Half a decade later, I spoke with Butler again on the breezeway of his Northwest Florida home surrounded by his three napping bichon frises. His nineteenth book, the novel A Small Hotel (Grove Press), had just been published in August. Whether he’s talking about leading workshop, writing from the dream space, or what to do with “bone headed” reviews, he has a way of stating ideas that is simultaneously practical and radical, and even with the tape recorder running, the graduate student in me found herself reaching for a pen.

Butler is currently a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. He lives in Capps, Florida, which has a population of one.

Emily Alford: In your book on writing, From Where You Dream, you explain that all literary fiction must come from characters driven by yearning. Please explain your definition of ‘yearning.’

Robert Olen Butler: Yearning seems to be at the heart of what fiction as an art form is all about. It’s based on the fact that fiction is a temporal art form—it exists in time—and it’s also an art form about human beings and their feelings. Any Buddhist will tell you that as a human being on this planet, you can’t exist for even thirty seconds without desiring something. My favorite word is yearning because it suggests the deepest level of desire. My approach [to teaching writing] tries to get at essential qualities of process for the aspiring artist beyond what is inherent in the study of craft and technique. This notion of yearning has its reflection in one of the most fundamental craft points in fiction: plot. Because plot is simply yearning challenged and thwarted.

How would you advise a writer struggling to figure out what a character wants?

I’m just fussing at your semantics, but “figure out” implies a thoughtful process in a kind of self aware and conscious state. You don’t analyze the character or look at the character and try to come up with a sound bite of a description of what the character wants. That’s not the way to do it. It’s more like intuition.

You sit with the character, you hear the character’s voice, you get a feel for the character because she’s emerging from your deep unconscious, not as you, but as a stranger in a dream, which we all have. And, you’ll be tempted—because of the way you’ve been trained in craft and technique and, indeed, the way you’ve been trained in literature, especially at university levels—you’ll be tempted to try to translate her into ideas and themes and structures and descriptions of her psyche and her desires. But with yearning, as with all elements of character, I advise just being with her in the way that you’re with another human being. [Think of] the process of falling in love with somebody, or meeting somebody where there’s a chemistry that allows for falling in love. It’s a sort of proximity, or awareness.

At what point does learned technique comes into the process?

The novelist Graham Green said that what you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. Now, my sense is that this runs even deeper than his initial context. This is absolutely also applicable to all the craft and technique you learn. The only craft and technique that you have legitimate access to as an artist is the craft and technique you’ve basically forgotten. That which has gone out of your conscious, analytical mind goes into the same compost heap—the dream space and the unconscious that I always talk about. It dissolves and continues to function in shaping the material of your unconscious self.

That way you establish a sense of the deep there-ness of a character and her reality. A writer ends up creating a character of whom, at the end of a story or a book, the reader may say, “I’ve known this character all along, in a kind of evolutionary way. There are things here I’ve noticed all along, but now they all coalesce for me.” The way all that happens is that the character is created absolutely in the senses, in the moment. Our “knowledge” of a character really is knowledge of gesture and tone of voice and the selectivity of sensual impressions around her that is done by her emotional state. If the artist carefully chooses these, and by carefully I don’t mean thoughtfully, the object she’s creating is organic.

Would you advise writers coming from a workshop culture, where technique feels paramount, to write until they forget what they’ve learned?

Exactly. Or forget that and start writing. It’s not as if those things are erroneous. As an observation about the way many stories effectively work they’re absolutely true. What’s erroneous is the assumption that the thoughtful analysis and willful insertion of that in the work is the creative process, and that’s where the great misunderstanding happens, because, in fact, it’s the antithesis of the process.

Your workshops focus very much on yearning and writing from the unconscious. Most workshops focus on making whatever manuscripts students turn in as close to “finished” as possible. Oftentimes, you tell students to put manuscripts away. What happens when the advice always seems to be to just keep revising until some journal takes it?

Learning to revise from your head leads you to anticipate. It begins to shift your motivation for writing. Real artists write not to be published, not to be famous, not win prizes, not to get sex. You write because you have some deep intuition that behind the apparent chaos of life on planet Earth there is order and meaning, and the only way that you know to express that vision of order is to go back to the way we live that chaotic life, in the moment through the senses, and pull bits and pieces out of it and reassemble them into these narrative parts. If you start perverting that with other motives to write, your ability to become an artist is severely hampered, if not destroyed.

You may become a very polished, published writer, and you may even have a literary career because a lot of book critics don’t have a clue as to how to read an aesthetic object either. But the kind of thing that endures, the kind of thing that those writers began setting out to create, the kind of literature that will be read two hundred years from now and still illuminate the human condition has been lost because of settling for this other thing.

The terrible taint on the artist’s ambition is to be thinking about publication, much less writing for it, much less writing and revising for that. The sad thing is that there are people capable of creating real works of art—I’m afraid that there are future artists who are getting diverted into just being future writers and published writers, and they’re going to end up settling because creating real works of art is a scary thing. Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. You have to stare down your demons every day of your life. Asserting technique to get published in some literary journal is really safe, and artists are not safe. If you’re starting to feel safe, you’re not pushing deep enough.

I’m glad you mentioned safety because I think your new novel A Small Hotel is fearless. Most writers shy away from sex scenes, especially sex scenes between people who love one another because we think, “Cliché!” and “Sentimentality!” A Small Hotel is a novel based around the inability to say the words “I love you,” and it challenges what intimacy is, where intimacy comes from. These are the things people avoid writing about so as not to come off as sentimental. Did it ever occur to you to try to avoid sentimentality?

I don’t think I’ve ever written an un-risky book, so no, it didn’t occur to me. This is the book that has come out of my unconscious. It took the death of my parents. My dad was eighty-eight when he died a few years ago, and then my mom died two and a half years later at ninety-two. When [my father] died, they had recently passed their seventy-first wedding anniversary. The two of them were shaped by familial forces that were very similar to the way Michael and Kelly were shaped. The foreignness of saying ‘I love you’ was the only model either of them had seen in their childhoods. The communicating of it was just the surface manifestation of the feeling, but it shaped their ability to either feel love or express it. That sort of thing gets passed on and on.

Michael really loves Kelly, but he cannot say it. He does not speak that language. Kelly deeply needs it, but she cannot ask for it. She says in the book, ‘If you have to ask it doesn’t count’. And that’s the terrible ironic, tragic reality of so many relationships in this life, and that’s the way my mom and dad lived. But they decided to speak the word and to speak it, frequently. Never a day in my life went by where that word was not used freely and openly. When my father died, I thought my mother would die immediately after, just because of the intense symbiosis. They found each other, my mom and dad, when he was fourteen and she was sixteen. They got married when he was seventeen and she was nineteen. And in the seventy-one years that followed, they just willed that word and that expression into their lives every day. It was a heroic act on their part because, in retrospect, I don’t think either of them either felt it or knew how to feel it. There’s not a day that went by where they didn’t argue furiously as well, but they had to end up saying, ‘I love you.’ It became kind of a compulsion. And there are problems with that too.

Seeing the arguments had an effect on me too, but my ability to feel it and speak it, that feeling of love was preserved in a way that it wasn’t in them. The heroic thing about them is that they knew to create the illusion of love. So, that’s where this novel came from. You know, fuck sentimentality. There have been some fabulous reviews of this book and there have been some absolute boneheaded reviews of this book, and it’s a kind of litmus test for the reviewers in some ways, and that’s fine. I don’t worry about being called sentimental and I just write the books I’m given to write.

I’ve read the good reviews and the boneheaded reviews. I wonder if the reason writers won’t write about love is that some reviewers simply can’t stomach a book about love.

To love and to express it is to be vulnerable. To create works of art is to be vulnerable, and it’s hard for people to let themselves be vulnerable. Especially in this world, where the internet lets us democratically savage one another, it’s even scarier, but the courage to be an artist means also the courage to love and to express it.

Further Links and Resources

In his TED talk, writer/economist Tyler Cowen talks about why stories make him nervous and why we should be suspicious of stories. Here’s a snippet of the transcript:

I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I’d like to do is instead tell you why I’m suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often the more nervous I get. So the best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is they’re a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter, it always leaves the same things in. You’re always left with the same few stories. There’s the old saying, just about every story can be summed up as, “A stranger came to town.” There’s a book by Christopher Booker, he claims there are really just seven types of stories. There’s monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, rebirth. You don’t have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you’re telling yourself the same things over and over again. [...]

So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like “this” instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be. But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple. The point of a narrative is to strip it way, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you could present in a sentence or two. So when you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good vs. evil, whether it’s a story about your own life or a story about politics. Now, some things actually are good vs. evil. We all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we’re too inclined to tell the good vs. evil story.

Watch Tyler Cowen’s whole TED talk below:

• Anne gives a roundup of some of her favorite TED talks by writers
• See more writers on writing: Chuck Palahniuk and Ann Patchett

And we’re not alone in our admiration for this new book or Pollack’s work. In her laudatory review of Breaking and Entering (Four Way Books, 2012) in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, author Jen Thompson writes:

Pollack is an engaging writer with a first-rate eye for the telling sociological detail, like the Militia Babes calendar in the Banks’s farmhouse. There is tension and menace when Richard or Louise encounters some new misunderstanding or threat. But since the author’s intent is to explore intolerance, hatred and evil, it is not enough that these forces merely simmer and self-perpetuate. The stakes are raised, and escalating consequences play out.

The “militia” referred to here is the Michigan Militia. More specifically, the Michigan Militia of the mid-1990s, a period that was, as Thompson writes, “the epicenter and high point of the militia movement, before increased scrutiny and revulsion at the Oklahoma City bombing put some militia groups out of business and sent others underground.” And Richard and Louise are outsiders from Northern California who have moved, with their daughter, to the middle of the state. Thompson says of the Shapiro family’s move and the book’s beginnings:

It’s an unlikely migration, precipitated by Richard’s breakdown and depression. He’s a therapist (as is Louise), and one of his patients has committed suicide. Then, during a camping trip, he accidentally started a forest fire. The move to Michigan, where he will work as a prison psychologist, is meant as a new start. But should they have bought the house in the tiny outlying town, just down the street from the Joyful Noise Church and the Wolverine Sportsmans Club? They’re like the teenagers in horror movies who decide to check out the haunted mansion.

Of course the spacious Midwest is a more appealing place for the Shapiros to raise their child than high-pressure California. And neither Richard nor Louise is aware, at first, of just how much suspicion they engender. Richard is Jewish, Louise is not, although everyone in town assumes she is, and people are often cheerful and upfront about their prejudices. “Didn’t you think I would get upset being told I’m descended from the Devil and responsible for just about every evil deed the world has ever known?” Richard finally demands, exasperated. (This descent from the Devil is meant literally, as genealogical information.) Louise, despite her splendid qualifications and genuine affinity for young people, is only grudgingly given a part-time job as a social worker at the high school. The school’s sole Jewish faculty member advises her to look for work in Ann Arbor instead. The janitor, Mike Korn — a fictional stand-in for Mark Koernke, “Mark from Michigan” — hosts a hate-filled and conspiracy-minded radio program. Two particularly repulsive prison guards tell Richard the events in Oklahoma City are part of a Zionist plot.

As is no doubt clear from this description, Breaking and Entering is a page-turning yet insightful book about a period of this country’s history that has often been overlooked in the long shadow of September 11th, but which nonetheless reverberates in the American consciousness in haunting and moving ways. In Brian Short’s 2009 interview with the author, responding to a question about drama and “boldness” in contemporary fiction and her own work, Pollack replies:

There are people who say I use too much plot, or too much sex, or too many dirty jokes, too much humor, my strokes are too broad. And sometimes they are. I’m sure if I redid Paradise, New York [Temple University Press, 2000], it wouldn’t be so slapstick. I started that in graduate school. But I like that. The first thing I love, when I read, is the language. Just like any literary writer, it’s got to be about the voice. I can’t read anything where I don’t like the voice. But then what do I like? I like plot, I like setting, I like humor, I like boldness. I think part of it has to do with being female. No one ever told Philip Roth to be more timid or nice, to have nicer characters or less sex, to not be as broad. And when a woman tests boundaries, it’s seen as unbecoming. We’re supposed to write these quiet, domestic stories or novels. I’ve just never been one to do that.

Eileen Pollack

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

When Twitter arrived on the scene, its proponents found themselves defending the very short. James Poniewozik put Twitter in historical context, and, in the New York Times, writer and teacher Andy Selsberg argued that writing short could make you a better writer.

Now, in the L.A. Times, Pico Iyer writes a defense of the very long sentence:

I’m using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment. [...]

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).

Iyer’s essay, of course, is a direct response to the so-called Age of Twitter. Yet his actual argument is not for longer sentences per se, but for nuance, for spaces for (and spacious) discussions in our reading, our conversation, our lives:

I love books; I read and write them for the same reason I love to talk with a friend for 10 hours, not 10 minutes (let alone, as is the case with the average Web page, 10 seconds). The longer our talk goes, ideally, the less I feel pushed and bullied into the unbreathing boxes of black and white, Republican or Democrat, us or them. The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world of bullet points and the inhumanity of ballot-box yeas or nays.

Wordiness doesn’t always equal depth of meaning, of course, just as shortness doesn’t equal pithiness. But just as Selsberg argues above for what writing short can teach you, I wonder if practicing writing the long sentence might provide a welcome and needed balance to Twitter-fueled shortness. What do you think?

Further reading:

• More on the very long sentence
• Proust knew how to write a long sentence, and here’s his longest, in English and the original French.

In her recent interview with Solomon, Contributor Sara Schaff speaks with the author about “truth” versus “accuracy” in fiction, why the short story is a more demanding form than the novel, and how she stumbled upon the story of a Russian mail-order bride, Rachel Bella Calof, whose story inspired this novel. In response to a question about developing her main character, Solomon replies :

This question is the hardest for me to answer because I was not that conscious of how it happened. I know what I don’t do. It is organic in that I didn’t go through and make decisions about [Minna's] character before I started writing her. She came to be who she was through the writing.

On a story level and on a plot level, I did know where the story was going. I really wanted to have a story-driven, plot-driven book when I launched into the longer form of the novel because I didn’t want to be wondering the whole time what it was about. On a thematic level I’m still learning what it’s about, but on a level of what’s happening, I always knew: this is a story about a mail-order bride who goes to America. It was nice to have that basic piece there.

I didn’t know exactly where it would end, and certainly lots of things changed, but I had a sense that this is this journey story, and these are some of the things that are going to happen. It’s certainly not going to be just stuck in her head the whole time. Minna became who she is because of what the story needed her to be. The story also became shaped around who she was. Especially in revision, where I started realizing wait, no, this isn’t really what would happen here. She really wants this, or she needs that. When I went back, she started driving the story more, whereas, in the beginning, she was becoming herself in relation to the story.

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

In The Little Bride, Anna Solomon’s debut novel, 16-year-old Minna Losk travels from Odessa to America as a Jewish mail-order bride. Her motivation is born in from both fantasy and necessity. The journey represents a move toward a more prosperous life, safe from grueling housework and pogroms, a world in stark contrast to the one she has experienced so far—devoid of family, comfort, or a true childhood. She is disappointed to find that her new home isn’t a grand house in a city but a sod hut in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota. And her new husband, Max, is a poor match for the desolate land he has chosen to farm. Old enough to be her father and rigidly Orthodox, Max is kind but perilously stubborn. In addition to grappling with new depths of loneliness, precarious weather conditions, and finger-numbing work, Minna finds herself the stepmother of two teenage sons, one of whom she grows increasingly attracted to over the course of a year.

Anna Solomon’s short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, and Shenandoah, among others. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Slate’s “Double X,” and Kveller. Before receiving her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, she was a journalist for National Public Radio’s Living on Earth.

In this conversation with Sara Schaff, Anna Solomon considers the nature of short stories versus novels, the process of writing and researching a first novel that is also historical fiction, and the unexpectedly encompassing nature of publicity and self-promotion.

Interview

Sara Schaff: In a recent interview with Erica Dreifus on her blog, you said you once thought that if you could learn to write short stories well, then you could learn to do anything, even write a novel.

Anna Solomon: It’s weird to say this, but I actually feel like a really masterful short story is harder than a good novel because it’s such a demanding form. It feels much more particular, and if things are not perfect, it’s much more obvious. I mean, I think there are perfect novels, but I think it’s less important that a novel is perfect.

There’s more room to breathe in a novel.

Yeah. I think some novels achieve that feeling of unity that you can get with a story, that sense of singularity where you can see it all in one piece. I often think of two different categories of novels—in one category are books like Housekeeping or So Long, See You Tomorrow. I think of books like that as being perfect in what they are, and I feel that part of that is because they’re on the short side and they’re quiet and kind of domestic books. Private books. And then there are books like the The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Updike’s Rabbit books that I think of as great novels, but I don’t think of them as perfect novels. And part of what’s great about them is that they’re not perfect; they let so much in, they’re much less precious and fussy in a way. But books like Housekeeping and So Long, See You Tomorrow, I’ve read six times, and I feel like they’re these bibles.

How do you feel about your novel now, compared to your stories? Did writing it feel very different?

It did! You know, I’ve talked to friends who also were writing short stories before they began novels, and they said to me, “I felt like writing each chapter of the novel was like writing a short story, and I was just writing short story after short story.” For me the form felt so obviously different—the pacing, the structure, that part felt very natural to me. I don’t know if it’s partly that my short stories have always been on the long side and kind of begging to be expanded; I also wonder to what degree the subject matter is just so different than anything I’d written. I had never written a historical anything, and I had never thought I would, nor do I really read much historical fiction, but this was the story I wound up wanting to tell.

People who’ve read my stories and read the novel will say to me, oh, it’s totally you; it feels like your writing, which is a great comfort to me when I hear that because in some ways they feel so different.

The fine sentences, the well-drawn characters—that all feels like you. But yes, The Little Bride does feel very different. It’s an epic journey whereas your stories are more contained.

It’s funny because my goal while writing this book felt sort of small. It felt sort of like, okay, all I want to do here is try to write a novel. I just have to see if I can do it, you know? I wasn’t trying to be overly ambitious—when I say that it sounds funny now because I took on a part of history, and I’d never done that before, but in the way I was talking before about the small and large books, it felt to me like a small, quiet book. I know there’s all this epic-ness and sweeping history, but it felt like a book that was very close to its characters, and in that way, kind of contained.

You’re following Minna’s story.

Right, it’s very close to her, and it stays close to her. In the new book that I’ve started writing, the thing I know I want to do this time is open that out. There are many more points of view it’s allowed to go into. It feels much bigger and messier and that’s really exciting, too, but I definitely had to do this first.

I’m starting to research material for a historical novel, and it feels so daunting. What was your process in writing historical fiction—did you research first and develop a sense of the place, or did you start writing the story and then fill in gaps from there?

I definitely did them at the same time. And I think it’s totally daunting, too. Now that I’m facing this other novel, I’m still asking, how are you supposed to do this? And how do you do it as a fiction writer? What’s the obligation to history?

I was fortunate that I came across Rachel Bella Calof, this Russian mail-order bride whose story inspired the book. I was at a residency when I read her amazing memoir, and I was in this place where I was working on a book that was going nowhere, and I was in despair. I started reading Calof’s story, and I got to this line in the first section where she’s undergoing her “Look,” [the physical examination one had to have before being approved as a mail-order bride] and she says, “They inspected me like a horse.” It was one of those lines that said so much while saying so little. And the whole first chapter of the book just kind of came into being. And then I was like, “Oh, I need to learn more.”

But even then I was always writing. I didn’t really take much time off to just research. I felt like it was really important for me to just keep moving, and have the research grow out of what the story needed me to know. When I was writing the sections in Odessa and needed certain details, like the names of streets she might have run through, I would put X’s, and later I would go and look up names. There’s this great history of Odessa written by a Brown professor, and I would look through it, look through the maps. It didn’t feel to me like those names were essentials, that they were affecting the story, I guess. I certainly think that they can. Seemingly unimportant details can have a huge impact, obviously. But I tried to use the research as inspiration, as much as information that would hold me to something.

So you don’t get bogged down by trying to make everything accurate before you get the story.

Exactly. Because the characters, the actual story, felt a lot more important to me. I think that’s partly because of how I read. When I do read historical fiction, which is not that often, I tend not to be reading for the “Oh, I want to know what it was like to live during this time.” But a lot of people do read it in that way. So at other points, I would get this anxiety, like, “Oh my gosh, this isn’t accurate enough.” I think the book actually wound up being accurate in most ways, but if people wanted to go through it and pick it apart, either from a farming perspective or an Odessa perspective, they could say this or that isn’t exactly right.

But that could happen with any book. You set a story in contemporary times, in a place you know, and someone will find inaccuracies.

Well, exactly. And that’s one of the interesting things about historical fiction. If you open yourself up, the artifice of writing it all is much more pronounced. Writing contemporary fiction, there could be the illusion that it is “truth” in a way, but there’s no such illusion with historical fiction. Any attempt to recreate the past is going to have plenty of falsehoods. Can we even attempt to understand what someone 120 years ago might have been thinking or feeling? I think we can. Do I claim that it’s accurate? I don’t think I’m as interested in that accuracy as I’m interested in the truth of it, on a human level.

While writing this book, I was ignorant about a lot of things, and I think that was good. There were a lot of things I didn’t think to worry about, and that part of what just let me do it. My sense is that with each book I write, the book will be better, but I will also be more aware of these important questions, and that awareness is going to make the process, not necessarily more difficult, but more fraught. There’s something very freeing about ignorance.

I’ve heard other writers say that the second novel was actually harder. Because of the expectations attached to a second book.

Yes, and now I can understand my process and understand what worked and didn’t work and therefore expect myself to fix all of it, but I might not have all the tools yet.

The novel is both a page-turner and a character-driven story. In literary circles the term “plot-driven” can be pejorative, as if a good plot precludes good writing or good characters. But Minna’s character really drives the forward momentum of The Little Bride. What she does and how she reacts feel very real and organic. How did you write and develop her character and the story?

This question is the hardest for me to answer because I was not that conscious of how it happened. I know what I don’t do. It is organic in that I didn’t go through and make decisions about her character before I started writing her. She came to be who she was through the writing.

On a story level and on a plot level, I did know where the story was going. I really wanted to have a story-driven, plot-driven book when I launched into the longer form of the novel because I didn’t want to be wondering the whole time what it was about. On a thematic level I’m still learning what it’s about, but on a level of what’s happening, I always knew: this is a story about a mail-order bride who goes to America. It was nice to have that basic piece there.

I didn’t know exactly where it would end, and certainly lots of things changed, but I had a sense that this is this journey story, and these are some of the things that are going to happen. It’s certainly not going to be just stuck in her head the whole time. Minna became who she is because of what the story needed her to be. The story also became shaped around who she was. Especially in revision, where I started realizing wait, no, this isn’t really what would happen here. She really wants this, or she needs that. When I went back, she started driving the story more, whereas, in the beginning, she was becoming herself in relation to the story.

Minna, though quite young, is so aware of and unapologetic about her desires. She even describes herself as being selfish.

In one sense she’s unapologetic about her desires and openly selfish, and then in another she’s constantly trying to want something else, or to change her desires: “Maybe I could think about it in this way and then I would want what I have. Maybe I could squint my eyes in this way and the room would be different.” But then her actual desire rears up and she’s never able to actually quash it.

Since she was a young girl, she’s had this innate sense of difference toward others—other kids being more religious and other kids being less self-aware. She’s always felt like an outsider, and her self-awareness grows from that. She’s gotten so used to her position as an outsider that she has less need to fit in and please. Some part of her wants to join that world; she looks at the character Ruth and thinks, “If I could just be a good housewife, and I could want that then that would be satisfying and I could just be normal.” But she’s just not. She’s never satisfied with that. She’s also not really satisfied with being unsatisfied, and you could say that’s a particularly modern feeling. But there are certainly lots of characters who were written in much earlier times about very strong, dissatisfied women. Jane Eyre, for instance. Becky Sharp.

Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country.

You know, I’ve never read that.

People don’t necessarily like the character of Spragg.

Well, people don’t necessarily like Minna either. [laughs]

I was wondering about the “likability” factor. How have readers reacted to Minna?

People either feel that she’s complex and real and they love that she’s not perfect and that she’s not always virtuous or giving. Those people love that she can be all these things. Or they feel, “She is mean and selfish and bad.” I had a friend who leads book clubs, and her book club read it and everyone loved it except one woman who just hated Minna. That’s going to happen.

I certainly want the characters I read to be complex and flawed. It’s important to me, because otherwise I would feel so lacking in my own character if I didn’t get to read other people who were struggling. But some people don’t read for that, and they want a sense of pure escape.

In terms of writing this book, looking back at your short stories, and thinking about the novel you’re writing now, do you see any similarities between your characters? What patterns are you noticing in your own writing?

On a purely external level, [the theme of] coming of age. There are a lot of 16ish-year-old girls – I’m pretty fascinated by that time – I think I always will be. I’m sure that it will change, too, as I get older, but it’s such a ripe moment for characters because there is so much change. That time in my life still feels so vivid, in ways that are not entirely pleasurable. [laughs] The complexity is certainly there.

There are themes that run through a lot of [the work]. One theme would be outsiders versus insiders. Place is also very important in almost all my short stories as well as the book; it becomes its own character. And it’s very important to my writing process.

Sex, too. Not just sex, but there’s a lot of complex sex going on. Part of it is power issues around sex.

And women and young women exploring their sexuality—matter-of-factly, unapologetically. Their exploration often feels like part of their longing for something else.

Yeah, that’s interesting.

In your story “What is Alaska Like?” the narrator’s relationship with Randolph Cunningham boils down to wanting to leave town and her job as a chambermaid. In “The Long Net,” June and her friend encounter a frightening pedophile at a campsite but the story turns on June’s longing for connection with her mom, wanting to be noticed.

It’s funny with “The Long Net” – that was a story where my growing awareness of my themes almost stopped me from writing it altogether. As I was writing I thought, wait, I’m writing “What is Alaska Like?” again. And then I thought, you know what, that’s what writers do. That’s okay. In many ways it felt like a maturing from “What is Alaska Like?” although I still love that story, too.

But those echos can help make a collection work.

Oh, I love that you called it a collection. I hope it will be a collection. It’s cool that you’ve read my stories more recently than I have. It’s such a gift to be read closely and have things be thought about in relationship to each other.

On some level, I write because I want other writers to read what I write and to appreciate it, so it’s been a change getting used to caring about sales. I sold my novel to Riverhead, and it turns out I’ve written a historical novel, and a Jewish novel, and a women’s novel. I’ve done all these things that turn out to be marketable, which of course my agent is thrilled about. The idea that it might actually sell well and catch on in book clubs is awesome. At the same time, I’d like my short stories to be taken seriously, too, despite the fact that stories tend to be tougher on a commercial level.

How do you feel about the self-promotion aspect of being a novelist today?

It was definitely a hard transition this past spring when I decided I had to get myself on Twitter. Well, I didn’t have to, but it’s turned out to be a really good thing. I actually wound up liking it, finding this amazing community of women writers, but also writers of all sorts, and feeling connected through it. I’m not the most natural at social media at all, but I do feel like I’ve been able embrace it.

I’ve also been finding the events totally great. I’m loving readings, I’m loving doing Q & A’s. I’ve been doing a musical and literary performance with my friend, Clare Burson, and that’s been going really well. That part of it I enjoy; it feels really gratifying. Part of me likes to perform, so that’s been great.

The harder fact of self-promotion is how encompassing and full time it is. I remember thinking last year, “When my book comes out, I’m probably going to have to give a good hour or two a week to publicity.” I really thought I would just be able to keep on keeping on with the writing. That [shift] has been hard for me, because I thrive on discipline and routine. It’s the first time in my serious writing life that I’ve taken this kind of break from fiction. I’m writing some essays, which I take seriously, but it’s not the same. And I’m not even doing those in a regular, every-day-sit-down-at-the-same-time fashion. The hardest part of promotion is not the idea of going out there and speaking on behalf of my book, but just the sheer amount of time and distraction. I could see why I would have been a better author fifty years ago, when you just went out, did a few readings, and then went back to your desk.

Further Links & Resources

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.

“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”¹

For nearly a year, Flaubert—“M’sieu Gustave,” to his valet Narcisse, napping under that bell-pull in Croisset—had been hard at work on a novel that would, upon its serial publication in the autumn of 1856 in the journal La Revue de Paris, ignite a firestorm of moral indignation, eventually landing Flaubert (and editor Laurent-Pichat, along with the journal’s printer, Auguste Pillet) in a Paris courtroom, charged with endangering public morality. That novel, Madame Bovary (this essay refers to the Lydia Davis translation, Viking 2010), would become the first masterpiece of so-called “realist” fiction—a label Flaubert himself resisted—in which the author essentially disappears behind what Flaubert called a smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose.

Emma Bovary, the novel’s putative heroine—or anti-heroine, depending upon one’s sympathies—seduced as much by her own romantic illusions as she is by the callow, calculating Rodolphe Boulanger, strolls arm-in-arm with the reader to the very edge of the abyss, and then over that abyss. Without authorial judgment, without moralizing, in meticulously, beautifully turned prose, Flaubert vividly describes her fall.  “Novelists,” writes the critic James Wood, “should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him.” But in 1857, few were thanking Flaubert, least of all Ernest Pinard, the imperial prosecutor who sought to have Madame Bovary banned:

“Who in this book can condemn this woman?” Pinard argued, readily answering himself: “No one.” Admirable though the book was, at least in terms of Flaubert’s considerable artistic talent, Pinard pronounced the author’s apparent lack of morality “execrable,” declaring: “Monsieur Flaubert can embellish his paintings with all the resources of art but with none of its caution; there is in this work no gauze, no veils—it shows nature in the raw.”

And how exactly did Flaubert go about his dangerous art in Madame Bovary? What does “nature in the raw” even look like, as far as fiction is concerned? Take this passage, fairly early in the novel, in which Emma and her husband Charles are invited to a ball at the opulent château of the Marquis d’Andervilliers, in La Vaubyessard:

It was very lofty, paved with marble flagstones, and the sounds of footsteps and voices echoed through it as in a church. Opposite rose a straight staircase, and to the left a gallery that looked out on the garden led to the billiards room, from which one could hear, at the door, the caroming of the ivory balls. As she was passing through it on her way to the drawing room, Emma saw men with serious faces standing around the game, their chins resting on their high cravats, all of them decorated, smiling silently as they made their shots. Against the dark woodwork of the wainscoting, large gilded frames bore, along their lower edges, names written in black letters. She read: “Jean-Antoine d’Andervilliers d’Yverbonville, Comte de La Vaubyessard and Baron de La Fresnaye, killed at the Battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587.” And on another : “Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d’Andervilliers de La Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Knight of the Order of Saint Michael, wounded in combat at La Hougue-Saint-Vaast, May 29, 1692, died at La Vaubyessard, January 23, 1693.” Then one could barely make out those that came after, because the light from the lamps, directed down onto the green cloth of the billiards table, left the room floating in shadow. Burnishing the horizontal canvases, it broke over them in fine crests, following the cracks in the varnish; and from all those great black squares bordered in gold there would emerge, here and there, some lighter part of the paint, a pale forehead, a pair of eyes looking at you, wigs uncoiling over the powdery shoulders of red coats, or the buckle of a garter high on a plump calf.

Here we have the subtlest of seductions, without gauze or veils. To Emma, through whose eyes we witness this scene, and into whom Flaubert has all but vanished, it is all so romantic, so beguiling. The lofty entrance hall, echoing like a church, and those serious, smiling, “decorated” men standing around the green-clothed billiards table, making their shots. And of course the decorated men hanging on the wall, the noble dead, burnished in their martial (and one suspects amorous) triumphs by the light from the lamps hanging over the billiards table. This is Flaubert at his soft-pedaled best, “present everywhere and visible nowhere,” as he famously put it in a letter in 1852, allowing each deliberately chosen detail to speak for itself, without comment. Where once these decorated men might have hacked at each other with swords, thus earning themselves some measure of glory (an attenuated, rather silly glory, we can almost hear Flaubert murmuring), now they can only knock little ivory balls around a billiards table. Later, as dawn approaches, with the music of the dance “still humming in her ears,” Emma stands looking up at the windows of the château, imagining the guests in their rooms. “She would have liked to know what their lives were like, to enter into them, to become part of them.” Windows, one soon finds, are a returning motif in Madame Bovary; and no wonder, since the novel is itself a window, clear as glass, into Emma Bovary’s soul.

It was this very idea of fiction as a crystal clear window that Pinard was railing against. By what moral compass was the reader to navigate the world illuminated by this novel and its “execrable” creator? Up until the publication of Madame Bovary, authors were more than happy to be that compass. But not Flaubert, apparently. Pinard was not only arguing against this one novel but against the extraordinary vanishing act Flaubert had performed. This is the spring Flaubert in no small way ushered in. This is his gift to us.

*

But had Flaubert really disappeared? How exactly can an author be both, as Flaubert himself put it, present everywhere and visible nowhere in fiction?

In How Fiction Works, James Wood counters the occasionally heard criticism that realism, as form, is not really so realistic after all, contriving as it does to compose what is and always has been a rather messy world into a daisy-chain of scenes which invariably (one hopes) build, through conflict and rising action, to a moment of epiphany or change. “Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.” In other words, the author hasn’t simply become a camera, mindlessly clicking on one image after another.  The author is still and always with us, quietly, deliberately pointing the way. It’s helpful to remember that Flaubert was wary of being labeled a realist, and rightfully so. Perhaps it is better to imagine him at Croisset, at the window of his second-floor study with its big white bearskin rug and green-clothed writing table and gilded Buddha, and yes, even that little porcelain frog inkwell, looking out past the tulip tree and yew hedges to the Seine. “I have sketched, botched, slogged, groped,” Flaubert had written with no small amount of frustration in 1852. “Oh, what a rascally thing style is. I don’t believe you have any idea what kind of book this one is. I’m trying to be as buttoned-up in it as I was unbuttoned in the others and to follow a geometrically straight line. No lyricism, no reflections, the personality of the author absent.” Absent but nonetheless present everywhere, like God and the Devil, in the details.

And this is precisely how Flaubert could be both present and nowhere at once in that billiards room with Emma Bovary—in the very details he’s given us. Again, these details aren’t merely photographic; they’re not a simple accretion of seemingly random props present only to fill a scene: footsteps and voices in a marble-flagged entrance hall, a billiards table, the light-burnished portraits fading into shadow. I’m talking about fiction at its best now, fiction which is artistically capable of keeping any number of plates spinning in the air. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and in much of the finest literature that has followed, from Chekhov to Babel, Welty to Bellows to Munro, those details we encounter in scene are details the author has scrupulously and deliberately chosen (or instinctively, blessedly stumbled upon) that go beyond the mere surface of things. Yes, they paint a vivid scene, often beautifully, but look a little closer and you’ll discover that the solid ground you’re standing on is in fact ice. And under that ice, in the dim green light, another story is being told.

Take this marvelous passage from John Banville’s novel, The Infinities, in which young Adam Godley is waiting for a train to deliver a somewhat unwelcomed guest:

He stands on the platform in the shade. Why is it, he wonders, that railway tracks always give off a smell of kitchen gas? He looks about. Nothing has changed here since he was a child, so far as he can see. The metal canopy overhead is painted yellow and edged with a wrought-iron filigree and must have been put up a century ago or more. The station is lovingly kept. There are pots of geraniums on the window-sills of the waiting room, the benches set at intervals along the platform are freshly varnished, and on the wall a stylised hand pointing the way to the lavatories is painted in bright-red lacquer with a shiny, thick black outline. But where is the station master, where is the cross-eyed porter with the black hoop thing that porters carry on their shoulders, who used to be a fixture of the place? The emptiness is eerie. He paces for a while, then sits down on one of the benches; the new varnish with the sun on it is hot and gummy to the touch. Beyond the tracks the grass is sere and ticks faintly in the heat. Beyond that again the broad reach of the river is a whitish-blue drift throwing off fish-scales of platinum light. The silence buzzes. Down on the track a ragged grey crow hops jerkily from sleeper to sleeper, looking for something, does not find it, gives a disgruntled croak and flaps away. The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlit surface of the day, like a clumsy gardener putting his foot through a vegetable frame to the humid tangle of things beneath. He gets up from the bench and paces anew, more agitatedly this time.

Notice how quietly Banville introduces a note of unease into this sunlit idyll with that rotten-egg “smell of kitchen gas.” It’s a lovely detail, unexpected and strange, and delicately rich with menace. Immediately Adam looks around, as if knocked slightly off balance, and sees everything is as it should be, as it’s always been, “so far as he can see.” In other words, the visible surface of the morning is still intact. The old iron-edged roof, the pots of geraniums and varnished benches, that painted hand pointing to the bathrooms. But where is everyone? Unnerved, Adam paces, then sits on one of the sticky benches to wait. The dead grass “ticks in the heat”—another marvelous, sly tightening of the screw of disquiet, as is the ragged crow down on the tracks, “looking for something” it does not find. A shift has occurred, as surely as if a cloud had crossed over the sun. “The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlight surface of the day…” and abruptly gets up to pace again, “more agitatedly this time.”

With its rigorous, poetic attention to rhythm and sound, it’s a passage one could well imagine James Joyce or even Flaubert writing, and yet Banville’s book was published in 2010. Call it what you will—realism or lifeness, or simply the artist quietly, attentively at work, whispering in our ear: we are there with Adam, waiting uneasily on that hot, sun-beaten platform, with the faint smell of kitchen gas in the shimmering air and the dry grass ticking beyond the tracks.

Another example of this attentiveness to telling detail is Pat Barker’s deeply affecting 1995 novel, The Ghost Road, in which we witness the death of the British poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in the final months of the First World War while trying to cross a canal under machine gun fire. Here, only moments after the battle, we come upon the terrible scene:

On the edge of the canal the Manchesters lie, eyes still open, limbs not yet decently arranged, for the stretcher-bearers have departed with the last of the wounded, and the dead are left alone. The battle has withdrawn from them; the bridge they succeeded in building was destroyed by a single shell. Further down the canal another and more successful crossing is being attempted, but the cries and shouts come faintly here.

The sun has risen. The first shaft strikes the water and creeps toward them along the bank, discovering here the back of a hand, there the side of a neck, lending a rosy glow to skin from which the blood has fled, and then, finding nothing here that can respond to it, the shaft of light passes over them and begins to probe the distant fields.

It is a scene Barker renders with both pathos and restraint, with this image of the dead sprawled along the canal after the storm has passed, their “limbs not yet decently arranged.” These young men have quite literally been left behind, not only by the battle still raging in the distance but by time itself. Already, one senses, the world is moving on. The rising sun, creeping near, discovers them, just as we have discovered them. Briefly, in that rosy glow that rises on the hands and necks and faces of these young men who in death have suddenly ceased to be themselves and are now simply the scattered, anonymous dead—in this glow we see the last flickering echo of life. The shaft of sunlight lingers on them, just as our eye might for a moment linger over a black-and-white war photograph in a book, before turning to the next page. It is not only Wilfred Owen then who has been effaced here by this Flaubertian-smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose. Barker too has vanished, or at least faded, right before our eyes.

*

Within a year of Flaubert’s death in 1879, Croisset was gone. The white-walled villa where he had written Madame Bovary, which for decades had served Flaubert so well as an island of domestic tranquility and peace, was sold to a consortium of investors and promptly gutted to the rafters. In its place they erected an enormous red-brick distillery, to which barges regularly delivered loads of coal and grain, docking down by the water’s edge. Where once eel fisherman had cast their nets, now a huge factory pipe poured an endless stream of reeking white foamy runoff into the river, while tall brick stacks, lit by the ugly light of softly hissing gas lanterns, spewed smoke into the air round the clock. Gone was the garden with its flower beds and yew hedges and glorious tulip tree, where M’sieu Gustave, when he was not laboring away at his desk upstairs, was often seen by the neighborhood children lounging on sunny afternoons, contentedly smoking his pipe. Years later, one of those children, now grown to adulthood, remembered that time at Croisset:

For me, he was a being like no other, exotic and fantastic, a mysterious personality whom I regarded in a confusion of wonder and respect. I never believed he was Norman. He was Persian or Turkish, Chinese or Hindu, I couldn’t decide which, but for sure he came from some distant place and had a distinctive nature. The fabulous accoutrements made me think he might well be a prince… When my nanny wanted to treat me, she’d walk me past his front gate, where I’d gaze at him smoking his pipe, slouched in a large armchair. I’ll always remember with tender emotion his pink and white striped culottes and his house robes, the floral design of which were pure poetry.

In life and in fiction, detail is everything.

*

From his study earlier, Flaubert had watched his greyhound Julio swim out to greet the boatman paddling past. A glittering golden-silver thread sketched itself on the brown river behind the dog as the slow current carried them along, and where the boatman’s oars dashed the water’s calm surface, the sunlight seemed to shatter like little glass globes. Standing there in his flowered Bokharan robe, a gift from his good friend Turgenev, with the mess of his great, unruly manuscript behind him on the green-clothed table—Bouvard et Pécuchet, on which he had labored now for three long years and saw no end to—Flaubert had felt the bones in his right hand throbbing, a deep smoldering ache that, along with the rheumatism in his knees and the pain in his swollen feet, rarely went away these days. Along with the pills Flaubert took for epilepsy and gout and his wretched, rotting teeth, his physician Fortin had prescribed a daily walk, but it was the garden with its weedy flower beds that had finally drawn him away from his writing this afternoon. Crouching painfully now, he pulled clump after clump of spiky dandelion. If only old Narcisse were here to help. But Narcisse, half blind with age, had returned to the bosom of his family years ago. Gone too was Flaubert’s mother, buried in Rouen, and Uncle Parain, and dear Liline, along with her English governess. A bumble bee, emerging from the soft purple throat of a lily, its black legs furred with pollen, lit for a second on the long sleeve of his robe, circled the bright red embroidered flower there, then buzzed away. Asleep on the warm flagstones, Julio’s paws twitched, a little ripple flowing up and down the muscles of his slender legs. The greyhound was dreaming, but of what? That boatman perhaps, his round red face, the oars creaking on the gunnels. What a little fool you are! Go back! Swim home before you drown! The long sun-emblazoned thread unfurling behind Julio as he swam toward shore. His beating heart.

Further Links & Resources

The second story, on being grateful for what you have, concerned the December in the late 1930s when my mother and her six siblings got off the school bus to find that their farmhouse had burned to the ground. My grandmother stood there by the smoldering foundation holding the only things she managed to grab as she ran out—the family Bible and two dresses on hangers. Everything else was lost, including their savings; in those early post-Depression years, my grandfather did not believe in banks. The neighboring families took them in by twos and threes that winter and (she always presented this as a fitting conclusion) gave them gifts of new Christmas ornaments.

The third wasn’t really a story but, rather, ingredients toward one, which I combined and recombined—a collection of mementos from my mother’s high school years. Her senior yearbook, with its twenty graduates—all those smooth, expectant faces gazing out and up toward a future that even in my childhood, of course, had long since settled into circumscribed lives centered around coal mines and factories. My mother’s radiant photograph captioned in iambic tetrameter: “She leaves a string of broken hearts.” And all the little mementos and keepsakes she kept in a small cedar jewelry box, its neat brass clasp opening with a whiff of past-preserved: twin black Scottie magnets which seemed ever to repel each other, a broken gold watch whose pinching wristband seemed itself a reproach to my encroachment.

What I was drawn to in these stories were all the wrong things. The dark pressured suspense of gypsies in the woods, molten mounds of gold and silver in the snow and charred timbers. The perplexing symbols of those two dresses or Christmas ornaments decorating loss (for years I rehearsed what I’d rescue if our house caught on fire). Souvenirs as synecdoche. Behind it all, the reminder of the utter unknowability of someone I was with every day, the vastness of the absences in a family’s past. The primary lesson, I suppose, was what reticence can teach, or at least coax forth—how we construct another’s life to the extent we can from remnants and fragments, much as I used to try to piece into a whole understanding my mother’s countless letter drafts to her own mother from the scraps in her wastebasket, revised until she’d written out anything that might cause any worry, revised until they said almost nothing at all. Torn in half, torn in half again. We are all fine here, she’d write in her tidy run-ons, the weather is unusually warm. Or sometimes just her full name, written over and over down the page. If, as Eudora Welty learned in her own childhood, one secret is often offered up in place of another, in my own family—which was loving and secure but also securely contained, each of us keeping our own counsel—I was another degree removed from those secrets, trying to assemble a story from whatever images and objects were offered or found or forgotten.

∞

My husband, Matthew Fontaine Maury Gildea, grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, because his parents drove there from Charlottesville for their honeymoon and decided to stay. Both my husband’s parents were Virginians, centuries back on his mother’s side. He was descended from French Huguenots, the Fontaines and the Maurys, who had come to Virginia in early 1700s. We have John Fontaine’s memoir, written between 1710 and 1719, on our shelves, there are plaques honoring his forebears on the walls of the Huguenot church in Charleston, and outside Charlottesville you can still see the marker on the site of the boarding school run by Fontaine’s grandson, the Reverend James Maury, where the promising and privileged boys he taught included Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison. History weights my husband’s very name, the first Matthew Fontaine Maury—Reverend Maury’s grandson— being “the Pathfinder of the Seas,” the author of The Physical Geography of the Sea, the first American to systematically chart wind and ocean currents. In my own family, I knew the names of my great-grandparents—and that’s the edge of my map; anything prior to that becomes a dissolve, a blank page, terra incognita. When my mother told me the fire story, I longed to look into that rescued Bible; I felt sure it was the repository of what would otherwise be lost, and perhaps now indeed has been.

∞

I was born in Hocking County, Ohio, where both of my parents had been born and raised, my mother in New Straitsville and my father in Enterprise, but we lived during my early childhood in a larger town called Logan. My memory of southern Ohio has a noirish pall over it, all semi-darkened rooms and parlor silence; outside, a perpetual light rain scented with coal, cinders always crunching underfoot. When I was seven, the auto-parts factory where my father was working closed down, so he and his fellow workers drove all around Ohio together looking for work. My father was eventually hired at the Ford plant in Sandusky, by Lake Erie, and so we moved four hours north to our new home in Clyde, about an hour south of Toledo. The distance from family was significant for my parents; we returned to Logan often on weekend trips. I recall that for a while, when we’d drive south to visit my grandparents, I’d feel excited, alert, as, just past Columbus, we crossed the terminal moraine—the line where the glaciers had stopped and the land shifted dramatically from dead flat to rolling hills. Over time that too receded, and instead of feeling I was returning to the place I was from, I began to feel that I was from nowhere at all. And that didn’t trouble me; it kept every road open.

∞

So it was that I grew up in Sherwood Anderson’s hometown, Clyde, Ohio, which had served as the model for his seminal collection of linked stories, Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919. In the front matter of the collection, there’s a map which is still quite true to the town’s layout, if skewed in scale, a kind of through-the-looking-glass glimpse. I used to turn just to that map, that visible connection with a place I walked every day—Main Street and the alley behind, Buckeye Street (eventually my family’s own address), Waterworks Pond—sensing some kind of larger resonance just by its transmutation, and often just transparent translation, into tales. Winesburg’s “Hern’s Grocery” was a thinly-disguised Hurd’s, the small grocery on Main Street where my mother sent me in the summertime to buy bread and milk. Herman Hurd had been Anderson’s boyhood friend; as Herman died in 1963, before we moved north, the shopkeeper I remember must have been his brother, Hiram. Herman’s son Thaddeus, an architect, became the town historian, the founder of the Clyde Heritage League, and a highly respected if, to me, rather forbidding figure (my memory substitutes photos of Ezra Pound).

In many ways, Clyde in the 1960s still resembled the town that Anderson had known (he left it in 1897), a place anchored by a stubborn stasis and insularity which was both comforting and exasperating. The Presbyterian Church’s bell tower was screened in by then (no longer having, if it ever did, the stained glass window Reverend Hartman broke in “The Strength of God”). But the town still had its hitching rails in place along Main Street when I was little, many of the streets were brick (I loved the cobble-cobble of tires passing over them), the dime store its original pressed-tin ceiling. And there was a long-defunct grain elevator in the middle of town, right by the railroad tracks that people had once believed would transform Clyde into a Cleveland or a Columbus. [Above image courtesy the Sherwood Anderson Foundation]

Instead, it became, as the city-limits signs still proclaim, America’s famous small town. If Clyde in itself wasn’t very distinctive—a single block of downtown with three stoplights, the fathers all working at Whirlpool or Ford or GM, the mothers at home endlessly making their ends meet—at least it could take pride in imagining itself as representative or definitive, a model, an emblem. Not that the townspeople generally were aware of Anderson’s book during the time I was growing up there, or the acute depiction of their town in it, its sympathetic but clear-eyed portrait of largely inarticulate, isolated lives marked by stunted ambitions, limited resources, thwarted desires. Anderson, in later years, recalled the reception of the book as hostile: “The people of the actual Winesburg protested. They declared the book immoral….” He writes of New Englanders burning copies outside of their town library, just as I’ve heard was done in 1919 in Clyde. Walter Rideout makes a persuasive case for Anderson’s revisionist account as a defensive reaction “to the erosion of the fame Winesburg had helped to bring him”; the reviews, as well as the letters he received around the time of publication, were actually predominantly positive. But what I knew firsthand in the 60s and 70s was that “Winesburg” was largely unchanged, and that Anderson, in his hometown, was unknown.

Anderson himself wasn’t a presence for me until I was twelve or so. My father was then, and remains, a champion reader—voracious and speedy, and not so much indiscriminate in his tastes as democratic. He was a regular patron at the library, where he favored hefty historical novels (I remember him dispatching Herman Wouk or R. F. Delderfield doorstops in no time), but he also would buy paperbacks by the pound in the nearby town of Fremont—John MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard—and would read through a grocery bag of them each week at the Ford plant where he worked a brass tumbler at twenty-minute intervals. I had settled on writing as my calling by the time I was eleven, and it was around that time that he bought a college literature text at a garage sale for me for a dime. Red cloth binding and about four inches thick, it included some Anderson’s stories—“I’m a Fool,” “I Want to Know Why,” and “Death in the Woods.” My father pointed out Anderson’s name in the table of contents and said, “This man grew up in Clyde.” It’s difficult to describe the enormity of the impact that had on me then, and thereafter—the possibility it fostered in me, the nascent sense of kinship. “I’m a Fool” and “I Want to Know Why” left me with an empty and unsettled sadness, but “Death in the Woods” felt like a folktale. I was as drawn toward the narrator’s need to tell the story as to the story itself. It would become a kind of touchstone for years; returning to it and reentering it, understanding more of what it had to offer, I began to see it as a barometer of my own growth as a writer, and a measure of how much farther I still had to go.

∞

In the Clyde Public Library, an oil portrait of Sherwood Anderson, a broadstroked rendering in umber and ochre based on a 1923 Stieglitz photograph, hangs over the fireplace in its rotunda reading room. I spent quite a bit of time reading opposite that painting while I was growing up. And then in summers when I was in college, I was employed at the library as a page. W.S. Merwin has written of those “angels” which all burgeoning writers need to encounter along the way, the teachers and kindly adults who take an interest at critical moments, who tend a passion with their direction and respect. For me, that angel was Marjorie Buck, the head librarian during my school years. She spoke softly and always very precisely, and had both a librarian’s thin-lipped primness as well as a generous and listening deference. She steered me early on from the YA books toward Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and to Frost and T.S. Eliot; she allowed me to borrow books that didn’t circulate, including the full four feet of the Harvard Classics and a beautiful gilt-edged, leather-bound set of Conrad that was kept in a locked cabinet in the basement. In a town full of recreational readers checking out the same handful of mysteries and bestsellers over and over, she would quote Shirley Jackson, P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh. She confided to me when I started working there that for years she had kept the subscription to Poetry magazine active solely for me—no one else had ever checked it out.

Marjorie was also unlike most women in town in that she had gone to college, and, as her husband was from Germany, had traveled widely in Europe. She told me a story once that I think Anderson would have enjoyed: at a meeting of the Clyde Garden Club everyone was asked to write down on a slip of paper the place where they would “most like to live in the entire world.” Marjorie said that was a difficult decision for her (Paris? Florence?), but she ultimately, loyally, decided on Stuttgart, where her husband had grown up. She then collected the slips of paper and read them aloud, and was startled to see that she was the only one in the room who hadn’t written down Clyde, Ohio. “Imagine,” she said to me, her smile both gently sympathetic and genuinely baffled. Imagine.

∞

Anderson’s A Story Teller’s Story, published in 1924, was his first of three overtly autobiographical works; he also published Tar: A Midwest Childhood, a semi-fictional account, in 1926, and his Memoirs. Really, all of Anderson’s autobiographical writings could come under the heading of “semi-fictional”—Anderson was by nature an embellisher, a teller of tales—he revised fact or fiction by repeating it aloud, retooling the narrative toward better effect with each new listener. But the basic players in his own story were these: the hardworking, gaunt, self-sacrificing mother who dies young; the ne’er-do-well footloose yarn-spinner musician father; the meager, hardscrabble childhood; the romantic, dreamy, misfit siblings; and young industrious Sherwood—“Jobby,” the go-getter whose own silver-tongued talent leads to success in advertising and business and a profitable marriage, but mires him in an empty life which he then dramatically abandons for art. His exit from the paint company he owned near Elyria, Ohio in November, 1912 was one such moment that grew in the retelling—the dramatic departure from the business world, the refusal to be a “mere peddler of words,” as Kate Swift will later warn George Willard in Winesburg from becoming.

The event does have firm basis in fact. Anderson had already written his apprentice novels Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men, and the stress of his strained marriage and family life, and immersion in work that felt dishonest to him were all increasingly taking their toll. He dictated a letter, then wrote a cryptic note to his wife saying, “There is a bridge over a river with some cross-ties before it. When I come to that I’ll be all right.” He walked out of the building, and turned up in Cleveland four days later. The story he made of this psychological crisis was that it marked his immediate departure for the writing life. Of course, it wasn’t that clean a break—it took about three more years for him to head to Chicago and fully embark on a writer’s life, and even then he had to return to advertising occasionally. But metaphorically, certainly, it was a division line, his own terminal moraine, a gesture that was more than telling. In recasting that gesture as a poem, I tried to imagine the missing days in that fugue state, while letting him tell his story the way he had parsed it out through his Winesburg characters. My own orienting insertion was my grandmother’s Logan farmhouse, whose roof had a great W N spelled out in slate shingles—the mark of its builder, William North, my father told me. I wondered as a child what person would ever dare leave so large a signature.

∞

What drew me from the start to Anderson’s fiction was his plain speech; his effort to honor, give name and voice to, unacknowledged lives; the poetry he recognized in the commonplace: “There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.” Anderson’s work derives from the oral storytelling tradition, but what made it distinctive, what makes it—at its best—riveting still, were its lyrical modernist undercurrents and its psychological acuities: the curtailed, halting, pulsing rhythms of speech and what those currents carry; what is revealed through what we suppress or what is generated between what we juxtapose—what simple words and their colors can convey and what rises out of language’s failure. (“It had the appearance of fumbling,” Faulkner wrote, “but actually it wasn’t. It was hunting, seeking.”) His voice was as familiar as a relative’s to me: those dovetailings of naivete and down-home turns of phrase and exaggeration’s swagger, laid over a solid foundation of humility, compassion, decency—in stories marked by the struggle between silence and expression, ineffectuality and control, desire and denial. His prose strives toward a purity—as Faulkner said, “The exactitude of purity, or the purity of exactitude, whatever you like”:

His was not the power and rush of Melville, who was his grandfather, nor the lusty humor for living of Twain, who was his father, he had nothing of the heavy-handed disregard for nuances of his older brother, Dreiser. His was that fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity, to milk them both dry, to seek always to penetrate to thought’s uttermost end.

For all these kinships I felt, I discovered early on that what I didn’t share with Anderson was a need to invent myself through story. My impulse rather was to seek out others’ stories in my own—an inclination toward essence rather than elaboration, toward metaphor more than description, suggestion rather than narration. Which is not to say that Anderson didn’t also incline toward poetry: he did publish three books of Whitmanesque verse. But Anderson, like Faulkner, wrote his best poetry within his prose. “It is a job for a poet”; “It needs the poet there,” he wrote in “Hands.” Such was the case throughout his fiction. His unsaids and untolds were what spoke to me most strongly, how a poet’s tools operated beneath those passive (“it needs”) gropings for “truths.”

∞

I’ve given this essay the title “A Story Teller’s Story,” and I’ve referred mostly to Winesburg, but the destination of the journey is “Death in the Woods,” the first story by Anderson that I read, and the one to which I’ve returned most often. It appeared initially in a magazine in 1916—so, written around the time he was writing the Winesburg stories—then was related again in Tar in 1926, and then was included in Death in the Woods and Other Stories, in 1933. It’s set quite clearly, given the placenames, in Clyde. The story, in first person, narrates the life of a woman named Mrs. Grimes, once a servant girl but now an old woman who lives on a farm with her abusive husband and son. On her way back from town where she’s gone to buy food for the men and the livestock, she freezes to death, and a pack of wild dogs make a kind of ritual circle around her body. The narrator lets us know then that he observed this death as a boy, with his brother. Tells how the brother related the story when they get home, of his dissatisfaction with the brother’s account. The story is his effort to do the story justice:

The scene in the forest had become for me, without my knowing it, the foundation for the real story I am now trying to tell. The fragments, you see, had to be picked up slowly, long afterwards.…
The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.

It’s fascinating to compare this version with the one that appeared five years earlier, though Anderson continued to revise it, repeatedly, after its appearance in 1933. What he appends to the 1933 version is his sense of the inadequacy of the story he’s just told: “I am only explaining why I was dissatisfied then and have been ever since. I speak of that only that you may understand why I have been impelled to try to tell the simple story over again.” If that sense of distance between the story I need to tell and the story I’m able to tell called to me at the earliest stage of my apprenticeship, it does so no less now. The restless effort to honor a life by piecing together its facts and remnants (like torn letter drafts, isolated keepsakes) and sketching the boundaries of its mystery, the desire to give voice to that life, the recognition that what’s unknowable and elusive might be conjured in the effort—those were ambitions I recognized and admired.

Death in the Woods

The story is about the storyteller,
about getting the telling right.

The narrator is recalling the winter
he and his brother, just boys, found a woman

frozen to death in the woods.
She’s been made old before her time

by a hard life, hard men. She’s beautiful
in death, of course. Her clothes worried

from her body by a pack of dogs
that have circled her dying, left an iced zero

around her in the clearing. It’s that circle
in the story that always gives me solace,

the drumbeat of that path, the dogs running
nose to tail. And the boy, now a man,

can’t stop telling this story. He invents a life
for the woman in an effort toward honor,

he erases it and starts again because
to be done with it is a disservice. The point

of the story is to keep her cold mystery,
keep that circle drawn around her

higher and higher, a glass wall, keep everyone
from getting any closer.

(Section 4 of “In the Pines,” Fimbul-Winter 74-75)

It’s the Anderson of “Death in the Woods” that feels most like my forebear, my kin—if Melville is Anderson’s grandfather, I’ve long felt that Anderson is mine. A print of that Stieglitz photograph, the one which was the basis of the painting presiding over the reading room in the Clyde Library, was the first picture I hung when I moved into my Warren Wilson College office. Anderson’s fiction, the landscape of his stories, is the place I come from—in the same way that I’d later feel I came, as well, from the worn, industrial landscapes and perspectives of the poems of James Wright, who said, “The spirit of place…isn’t simply image but presence…the genius of place.” And if place, as Welty says, is our source of inspiration and knowledge, if a writer’s honesty begins there, she also allows, “You can equally be true to an impression of place.” That impression, for me, has now been shaped by Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Virginia, Michigan, Texas, and North Carolina, as well as Ohio, and it’s been informed over the years by so many other writers. If I came into writing feeling largely without history or place, writing became a means of discovering both; it also became, as it did for George Willard, a means of discovering a way out, the road ahead. Sherwood Anderson gave me a map.

Further Links and Resources

“Prolix! Prolix! There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix.”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
“We Call Upon the Author to Explain”

I thought about using a more purely literary quote for this essay—Elmore Leonard’s “Skip the boring parts”—but that’s an oversimplification, and I want to speak against oversimplification. (Besides, Nick Cave is a terrific writer with two novels under his belt, and his album notes look and read like chapbooks; he deserves to be quoted by writerly types more often.) Fiction writers are admonished to cut, cut, cut at least as many times as we are urged to write every day. And while it is generally sound advice, it is also terribly easy to misapply.

Thousands of pieces of fiction annually grow stronger by cutting, but those aren’t the ones I worry about. I’m concerned for those that have the life and soul torn out of them because the scissors of concision are wielded with no apparent purpose other than cutting for its own sake. A lot of this kind of cutting happens in response to critique from workshop leaders or peers who have seen other pieces improve through cutting, and who pass on the well-intentioned dictum without thinking, as if it applies to all pieces at all times.

Which is, of course, untrue. Six-line prose poems have turned into eight-page short stories. Novellas have bloomed into trilogies. Novels have gone from 280 pages to 320 pages and gotten better, not worse. Sometimes pieces get bigger not because they become bloated with needless words, but because they tell more story, and sometimes more is exactly what a work needs. In the interest of making a work “tighter” we often reach for the scissors because we’ve been instructed to cut, cut, cut. Telling more story in the same number of pages can also achieve the tightness we desire, perhaps to better effect. We tend to confuse brevity with tautness, though plenty of work—especially today, with the ubiquity of abstract, absurdist flash fiction—is guilty of having so little story that it can’t become taut no matter how stripped down it is.

In the worst-case scenario, premature cutting for its own sake doesn’t serve the tale, and it can even cause a tale to die before it has a chance to blossom. I don’t know how many works of fiction die annually from such premature cutting, but I do know that writers who teach or critique their fellow writers need to encourage the responsible use of scissors for a specific purpose. Scissors need to serve a controlling idea, and if that controlling idea is absent, then tightness is merely an attempt to write like somebody else (frequently Raymond Carver or, in the case of abstract, absurdist flash fiction, Donald Barthelme).

One way to look at the scissors question is through the figure of the narrator, which we can talk about regardless of whether a work is in first, second, or third person. I know that I’m in the minority in speaking of narrators when discussing third-person point of view, since some writers only acknowledge its existence in first person. But all tales have tellers, and these tellers vary from story to story and book to book; if they didn’t, all work by a particular writer would sound the same across the board, or be determined by the vagaries of mood and circumstance. If narrators don’t exist in third person POV, then how can we accommodate books that follow multiple characters in close third person, such as Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, or blend close third person with first person, such as Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street?

Narrators exist across the spectrum of fiction, and plenty of people use more than one narrator in a single work. These multiple narrative personae notice different things, and they represent the psyches of the characters they follow in different ways. They serve as periscopes looking into the author’s fictive world, and as the interface between the author and the reader. Narrators guide our attention, and they can change considerably as authors move from draft to draft. They are what changes first—a small loosening of diction, a hint of more or less desperation, an increased willingness to let characters suffer for their wrongs—when authors want to chart new pathways through their fictive worlds that are more elucidating, more suspenseful, more concrete than those in previous drafts.

Narrators, over time, tend to speak their truths more bravely and bring us more directly to the heart of things. As we work through the drafting process, changing lines here and there—and yes, skipping the boring parts—we’re actually arriving at more precise narrative personae that allow us to work with more confidence and render our characters more decisively. How often have you heard a fellow writer say, “I just found a new voice for this draft, and I love how vague and imprecise it is!”? The great joy of working through drafts in fiction is to see sharp focus emerge from blurriness, to hear innuendo-filled dialogue turn into direct personal challenge, to feel murmurs of understanding and desire become actions in the flesh.

This, not concision for its own sake, is what we should aspire to when we take out the scissors and cut our fiction. If we tweak our work only to make it appear more taut—though it never contains more story, and though its truths are never spoken more sharply—then we embrace concision as a mere stylistic ornament. Ultimately I agree with Nick Cave: there’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix, as long as we’re wise about how we use them—to serve the work, not some knee-jerk reaction to cut, cut, cut.

Maybe that project on your desk or bookshelf doesn’t need cutting after all. Maybe it needs more of a story to tell, or a bolder narrator to tell it.

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at South Dakota State University.