel and deliver it and have it accepted, I will publish it in 2013, probably, which keeps to the never-more-than three years pattern.

How does the germ of a story begin? Does the process still surprise you?

They come in different ways and with different matters trailing along in them. I carried “What Feels Like The World” around—the floor of it: a man and his overweight daughter, and the sorrow parents feel watching their children go into a building where they can have no immediate effect on what happens to them in there—I carried that around for a year or so, because each day for a long while I’d seen this heavy man with his overweight daughter walking up to the door of my kids’ school. There was a special bond between them. And then carrying that around as I was, that image and that sense of the helpless love I knew he felt in the circumstance, his heavy darling walking up to the door and in, where, children being as they are, she would suffer all that they both knew she would suffer the whole day long, and it was in their faces, too.

Carrying that around as I was, I happened to be at a gymnastics demonstration at that very school, where about nine of the seventy kids ran around the vaulting horse instead of going over it. (I think the heavy girl was in an earlier class, or was absent.) But of course there were other heavy kids and watching them go around the vaulting horse, I had an image of this man, this father of the heavy girl throwing a fit in the hallway of the school about his child, saying “What the hell. Everybody can do SOMETHING, can’t they? Why put her through this humiliation?” I had that picture of him shouting down the hallway of the school, and I knew then that I would write the story. Or, a story. Something to do with that helpless feeling the parent suffers when his child has to go through the badness of that kind of situation.

When I got to the end, I read the last paragraphs to my wife, who said, “You can’t leave it there.”  I read the end to some friends, all of whom said, “No, you can’t leave it there. The reader will want to know.”

So I tried like hell to render the rest of the scene, and I did it both ways. [The first], where I wrote her sailing over the vaulting horse, felt like cheating, like treacley television Hollywood cotton candy reality existing only to pander to the already asleep. The second way, where she failed to get over, felt like cheating it another way, rubbing a smart reader’s nose in it purely for the self-indulgent pleasure I could get out of what I could do with English sentences to make him squirm and hurt past the experience. So I left the end as it was and sold it to The Atlantic a couple of weeks later. And it won an O. Henry Award and I still get people who want to know if she gets over that vaulting horse.

It was after it had been in the magazine, and sometime just before it appeared in my first book of stories, that I was visiting a class my friend the poet Roland Flint was teaching and he pointed out what the story was really about: “It is soaked in grief,” he said. “And of course grief, the thing you can’t get over, is that vaulting horse.” I did not know this in the writing of it and this is why I talk so much about trying to let go of what you think and just feel your way through it like a child making that drawing, seeing it directly and without attitudes or opinions or, really, beliefs, either.

I never sketch out any plot, and will only make a note as to the next minute or so in the life of a character or some idea of where he/she’ll go in the next couple of pages, if I have some sense that I won’t be able to call it up when I sit down again. If the story does not surprise me, I do not trust it, and will usually not let it go until it does surprise me. The surprises are all the fun of it. And if you trust them enough you’ll write a lot of stuff that will please you every time you look at it for the surprises it gave you. Somehow they always stay fresh.

When you return to a scene, how do you go about adding to depth and texture?

There is a simple answer to this one, though it is difficult as hell in practice. In re-writing, along with paying attention to the writing, the sentences line by line, I also try to see if I am involving all the senses, how it feels on the skin, texture, smells, sounds, sight. All of it. And then in looking at what is said I try to make sure that every line of dialogue is doing more than one thing. That is, carrying the story forward, giving character, leaking in history and the matters that are at issue, the what’s-wrong, as it were, but keeping all this artifice from being visible to the reader. Then having worked all that, and gone over and over it, I go over it still again, looking at the writing again, the words and lines. I want all the artifice to disappear; I want everything to disappear except these people in their trouble, whatever it is. And it is always some kind of trouble because that is the province of the human story, and news of the spirit in narrative can only arrive through the abrasions of conflict. Conflict, which scrapes the barnacles from the soul and lays it bare.

What do you grow against? The classics?

Oh, yes, of course the classics—and books, books, books, all the time. Right now I’m reading Tolstoy—War And Peace for the fifth time, Anna Karenina, for the third; Kawabata—Thousand Cranes; Shakespeare—over these last five months, King Lear six or seven times, listening and reading; Romeo and Juliet four times, listening and reading; As You Like It twice, Macbeth three or four times; Hamlet four or five times; Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar; Graham Greene—The Power And The Glory for the third time; Eudora Welty—Delta Wedding; Percival Everett – Assumption; Alix Ohlin—Signs And Wonders; Trollope—The Eustace Diamonds for the first time (and I’ve been reading it for a year); and Philip Roth—Indignation, and I just finished Nemesis and Everyman.

In the workshop you once said it would be a “sin” for us not to write.  Could you elaborate?

We live in a culture that sees trying to write as some sort of indulgence of the ego, when not a plain presumption. But if you have talent for it, you are morally obligated to do it, and all one need do is look at that passage in the Bible about the ten talents: it’s where we get the word. The very word implies responsibility.

I had a dear friend, gone now, the poet Roland Flint, who called me one night crying, because he’d had this thing happen on his way home from school: he saw a little toddler on the island between two lanes of traffic. Stopped to keep him from wandering into the road. Held his hand and walked him across the street, thinking all the while about his son, Ethan, who was run over by a car and killed before his eyes twelve years earlier. The toddler’s parents came running from a house in the opposite direction of where Roland was walking the child, and the father got down on one knee and yelled at the child. “Don’t EVER go out of the house without Mommy and Daddy.” And Roland had to say, “I think he’s very frightened now.” And the parents stood there, the mother holding the child, now, and Roland went on to say, “I must tell you, I lost my son in this way, twelve years ago.” The parents said they were sorry and went on to their house and in, and Roland went, crying, back to his car, got in, drove home, wrote about the event in his journal, then wrote a poem about it, still crying, and finally called me.

He said, “To think that I could cheapen Ethan’s death by writing a goddamned poem about it. To think that I could use it in that way.” And I listened, and told him I loved him and understood, and we hung up. But then I thought about it and I called him back. “Roland, you’re supposed to write the poem. You’re morally obligated to do it. You must do it. For Ethan, and for all those people out there who don’t have the words, who’ve gone through this very thing. It’s what you’re absolutely supposed to do now.”

And he wrote his poem, “Stubborn.” And had it printed in a large picture frame, and inscribed it to me like this: “I wondered who I’d sign this first copy to, but of course should have known all along it would have to go to the Bausch who made me write it.”

It was one of my proudest possessions for all the years I was in that house in Virginia, and as far as I know, it is still on the wall there.

But that’s what it really means: the ten talents and us, who have this talent.

Further Links & Resources

• Follow Richard Bausch’s Ten Commandments for writers.
• Get Baush’s latest book, the collection Something Is Out There. [Amazon. Powell's. Indiebound.]
• Read Roland Flint’s poem “Stubborn” (scroll down to the second poem on the page).

“I think the best stories start from something tiny. [...] A short story can easily destroy itself through metastasis. I think if you start a story with more than two scenes in mind, you may be doomed. At least you have a hell of a lot of work ahead of you. If I start off trying to get at this one little moment, that’s all I want to do. And then I have to build the world that makes that moment happen.”

~ Wells Tower

• Read more about Wells Tower on Fiction Writers Review
• Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love
• Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises

“With short stories, you never really expect the World at Large to care one way or the other. It’s a labor of love, and no one disputes that, and I think the purity of that endeavor is very liberating.”

~ Valerie Laken

• Read more about Valerie Laken on Fiction Writers Review
• Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love
• Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises

Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1908) is one of those stories—paralleled by certain films—that I always return to with an odd yearning. Each time, despite myself, I hope that the story (or film) will somehow end differently. That Connie won’t leave with Arnold Friend. That Christopher Reeve won’t discover that penny from 1979. Or, in the case of London’s story, that “the man” won’t break through the ice—and that the fire won’t go out.

Perhaps part of the story’s great appeal is how very different it is from my own lived experience and writerly tendencies. My version of the great outdoors is Manhattan’s Central Park. My stories are set in New York and Berlin and Paris. I’m not particularly fond of animals (and neither, it seems, are my characters, since I cannot think of a single one who even has a pet). So it is difficult to imagine myself somewhere to the side of “the main Yukon trail” in subzero (way subzero) temperatures, let alone accompanied only by “a big native husky, the proper wolf-dog, grey-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf.”

London’s story makes me feel life-threatening cold. It makes me visualize unfamiliar geography and landscape. Like Megan Mayhew Bergman’s new collection, it teaches me about animals and their instincts—without requiring me to get up close and personal with them. In short, “To Build a Fire” accomplishes one of fiction’s most noble goals: allowing me to broaden my understanding of life and experience. Even if, in the end, the man always dies, and the dog always turns around, trotting “in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.”

• Read “To Build a Fire” online
• Want more Stories We Love? Read the whole series—and keep checking back all month for more as we celebrate Short Story Month
• Like Erika’s taste? See more of her recommended reading.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/stories-we-love-to-build-a-fire/feed 1 http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/an-interview-with-luana-monteiro http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/an-interview-with-luana-monteiro#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:00:37 +0000 Melissa Scholes Young http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=34927 I came across Luana Monteiro’s Little Star of Bela Lua by accident: it was hidden away in the International Literature section of the World Bank’s bookstore in Washington D.C. I’d spent a few years early in my career teaching and living in Brazil. But since my Portuguese is only conversational, I wanted to read Brazilian stories written in English as a lens into the contemporary literary scene there. Translations are invaluable, of course, but discovering a book written in English with the authenticity of Bela Lua felt serendipitous. Turned out I had to come home to find my way back to Brazil.

Little Star of Bela Lua is Luana Monteiro’s debut short story collection. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she completed her MFA at the University of Wisconsin, and she is currently at work on a novel. We corresponded via email about writing, nirvana and the evil eye.

---

Interview

Melissa Scholes Young: I lived in Brasilia for years, and I rarely came across Brazilian literature in English. You root Little Star of Bela Lua firmly in Brazilian culture. Why write in English, and not Portuguese?

Luana Monteiro: My literary awakening happened in my late teens and early twenties when I was already living in the U.S. I mostly read books written in or translated into English. It was the language of my surroundings, and it was the one that offered itself when I sat down to write my first short story. The English I use, however, is not divorced completely from the influence of Portuguese; my mother tongue asserts itself in the rhythms, the intonations, and the mistakes I repeatedly make.

In the subtitle of your collection — “Stories from Brazil” — I was struck by the “from.” These stories have traveled to get to their audience. Did you consider audience while writing? Did you see the readers as mostly American?

Yes, I did see them as mostly American; well, they were mostly American because many of those stories were written while I was in college, and were read in creative writing classes. The book has been translated into Portuguese and French. So when I visited Brazil in 2011, I was surprised and a little dismayed when my half-sister asked me, “Is that character in that story named Carolina supposed to be me?” [I thought] Uh… no, Carolina, of course not.

Many of your female characters struggle against cultural norms. Valquira, the rhymester, enters an entirely male-dominated music scene and holds her own against the machismo. Cloé wrestles with sexual desires that women are expected to suppress, especially as Christians. What interests you about these struggles?

The influence of religion on a character’s search for authenticity and transcendence is a recurring theme in my writing. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to escape Christianity while growing up in Brazil; it penetrates every aspect of society, from public observances to one’s intimate life. The Christian ideology of the feminine ends up affecting the sexual attitudes of the country, particularly women’s sexuality: on one hand there is the image of the virgin, pure, modest, delicate, on the other, the sexual goddess, carefree and licentious, created by the consumer market. The relationships between the spiritual and the commercial, Sunday Mass and carnaval, prudishness and sensuality; those interest me very much.

This is a more traditional Brazil than I experienced. When most people think of Brazil, a glamorous Carnaval image is evoked, yet Carnaval isn’t even explored until the second half of the book. I taught at the Escola Americana de Brasilia, and Carnaval seemed to dominate more than half of each school year for my students and most conversations. Yet your portrait of Carnaval on the streets of Pernambuco isn’t flattering. You mention the underbelly of the celebration: the excess, the stink, and the vomit. You describe in detail men and women passed out on the streets “like dead cattle.” What led to your decision to write Carnaval so raw?

Well, the glamor of carnaval works better in marketing pamphlets than stories. Yes, carnaval can be glamorous, but it’s not only glamorous.  I could write an entire book on unflattering carnaval images! I love the idea of carnaval: four days of abandon, music, jubilance and friendship, where strict class and gender divides melt and the hierarchies of society are turned upside down. But there is also the underbelly, the grime and violence, the turning away from all that is ugly and sad, a denial of those who are so marginalized that they can’t even participate.

Elizabeth Bishop, who lived in Brazil for fifteen years, beautifully (and painfully) illustrates this intolerance for the destitute in her poem “Pink Dog.”

Ah, “Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!” That poem communicates so much about the dual nature of the celebration. Did you find yourself wrestling with how to write about those marginalized?

You’ve lived in Brazil, I’m sure you’re familiar with the ways domestic maids, for instance, are treated. They raise their employers’ children, cook their meals, clean their houses, wash their clothes, but aren’t welcome at the table with the family, and in many households they’re not even allowed to use the same set of dishes and silverware as their employers.  In light of these hierarchical relationships, it’s tempting to write characters one-dimensionally on both ends of the social spectrum, but I try not to fall into that trap.

I appreciate what you said about the possible melting of gender divides, at least temporarily. In “The Whirling Dove” Mãe Joana tells Cloé “This is a man’s world, my girl. They run the nations and the corporations—but in their shadows, almost always stands a strong woman.” Is that a commentary on Brazilian society in particular, or the status quo more broadly?

The commentary has more to do with how they are recognized in relation to how men’s accomplishments are celebrated. Brazil has particularly rigid expectations tied to gender, despite choosing a woman as president.  This gets highlighted in the media these days. Peruse Brazilian periodicals and you’ll come across an inordinate number of articles devoted not to [President Dilma Vana Rousseff’s] policies and initiatives, but her clothing, the shaping of her eyebrows, her make-up, her weight. By the way, the general opinion is that she will never belong in the ranks of the world’s best-dressed. If only I’d known that before I voted for her.

Exactly! You make political statements throughout the stories. You mock the PT [Lula’s Worker’s Party] in “Antonio de Juvita.” His speeches, which the people applaud, are almost nonsensical. Do you think literature can be an effective path for political change or is it just good fodder for humor?


I didn’t set out to mock the PT. Antonio de Juvita is almost a mythical character in the Brazilian Northeast, the bohemian, unemployed, coddled bon-vivant who takes a shot at local politics out of boredom and a desire for popularity. All he knows about political discourse is to employ the words “honesty” and “work,” and to do it often. The self-aggrandizing in small town politics is the subject of thousands of poems and songs; people have learned to see the humor in it, and to regard the words “work” and “honesty” from the mouth of any politician with suspicion. It was in that spirit that I wrote the character of Antonio de Juvita.

As for political change, yes, I am an optimist and still believe that works of prose and poetry can be an effective path for political change, insofar as it changes the predisposed reader. But I’d say music is a better medium for affecting change, because it’s immediately accessible and can carry a distilled message.

Like Caetano Veloso? Who else?

Chico Buarque. (Did you know he is my real father? I grew up wishing he were.) Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil. I love the traditional music of Pernambuco; maracatu, frevo, côco, ciranda. Lately I’ve been enjoying a lot of the younger female singers, Céu, Cibelle, Renata Rosa, Ana Paula da Silva.

Let’s chat more about Antonio. The story foreshadows Brazil’s evolution into a first world economy. Does the past have to be discarded in the name of progress? During his campaign, Antonio cheers “Out with the old!” Ironically, his family’s fortune comes from liquor recipes from the “Old World.” His mother disapproves of his lack of respect for his elders. How do you see the struggle between growth and tradition?

This is a very complicated issue, but two things stand out to me: economic growth has eased the suffering of many in Brazil, and that has to be applauded. At the same time, the commercialization of a culture brings its own set of problems, including the loss of authenticity of traditions and serious threats to the country’s environmental health.  Traffic in Recife, a byproduct of growth, is an absolute nightmare!

Change seems inevitable. Your stories preserve the culture, while the humor makes the struggle more digestible and accessible. What other writers influence your work?

Lately, I’ve been enjoying the work of J.M. Coetzee. He is fearless in his explorations of the dark, even monstrous, chambers of the self, the “rictus of the imagination,” to borrow one of his phrases from The Master of Petersburg. I admire him immensely for that, even though that very courage causes me to cringe my way through many of his passages.

I loved Coetzee’s Disgrace. His portrait of misery in post-apartheid South Africa was painful and important.

It’s so true. Also, [when I was] an impressionable young writer, Paul Bowles inspired me for many of the same reasons. I love Juan Rulfo’s stories, Clarice Lispector’s. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories were a big influence early on. So was the poetry of Octavio Paz, Florbela Espanca, Elisa Lucinda.

The collection has magic, too. One can see the influence of Marquez. The surreal isn’t even questioned. Of course a fish can miraculously appear in your toilet and then change the course of most of the town. Of course a priest can become smitten with a river spirit.  Was it a leap to write the bizarre in such a real way? Or has the mystery and superstitions of Brazil always infused your stories?

It wasn’t a leap at all. For a huge segment of society, the supernatural is commonly employed in the interpretation of daily occurrences.  Christianity, with its focus on faith and miracles, has played a significant role in this familiarity with the surreal. The nightwatchman of the building in which I lived as a child often told me biblical stories. He was a subversive proselytizer, no doubt, but I didn’t even realize they were biblical stories until much later. It didn’t matter, the man was a natural storyteller, and his unwavering belief in the stories he told, coupled with the deadpan delivery style that did not distinguish the supernatural from the mundane, left little room for doubt or questioning. The stories stuck. His tales of the apocalypse terrified me then.

A lot of what would be considered bizarre in the U.S. is simply accepted by the Brazilian majority. Many routinely blame illnesses on evil looks from a stranger. Here’s a little anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon: recently a close friend, a musician, a college graduate — and I add this because there are those who insist these “superstitions” only exist among the uneducated masses – came down with a cold after a performance. Without hesitation, she blamed it on a particular member of the audience, specifically, his or her olho gordo, fat eye, also known as the evil eye. Fortunately, she knew how to prevent future attacks and was able to purchase the correct amulet (a figa) at any one of a dozen stands in the market that very day.

That reminds me of my students who gave me crystals for every holiday. They were terrified of my vulnerability.

Yes, you need a crystal figa. I’ll get you one next time I visit Recife’s Mercado de São José.

Perfect! We all need protection from the evil eye.

Can we chat about structure? Almost every story is revealed in the first few paragraphs. You seem to subscribe to Vonnegut’s theory that a story should begin as close to the ending as possible. We’re told the fish will change Otalia’s life immediately in “Bela Lua”; Valquira says she’ll never leave music for a man; Padre claims you can’t tempt fate; Antonio will join the National Armed Forces. Yet we don’t know how the conflicts will actually be resolved. And the conflicts still seem fresh as they twist and turn. How do you see the structure of the story contributing to the storytelling?

Many of my stories are structured that way because often all I know at first is the beginning circumstance of a character, the ending circumstance, and how the character is ultimately affected by whatever happens. The path that takes me from one point to another is usually a mystery that reveals itself incrementally in the act of the writing. It takes time to know a character, to separate him or her from the writer. That promise of intimacy through time is what attracts me to the novel form.  But to answer your question, structure allows for an organized telling of a story. Sometimes I think I have the best structure and it’s not until the end that I realize the story would be better told if I move things around.

I’m wondering about process. How far into the writing of each story do you [figure out] what it’s about?

At the outset, I’m aware of at least one dimension of what a story is about, even if it’s the most superficial one – say, a relationship between a mother and daughter. The deeper layers tend to reveal themselves much later, as the characters develop.

Did these stories come out whole or was revision a major factor?

Revision is always a major factor for me. There are infinite ways to write the same story; I would consider myself very fortunate to choose the best one first. Are there writers out there whose stories come out whole?  Who are these creatures?

I don’t know them either. Only rumors. I definitely wouldn’t want to interview them.

It may be awkward and a bit spooky; you may need to employ the services of an exorcist when you’re finished.


I’ll have my crystal figa to keep me safe. And speaking of safety, many of your stories begin with a detailed introduction of the setting. The reader is firmly planted on comfortable ground before the plot begins. Not just the name of the town but the region, its history, its role in modern development, its pride, etc. What role does setting have in the story telling itself?

Immediacy.  If I’m going to write about a place, real or imagined, I have to make it as inhabitable as possible and, for my own sake, do it as early on as possible. Firmness in place helps me find my way through the intricate pathways of a story. The characters demand it; if the setting is not detailed enough, they cross their arms and roll their eyes at me as if to say, “Are you kidding? What are we supposed to do with this?”

You are a hard woman to find on the Internet. Is that intentional? It seems such a race in the literary world these days to “market” and “brand” an author. Are you avoiding the limelight or just focused on the writing?

I find marketing my own writing embarrassing. My natural inclination is to avoid it. For me, ultimate success means having the ability to decline any interviews, readings, public signings, without a second thought to its impact on book sales or career. I’m not intentionally hiding, but I am not making an effort to be found either.

What are you writing now?

I’m working on a novel that explores the enormous universe of the religious and the ritualistic in Brazil. In a sense, it’s a coming-of-age story, where the protagonist is forced to negotiate the influences of Christianity and Candomblé, personified in her paternal and maternal grandmothers.

I can’t wait to read it. I saw a Candomblé ceremony in Salvador and it was intoxicating. Touristy and probably inauthentic but intoxicating nonetheless.

I, too, had the good fortune of witnessing a ceremony in Recife. Luckily for me, I was the closest thing to a tourist in the place. It was beautiful, complex, edifying. I grew up with so many prejudices against Candomblé and its practitioners; it’s been an immense joy to dispel these prejudices and learn about a culture that is so essential to Brazilian identity.



Candomblé ceremony, photo credit Luana Monteiro

A writer balances many roles — you happen to be a mother, too. In the interview at the back of Bela Lua, you said you meditate and write every morning. How do you find your process evolving now?

Funny you should ask! As I’m sure you can imagine, I’ve been too sleep-deprived to keep up my meditation routine. I tend to fall asleep the minute I sit up and close my eyes. My daughter is almost two; it took a year to work out a sustainable writing routine. Meditation will come next.

Um passo de cada vez, sim? [One step at a time, yes?] Muito obrigada, Luana.

Yes, um passo de cada vez. Maybe nirvana will visit me while I sleep, like a thief in the night. Is it too much to ask?



---

Further Links and Resources

• Watch a video of “Writers in the Round: Latino Voices,” an event featuring three Wisconsin Latino writers including Luana Monteiro.
• Read about Granta’s selection of “The Best Young Brazilian Novelists” and the issues to be published in Portuguese in July 2012 and in English in Fall 2012.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/an-interview-with-luana-monteiro/feed 2 http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/surfers-and-cowboys-an-interview-with-robert-garner-mcbrearty http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/surfers-and-cowboys-an-interview-with-robert-garner-mcbrearty#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:00:43 +0000 Steven Wingate http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=34173 Robert Garner McBrearty is a quiet guy. He doesn’t walk into a room glad-handing and trying to work the crowd, and you’re not likely to find him tracking visitors to his website via Google Analytics. He’s more like a person you find on a back porch at a hectic party and sit down with, only to learn that he’s earned quite a few accolades that louder writers would crow about.

I know this because I experienced it firsthand, working with McBrearty at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he has taught fiction, creative nonfiction, and composition for the better part of two decades. I don’t know how many times we ran into each other before I knew that he had a short story collection out (A Night at the Y, originally published by John Daniel & Company , or that he had an MFA in creative writing from the storied Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, or that he had won a Pushcart Prize, or that he had received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Like I said, a quiet guy. Fortunately I got to know him a bit, and heard early on about his second collection (Episode, from Pocol Press), and his selection for the 2007 Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award. Since he doesn’t crow about himself, I’ll refrain from crowing too much more about him. Suffice it to say that he has enviable amounts of perseverance as a fiction writer and a new collection out, Let the Birds Drink in Peace, from Conundrum Press in Denver.

---

Interview:

Steven Wingate: You’re one of those writers who seems particularly dedicated to the short story. Have you tried the “dark side”—novels—and if so, can you delineate your feelings toward both mediums?

Robert Garner McBrearty: I have indeed tried the novel and will continue to do so, though I do feel most at home in the short story form.  I think I’m not all that bad at novels—I’ve had three unpublished novels represented by literary agencies, and way back in 1992, I had one novel that passed through several editorial approvals before being turned down by the senior editor at Houghton-Mifflin. That was sort of discouraging. One week I was riding high with anticipation of a nice advance, and the next week I was working in a warehouse. Just a few years ago, I had another close call with another major publisher. I think, though, I’ve never gotten any of my novels completely right. They had some good writing in them—maybe some of my best—and in fact I’ve raided sections over the years and used them in short stories, but I think there’s always been some flaw, perhaps structural, perhaps a need to explore more deeply when I felt like cutting away. The short story provides a fairly clear path, once the idea sets in, so it’s easier to get from start to finish without making too many wrong turns, and if one does make a wrong turn it’s easier to get back on track.



I do have a few other thoughts about it. Raymond Carver was asked once why he wrote the short story and not the novel and he said something along the lines of he wouldn’t mind writing a novel but the short story had fit in more with the rest of his life. I feel like that a bit. I know my own level of hardship was substantially less than Carver’s, but my early years always felt kind of chaotic: bad jobs, moving around, and it was hard to sustain larger works. And then the kids came along and there was a lot of distraction there, so somehow the short story always seemed more doable. Now I’m older and the kids are grown and time seems to be opening up more, so who knows?

I think the short story (I think of Cheever and Hemingway and Carver and Tobias Wolff and Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro and Donald Barthelme and Barry Hannah and Borges and a host of other great writers) is a wonderful part of our literature. I wish we talked about short stories and short story writers more (obviously, as a short story writer I would be inclined to desire this!). People often talk about what great novel they’ve read—no jealousy here—but too infrequently someone says, “Hey, I just read this wonderful short story in…”

I guess I’m drawn to short stories, too, because I can flip from one idea to another fairly quickly.  With novels, a certain level of boredom and confusion and despair always set in. If I screw up a short story, I can move on. Screw up a novel and there goes years of work. Well, not entirely. You learn something from the experience, but it’s rewarding to actually see something in print. If I go through a long period without seeing something of mine in print, the despair sets in. I spend a fair amount of energy warding off despair and the short story gives me more opportunity to ward it off. I couldn’t just write novels and wait years between publication, if they ever got published.

You’re a Western guy through and through—raised in west Texas and a longtime Coloradan—and we did an AWP panel about how writers based in the West deal with the macro-mythos of the West. How is the whole West thing going for you now, especially with the West becoming so homogenous with the rest of the country?

Well, let’s make that south Texas. I grew up in the fifties and sixties as a suburban kid in a large city, San Antonio, so I spent a lot more time riding my bike than riding a horse. In high school, there were “surfers” (who hadn’t quite earned the right to be “hippies”) and “cowboys.” I was a “surfer” by virtue of my longish hair, though I have only been on a surfboard once in my life—a not entirely satisfying experience, though I did have a brief moment of glorious gliding along.

I think, though, that distinction between “surfers” and “cowboys” reflects on the sense of duality I always felt. We were in a new subdivision of modest ranch-style homes, but on the edges of the neighborhood, there was still open land, with cactus and mesquite trees, and outlying houses with sprawling yards where people kept horses. One always knew that rattlesnakes were not far off. I don’t know how frequently it actually happened, but there was always this sense that there were neighborhood fathers cleaving rattlesnakes with hoes.

One had a sense that the frontier was not far off, both in place and time. My mother’s side of the family, especially, came from ranching roots (small ranches, not the Ponderosa), but I grew up with stories of bandits riding through, battles between the settlers and the Comanche, and of course, the Alamo loomed in my consciousness. So in a way, I was a typical suburban kid riding on a bike, but envisioning riding the prairie. And of course so many T.V. shows and movies of that time built onto the western mythos, and maybe one wanted to claim a little piece of that, the way when the home football team wins, “we” win. So, it’s like, hey, I’m in Texas so there’s a little piece of John Wayne in the Alamo in me. And then later in life one realizes how far one is away from living the myth and one plays off that a bit, so there’s some comic potential there, too.

When I write, I don’t particularly set out to be Western or not-Western. But I consider my roots, how I grew up, and those stories of my upbringing and the mythos of the Western frontier float around in my mind so they are part of who I am, and I allow my subconscious to lead me here or there. Here in Boulder County, I can be walking on a beautiful trail within minutes of leaving my house, and one doesn’t have to be a great adventurer to experience the big sky. Had I grown up in the East, in New York, say, I think I would be a very different writer than I am. I allow the “West” to show up as it shows up. I think it’s similar to the way I approach Catholicism in my writing. I don’t set out to be either a Catholic or non-Catholic writer. The background shows up as in “Hello Be Thy Name.”

In Let the Birds Drink in Peace there’s also a strain of micro-mythologizing: people viewing their lives in heroic terms. We see it in “The Helmeted Man,” “Acting Lessons,” and “The Edge He Carries.” What draws you to them?

Well, at the risk of sounding a bit pathological, I think it may stem from my own sense of self-aggrandizement. But, wait, isn’t that what we fiction writers do? Don’t we write fiction instead of memoir because we want to make the experience somewhat different, maybe larger, than it actually was? So I think as a kid, even, I was always sort of playing “hero” in my mind. Later in life, I acted and I also became a terrific liar. Though most of my lies were really more “bullshit” where I wanted people to figure out somewhere along the way that I was making it up. The reality was kind of boring, so why not tell the tall tale? I like the conflicted hero, the one who has doubts about his own heroism. He keeps replaying it in his mind: was he really brave or just lucky? Didn’t he almost not do the brave action that he did? And what about all the times he didn’t do the brave action at all, but took a pass? As they replay it in their minds, they become less and less sure about their own bravery.

I do look for those moments that stand out in one’s life. I’m talking about the regular person who isn’t exposed to danger on a daily basis, unless of course we view all of life as dangerous, which it actually is if you think too hard about it. But soldiers, say, are exposed to danger in a different sort of way, or activists in despotic countries. The average person goes about his or her daily life and there are only so many times those big moments come, when one can act or not act. I’ve had some times when I didn’t act and those times haunt me, and a few times where I did act—and those times haunt me too. At first there is a desire to pat oneself on the back, but then later the self-doubt sets in.

At any rate, though, I think those moments can make for good fiction. I have an eye toward the dramatic. I like something to happen. In “The Acting Class” the big event actually occurs as a lie/story that the narrator is telling, but I hope the story within a story still has some of that transporting effect that drama has.

Many of your characters are what used to be called “ne’er-do-wells”: people who don’t have much of a shot to succeed, and who frequently berate themselves for not having lived the life they might have. I also see lots of menial labor here: dishwashers, janitors, etc. Why is this one of your territories?

In some ways, my most formative years as a writer were in the years after I got out of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I graduated from there in 1981, when I was twenty-six. I had an M.F.A. and no desire whatsoever to teach anything to anybody. I spent about five years just working odd jobs. Dishwashing was a big one. I’d done it in college and I was good at it. I had the best hands in the game. I don’t know if it’s still like this, but back then if you had dishwashing skills and an M.F.A, you were in. You were highly sought after… There was one night at a fancy French restaurant where the owner said to me, “You have a Masters degree and you’re washing dishes? You must really be stupid.” I think I was. I was stupid at making money. Other bad jobs ensued. I’m grateful for that time. It’s given me an affinity for people working the menial jobs. I’m very polite to waiters and waitresses or any kind of service personnel. I’m always an inch from getting up at the table and saying, “Hey, I’d better go see if they need help in the kitchen.” I was batting out my stories, working crappy jobs, married by then. I remember my wife (of almost thirty years now) calling home when we were engaged and how thrilled her parents were to hear her future spouse was a dishwasher!

After about five years of that kind of work, though, I was drained. That work experience was sort of mythical, too. I never really fit it, I was never really one of the guys. I was an outsider there, too. I answered an ad for a small school in Berkeley. By then I had a Pushcart Prize (“The Dishwasher,” what else?) and a few other publications and the director there, the poet Philip Brady who went on to become a good friend, liked me and hired me to teach composition, and it beat washing dishes or working in a warehouse.

For years, though, I would often have some crappy job to accompany my part-time teaching, so I guess there was always a feeling like “success” was something I wasn’t quite experiencing, and I guess that shows up in many of the characters I create…I also have a way, I suppose, where the “boss,” the guy who is more successful, is sort of the bad guy as in “Houston, 1984.” I don’t really mean this as some sort of class warfare statement, but it’s often been my own experience that the guy in charge is something of a prick. So I have a lot more affinity for the underling.

What I hope comes through, though, is that the characters aren’t beaten. Beaten at, certainly, but not beaten.

Colonel William B Travis, commander of the Alamo, appears in “Colonel Travis’ Lament” and in “Alamo Dreams.” He’s not-quite mythic; he’s part of the action, but not central to it. Why are you drawn to him as a character, and is your answer related to your curiosity toward the West, myth-making, and ne’er do wells?




I think that’s one of my more complex stories. First off, it should clearly be read as speculative fiction, even absurdist at times, and is not meant as a reflection on the real-life figures, for whom I have great respect. Still, I could not have written that story without having some obsession with the real life Alamo. I was interested in so many aspects of the story. One was in fact that Travis wrote some very dramatic letters during the siege, calls for help, with the letters increasingly becoming brooding as the calls for help went unanswered. In my story though, one can see that he’s having sort of a great time as he’s writing, really getting into his own mythology about glory and honor and his place in history. So I identified with Travis as a writer, and I thought about what if he was really getting into the writing, that this was the best writing of his life so the writing was kind of really energizing him even though this siege was going on. At the same time, though, the horror draws nearer.

The ne’er-do-wells does fit in here because many of the people of that time came to Texas with past misfortunes weighing on them. Travis’s marriage had fallen apart, Crockett had lost his election in Washington. They were looking for rebirth, new opportunity, redemption. Even in his own time, Crockett was mythologized, his backwoods warrior image blown up way beyond reality.

I show Travis and Crockett as realizing they’ve gotten themselves into a desperate situation, trapped by their own mythology. The situation’s gone too far. What good is being glorified by history if one is about to die? I was also interested in the relationship between leaders and followers, as it applies in many situations, even beyond the military. The little guys, the foot soldiers, get caught up and used by the grandiose ambitions of their leaders. I think of people like Custer here, too, not a whole lot of concern for the men he led to doom.  In this case, Travis does care—but it’s too late.

In “Houston 1984” you play with the detective genre in an interesting way—your character actually is a private investigator, so his search isn’t a metaphor for some broader search. It’s the meat and potatoes of your character’s life, which is in no way mythologized at all. What’s going on for you in this story?

Glad you asked. The “1984” plays off Orwell. The story is set before we had as sophisticated spying devices as we have today, but the Boss has a vision of what’s to come when, “we can tap a button and zoom in on any bedroom we want to.” So part of the story is about the loss of our personal privacy and how destructive that can be. As a detective that’s what one does: invade the privacy of someone. In this case, the detective realizes it’s wrong. He’s sympathetic towards the subject of his investigation, and at the end he suspects his actions, his report, has led to a woman’s death. I also wanted to make the detective sort of a regular person—he’s worried about money, he’s got a brother he needs to take care of, and Houston itself is a brooding, violent place, so again there’s that sense of living in a world of siege. One other part, I think, is important. The Boss is also taking about a coming time when the old moral order will be gone, replaced by something else, “…the real scruples. The ones that come when the old scruples have passed away.” But of course the new scruples are pretty suspect themselves. It’s a world, again sort of Orwellian, where bad is good and good is bad, a world where any action can be justified or maybe not even need to be justified because all is okay. In the end, the detective responds with nausea, literally. Nausea at what’s he’s allowed himself to be drawn into, nausea at the situation, nausea at what he’s done.

You’ve been a small-press guy throughout your career, and Birds has just been published by the small, relatively new Conundrum Press in Denver. How is this going for you, and how has your attitude toward the press/author relationship changed for you over the years?

Well, to be honest, I would have no objections to a nice fat check from a major publisher.

But first off, let me just say what a great experience it’s been working with Conundrum Press. I met my future publisher, Caleb Seeling, at the Writing the Rockies Conference at Western State College in Gunnison. I handed him copies of my first two books, A Night at the Y, and Episode, and didn’t think too much of it after that. I didn’t make any sort of a pitch or anything: I just said, more or less, hey, hope you enjoy these. Then a couple of weeks later, he called and said he really liked my writing and wanted to do a book. At first we talked about doing a reprint of A Night at the Y, which had gone out of print. But as we talked more, we realized we wanted to do something new as well.  So this is sort of a hybrid. It brings back three of my golden oldies from A Night at the Y (hope you don’t mind my calling them “golden oldies,” sort of a little more of my own self-mythologizing), and ten new ones.

But what really comes to mind with this book is personal relationships. I have sat down with Caleb and with senior editor Sonya Unrein and had good conversations about Birds, and also about possible future books. It actually makes me want to write more, as Conundrum is interested in my overall career. It’s a new press, of course, or under new ownership anyway, and I have the first new book out of the blocks, so our fates seem somewhat entwined. I’m certainly rooting for the press, and I know the press is rooting for me.

In terms of small presses, in general, I have to say Hats Off! I never would have survived, emotionally, without them. I was working as a dishwasher when I got the call from Rie Fortenberry from Mississippi Review, speaking some of the most wonderful words I have ever heard: “Robert, this is Rie Fortenberry calling from the Mississippi Review, and I wanted to tell you that your story ‘The Dishwasher’ is going to be reprinted in The Pushcart Prize.” My hearing sort of went out after that, and for a few days I was convinced that someone was playing a joke on me. But being a dishwasher who has a story about being a dishwasher appearing in the Pushcart Prize anthology somehow makes one scrub the dishes with a cheerier attitude. There were other experiences like that, times of gloom, when some acceptance from a literary magazine would come along that kept me going. Those kinds of affirmations were incredibly sustaining. I also appreciate it when an editor takes a second or a third story, as with North American Review , Mississippi Revie w, Missouri Review, and Green Hills Literary Lantern.

So, of course, not much money in small press publishing, usually not much glory, but mostly I just say “thank God” for the small presses. Brave, noble enterprises! I hope to be sending stories to them for many years to come.

---

Further Links and Resources



• Read excerpts from Episode and other works over on McBrearty’s website.
• Check out this brilliant short short published in Narrative .
• You can find an excerpt from “The Dishwasher” along with other inspiring pieces to get you writing, in Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/surfers-and-cowboys-an-interview-with-robert-garner-mcbrearty/feed 2