Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

We have barely sat down at Smooch Café in Fort Greene, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Swedish author and playwright, preempts my opening line: Should we do the interview in English?

The question seems inevitable coming from an author whose work has centered around language in one way or another since his debut novel One Eye Red took Swedish critics and readers by storm in 2003. A master of words who has created his very own language: Khemirish – a playful mix of Swedish, Arabic, French, English – has now been carefully translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles in Montecore, his first novel to be published in the US. So specific is his language that he doesn’t think his first novel can even be translated for the American market.

Now, however, we decide on English, despite our common nationality and the fact that Jonas Hassen Khemiri isn’t so fond of his English self. As he put it at a reading in Dumbo earlier this year: “I always feel a little bit like a nerd when I speak English.”

Nerd or not, since then he has received not only a write-up in the New York Times for Montecore, but also an Obie Award, the prestigious off-Broadway prize, this May for his play Invasion!, which had its U.S. debut in February. (It has also premiered in South Korea.) Directed by Erica Schmidt of The Play Company, Invasion! had an early fall revival in New York at The Flea Theater in Tribeca. We spoke in September, during this run of the play.

Invasion! The Play Company production, Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

Interview

via Folkteatern Göteborg

Katarina Matsson: Since your name is new to most Americans, let’s start from the beginning. Who is Jonas Hassen Khemiri?

Jonas Hassen Khemiri: I’m a 32-year-old granola-eating, theater-thinking Swedish writer who’s here because Invasion! re-opened at The Flea Theater – and to do some talks after the show, to sit in the audience and be very nervous, and to meet with people like you to do interviews. Then I’m going back home to Stockholm for the premiere of my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare (“Apathetics for beginners”).

It sounds like your attention is a bit divided?

It feels like my brain is in Sweden and my body is here. Hopefully I’ll make it through the day brainless! But I like to be reminded that there’s always this phase of nervousness before an opening. I remember when I had that with Invasion! – even though it was quite a long time ago.

Invasion!, your first play, premiered in Sweden in 2006. It deals with identity and the power of words. At the center is this elusive, almost magical name – Abulkasem – that takes on different meanings throughout the play. Is Abulkasem a playwright, a contradictory fundamentalist, a dorky guy in a bar, a hiding refugee – or all of the above? How do you think the piece has translated to English and specifically to an American context?

It’s difficult for me to say, because I’m not American enough to be the judge of that. According to the reactions of some of my American friends it seems like it has translated quite well, or very well, into an American context. We had some doubt whether or not to move [the play’s setting] from Sweden to the States. Now it’s set in the States. We felt that we had to do that in order to make the play immediate. This is a play that moves very fast. We did readings trying to keep it in Sweden, and it’s interesting because people had a much easier time to just laugh off the questions of fear and inequality that the play deals with, and not realize that it’s actually a play about their country also.

But when you won the Obie Award in May, the award committee said your play had “help[ed] us see ourselves, as Americans, more clearly.”

That sounds very nice. I’m happy, because it is a play mainly about fear and about how identities, individual and collective, are being constructed through vague senses of threat. [It’s also] about language and how language is used to manipulate people. That is a subject that has kept coming back in my writing in different forms.

Where and when did your interest in language start?

I think it comes from my background. Growing up in a multilingual family, and being around people who’ve been discriminated against because of their lack of language, you realize the power that a language gives you. I’ve always been in a luxurious position. My Swedish is perfect; I’ve always been able to choose between different levels of Swedish. I think that’s why these themes interest me.

What I’m doing now is quite different from what’s going on in Invasion! – or from anything I’ve done before. It’s difficult to talk about, because I don’t really know what it is. But in my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare, these themes of language and manipulation also play a big part. It begins with a national trauma in Sweden. I guess it’s even more related to the construction of a national identity. It’s actually a comedy about these apathetic refugee kids, a dark comedy. It deals a lot less with the kids than with how a national identity is constructed through the use of external elements.

One similarity between Invasion!, the new play, and a lot of things I’ve written is that they’re all trying to investigate the speed of words; how words can be transmitted very fast and how words can change meaning.

There’s a recent example that I find very interesting. Qaddafi in Libya used to call his opponents “rats,” and Assad in Syria called them “germs.” When the rebels gained power there was a tweet from Syria saying: “We the germs of Syria, salute the rats of Libya.” That tweet got a huge spread in a matter of minutes. But I also thought it was interesting that “rats” and “germs” were the terms being used to de-humanize, because they’re also something that’s extremely difficult to stop. They can spread anywhere and they will definitely outlive us. That sense, that we live in a contemporary time where words are being spread and manipulated so quickly, is something that I find a lot of inspiration in.

Yes, linguistic change is a very big part of our society. Speaking of national trauma, the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 recently passed. The consequences of the attacks are apparent in Invasion!

Yes, in some ways. But I think that reading is more defined in the American version than in the French or German ones. I was never thinking explicitly of 9/11 when I wrote it. But that’s also what’s cool about writing theater, that my words can be amputated from me and put in a new setting. I’m not even in control of the actual translation, these are Rachel’s words, the translator’s, my words have been transmitted through her. And all of a sudden they start meaning something that I can’t pick up on. I’m very happy that people seem to like them, but I’m not sure I understand the reasons why people like them.

Sometimes the audience laughs at very peculiar places and I don’t understand what that means, especially politically. It wasn’t until I was here the first time that I realized it was literally performed in the shadow of the World Trade Center. And that added something to the play. The loss of that power I, as a playwright, have is actually something I really like. The feeling that “wow, I’m not in control of my words anymore, they can just mean anything,” that’s what the play is about. How a magical name is just being amputated and moved, almost like a relay baton.

These themes of language and names are also very present in Montecore, your second novel, published by Knopf in the US this spring. You constructed the story like an e-mail correspondence between a son and a man claiming to be his missing father’s best friend. Together they try to write the father’s life story, which becomes as much a clash between realities as between languages. The result is both humorous and heartbreaking.

That work is a lot more personal. It’s about the trials of writing the story of a missing father. And that story is quite, well, reminiscent of my life, to say the least. It’s a book that plays around a lot with the biographical facts of my life and then tries to show the fictionality – and the impossibility – of summarizing a life in a book.

There are definitely links between Montecore and Invasion! because both projects end in a situation where the real, authentic person – be it Abulkasem in Invasion! or Kadir in Montecore – is very hard to capture. There’s something very fleeting and impossible in the ambition to capture a life. Another similarity between the two is that the emphasis [placed] on the way that people fantasize about the missing person actually tells the story. The fantasies that they use in order to conjure an image of this missing person tell the story of who they are. So we’re never in a position where we get to know their real selves, but through their fantasies we get the contours of who they are or who they would like to be.

A lot of your work also centers on racism and a sense of in-between-ness. Growing up in Stockholm, with a Tunisian dad and a Swedish mom, did you feel any prejudice?

It’s one of those things that is difficult to talk about, because it easily becomes very victimizing. But I think that Sweden, despite a lot of Swedes’ feelings, is a country like all other countries. We have problems with discrimination and racism and homophobia and whatever. Growing up, it was much easier for me to try to put myself in an eternal underdog position. But things didn’t get interesting until I realized the [number] of situations where I was in a power position, where I was in fact in line with the power structure. Be it reading feminist thinkers, or my perfect Swedish, or growing up in Hornstull in Södermalm in Stockholm, an area that is typically middle class. The realization that I, in many settings, am enjoying privileges that I hadn’t seen before. I think my writing changed a lot when I realized that it wasn’t the underdog position that made me a writer; it was the interest in what these structures make of people.

Then came questions on how to deal with that power, what to do with it. The feeling of being powerless is something a lot of my work centers on. How can we use language to manipulate ourselves out of a world where we feel powerless? I think that’s one of the red threads through all my work. The way a lot of my characters use language to block out the real world is very similar to what I’ve been doing my whole life. Words have been my comfort zone. But there’s also a kind of sadness to that. It has always been easier for me to write about life and politics for example, than to actually take part in a more practical way.

Yes, you’re very good at standing on the outside, looking in. But writing about life is also a way of taking part.

Yes, I’m hoping to show the complexities of life. I like a lot of writing that’s completely different from mine too, but this is my way of attacking things. I’ve never been very Brechtian, you know, it’s not my style to try to inspire class struggle or give an easy answer.

How did you find your language, your voice?

I’m not sure I have. I keep wanting to find new voices. I think that at one point it would be lovely to feel like I found a voice that felt like mine. But that’s based on the idea that I would have this authentic voice inside me, and I don’t believe that’s true. I think I consist of the sum of the multiple voices I’ve invented so far, and hopefully I will be able to invent more voices as I go along.

When you started writing Montecore, you heard the voice of Kadir, the missing father’s friend who employs a very special language, a mix of French and Arabic directly translated into Swedish (with a lot of laughs as a consequence!). Is that often how your writing project starts, with you hearing a voice?

Yeah, it’s quite audio-related. It feels like I hear voices. Which also sounds like I’m crazy. I remember when I was a kid and I heard writers say, “you have to listen to the voices.” I thought they were crazy and bullshitting me. But everything that I’ve written, that I’m remotely happy with, is something where the voices have taken over and made it work. With the new play, too, the voices took over. For me, the most enjoyable phase of writing has always been to just lean back and listen to what the voices are telling me.

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that you’re a very good playwright and that you would find playwriting easier than writing a novel.

Definitely. I didn’t think about it until recently, but a lot of writers that I find inspiring are often writers who change back-and-forth between writing prose and plays. Cortázar for example and P.O. Enquist, they are both very voice-driven. One can argue that all writers are voice-driven, but I think that the writers that I really like are more concerned with trying to find rhythm or an internal order to a certain voice, rather than to transmit a certain story.

Someone asked me if a good memory is important to becoming a good writer. I think a lot of writers that I like tend to be more focused on having a good rhythm than on having a good memory. I’ve never been very impressed by writers who try to impress me with their good memory. You know what I mean?

You’ve told me before that you’re sort of face-blind. Do you think that has made you more audio-centered?

What I’ve heard is that a lot of people who have a really bad sense of faces are really good readers. I don’t know if I’m just saying this to comfort myself and if my source for this is Fox News or something … Maybe it’s just a feeling that if you’re bad with faces you need to read a lot of words for things to make sense. Or maybe it’s the fact that you read so many words that you become obnoxious and uninterested in people’s faces, haha. I don’t know what it means.

But I’ve always been very audio-focused. I dare you to one day meet me without these (he lifts the headphones that hang casually over his shoulders). You will never have seen me without my headphones since I was maybe 12. I literally don’t think I’ve stepped out of my apartment without them; I always, always have them.

Why?

Because I constantly feel the need to add something to boring, everyday life. It’s not enough to just walk down DeKalb Avenue and enjoy the sunshine. I need to have that perfect “enjoy the sunshine”-song to make it, you know, extra. It’s very internal. It’s my feeling of being in the very right position, of being where I’m supposed to be.

But it’s also a way of putting a filter, a distance, between yourself and the world.

Exactly. In a way it’s making the outside world count less. You can say that you add something to life by adding a soundtrack, but at the same time you’re also blocking a lot of things out. Maybe that’s what I’m kind of doing in writing. You have to block out certain things in order to be able to continue with this strange job.

I understand that your writing process is also very intense and solitary?

In periods, yes, but they’re also the phases I enjoy most in life. Every time I enter a phase where I know that “Wow, I’m going to be just writing the next couple of months,” that’s one of my happiest moments. I’m very happy now too, but I think those moments are the reason why I keep doing it. Like at the beginning of the summer when I realized that I had four months of just entering into my brain and trying different weird stuff out.

You also distance yourself geographically. You write a lot about Stockholm and Sweden, but you travel to all these big cities – Paris, Berlin, New York – to do it. How come?

I see myself as a very provincial writer. I’m not the kind of writer who has social, anthropological ambitions to go somewhere else. My memories and my background are extremely important for my writing. I think I was reminded of that when I came home from Berlin after spending two years there. I realized the amount of inspiration that I always get from memories. I used to have this strange idea that I could go anywhere and just make stuff up, but I don’t think I’m that kind of writer.

Further Links & Resources

credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

• Visit Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s website – Khemiri.se – for more information on his plays, fiction, lectures, links to what inspired the work, and more.
• Interested in exploring Khemiri’s writing further, but your Swedish is a bit rusty? Consider picking up a copy of the English translation of Montecore from your local indie bookseller.
• Watch a short video about the original English debut of Invasion! at The Play Company in New York, here.
• Read the New York Times profile of Jonas Hassen Khemiri from September, which describes the Obie-winning play in these terms:

If Caryl Churchill, Franz Kafka and Ali G were to goof around one night and play their music too loud until the Department of Homeland Security came knocking on their door, they might emerge (eventually) the next morning holding something like the script to Invasion!

A while back, we wrote about Elevator Repair Service’s performance of Gatz, in which The Great Gatsby is read in its entirety onstage.

Recently, Elevator Repair Service took on a different lit-meets-theatre project, which they called “Shuffle”: to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the New York Public Library, the group performed three great works of literature—The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury—simultaneously. According to the New York Times, the library was temporarily transformed into a piece of performance art.

Visitors wandered in and out, some fascinated, others apparently dumbfounded. No, they couldn’t get the July 1947 issue of National Geographic just now, and, sorry, but Vol. XXXIV of The Journal of English and Germanic Philology would have to wait too. There was a stack of recent copies of The Washington Post at one end of the counter, but an actor’s drink was on top of it. A severe-seeming woman in a black dress talking on the phone looked as if she might be a librarian but turned out to be, oops, another one of the actors, speaking Hemingwayese: “The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta.”

No help at the periodical room’s computer terminals: they were displaying not the catalog but a version of the script that the actors were reciting, and if you looked up at the wall, a projection of the text of all three novels was quickly scrolling by.

Read the rest of the article for a fuller sense of the zaniness—trust me, it’s worth it! And tell us: what work(s) should Elevator Repair Service take on next? How about Moby-Dick? Huck Finn? Both together?

Image credit: Spider-Man on Broadway

The show’s decision to let Taymor go was apparently in part due to her refusal to alter the script, even when everyone around her agreed it wasn’t working. Reports the New York Times:

According to four of her colleagues, Ms. Taymor boxed herself into a corner with the producers in the last few weeks by rebuffing their requests to allow outsiders to make changes to the show. She would not meet with some of them, and she did not act on suggestions for improvements; at one feedback session with the cast, some actors argued for strengthening the central love story between Peter Parker and M. J. Watson, but Ms. Taymor insisted, “It’s there.” The Edge, Bono and the producers also expected that she would make far-reaching changes in the show’s critically panned Act II, but after attending recent performances, they concluded that she lacked the objectivity to ruthlessly reshape the show.

Taymor had been working on this script for nine years. Is it any wonder she had no objectivity left? Any writer would have trouble killing darlings after such a long time.

Having not seen the show myself, I have no position on its merits or the wisdom of the producers in removing Taymor and bringing in a “script doctor.” But I feel incredible sympathy for her and her story, flawed though it might be. A friend of hers summed up her reaction for the press:

“Julie’s an extremely sensitive person, and she has always felt like a mother to her plays, a mother to her characters,” Jeffrey Horowitz, a friend and artistic director of New York’s Theater for a New Audience, said Wednesday. “This is like a mother being taken away from her family. She loves that family. She wants that family.”

As a fiction writer, I may write stories that don’t work at all. I might spend pages and pages on characters that are unbelieveable and plotlines that are flimsier than spiderwebs. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve done so. But because fiction writers work alone—and because, for most of us, no one is impatiently clamoring to present our work to the public—we have time to figure those mistakes out on our own. We can keep hammering away at the pieces that aren’t working, shoving them under our beds or into locked desk drawers, pulling them out months or years later and trying to work on them again. Or, as often happens, we are free to keep the arcane and possibly out-of-place references to Greek mythology, the underdeveloped love story, the “geek chorus” that only we think is clever.¹ We can spend years laboring on stories and books that will never work. And at some point or another, most writers do.

But that’s where Taymor is in a different situation. Hundreds of other people, from actors to set designers and producers, are involved in her work. She doesn’t have the leisure to work the kinks out of the script on her own, let alone the ability to doggedly stick to something that isn’t working. The producers, tired of waiting, have brought someone in to put her darlings out of their misery.

And I feel bad for her. It’s one thing to murder your own darlings when you know it will make a better piece. It’s another to have someone murder them for you when you’re fighting, however misguidedly, to keep them alive.

¹Just… read the plot summary.

© Olin Thomas, via Knopf

In the denouement of his 1985 novel Continental Drift, Russell Banks lays out a kind of manifesto:

Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives – no, especially wholly invented lives – deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book’s objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.

Few writers seem as concerned with the world as it is, and how fiction can explore its outer limits and shake those foundations to their core, than Joshua Furst. His debut story collection, Short People (Knopf), was one of those books that elicited an immediate vow to myself to read whatever Furst writes. The ten stories in that 2003 collection all deal with children, a.k.a. “short people,” and each one captures so fully what it feels like to be a particular age – 5 years old or 13 or any in between – that they generate the kind of false memories that only great storytellers can. After reading “Merit Badge,” Boy Scout Camp feels like something personally experienced. “She Rented Manhattan” will turn you into an awkward, lovelorn teenage girl for more than the story’s 16 pages.

In 2007, Furst followed up Short People with a novel, The Sabotage Café. That novel follows Cheryl, a suburban teen who runs away to Minneapolis, and her mother, Julia, beset by demons from her own past on the streets. Cheryl links up with a band of gutter punks, four guys who each reveal a particular shade of disenfranchisement with the American Dream. Trent, a darkly alluring anarchist, becomes her closest confidant. Julia houses alienation of a different kind; a past visit to a mental ward has made her suppress what she feels is her true self – until now. Their story takes a withering look at how society categorizes, and often ignores, the more difficult segments of a community. But Furst doesn’t deal exclusively with the dark side of consumerist culture, and those who rail against it. The Sabotage Café also maps the peculiar, sometimes hilarious, ticks of a generation raised in a pop cultural morass. Junk food to T.V., he gets the details very right, a kind of shorthand for childhood from the 1970s on.

Joshua Furst graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He is the author of a story collection, Short People, and a novel, The Sabotage Café. Furst has received a Michener Fellowship, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, for the 1996 short story “Red Lobster”, the 2008 Grub Street Fiction Prize for The Sabotage Café, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Ledig House. He has taught writing at several schools, including the University of Texas, Eugene Lang College, and, currently, the Pratt Institute.

Furst met me for lunch in Chelsea in late September. We talked about the launch of a new collective called Mischief + Mayhem, massively multi-player online role-playing games, the East Village in the late 1980s, and his belief that “every human being deserves the basic respect of being allowed to define their own reality.”

Interview

Lee Thomas: You’re coming from class?

Joshua Furst: Yeah, I was just teaching down the street.

You’ve taught all over the place.

I’ve taught at a lot of places, it is true.

Austin, TX via Flickr

Were you in residence at Texas?

I was a visiting writer at Texas.

How did you like Austin?

I loved Austin. You know, you can’t really exist in America without having half the people you know tell you that Austin is the best city in America.

Or Portland.

Well, Portland too, yeah. But I’ve been to Portland. Portland is exactly what people made it out to me to be, and Austin was absolutely unlike everything that everybody had told me it was.

How was it different from what you expected?

For one thing you have to drive everywhere, and I was expecting much more of a walking town, because of the Boho atmosphere that people talk about all the time. It also had much less pretension than I was expecting it would have, I mean it didn’t have those anti-pretension pretensions that I was assuming it would have – like Portland has. It’s very egalitarian that way.

So, what made you want to become a writer?

When I was 8-years-old, maybe 9-years-old, I was cast as the boy in a production of Waiting for Godot at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin. I spent the time during rehearsals studying the script and trying to parse some kind of cosmology out of the text. It put me in a relationship to words, and to aesthetics in general – theatrical aesthetics, in that case – that changed the way that I understood what it meant to be a thinking, feeling person in the world.

What did you read when you were growing up?

I read a lot of plays because I was very, very involved in the theater, and I was a child actor throughout my high school years. And I read a lot of comic books, and then the 10,000 Maniacs were very popular, and I became a fan of their “Jack Kerouac” song, so I searched out Jack Kerouac. I followed the sort of usual progressions through all of those writers whose books you steal, toward literature proper.

Do you come from a family of readers?

My parents are both serious readers. When I was a little kid my father, for bedtime stories, would read me Shakespeare plays, and we’d go a scene a night through the canon.

Do you have favorite plays?

Absolutely, you mean Shakespeare plays?

Yes.

Well, the one that I was most affected by, reading aloud with him, was Julius Caesar. But, by far, my favorite Shakespeare play is King Lear – which contains the entire world.

You studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop and sold Short People before you left the program, right?

I did. I sold it, I think, two days before I left town.

During what period had you written those stories?

Well, I’d been working pretty full time in theater, throughout my twenties in New York, writing and directing plays. Throughout that time I’d been writing stories, too, at my day job, instead of doing the work they were paying me for. So I had about half the stories in my collection before I went to Iowa, and I wrote about half the stories that became Short People while I was there. I knew exactly what I was trying to achieve before I got to Iowa, and went about writing stories specifically for the collection, and working toward this image I had in my head of how the collection would work.

Do you remember what the first story you wrote for the collection was?

The earliest story in the collection is “Red Lobster,” which was written in 1996, and published that very same year.

It won the Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award that year?

Yes, it won the award that year as well.

I love that story.

Good, I’m glad. That’s nice of you to say.

I also really love the first story in Short People, “The Age of Exploration,” and how it bookends the collection. It’s really a story about that awareness, when you’re a really little kid, of the way that you’re different from other people, and the dawning consciousness of other people’s interior lives. Is that something you thought about when you were a kid and revisited as a writer, or is that a fully adult idea?

Image Credit: Flickr

I mean, it’s definitely something I thought about as a kid. I think it’s impossible to be a kid and not think about, right? I mean, you know, the kid goes into the forest. What is going into the forest? Going into the forest is realizing that your family unit, your enclosed society is only a small part of a larger society, and that you’re now suddenly lost in this much bigger society, stuck in a terrifying position where you can’t understand the social codes because they’re so much more complicated and different from those of your small family unit. That can be a horrifying and troubling experience for any kid.

It can be a trauma from which you don’t recover.

Oh, I think it’s a trauma we spend most of the rest of our lives trying and failing to recover from.

In Short People, your young characters often strive to have agency in their world, and also to make sense of it. They aren’t really aided very much by adults. Is that search for meaning more prevalent in younger people? Or are adults just better at hiding their failed attempts?

Image Credit: Flickr

When I was writing the book I wasn’t thinking of it so much in those terms – in terms of the relationship between the kids and the adults – as I was operating under a belief that I still hold, that there have been some major shifts in the way that our society operates: the prevalence of pop culture, and the way that pop culture has become an American culture. I think that there are certain generations of Americans for whom that was not the case. And I think for my generation, at least in my experience, the role that pop culture played in our understanding of morals and ethics and all of the things that go along with being a human being, was as large, or larger, depending on the situation, than the traditional cultures that we, as an immigrant society, have had handed down to us. So the mutts of America really do have a culture, it’s just a paltry and confusing and pitiless culture that our parents can’t help us with because our parents don’t live in that culture. They weren’t raised in that culture, and they didn’t have to grapple with the meaning of that culture in the way that we have.

What about the child narrator interests you?

There are a number of things about child narrators that interest me. One is, the relationship between preconceptions and experience. In that, as we become older, we become ideologues in certain ways. We start to believe that our beliefs about the world can define our reality. When in fact, that is obviously not true. Children are still impressionable enough to be testing out various belief systems. For them, the fault lines between ideology and realty become much more apparent much more quickly, to deeply intellectually-devastating effect. The other thing about child narrators that I hold to—that I think many writers who attempt to write from a child’s point of view don’t hold to, or don’t understand—is that there is not a difference in intelligence between a child and an adult. It’s not that children are naïve and incapable of discernment, it’s that children have less information, because they’ve had less time to compile information. I think we sell our children short, and we sell their experiences short, when we assume that they’re innocent in some way that they’re not.

In fact, I think a young person could read many of the stories in Short People and relate to them on a deep level. There seems to be an artificial construct in the world, that there’s a quantifiable thing called ‘adult content.’ If The Sabotage Café had contained less adult content, would you have been pressured to market the novel as Y.A.?

I wouldn’t have gotten that pressure because of my particular situation with my publisher, the set of circumstances around it. I’m lucky enough to have an editor who can still really do what he wants and pursue art. Obviously he’s affected by economic pressures, as anybody who works in publishing is, but he has a lot more leeway than a lot of editors do in our current environment. So he would have been able to get away with me writing about children for adults. I think in a different set of circumstances, with a different editor, absolutely, I would have been pressured to pander to the market. Also, interestingly, lot of stuff sold as adult fiction is, in fact, Y.A. fiction. A lot of coming-of-age novels aren’t measurably different from books that are marketed as Y.A. fiction. But separate from that, the difference between adult fiction and fiction for children has more to do with the point of view of the author and the subtleties of aesthetic and what those translate to in terms of the meaning that’s being communicated.

Pop culture is very prevalent in both your stories and your novel. It seems at times that you really drive the nail home with humor. Can you speak about humor in your writing?

Humor is very important to me. I believe that the best comedians are those who are most in touch with the darkness in themselves and their world. I’m conscious of that when I’m writing. How it appears in scene is less consciously within my control, because I have to write towards the reality of the characters and the situations if I’m going to make it believable. I do think that there is a certain amount of absurdity that is inherent in our contemporary world, that a lack of consciousness about this leads to a kind of a lie. And with that absurdity, obviously comes humor.

Are there comic or satirical novelists you enjoy reading?

I mean, my hero is Phillip Roth, who is often satirical. Though, not lightly satirical, like I would say Confederacy of Dunces is.

There’s no slapstick.

No, there’s a lot of slapstick in Portnoy’s Complaint, but it’s such gruesome and ugly slapstick, such self-loathing slapstick, that you’re never quite sure what the target it. Dostoyevsky – who’s another one of my huge heroes – is full of slapstick and comedy, too.

The Russians are really good at humor. They wrote such long works that they really could cram it all in. Talking more about Sabotage Café – a large part of the book deals with street kids and gutter punks. What made you interested in telling their story?

There are a number of things that made me interested in telling their story. I was fascinated by their particular relationship with American society, and the fault lines of American capital that their existence in and of itself points out. They, naively or not, have recognized one of the core injustices of American capital. And unlike most of the rest of us, they have attempted to find a way to grapple with it. They generally haven’t done a very good job of it. They generally end up destroying themselves more than they end up actually dealing with the problem. But to dismiss them out of hand for those bad choices becomes, I think, in our public conversation, a way of dismissing the truth behind those choices. Just because they’re wrong doesn’t make them wrong, you know?

East Village, 1988. via Flickr

One of the other reasons I was fascinated by them is because I lived down in the East Village during the late 1980s, early 90s, during the riots in Tompkins Square Park, and the entire transformation of that neighborhood. The culture of transgression was basically legislated out of the neighborhood, and the neighborhood was changed forever, obviously. So I had this storehouse of experience and memory that was fertile for a novel. There are a great many other reasons why I chose them, but these are the two primary inspirations.

Did you interact with the kids in your neighborhood?

You couldn’t not. When the streets close down and there’s a mob on the street, if you’re on the street, you become part of that mob. You have no choice.

My interactions with these kids in San Francisco always felt very us-versus-them tinged. I wish that they weren’t, but the barriers to dialogue seem so high. That feels like a cop-out on my part.

No, it’s not. The barriers to dialogue are insurmountable. We live in a culture in which identity is such a construct, in which everybody, at a certain point in their life, surrounds themselves with material signifiers of the person that they want the world to think of them as being. And there are so many varieties of choice there, and the meaning of those signifiers is so complex and so intertwined with consumerism and various approaches to consumerism and various relationships to class – both psychologically and materially – that nobody can really talk to each other. I mean, talking to those street kids if you’re a good, left-leaning, humanist urban dweller – which I’m assuming you are because you’re wearing a corduroy jacket – is just as impossible as talking to Glenn Beck or one of his followers. Every little group has its walls, and nobody can communicate outside those groups – at least superficially.

Image Credit: Flickr

Between the recurring case studies in Short People and Julia, the mother in The Sabotage Café, you write very convincingly of mental illness. Do you have experience working in a hospital, or visiting a mental ward?

I know quite a bit about mental illness. I’ve thought very deeply and very long about the relationship between mental illness and the way that society conceives of itself, and the way that we define reality. One of the things that mental illness points toward is the possibility that reality is not what we think it is, and I believe that every human being deserves the basic respect of being allowed to define their own reality.

Julia really considers the compromises that she has made – basically sacrificing herself for a stability that feels more constraining over time. Many people play around the edges of those ideas and mostly keep it together, but I think that there is the Julia extreme and the Trent extreme – of anarchy and rage, even if that leads to self-destruction. Is there a happy compromise, or is that just something that people have to live with?

The Julia extreme being this nice suburban home?

Yes, the nice suburban home, keeping your demons at bay, and the implicit understanding that to participate in society you aren’t going to express yourself in certain ways, or people will think that you are mad.

Well, I mean, it’s hard to express them without people attempting to paint you as someone who is going to burn the house down. I think, separate from the aesthetics of the book and the issues of the characters, there are other possible ways to experience and engage in society than capitulation, having to do with defining society down, and thinking of community in terms of your neighborhood, your block, your town hall. The small society in which you operate has room for its own more equitable and less autocratic system. That, in the end, becomes more powerful than the larger organizational systems in some ways – if it really works, if you’re living and working within that environment. The very powerful forces in our society have learned a valuable lesson from the 1960s, which is that if they sell you back the image of what you want, they will neuter the dissent that you’re attempting to express. They allow you to receive the ego-gratification of your dissent, without ever having to grapple with the repercussions of that dissent. You feel heard, without actually having to be heard. And they can keep right on doing the corrupt and despicable things they’ve always been doing.

Does your experience in drama inform how you think about and write fiction?

Oh, absolutely. There are a number of ways in which that’s the case. For one thing, my understanding of dialogue and point of view and the relationship between words and meaning rose out of a deep engagement with the vernacular, the spoken word, because in the theater it’s all spoken. That’s had a deep effect on how I think about characters in a work of fiction. For another thing, because I started in theater, because I really came to literature through theater, my primary relationship with literature was completely international. In theater there’s not such a distinction being made between American playwrights and non-American playwrights. There are plays, and you read the history of theater, and you’re reading Brecht and Genet and all of these playwrights from around the world, as the history of theater – you’re not just reading English-language theater. I didn’t get a degree in English Literature, so from the start, I didn’t think of literature as this one English tradition, I thought of it as the whole history of words on a page. That would not have been the case if I hadn’t come out of the theater.

On another level, my approach to aesthetics has been very defined by working in theater. I have much less interest in, or tolerance for, pre-existing genre convention, because the particular kinds of things I was doing in theater had to do with character and space and time, and all of the things that can be done within a fixed space. I think of a work of literature as being, in many ways, a fixed space of time, and what can be done within that. As opposed to, “How do I tell a social-realist story, about three generations of a family that touches on class and society?” in these various workman-like ways.

Do you still go to the theater?

I have lately been writing theater reviews for The Jewish Daily Forward, and that has gotten me into the theater more frequently than I’ve gone in the recent past. When I left theater, I left theater because I couldn’t play well with others. And I always felt like they were fucking with my vision. And then I didn’t enjoy going to theater because all I saw was compromise on the stage for a long time. But I have begun – now that I have less of an investment in theater and the way it works – begun to be able to appreciate it more again.

Do you ever write plays?

I’m talking to a friend of mine about maybe writing a one act. He’s going to write one too, and we’ll mount those together. But I haven’t seriously written a play since 1998.

In an Identity Theory interview from 2003, you spoke about going through a bit of hardship for the sake of your art – this idea that you have to earn it in order to teach yourself the meaning of trying to make your work the best it can be. When you teach, is that something you talk about with the students? Is that something you think can be taught?

Image Credit: Flickr

What I can do as a teacher is give the students tools by which to read better, and understand on a theoretical level the relationship of their choices sentence-by-sentence to the effect of those choices on the reader. Then I can talk with them about the process by which one goes about teaching oneself. Now, the first part of that is difficult and is real, there are actual concrete things that the students learn in that context. But in terms of what happens afterwards, there are a few essential things that I think any writer has to do if they’re going to be a good writer. One is, they have to be able to make their own choices, as opposed to thinking first “What would my teacher think is the right choice?” And if their only experience with writing, and their only experience with literature has been contained within a classroom, they’re only going to know how to attempt to please the figure of authority in that classroom. So, until the only authority in the room is their own developing aesthetic, and the literature that they’re reading, they’re not going to be able to define these things for themselves. I tell students not to go to grad school straight out of undergrad, because it’s going to be catastrophic for them as writers. But it’s not because I believe they should live in hardship, it’s because I think that then, if and when they choose to go to grad school, they’ll be going on their own terms, instead of someone else’s terms, and they’ll be better writers for it.

You teach undergraduates?

I teach undergraduates, primarily. I enjoy teaching undergraduates, because the flip side of what I’ve just said is that with graduate students, you’ve often got people who have so clearly defined their aesthetic that they’re not willing to engage in the conversation on my terms, which I, of course, want to do.

Your new novella: you only have to say what you want about it.

No, no. It’s finished. We’re shopping it. It’s called One Inch Tall. It’s about 80-85 pages long. It’s a story that revolves around a 40-ish-year-old man who, for a variety of reasons, is obsessed with, and whose life has been overtaken by, massively multi-player online role-playing games.

Did you do research for this?

Ah, I plead the fifth.

In late September you had a big launch party for Mischief + Mayhem – talk to me about the genesis of this idea.

Mischief + Mayhem started as a collective about three years ago. It was just a group of writers who, to one degree or another, had all experienced quite a bit of success in the publishing world and artistically as writers, who were seeing the trends going on in publishing and in literature, and in various ways and to varying degrees were dissatisfied with these trends. The history of literature is littered with small bands of people who have united for aesthetic reasons and attempted to support themselves and each other as artists, without having to bend to the marketplace at every turn. So that’s what we have set out to try to do.

How did you find each other?

Interestingly, we had all, at some point, over the past ten years been to the same writers’ colony, which is called Ledig House – it’s in Upstate New York. So we all met through the network of people who are alumni of Ledig House.

Part of Mischief + Mayhem’s mission is to “Nurture and promote distinctive authorial voices, especially those that fall outside commercially acceptable notions of literature, and to do everything we can to bring those writers the largest possible audience.” How do you find manuscripts that fit this bill?

We don’t really take submissions, because there are only five of us, and we’re all working writers. What we are open to are queries about our process and how we’ve gone about building this, in hopes of helping other people form their own collectives, and their own groups, and continuing to open up the dialogue. Which isn’t to say we only publish ourselves, we’re explicitly not interested in only publishing ourselves. I, for instance, have nothing planned in terms of the near future, in terms of publishing with Mischief + Mayhem. I’m under contract with Knopf, and I’m very happy with my position being published with Knopf. I just know of a great many authors who are not as lucky as I have been, and who are not in the position that I’m in, who are doing extremely interesting things in kind of a punishing environment right now. It’s kind of a ripple effect: everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who’s written a great book. That doesn’t mean that we’re a closed system that is only interested in publishing the elite people who have already made it, but because it’s not our full time job, there’s no way that we can read manuscripts all day.

Is the primary goal to open up a dialogue online?

Well, one aspect of what we’re doing right now, as we’re launching the press, is a website that has a blog component and the journal component. Once a month there’s a journal called Wild Rag that will publish four things, a piece of fiction, an essay, a piece of criticism, some sort of visual art and another thing that might be a hodgepodge of any of them, or might be something completely different. The first one of those is launching, we’re shooting for October 1. Then there’s a blog, which we’ve started posting to. We haven’t yet worked out all the kinks. That will have new posts—when it gets going—every day, by the members of the collective themselves, as well as other bloggers and other artists in various art forms, writers who are interested in visual arts, and specifically in translation, and a variety of other things, writers who are kindred spirits of ours. So every day there will be new content. Hopefully it will dissect and engage with ideas of aesthetics and art in relation to politics and culture, and with the question, “What does it mean to try to create relevant art? Is it possible for art to actually be relevant, or are we speaking in a vacuum?”

How do you decide what art you engage with?

I get a lot of it from my students, who don’t know any better, or haven’t been trained to know any better, and so just pick up any book that’s before them. They mention these oddball and exciting writers they’re reading, and I write down the name of the author and look it up, you know? Then, also, I know the terrain a little bit, and I’ve read widely enough that there are authors whose work I’m following, and when their next book comes out, I know I want to read it. There are certain people who are affiliated with certain aesthetic movements that I find fascinating, so I will say, Oh I want to look at this because of this, that or the other criterion. If you’re engaged with your world, your world engages with you. I don’t find what I want to read from the New York Times.

Do you think there is a difference between being involved in the art of your contemporaries and art more generally speaking?

I pretty militantly read one non-contemporary book for every contemporary book I read. I try to make sure, if I’m reading a Charles Dickens book, the next book I’m going to read is going to be a contemporary book. And if I’m reading a contemporary book, the next book will be a non-contemporary book. To me, the best contemporary literature is in conversation with the history of literature, as well as the literature that exists in our singular time and place. And then, of course, it’s also in vigorous, fierce conversation with the world around us, too.

Further Links and Resources:

I frequently happen upon Selected Shorts on NPR midway through a story and go through a predictable course of thinking: I’ve missed the first part of the story. I should just download the podcast and hear it from the top. Wow, that sentence was brilliant. What the heck is going on here? And then I end up listening to the conclusion of the story and enjoying it immensely.

Now that I’m in New York, I hope to make it to one of the live stage performances of Selected Shorts. If you’re lucky enough to already have a ticket, on May 26th Selected Shorts will celebrate the stories of This American Life with an evening featuring Ira Glass, Mike Birbiglia and Elna Baker. Just in time for Short Story Month, this evening is also a part of New York Book Week. I’m excited for the Audience Favorites performance on June 9, when three stories nominated and chosen by listeners over the past season will be read onstage.

But no matter where you are, a short story read aloud is a very fine thing, so check out your local library or bookstore to see if any authors are visiting or giving readings. I’ve also been thinking a short story supper club might be the busy friends’ solution to the book group. Each week or month, one person could read a favorite short story after dinner or over a cup of coffee, discussion to follow. Pre-reading not a requirement.

What are some of your ideas about how to celebrate the read-out-loud story?

We’ve seen a lot of book adaptations lately, from Where the Wild Things Are to Precious to The Lovely Bones. Screenwriters and directors cut scenes here and add scenes there to transform the book into a cohesive viewing experience. A good adaptation can be a brand-new work of art. But in the process, the book is often boiled down to its essence while the particulars–the writer’s own words–are often lost.

The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is trying to work around that. The A.R.T.’s latest production is “Gatz,” a staged reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby in which the original text is the show:

Gatz is conceived as a single six-hour production in which an ensemble of 13 actors bring to live every word of the novel with no text added and none removed.

The show begins as an office worker (played by actor Scott Shephard) finds a copy of The Great Gatsby and begins to read it aloud. An NPR review explains what happens next:

It doesn’t take long for things to turn strange. Co-workers wander on and off stage — an assistant, a janitor, a man in a suit. The lines between the narration and the action begin to blur. It’s as if the book is coming to life. Then, the janitor blurts out a line of dialogue from “Gatsby” character Tom Buchanan.

“Civilization’s going to pieces!”

And so it goes, ramping up, getting more surreal. While “Gatz” stays true to the words, it takes liberties with every prop, sound effect and stretch of the imagination.

The show is so long that it’s split into two parts, separated by a dinner break.

So why do it this way? Every novelist’s dream: a profound love for the novel itself, exactly as it’s written. “What made this a great book,” director John Collins explains in a video interview with NPR affiliate WBUR, “was not so much the story, or the characters, or the themes, or the symbols, but this writing. We thought, well, here’s a great crazy idea to start with, here’s a great crazy project, here’s a great impossible task: we’ll do every single word of it.”

Even the most slavishly faithful adaptations are based on plot and characters; usually, the only use of the actual text of the book is in dialogue, or (shudder) voiceover. Beautiful, powerful, pivotal passages of prose are condensed into a single shot, or left out entirely–never mind that the author probably spent weeks fine-tuning the language and picking just the right words. So as a fiction writer, I can see the appeal of the “Gatz” type of adaptation: the writing itself is in the spotlight the whole time.

What’s more, the show is intended to dramatize the blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction. Collins continues, “When you read a book that you love… you start to see the people that you know in the characters. And you also start to see the book around you, when you get that involved. The line begins to blur a little bit between your own reality and the reality of the book.”

You can see the A.R.T.’s trailer here and snippets of the show here.

Break a leg, Brian and company!