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In her recent interview with Nadelson, Contributor Julie Judkins speaks with the author about the early influence of Bob Dylan on his literary life, how he balances teaching and writing, why poetry matters to his work, and more. They also discuss the role of place in his fiction. In particular, why nearly all of his stories are set in his native New Jersey, despite the fact that he’s lived in Oregon since 1996. In response, Nadelson says:

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.

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

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.

Finding these unlikely correlations between worlds, Mehta blurs cultural distinctions in the hyphenated Asian-American identity. In “Ten Thousand Years,” he sees Hindu lore in a Western relationship. The narrator recalls a poem in which Kali straddles the corpse of Lord Shiva, aligning the act with his lover’s infidelity: “Kali was fierce—a string of severed heads around her neck, her blood-stained tongue exposed, machete drawn as she lowered herself upon Shiva’s dead, but erect, penis.” The protagonist likens that image to “[his lover] and Miss Andhra Pradesh taking turns practicing corpse pose in the sand.”

Mehta’s simple yet striking imagery becomes most effective in “The Cure” and “What We Mean.” Situated in the middle of the book, the stories provide brief repose from Mehta’s predominantly character-driven works. Instead, Mehta uses these pieces to showcase his mastery of language. “What We Mean” considers the varied manifestations of meaning: “When… dogs bark, they are trying to communicate something vital. Someone is trapped in a burning house… Someone is holding onto a branch in a fast-flowing river heading for a waterfall, the branch about to break.” Though they lack the driving plot of the surrounding stories, these pieces command reader attention through spare, evocative language.

Ultimately, Quarantine becomes less a meditation on sexuality and race and more an investigation of human connections. While the collection does not shy from sex, it also marvels at the restorative effects of platonic touch. In “Ten Thousand Years,” the narrator’s boyfriend, Thomas, forms a deeper connection with his grandmother than the grandson ever had. In Thomas’s touch, the elderly woman finds a tenderness her grandson could no longer give. She dozes to his “hand on her forehead, gently stroking it until she [falls] asleep.” Similarly, “A Better Life” explores the sympathies between a college graduate and the wife of his host family. Mehta’s gentle, emotional prose culminates in one of the collection’s most tender scenes when, wordlessly, Lala offers Sanj the only comfort she can through her embrace.

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I have, after all, been waiting for it since 2004. That was when I first came across Orozco’s short fiction in Harper’s Magazine. I was so stunned and moved and entertained that I hustled across the library to a computer, where I found another story of his in the archives of Zoetrope: All-Story. It was electric, mesmerizing. A couple years later I found another one anthologized in a text I was using to teach a fiction-writing course, then a couple years later a new one in a Best American anthology. Each time I was dazzled, and I searched for his book, eager to read more. But there was no book. Not until now.

Some fans have been waiting even longer. In a recent interview in Poets & Writers, Orozco, fifty-three, says that when his eponymous “Orientation” was selected for Best American Short Stories 1995, it raised a din from agents and publishers eager to see more of his work. The only problem? “There wasn’t anything else,” he says. It was his first published story.

Even so, it elicited the same response from author Dan Chaon: “I became a fan of Daniel Orozco when I first read the story ‘Orientation’ back in the 1990s. I’ve been waiting eagerly for this collection ever since, and I’m so grateful to have it in my hands at last.” That’s a blurb from the dust jacket, but this is one of those rare books that lives up to its blurbs, that makes the effusive praise there seem accurate and reasonable.

The stories are, first of all, hilarious. The writing is playful, full of satire and absurdity and insight. An employee at a temp agency is awarded “the assurance of permanent temporary employment.” When an earthquake hits, “The chimps on Monkey Island go ape-shit.” An office worker is instructed, “You are allowed to heat food in the microwave oven. You are not, however, allowed to cook food in the microwave oven.” When two officers arrest a man who has lost an arm, they “ponder a cop koan: How do you cuff a one-armed man?”

Even the forms of some stories emphasize the absurd. “Officers Weep,” comes in the form of a police blotter, delivered with corresponding objectivity, the point of view remaining impersonal even as the personal lives of the officers begin to emerge—their thoughts, their emotions, their burgeoning love for each other. They sass complainants, make bad jokes, flirt awkwardly, and the impersonal nature of the blotter, along with Orozco’s precision, makes it all very funny:

3600 Block, Sunnyside Drive. Vandalism. Handball courts in Phoenix Park defaced. Spray-paint graffiti depicts intimate congress between a male and a female, a panoramic mural of heterosexual coupling that spans the entire length of the courts’ front wall, its every detail rendered with a high degree of clinical accuracy. Officers gape. Minutes pass in slack-jawed silence, until officer [Shield #647] ascertains incipient boner. Officer horrified, desperately reroutes train of thought, briskly repositions his baton. Second officer [Shield #325] takes down Scene Report, feigns unawareness of her partner’s tumescent plight, ponders the small blessings of womanhood. Vandalism reported to Parks & Rec Maintenance.

But Orozco’s intention isn’t just to get us laughing at these characters. He adds emotional stakes by revealing the man’s “cautious and lonely life” and by letting us know that the woman feels “for the first time in a long while, yearned for, desired.” He adds gestures that show their happiness and connection—as they are beating back demonstrators, for example, they watch each other with admiration, smile, wave, stick out their tongues. Orozco also adds descriptions that resonate with their interior states, such as “the radio crackling like a comfy fire” while they park, watching the ocean. After consummation, they “watch a ball of sunlight flare up at earth’s edge like a direct hit,” and then “assess scene, ascertain world to be beautiful.”

But a complication is introduced just before this, when the officers take off their rings, suggesting this is something other than an innocent romp. The imagery grows more ominous—“a gash in the bruise-colored sky bleeds yellow”—and afterward the story darkens. They respond to a domestic disturbance, finding everything quiet except for “the robust glissandos of a chain saw.” The type of call—domestic disturbance—develops the complication. It calls forth associations with both the domesticity represented by their rings and the disturbances they have made—or responded to—with their liaison. The nature of the call, its insinuation of horrific violence, gives us a sense of the damage such disturbances can create. It echoes what these two officers might be facing in their own homes, or what they might face in the future if they build a home with each other. It also tests the strength of their connection. Will they risk an ultimate sacrifice in support of each other? It’s this sort of depth and complexity and loss that make these stories more than simple comedies.

In many stories, characters are confronted with opportunities for connection and thereby forced to weigh the pain of loneliness against, worse, the pain of alienation. In a vignette from “Hunger Tales,” for example, a woman distracts herself from her loneliness by shopping for cookies at a sprawling, anonymous supermarket. One night she finds a woman like her in the cookie aisle. She longs for connection, but rather than making one here, she is horrified to have her loneliness exposed: “Nobody, she felt, needed to know that much about her.” In another vignette, a man is housebound by his obesity, but like the woman, he hates the presence of others more than he hates his isolation. It gives him the same sense of overexposure and shame to have firemen rescue him when he beaches himself on the floor, to have news crews wrestle him into a suit for interviews, to have a church group “cook his meals and wipe his ass and offer the only companionship he had.” In the end, he dreams of escaping all human contact, a wish that seems both reasonable and terrible.

Likewise, in “I Run Every Day,” a shy and reclusive warehouse worker takes up running, and it changes him: “When I look in the mirror now, I see somebody who doesn’t disgust me.” It’s no coincidence that the activity he takes up—running—is a solitary one, and this affects his view of the world: “You get where you are by yourself. There’s no regret in that. That’s just the way it is.” But regret is exactly the subtext this passage creates with its defensiveness and resignation. And yet the greater distress for this character is the presence of others. When a new worker invites him to lift weights, initiating him into a group of friends, the protagonist retreats to a treadmill. Later, when he realizes he has let a secret slip, and the other warehouse workers tease him, he feels the same alienation as the cookie woman and the obese man: “I should have known what to expect from people. I should have known better.” And like them, he chooses isolation over companionship in the story’s chilling ending.

In many stories, the objective nature of the form enhances this conflict. The point of view is often distant and impersonal, even as the action dives into deeply personal arenas. No story demonstrates this better than “Orientation,” which takes the form of a monologue, a supervisor introducing a new employee to the building: “Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That’s my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle.” He goes on to describe telephone policy, forms processing, kitchenette protocol. Like in “Officers Weep,” the form emphasizes regulation and procedure, uniformity and bureaucracy, and it gives Orozco the chance to lampoon those things. The supervisor explains, for example, that breaks are a privilege that can be revoked, but that lunch is a right. “If you abuse the lunch policy, our hands will be tied and we will be forced to look the other way. We will not enjoy that.”

But again, the story goes much deeper than simple satire. In the course of these impersonal introductions, the supervisor begins to drift into personal territory, describing the lives of other workers:

The men’s room is over there. The women’s room is over there. John LaFountaine, who sits over there, uses the women’s room occasionally. He says it is accidental. We know better, but we let it pass. John LaFountaine is harmless, his forays into the forbidden territory of the women’s room simply a benign thrill, a faint blip on the dull, flat line of his life.

The results are funny, but they’re also disturbing, because the detachment of the narrator highlights the separation that office bureaucracy imposes on its workers. The secrets become darker and more personal—love circles, sexual humiliation, stigmata, even a serial killer—and they are juxtaposed with explanations of the Mr. Coffee and the supplies cabinet, creating a strange combination of intimacy and detachment. Just after the narrator describes the hauntings performed by Barry Hacker’s dead wife and unborn child, for example, he says, “We have four Barrys in this office. Isn’t that a coincidence?”

One woman, Gwendolyn Stitch, decorates her cubicle with penguins, organizes social functions, offers professional and emotional support, but none of it breaks her isolation, or the bleak objectivity of the narrator:

Because her door is always open, she hides and cries in a stall in the women’s room. John LaFountaine—who, enthralled when a woman enters, sits quietly in his stall with his knees to his chest—John LaFountaine has heard her vomiting in there. We have come upon Gwendolyn Stitch huddled in the stairwell, shivering in the updraft, sipping a Diet Mr. Pibb and hugging her knees. She does not let any of this interfere with her work. If it interfered with her work, she might have to be let go.

In other words, the personal does not matter; only the work output does. Here are these people in close proximity, spending their time together, knowing the private details of one another’s lives and yet ignoring them, and thereby ignoring each other, retaining their isolation even within a crush of human need and longing. For them, personal intimacy creates separation rather than connection—the more intimately the characters know each other, the greater their alienation.

Author photo courtesy U Idaho website

That theme runs through most of these stories, but each one bursts from the page fresh and invigorating and hilarious and heartbreaking. 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. Believe Anthony Doerr when he says, “Orozco can do anything [. . .] and I won’t be surprised when it becomes a cult classic.” Believe David Means when he says “‘Somoza’s Dream’ alone is worth the price of the ticket. But that’s not fair, because the same could be said of ‘Officers Weep,’ ‘Shakers,’ and every single story in this stunning piece of literary art.” Believe Julie Orringer when she says, “This may be Orozco’s first collection, but he’s nothing short of a master.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What I mean is, when I look for innovation in fiction I want fiction, real fiction. As I say to my students straight out: It’s all about the story, stupid.

Well, don’t tell that to Alissa Nutting. She’s got “story” written in ink on every page of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, her lively, well-imagined, and jaw-droppingly smart prize-winning debut. I’ve got my work cut out for me trying to describe what you’ll get out of this collection: imagine Donald Barthelme writing smart feminine narratives, Mary Gaitskill sans the kinky sex, or Margaret Atwood turning to dry, Colbert-style humor, and you may start to get an idea of what to expect.

The stories in the collection live up to their title: women and girls hold jobs that definitely qualify as unclean. One is the boiled dinner for an obscure cannibalistic club, another is a porn starlet reality show host for an episode featuring anal sex on the moon, another is a child-actress-from-hell’s “adult zombie slave” television show sidekick. Each story catapults the reader into the wicked world of Nutting’s witty imagination, from a hell in which every damned frequents the same small bar that serves only non-alcoholic beer, to one where celebrities and rich people agree to turn their bodies into host environments for endangered species.

Yet, in spite of the sometimes impressionistic, sometimes realist, sometimes naïve-painting-inspired settings, the characters remain painfully familiar: a sister attempting to save her paraplegic brother from terminal depression, a transsexual attempting to hide her past from her boyfriend and from KKK bigots, a daughter trying to reconcile to her abusive mother, women coming to terms with infertility or with fatal diseases—and girls and women just trying to connect emotionally to the people in their lives.

I would abstain from labeling Nutting’s collection “women’s fiction” if it didn’t treat so heavily on the grotesque importance assigned to a woman’s beauty, and on the paradoxical conflicts and stupidities that such unreasonable demands create.

In “Model’s Assistant” for example, a party nerd is granted access to an elite night-clubbing society through her improbable friendship with a supermodel. The protagonist confesses, “Since that night my life has changed in a myriad of ways. I’m still no one, unless I am with Garla, and then I become With Garla, a new and exciting identity that makes nearly everything possible, except being a model myself. And except being someone when I am not with Garla.”

The party nerd’s life improvement reflects in the leftover attention that she can scrape from the model’s groupie followers. And when that friendship is threatened, the odd, unintelligible language the supermodel speaks takes an ominous turn: “Put you in tiny coffin,” says the supermodel when “breaking up” with the assistant, a poignant and telling variation from her earlier catch-phrase, “Special coffin.” The fact that Garla speaks no English and can only utter catch phrases that don’t always make sense (”Vodka, you know?”) is of no concern to the beautiful people who worship her.

In “Porn Star,” “Ant Colony,” and “Bandleader’s Girlfriend” the situation is reversed: women are trapped by their beauty and sexual drive, and are reduced and victimized by evil surgeons, cold-blooded Idol-style audiences and shrewish sisters with terminal cancer whose jealousy grows to appalling proportions. The beautiful protagonists of these stories are only partially aware of the potential dangers of the envy they attract: “I was very used to people feeling like they were more important then me, but less beautiful,” says the heroine of “Ant Colony.” “I often felt that every transaction in my life somehow revolved around this premise.”

Similarly, in “Band Leader’s Girlfriend,” the flighty Claudia/Sorcerella has trouble shaking off an overbearing sister who makes it a habit to call her and hang up on her, or call her and shout. “I feel like I am some sort of hostage negotiator, except Sister is both the hostage and the captor,” ponders the overwhelmed narrator.

Alissa Nutting / photo from the author's website

Nutting is especially brilliant when revealing the dysfunctional layers of her characters’ otherwise glib and (mostly) carefree lives. The transsexual narrator in “She Man” reveals that a dog-murdering pimp is blackmailing her, this after a cheerful description of a perfectly ordinary and satisfying life as “queen of kitsch.” The relationship between the narrator of “Deliverywoman” and her online buddy, FluidTransfer69, echoes the usual she said/he said disconnection of casual cybersex partners that happens when one takes the other more seriously than the situation warrants. But this otherwise common scenario takes a turn for the morbid when the narrator reveals that her mother, convicted for murdering her father, was preserved cryogenically and her body is up for sale on a futuristic e-Bay style auction house.

Unclean Jobs harnesses this type of Jerry Springer drama to bring humor and postmodern insights to these action-packed short stories. You can spend the time chuckling as you turn the page, or you can ponder the prophetic vision of the near future that this collection delivers. Either way, reading Alissa Nutting’s fiction more than satisfies.

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Alissa Nutting - photo from the author's website

Each of the eight short stories depicts, in quick-witted prose, perspectives of new and old residents of this mixed community. Wingfield’s piecing together of the distinct voices of the citizens of Cleave Springs allows him to craft a larger and more varied narrative than if the author were limited to a handful of perspectives.

Image via author's website

For example, Wingfield implements both first- and third-person perspectives that each address a wide swath of topics, ranging from people dealing with such issues as learning disabilities, mental and physical illness, pregnancy, and obsession with the past. In “Lily Pad,” the first-person perspective shifts between a bright student working at the new coffee shop and a boy with Asperger’s syndrome, both of whom try to articulate how their class difference affects their lives. The reader needs this array of themes and characters in order to form a more complete picture of Cleave Springs and its population, one that illuminates how economic change affects individuals in different ways.

This multi-faceted approach also plays to Wingfield’s skill as a storyteller. The author has a wonderful ability to give characters engaging, distinct personalities and vivid histories in the space of only a few paragraphs. This brevity begins immediately in the collection’s first story. In “Precious,” a former Washington politician reflects on his wife’s approach to transition, observing that she “…built another bridge between the New Cleave Springs and Old Cleave Springs, between us and one of the lifelong denizens of the neighborhood.” With just a few short phrases, the reader already knows the actions of the speaker’s wife as she dedicates herself to reducing the tensions that come from economic disparity. Wingfield encourages us to think about how economic disparity should not imply discrimination; instead, we can learn from one another in order to help further a changing neighborhood. The speaker also speculates on this kind of America as a whole, contemplating that

America is a rich country growing poorer all the time in places. Cleave Springs was a real place, a place that rose early last century with the great railyard that spawned it and then declined as the railyard went quiet. A place that had tasted death and was waiting to be coaxed back to life.

Cleave Springs, then, reflects the changing American landscape. Wingfield applies much of modern-day American history as a whole to a small town. He provokes readers to expand their vision beyond these short stories and to really think about how American progress has damaged many previously burgeoning towns, such as the now-abandoned factory industry of Allentown, Pennsylvania, where the husks of the buildings still remain. The people living in Cleave Springs, as in real American towns, feel the ramifications of political turmoil and unrest as surely as they discover some sort of connection to the places they inhabit.

However, this book is not only about the families who have watched Cleave Springs change beneath their feet during their lifetimes. Newcomers to the town—in some cases families dealing with illness and death—also inhabit many of the short stories. In “Wonders of the World,” a wife battling MS tries to find meaning in an antique, mint condition Justice Lager beer can she discovers in her attic. She seeks out companionship with a can collector to escape from her marathon-runner husband’s financial debts, her inability to care for her child, and her own disease. Some of these families break apart through sudden death. “Heirlooms” describes the ordeal of a radio DJ widower and his fight to keep a dead honey locust tree, a reminder of his deceased wife, despite protests from the neighborhood association. When challenged, he recalls a time before economic prosperity changed the neighborhood, describing his wife and himself as “the first wave of pioneers” who know that “danger was just part of the Cleave Springs experience.”

He remembers in detail when “after dark, the pioneers holed up in their houses and yielded the streets to a large contingent of addicts and thugs. The right of way playground…functioned as an evening drug emporium.” The removal of the honey locust sparks a bond between himself and the previous owner of his arts and craft Sears home. Like many new homeowners who do not understand the history of the place they inhabit, once the narrator understands more about where he lives, he begins to appreciate the old inhabitants who have lived there for generations. We continue to see this resurgence of historical inquiry into old homes and neighborhoods, where people discover and even contact previous owners of their homes.

While some residents continue to dwell on the older days of Cleave Springs, others surge forward to gentrify the working-class neighborhood with specialty stores, cafes, and clean streets. Not only do some citizens wish to improve the neighborhood through progress, but some also seek to protect what others would destroy. The collection’s title story reflects Wingfield’s environmental interests in preserving the natural world, when we see brief flashes of wildness within supposed order. A boy from one of the working-class families lures neighborhood cats to feed a lone coyote living in the overgrown brush of the right of way. He tries to hide the last remaining coyote before the untamed weeds become a neatly manicured and paved path.

The boy leads a newcomer, a soon-to-be-mother from California, into the overgrown weeds of the neighborhood. While the woman’s husband remains wary of the boy, the woman trusts him as he guides her through the “strange geography” and “walls of vegetation” to show her the coyote, which disappears after the neighborhood association clears the right of way. Years later, the woman brings her children there to “lead them in a chorus of howls.” This story, in evoking the collection’s title, illuminates economic and social progress in a light that depicts the destruction of the natural plant life in old neighborhoods as removing an integral part of the community. In this new neighborhood, the original wildlife residents now have no right to public space, which we see in everyday news as black bears, moose, and coyotes stumble into suburbs and towns as they continue to be pushed out of their original habitat. Although a newcomer, the woman continues to remember the coyote and pays tribute to it, despite its absence.

Considering its timeframe and the historical events that intersect with the narratives of these stories, American rights and the freedoms of its citizens are a natural concern. In “Air Space,” two neighbors, watching the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon, find solace in each other after they hear an explosion that “curdled the air outside.” Just as political parties chose to support or dissociate themselves from the War on Terror, the two drift apart after disagreeing about the ways the U.S. government responds to the attacks. The woman moves to France in order to feel safer, while her lover remains in the States, convinced of the legitimacy of U.S. policies yet embittered by her departure.

Right of Way captures the ways politics influence our everyday lives and shows how Cleave Springs functions as a microcosm for America’s changing landscapes. In addressing political and social issues with a light touch, this collection does not feel like a sermon but a reminder to pay closer attention. Just like the mother who leads her children in a howl to commemorate the loss that always comes with a sense of progress, Wingfield reminds the reader of the ramifications of change, how it can bring people together and also push them apart.

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It was a special workshop because all twelve students in the class felt like we were part of Rash’s success. Here was this soft-spoken, kind teacher who read our stories with great interest, listened intently to our fumbling opinions about short fiction, and treated us like his writing equal, and all the while he was about to republish his first novel with a major publisher and finish writing his second novel, Saints at the River (2004). We all felt like if this could happen to our teacher, then it could—with hard work and dedication—happen to us.

We caught fire as writers that semester.

I, in particular, burned bright because Rash was the first writer I’d met from my home state of North Carolina. I said as much one afternoon while following him across campus to the faculty parking deck (my earnestness may have bordered on menacing in the early days of my writing life). Rash nodded like he understood what our shared statehood might mean to me and then reached into his car and pulled out his copy of My People’s Waltz, a collection of short stories by his good friend Dale Ray Phillips.

Haw River, NC via Flickr - ishmh_

Phillips grew up in Haw River, North Carolina and, like me, had attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the mid-nineties, not long after completing his MFA at the University of Arkansas, he started working as an instructor at Clemson University where he met Rash and George Singleton. Years later, I would interview Rash for the Southeast Review about their friendship. Rash said he’d never taken a creative writing class in college or graduate school and that his time with Phillips and Singleton was like a writing group, one where they would encourage each other to keep writing and do the best they could:

George was living about twenty miles away, but he would come over a lot. Dale, George, and I on Friday afternoons would go out together and talk literature… just being around each other made us all want to write more and better… They’re just great friendships. I think that’s the best thing. It was just kind of a nice dynamic. We all write differently. We would talk about what we were reading, more than what we were writing. We’d teach each other. Dale would mention maybe a short story I hadn’t read. George might the next time. I might mention something to them. It was a good time.¹

That afternoon in the parking deck Rash said if reading writers from North Carolina made me want to work harder then I ought to read one of our state’s best.

My People’s Waltz, published in 1999, is Dale Ray Phillips’s first and only book. The collection, a novel-in-stories, opens with an eight-year old boy, Richard, who stops speaking the summer his mother is institutionalized for a nervous breakdown. The remaining nine stories, narrated by Richard and spanning thirty-plus years, follow the events of his youth in North Carolina. The strained relationship between his traveling salesman father and his fragile mother shape the book—as do the birth of Richard’s son in Arkansas, his stint as a conman in Texas, and the withering of his marriage in a variety of Southern states. The collection culminates with its title story, “My People’s Waltz.” Richard visits his mother’s home in Chapel Hill. Now a middle-aged man with his son and estranged wife in tow, he comes to understand that “[he hails] from a stock of people who dance in their kitchens” and he does his “best cakewalk toward [his] loved ones in that room where [their] voices echoed, and then were gone.”

I’ve heard rumors from other writers—whenever I meet a writer who may have crossed paths with Dale Ray Phillips, I ask—that he owes a novel to his publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, based on the same characters featured in his story collection. Rash says he isn’t sure why his friend hasn’t published. Singleton, who taught my last fiction workshop at USC, mentioned offhand in class one afternoon when talking about writing five-hundred word sentences as a way to free yourself up to write that he had a friend, Dale Ray, who was paralyzed by perfectionism. He said he would write a sentence like, “The woman lay on the couch.” Then, he would quit writing until he was certain it was “lay” not “lie” instead of writing “reclined” and moving on. Singleton was quick to point out that his method, while difficult and slow, had resulted in his stories being published in the Atlantic, Harper’s, and GQ as well as being anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South.

I tend to believe Singleton is right about the perfectionism. A sampling of the collection’s opening sentences demonstrates the writer’s ambition as well as the care and attention paid to the language:

My grandfather kept his floozy in a silver Airstream above the bend in
the river where the dead crossed over.

All our domesticity has a perimeter of wildness, and when I was fourteen, mine was the woods which began where our neighborhood ended.

How do you begin to judge your father?

When I was thirty-five and freshly separated and still a stouthearted pilgrim to myself, I took a job on the Gulf Coast swindling people.

I first heard about the types of love in junior high school, when purse-lipped teachers herded the girls into the library and corralled the boys in the gymnasium so that experts could explain sex.

The stories themselves are no less highly-stylized, vibrant, and intense than his opening sentences. Yet there’s vulnerability in the storytelling that’s more endearing than the flash of language.

In the story, “Why I’m Talking,” the eight-year old Richard moves into his grandfather’s home along the Haw River while his mother recuperates from a nervous breakdown at an oceanside hospital. The river house isn’t the grandfather’s “real” residence—he’s a retired circuit judge who lives across from the courthouse in “a columned stone residence listed in the historical register”—but his hideaway, “a place not listed on any of the municipal maps” where he keeps his black mistress, Miss Minnie, and their interracial child, Sudie. Richard’s father convinces the grandfather that the boy can be trusted with the family secret because he’s recently quit talking. His muteness alarms Miss Minnie who “[administers] spells and potions to cure [him]” such as “necklaces of garlic, an impromptu exorcism in which [he] stared at a crucifix so long [he] feared [his] eyes had permanently crossed, several smelly poultices strapped snugly to [his] chest like life jackets, and baptism in everything from mail-order holy water to motor oil.”

Richard, though, has his own secret: his muteness is voluntary. He decided to quit speaking the day his “mother wore her bridal gown and talked nonstop to her reflection in the mirror” and while running the oven gas “instructed [him] to sit on her lap as she made hand shadows, the shapes in turn as fierce and friendly and unnamable as her craziness.” Richard believes his reasons for not talking “sound enough: whatever had abducted my mother might steal me if I let out too many words.” To prevent his silence from hindering his mother’s recovery, he writes her postcards and it’s in this way that “deception and protection would be forever linked for [him].”

The extent of that deception backfires when his mother escapes from the hospital and unearths her son’s whereabouts. Through a series of events too complicated to explain here, but prompted by the boy’s unwillingness to speak on the telephone, the grandfather becomes so agitated that his daughter is on the verge of discovering his secret second family that he succumbs to a heart attack in front of his grandson. The moments after the death are some of the most beautiful and horrific I’ve ever read:

As the last convulsions struck, he bit off a portion of his tongue. His eyes became as wide as things held under a magnifying glass, and I searched for my image in them as they clouded. Then I shut my grandfather’s eyes, because I didn’t want to see what they saw.

What do you do with your forefather’s tongue? I put that tip of tongue to my lips, stood in front of the living-room mirror, and made it waggle. When pulled away, it left a little moustache of blood. Here was a thing that had lived and loved and pronounced judgments—and it was mine. Then I weighted it with rocks fetched from my river-bottoming and bound the whole affair with cheesecloth meant to wrap fish heads and seasonings for catfish stew. I hurried it to the Haw and heaved in this strange offering, because I feared becoming fluent in the language it now spoke.

Phillips has the rare ability to place beautiful and haunting images in the most desperate and ugly of situations. The story, “The Woods at the Back of Our Houses,” ends after a party Richard’s father throws to celebrate the 1969 moon landing. Three boys—Richard, “an orphaned boy named William who had three testicles,” and “a stutterer [they] called Ba Ba Bobby”—gather around a drunken reveler in the woods named Mrs. Hans. All summer long, the boys have been climbing trees to watch her “waltz naked around her living room and stop to examine her beauty in the mantel mirror.” They take advantage of her drunkenness and “grope her and fondle her breasts” until she surprises them by saying, “We will now screw like dogs.” The boys take turns “grappling with love and other newfound feelings under a fat moon where men were walking. It’s strange, the way you learn to wear the weight of such moments.”

Phillips sets “At the Edge of the New World” in a neighborhood where “wife beating and noisy front-yard battles [are] part of [the characters’] world.” A man named Lamar strikes his wife so hard she loses an incisor. Afterwards, still in a rage, he finds his dog, Lucky, who “had a perpetual spot of mange on its flanks” and dunks him repeatedly in a barrel of old motor oil which “was thought to be a home remedy for the disease.” Upon release, the howling dog “as if in need of regaining its master’s good graces… [brings] a stick to Lamar, and they [play] fetch at first light, while down by the Haw River you [can] hear the mill generator’s high-pitched whine as it [struggles] to convert water into a substance as ethereal as electricity.” A teenaged Richard watching from his bedroom window convinces himself that “their sorrow would never be my own. Like most people, I actually believed I could escape where I came from.”

Sorrow catches up to Richard in the story, “When Love Gets Worn.” Back with his wife after “a bit of sordid business on the Gulf Coast” selling “fake trailer lot deeds to investors with souls more crooked than [his] own” in the story “What It Costs Travelers,” Richard finds himself living a “tattered lifestyle… in Texas.” His wife, Lisa, “has been petitioning him for an uncontested divorce” while he “[fattens his] adjunct lecturer’s wages by painting over the heel marks left by previous tenants” in the apartment complex she manages. Heartbroken and desperate, he finds himself spending evenings before class, “though [he has] sworn not to” in La Club Mexicana for “fortification before teaching.” In the type of place “a sensible person would avoid,” he buys a ten-dollar dance with a prostitute, “We slow dance, and she eases me into a darkened corner. When she massages my stiffness, I bury my face in her cleavage… I suckle greedily at the difference between this breast and Lisa’s… Of all the times that I have drunk here, I never thought I would become one of these men in this room.” In the shortest of waltzes, Richard transforms into the kind of man he loathes.

Not all of the stories’ images are devoid of hope and good feeling, though. In fact, Phillips’s writing is often at its finest when it transcends the sorrow and reaches for a moment of grace. This happens most often when characters are on the verge of trouble or the unknown and find themselves in need of trusting one another. In the story, “Corporal Love,” Richard dances around this feeling of risk by recounting all of his past relationships starting with his “first love [who] knocked out [his] front incisor so [he] could buy her a charm bracelet with the tooth fairy money” and ending with the woman he “would marry, Lisa, after she waltzed into [his] life.”
In one of the funnier moments of the collection, he claims he learned everything he needed to know about love and women from a local army recruiter hired to “[terrorize] adolescent audiences with the consequences of Onan’s sin (hairy palms and a deterioration of the thought process) and premarital sex (venereal diseases and Eternal Damnation).” Richard admits, “The diseases didn’t scare anyone; penicillin could cure anything, and besides, it took twenty or so years for the spirochetes to crawl up the urinary tract and infect the brain or spinal column… At age thirteen, a bed in a room where you were crazy seemed a fair price to pay for twenty years of unmitigated fornication.”

“Everything Quiet Like Church” finds Richard waiting outside his Arkansas cabin, unsure of what to do with himself, and having to trust a midwife and her blind sister to deliver his son. He recounts how in the months leading up to the delivery he’d confide to complete strangers that he was about to become a father, “Once [at a pizza place], a man thought I’d said that I had just become a father, and rounds were stood for all. That day, there seemed no better smell on earth than spicy sauces simmering and the odor of baking bread.” The story, “What We Are Up Against,” opens with, “My Father died obsessed with being remembered. His tombstone was a granite reproduction of Winged Victory engraved with Think of me as you pass by / As I am, soon will you lie.” Richard offers a eulogy of sorts for his father by recounting the last camping trip they took together with his son, Fisher.

It’s a boozy weekend spent camping on a lake with two floozies the father picked up in an airport bar that somehow finds its ending with the men acting irresponsibly. The father sits drunk at the helm of a rented motorboat with his grandson acting as skipper as they pull an even drunker Richard naked on water-skis across Crater Lake. Before turning in for the night, settling into the tent in “the warm spot between [two] sleeping generations, Richard finds himself wondering how his own son will remember him, “I felt humbled by that ache which even pharaohs knelt down before when they saw the capstone set into place, and they yielded to how we would remember them.” It’s in these moments—moments of uncertainty and misunderstanding—where we watch with great sorrow as the story’s characters fall again and again into bad decisions with the most elegant of intentions.

For me, the best moment in the story collection—the most full of grace—is the moment when all of the bad things to come are brewing on the horizon but haven’t yet managed to fully snag the family. Twelve-year old Richard in “What Men Love For” finds himself caring for his mother on the verge of another mental collapse while his dad is away selling medical equipment throughout North Carolina and Virginia. His father hopes for a promotion that will keep him “home two days a week, plus weekends.” The promotion inevitably falls through, pushing the mother over the edge, and his parents’ marriage into uncertainty. Father and son take a head-clearing motorcycle ride up into the mountains. After they have “gone as far it [is] possible to go and still turn back,” Richard clings to his father on the back of the motorcycle and puts all of his trust into him that he’ll somehow pull everybody out of this mess:

I thought of how the road leading down from the mountainside was steep and dangerous. Around one bend or another would lie a blind curve whose far side held secret what might or might not be. As we approached that curve there would arise in us a steady drumming. Our chests would swell and throb until our pulse beat in the quicks of our fingertips. We were blood-full of the moment wherein, against all probabilities, you lean into the curve and take your chances of making it. You feel earthbound, not by the motorcycle but by your urge to round that bend. Oil slick or happy ending, complete with a hero’s welcome, you ease into that snake of road whose other side holds your future hidden. This moment is what men love for. You are father and son, caught in homeward motion.

“Hold on,” my father said, and we went at that curve with all the speed and hope that we could muster.

The chances of making it—oil slick or happy ending—are what I put all my speed and hope in as I continue to work hard and do the best I can as a writer. It’s the same kind of hopefulness that keeps me patient for Dale Ray Phillips’s second book.

Citation:

“Twisting the Radio Dial: An Interview with Ron Rash,” The Southeast Review, 25.2 (2007):
p. 104-117.

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